Hitler

Berghof, the only place where she could emerge as one of the extended ‘family’. Even there, however, she was hidden away during receptions for important guests. Hitler often treated her abysmally when she was present, frequently humiliating her in front of others. The contrast with the olde-worlde charm – kissing hands, linking arms, cupping elbows – that he habitually showed towards pretty women in his presence merely rubbed salt in the wounds.
    Probably the closest that Hitler came to friendship was in his relations with Joseph Goebbels and, increasingly, with his court architect and new favourite, Albert Speer, whom in January 1937 he made responsible for the rebuilding of Berlin. Hitler frequently sought out their company, liked their presence, was fond of their wives and families, and could feel at ease with them. The Goebbels home was a frequent refuge in Berlin. Lengthy talks with Speer about the rebuilding of the capital city amounted to the nearest thing Hitler had to a hobby, a welcome respite from his otherwise total involvement in politics. At least in Goebbels’s case there were elements of a father-son relationship. A rare flicker of human concern could be glimpsed when Hitler asked Goebbels to stay for an extra day in Nuremberg after the rally in September 1937, since(according to the Propaganda Minister) he did not like him flying at night. Hitler was the dominant figure – the father-figure. But he may have seen something of himself in each of his two protégés – the brilliant progagandist in Goebbels, the gifted architect in Speer.
    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. 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. 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.
    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. 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. At midnight on his birthday, he, Goebbels, and Speer stood in front of plans for rebuilding Berlin, fantasizing about a glorious future. ‘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.’
    In part, too, it was prompted by Hitler’s growing preoccupation withhis 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. 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. He had