The war, and the hatreds Hitler had invested in it, consumed him ever more. The musical evenings had stopped after Stalingrad.16 He ate on his own a good deal of the time, to avoid having to converse with his generals. Outside the war and his buildings mania, he could rouse little interest. He told Goebbels how he longed to be able to go to the theatre or see cinema again, to be among people as he used to be, to enjoy life once more when the war was ended.17 This was mere nostalgia in the midst of a war of which, though he failed to see it, he was the main author, and which had been at the centre of his thoughts for two decades. He was by now in many respects an empty, burnt-out shell of an individual. But his resilience and strength of will remained extraordinary. And in the strangely shapeless regime over which he presided, his power was still immense, unrestricted, and uncontested.
As the war that Hitler had unleashed ‘came home to the Reich’, the dictator — now rapidly ageing, becoming increasingly a physical wreck, and showing pronounced signs of intense nervous strain — distanced himself ever more from his people. It was as if he could not face them now that there were no more triumphs to report, and he had to take the responsibility for the mounting losses and misery. Even before the Stalingrad calamity, in early November 1942, when his train had by chance stopped directly alongside a troop train returning from the east carrying dejected-looking, battle-weary soldiers, his only reaction had been to ask one of his manservants to pull down the blinds.18 As Germany’s war fortunes plummeted between 1943 and 1945, the former corporal from an earlier great war never sought to experience at first hand the feelings of ordinary soldiers.
The number of big public speeches he delivered constituted a plain indicator of the widening gulf between Führer and people. In 1940 Hitler had given nine big public addresses, in 1941 seven, in 1942 five. In 1943 he gave only two (apart from a radio broadcast on 10 September) — on ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’ on 21 March, and to the Old Guard in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich, as usual, on 8 November.19 The bulk of his time was spent well away from the government ministries in Berlin’s Wilhelmstraße — and well away from the German people — at his field headquarters, or at his mountain eyrie above Berchtesgaden. He spent no more than a few days in Berlin — mainly in May — during the whole of 1943. For some three months in all he was at the Berghof. During the rest of the time he was cooped up in his headquarters in East Prussia, leaving aside a number of short visits to the Ukraine.20
Goebbels lamented in July 1943 the way Hitler had cut himself off from the masses. These, commented the Propaganda Minister, had provided the acclaim on which his unique authority had rested. He had given them the belief and trust that had been the focal point of the regime’s support. But now, in Goebbels’s eyes, that relationship was seriously endangered — and with it the stability of the regime. He pointed to the large number and critical tone of the letters — half of them anonymous — arriving at the Propaganda Ministry. ‘Above all, the question is again and again raised in these letters,’ he went on, ‘why the Führer never visits the areas which have suffered from air-raids, why Göring never shows himself, but especially why the Führer does not even speak to the German people to explain the current situation. I regard it as most necessary that the Führer does that, despite his burden through the events in the military sector. One can’t neglect the people too long. Ultimately, they are the heart of our war effort. If the people were once to lose their strength of resistance and belief in the German leadership, then the most serious leadership crisis which ever faced us would have been created.’21
The move to ‘total war’, introduced during the Stalingrad crisis, provided the final demonstration that no semblance of collective government and rational decision-making within the Reich was compatible with Hitler’s personal rule.
