While the tumultuous developments on the eastern front unfolded, the Reich was gradually turning into a Führer state with an absentee Führer. During the summer of 1940, Hitler had been away at his headquarters on the western front for approaching two months.151 It had been no more than an interlude. But once the eastern campaign had started, and especially once it was realized that this was to be no repeated rapid military triumph, his absence became prolonged and then, in effect, permanent. Whereas Churchill was concerned to speak to the British people and let himself be seen as often as was practicable, Hitler practically disappeared from the public eye. During the remaining months of 1941, and with the popular mood in the Reich far from buoyant, he scarcely left his field headquarters to appear in public in Germany. Pressed by Goebbels to give a speech to rouse sagging morale, he deigned to spend six hours in Berlin on 3 October. A month later, on 8 November, he travelled to Munich, gave his customary address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the Movement to commemorate the Putsch, spoke next day to the Reichs — and Gauleiter, and left immediately for the Wolf’s Lair. And he attended on 21 November the funeral in Berlin of General Ernst Udet (the First World War flying-ace in charge of air armaments who had committed suicide after Göring had made him the scapegoat for the Luftwaffe’s failures on the eastern front), returning six days later for the ceremony prolonging the Anti-Comintern Pact and using the occasion to receive a number of foreign dignitaries before departing again for his field headquarters in East Prussia after a stay of two days.152
Otherwise the German people saw him only in occasional newsreel clips, usually in the company of his generals. His continued absence in 1941 was the start of a process which, as the war progressed and final victory became a mirage, would transform the most notable populist leader of the twentieth century, the masterly demagogue whose power base had rested in no small measure on his unrivalled ability to play on the expectations and resentments of the people, into a remote and distant figure.
Hitler’s increasing detachment meant an inevitable acceleration of the existing, strongly developed tendency towards the disintegration of any semblance of coordinated administration of the Reich. The stark figures for governmental legislation provide an indicator. Out of 445 pieces of legislation in 1941, only seventy-two laws, published Führer decrees, and ministerial decrees represented any semblance of inter-ministerial policy formation. The remaining 373 decrees were produced by individual ministries without wider consultation.153
Bormann’s appointment as head of the newly designated Party Chancellery in May 1941 accentuated rather than checked the trend. His proximity to Hitler, bureaucratic energy, ideological commitment, and ruthless drive certainly gave the Party new impetus and scope for intervention, after years of leadership by the weak and ineffectual Rudolf Heß. Bormann saw his role, in belonging ‘to the closest staff of the Führer’, as channelling selected information to Hitler and ‘continually informing the Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, and heads of organizations of the decisions and opinions of the Führer’.154 Though, under the influence of events in the east, Bormann’s leadership of the Party now accentuated the ideological tone and radicalization of policy on the home front, it brought no coordination of government. On the contrary: the consequence in practice was to intensify still further intergovernmental conflict and heighten the unresolvable tension built into the Nazi regime between the demands of bureaucratic administration and the anti-bureaucratic pressures of an ideologically driven leadership of the regime.155
Hitler’s role remained, of course, pivotal. He was, as ever, the linchpin of the system (if ‘system’ is an appropriate term for such an administrative free-for-all) and the fount of ideological legitimation. He was also kept informed, though in unsystematic and ill-balanced ways, of, frequently, quite trivial as well as more important issues. But the insistence on retaining all the overriding controls of every significant sphere of rule in his own hands, coupled with his physical absence from the centre of government, almost total preoccupation with the war effort, and complete distaste for bureaucratic methods, meant an inescapable fragmentation of the machinery of government and, accompanying it, an ever-intensifying radicalization of the regime.
