Hitler

for the Führer cult that was taken up in its myriad form by so many others.
    Hardly a protest was raised at the purges of university professors under the new civil service law in April 1933 as many of Germany’s most distinguished academics were dismissed and forced into exile. ThePrussian Academy of Arts had by then already undertaken its own ‘cleansing’, demanding loyalty to the regime from all choosing to remain within its hallowed membership.
    The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the ‘new spirit’ of 1933 came with the burning on 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime. University faculties and senates collaborated. Their members, with few exceptions, attended the bonfires. The poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose works were among those consumed by the flames, had written: ‘Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.’
    VIII
    Scarcely any of the transformation of Germany during the spring and summer of 1933 had followed direct orders from the Reich Chancellery. Hitler had rarely been personally involved. But he was the main beneficiary. During these months popular adulation of the new Chancellor had reached untold levels. The Führer cult was established, not now just within the party, but throughout state and society, as the very basis of the new Germany. Hitler’s standing and power, at home and increasingly abroad, were thereby immeasurably boosted.
    Already in spring 1933, the personality cult surrounding Hitler was burgeoning, and developing extraordinary manifestations. ‘Poems’ – usually unctuous doggerel verse, sometimes with a pseudo-religious tone – were composed in his honour. ‘Hitler-Oaks’ and ‘Hitler-Lindens’, trees whose ancient pagan symbolism gave them special significance to
völkisch
nationalists and nordic cultists, were planted in towns and villages all over Germany. Towns and cities rushed to confer honorary citizenship on the new Chancellor. Streets and squares were named after him.
    The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany. Not even the Bismarck cult in the last years of the founder of the Reich had come remotely near matching it. Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of the ‘Leader of the New Germany’. However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion thatcould not simply be manufactured. Hitler was on the way to becoming no longer the party leader, but the symbol of national unity.
    And it became more and more difficult for bystanders who were less than fanatical worshippers of the new god to avoid at least an outward sign of acquiescence in the boundless adoration. The most banal expression of acquiescence, the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, now rapidly spread. For civil servants, it was made compulsory a day before Hitler’s party was established as the only one permissible in Germany. Those unable to raise the right arm through physical disability were ordered to raise their left arm. The ‘German Greeting’ – ‘Heil Hitler!’ – was the outward sign that the country had been turned into a ‘Führer state’.
    What of the man at the centre of this astonishing idolization? Putzi Hanfstaengl, by now head of the Foreign Press Section of the Propaganda Ministry, though not part of the ‘inner circle’, still saw Hitler at that time frequently and at close quarters. He later commented how difficult it was to gain access to Hitler, even at this early period of his Chancellorship. Hitler had taken his long-standing Bavarian entourage – the ‘Chauffeureska’ as Hanfstaengl called it – into the Reich Chancellery with him. His adjutants and chauffeur, Brückner, Schaub, Schreck (successor to Emil Maurice, sacked after his flirtation with Geli Raubal), and his court photographer Heinrich Hoffmann were omnipresent, often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices. Even Foreign Minister Neurath and Reichsbank President Schacht found it difficult to gain Hitler’s attention for more than a minute or two without some intervention from one or other member of the ‘Chauffeureska’. Only Göring and Himmler, according to Hanfstaengl, could invariably reckon