Hitler

dismiss from office without respect to ‘acquired rights’. Using the Schlitt case as his example, he launched into a savage attack on the failings of the judiciary. From now on, he said, he would intervene in such cases and dismiss judges ‘who visibly fail to recognize the demands of the hour’.
    As soon as Hitler had finished speaking, Göring read out the ‘Resolution’ of the Reichstag, empowering Hitler ‘without being bound to existing legal precepts’, in his capacity as ‘Leader of the Nation, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, Head of Government and supreme occupant of executive power, as supreme law-lord and as Leader of the Party’, to remove from office and punish anyone, of whatever status, failing to carry out his duty, without respect to pensionable rights, and without any stipulated formal proceedings.
    Naturally, the ‘Resolution’ was unanimously approved. The last shreds of constitutionality had been torn apart. Hitler now
was
the law.
    Many people were surprised that Hitler needed any extension of his powers. They wondered what had gone on that had prompted his scathing attacks on the internal administration. Disappointment was soon registered that no immediate actions appeared to follow his strong words. Lawyers, judges, and civil servants were not unnaturallydismayed by the assault on their professions and standing. What had caused it was in their eyes a mystery. The Führer had evidently, they thought, been crassly misinformed. The consequences were, however, unmistakable. As the head of the judiciary in Dresden pointed out, with the ending of all judicial autonomy Germany had now become a ‘true Führer state’.
    Hitler’s populist instincts had not deserted him. Less elevated sections of the population enthused over his assault on rank and privilege. This had successfully allowed him to divert attention from more fundamental questions about the failures of the previous winter and to provide a much-needed morale-booster through easy attacks on cheap targets.
    For the mass of the German people, however, only the prospect of the peace that final victory would bring could sustain morale for any length of time. Many ‘despondent souls’, ran one party report on the popular mood, were ‘struck only by one part of the Führer’s speech: where he spoke of the preparations for the winter campaign of 1942–3. The more the homeland has become aware of the cruelty and hardship of the winter struggle in the east, the more the longing for an end to it has increased. But now the end is still not in sight.’
    III
    Hours after his Reichstag speech, Hitler left for Munich,
en route
to the Berghof and a meeting with Mussolini. He was in expansive mood next lunchtime at his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria. He held forth to Hermann Giesler, one of his favoured architects, and his companion-in-arms from the old days of the party’s early struggles in Munich Hermann Esser, on his plans for double-decker express trains to run at 200 kilometres an hour on four-metre-wide tracks between Upper Silesia and the Donets Basin. Two days later, at a snow-covered Berghof with Eva Braun acting as hostess, he was regaling his supper guests with complaints about the lack of top Wagnerian tenors in Germany, and the deficiencies of leading conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch. Walter, a Jew who had become renowned as the director of the Bavarian State Opera and Leipziger Gewandhaus before being forced out by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrating to America, was an ‘absolute nonentity’, claimed Hitler, who had ruined the orchestra of the ViennaState Opera to the extent that it was capable only of playing ‘beer music’. Although Walter’s arch-rival Knappertsbusch, tall, blond, blue-eyed, had the appearance of a model ‘aryan’ male, listening to him conduct an opera was ‘a punishment’ to Hitler’s mind, as the orchestra drowned out the singing and the conductor performed such gyrations that it was painful to look at him. Only Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into such a magnificent orchestra, one of the regime’s most important cultural ambassadors, and acknowledged maestro in conducting the Führer’s own favourite Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, met with his unqualified approval.
    Between monologues, he had had ‘discussions’ with Mussolini in the baroque Klessheim Castle, once a residence of the Prince Bishops of Salzburg, now