By 1944, Hitler was a sick man — at times during the year extremely unwell. Cardiograms, the first taken in 1941, had revealed a worsening heart condition.11 And beyond the chronic stomach and intestinal problems that had increasingly come to plague him, Hitler had since 1942 developed symptoms, becoming more pronounced in 1944, which point with some medical certainty to the onset of Parkinson’s Syndrome. Most notably, an uncontrollable trembling of the left arm, jerking in his left leg, and a shuffling gait, were unmistakable to those who saw him at close quarters.12 But although the strains of the last phase of the war took their toll on him, there is no convincing evidence that his mental capacity was impaired.13 Hitler’s rages and violent mood-swings were inbuilt features of his character, their frequency in the final phase of the war a reflection of the stress from the rapidly deteriorating military conditions and his own inability to change them, bringing, as usual, wild lashings at his generals and any others on whom he could lay the blame that properly began at his own door.
In looking to the loss of ‘genius’ through pressures of overwork inappropriate to Hitler’s alleged natural talent for improvisation, Speer was offering a naïve and misleading explanation of Germany’s fate, ultimately personalizing it in the ‘demonic’ figure of Hitler.14 The adoption of such a harmfully over-burdensome style of working was no chance development. It was the direct outcome of an extreme form of personalized rule which had already by the time war began seriously eroded the more formal and regular structures of government and military command that are essential in modern states. No other war leader — not Churchill, Roosevelt, or even Stalin — was so consumed by the task of running military affairs, so unable to delegate authority. The breakdown of governmental structures in Germany had gone yet further than their erosion in the Soviet state under Stalin’s despotism. The reins of power were entirely held in Hitler’s hands. He was still backed by major power bases. None existed — whatever the growing anxieties among the military, some leading industrialists, and a number of senior figures in the state bureaucracy about the road down which he was taking them — that could bypass the Führer. All vital measures, both in military and in domestic affairs, needed his authorization. There were no overriding coordinating bodies — no war cabinet, no politburo. But Hitler, forced entirely on to the defensive in running the war, was now often almost paralysed in his thinking, and often in his actions. And in matters relating to the ‘home front’, while refusing to concede an inch of his authority he was, as Goebbels interminably bemoaned, nevertheless incapable of more than sporadic, unsystematic intervention or prevaricating inaction.
Far more gifted individuals than Hitler would have been overstretched and incapable of coping with the scale and nature of the administrative problems involved in the conduct of a world war. Hitler’s triumphs in foreign policy in the 1930s, then as war leader until 1941, had not arisen from his ‘artistic genius’ (as Speer saw it), but in the main from his unerring skill in exploiting the weaknesses and divisions of his opponents, and through the timing of actions carried out at breakneck speed. Not ‘artistic genius’, but the gambler’s instinct when playing for high stakes with a good hand against weak opponents had served Hitler well in those earlier times. Those aggressive instincts worked as long as the initiative could be retained. But once the gamble had failed, and he was playing a losing hand in a long-drawn-out match with the odds becoming increasingly more hopeless, the instincts lost their effectiveness. Hitler’s individual characteristics now fatefully merged, in conditions of mounting disaster, into the structural weaknesses of the dictatorship. His ever-increasing distrust of those around him, especially his generals, was one side of the coin. The other was his unbounded egomania which cholerically expressed itself — all the more pronounced as disasters started to accumulate — in the belief that no one else was competent or trustworthy, and that he alone could ensure victory. His takeover of the operational command of the army in the winter crisis of 1941 had been the most obvious manifestation of this disastrous syndrome.
