Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

In the case of Speer, the fascination for architecture provided an obvious bond. Both had a liking for neo-classical buildings on a monumental scale. Hitler was impressed by Speer’s taste in architecture, his energy, and his organizational skill. He had rapidly come to see him as the architect who could put his own grandiose building schemes, envisaged as the representation of Teutonic might and glory that would last for centuries, into practice. But other architects, some better than Speer, were available. The attractiveness of Speer to Hitler went beyond the building mania that linked them closely to each other. Nothing homoerotic was involved — at least not consciously. But Hitler perhaps found in the handsome, burningly ambitious, talented, and successful architect an unconsciously idealized self-image.¹⁸¹ What is plain is that both Goebbels and Speer worshipped Hitler. Goebbels’s adoration of the father-figure Hitler was undiminished since the mid-1920s. ‘He is a fabulous man’ was merely one of his effusions of sentiment in 1937 about the figure who was the centre-point of his universe.¹⁸² For Speer, as he himself later recognized, his love of Hitler transcended the power-ambitions that his protector and role-model was able to satisfy — even if it originally arose out of them and could never be completely separated from them.¹⁸³

In earlier years, Hitler had invariably spoken of his own ‘mission’ as the mere beginning of Germany’s passage to world domination. The whole process would take generations to complete.¹⁸⁴ But, flushed with scarcely imaginable triumphs since 1933 and falling ever more victim to the myth of his own greatness, he became increasingly impatient to see his ‘mission’ fulfilled in his lifetime.

Partly, this was incipient megalomania. He spoke on numerous occasions in 1937 about building plans of staggering monumentality.¹⁸⁵ At midnight on his birthday, he, Goebbels, and Speer stood in front of plans for rebuilding Berlin, fantasizing about a glorious future.¹⁸⁶ Hitler even thought for a while of creating a new capital city on the Müritzsee in Mecklenburg, eighty miles or so north-west of Berlin, but eventually dropped an idea which was patently absurd.¹⁸⁷

‘The Führer won’t speak of money. Build, build! It will somehow be paid for!’ Goebbels has him saying. ‘Frederick the Great didn’t ask about money when he built Sanssouci.’¹⁸⁸

In part, too, it was prompted by Hitler’s growing preoccupation with his own mortality and impatience to achieve what he could in his lifetime. Before the mid-1930s, his health had generally been good — astonishingly so given his lack of exercise, poor diet (even before his cranky vegetarianism following the death in 1931 of his niece, Geli Raubal), and high expenditure of nervous energy. However, he already suffered from chronic stomach pains which, at times of stress, became acute spasms.¹⁸⁹ A patent medicine he took — an old trench remedy with a base in gun-cleaning oil — turned out to be mildly poisonous, causing headaches, double vision, dizziness, and ringing in the ears.¹⁹⁰ He had been worried in 1935 that a polyp in his throat (eventually removed in the May of that year) was cancerous.

¹⁹¹ It turned out to be harmless. During 1936, a year of almost continual tension, the stomach cramps were frequently severe, and Hitler also developed eczema on both legs, which had to be covered in bandages.¹⁹² At Christmas 1936, Hitler asked Dr Theodor Morell, a physician who had successfully treated his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, to try to cure him. Morell gave him vitamins and a new patent remedy for intestinal problems.¹⁹³ Goebbels mentioned in June, and again in August 1937, that Hitler was unwell.¹⁹⁴

But by September, Morell’s treatment had apparently made a difference. At any rate, Hitler was impressed. He felt fit again, his weight was back to normal, and his eczema had vanished.¹⁹⁵ His belief in Morell would last down to the bunker in 1945. From late 1937 onwards, his increasing hypochondria made him ever more reliant on Morell’s pills, drugs, and injections.¹⁹⁶ And the fear of cancer (which had caused his mother’s death) never left him. At the end of October, he told a meeting of propaganda leaders that both his parents had died young, and that he probably did not have long to live. ‘It was necessary, therefore, to solve the problems that had to be solved (living-space) as soon as possible, so that this could still take place in his lifetime. Later generations would no longer be able to accomplish it. Only his person was in the position to bring it about.’¹⁹⁷