Not surprisingly, in quantitative terms, the person POWs talked about most often in the protocols was Hitler, followed by Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels, and then at some remove Ley, Baldur von Schirach, Walter von Brauchitsch, and others. In this regard, the protocols reflected the amount of popular attention the individual leadership figures commanded during the Third Reich. Moreover, faith in the Führer is a running trope in the POWs’ conversations. “There is only one HITLER and whatever he wants will be done,” pledged one soldier,485 while another intoned, “If HITLER no longer lived then I should not desire to live.”486 Soldiers’ trust in their Führer was blind and boundless. “If the Führer has said it, you can rely on it,” one POW assured his listeners. Another asserted: “HITLER has done it wonderfully. He has kept all his promises. We all have the fullest confidence in him.”487 In November 1940, a lieutenant said: “I am perfectly convinced that we’ll win the war. Absolutely certain. HITLER will not tolerate BERLIN being bombed by American a/c [aircraft].”488 And a private confessed that when confronted with bad news: “I console myself with the words of the Führer, he has taken everything into account.”489
Germans had emphatic faith not just in the Führer as a person but in the predictions he made. “I am not a rabid National Socialist,” said one Luftwaffe first lieutenant in 1941, “but when HITLER says that the war will end this year, then I believe it.”490 Even Stalingrad, as doubts first emerged in Germany’s ability to achieve final victory, did not dispel Germans’ trust in Hitler. For example, a low-level officer named Leska complained, “The outlook for us isn’t rosy,” whereupon his interlocutor, Private Hahnfeld, responded, “Yes, but the FÜHRER has always known that it is a struggle for our very existence.”491 A conversation between two sergeants was very similar:
LUDWIG: Things look appalling in RUSSIA!
JONGA: That’s just your imagination. It’s no longer a question of gaining territory but of who wins the war of morale. If the Russians imagine we’re weak, then they’ve made a mistake. Don’t forget what a marvellous head ADOLF has on his shoulders.492
Regardless of rank and function, German soldiers’ faith in the Führer seems to have been genuine. Often their statements give the impression that the speaker feels he has a personal relationship to Hitler. That is not unlike today’s pop stars, who seem beyond reach and blessed with something extraordinary, yet still remain strangely familiar and intimate. The propagandistic staging of Hitler’s public appearances, indeed the presentation of the whole National Socialist system, was thoroughly modern. It’s hard to imagine Winston Churchill receiving thousands of love letters, as Hitler did, or getting 100,000 congratulatory telegrams, as was the case when Göring’s daughter was born.
The myth of the simple-hearted, benevolent, and yet mysterious and omnipotent Führer was bolstered and updated by countless rumors. Hitler also cultivated the image of the diva with his screaming style of oratory, his ascetic eating and drinking habits, and his legendary outbreaks of temper, which allegedly once included biting a hotel carpet.493 POWs who could boast of special proximity to the Führer, for example, those who were once seated near him or called to report directly to him on military matters, described those encounters in immense detail and always with reference to Hitler’s special qualities. Those stories were intended to imply an intimate familiarity with the Führer, and news about Hitler, whether first- or secondhand, was a topic that guaranteed a rapt audience. One recurring trope was Hitler’s hypnotic ability to put others under his sway.
A somewhat different picture emerges from actual encounters with the Führer, such as related by Ludwig Crüwell, the commander of the Wehrmacht’s Panzer Army Africa, to an eagerly attentive stool pigeon:
