Q. What about the men around Hitler; are any of them of the caliber to succeed him?
A. None of them is of the caliber to succeed Hitler, but Hitler has publicly announced Goering as his successor, and he would automatically take the position if der Fuehrer should die now. In the Party there is nobody to compete with him. The bloodthirsty Himmler, head of the SS Elite Guards and the Gestapo, is merely a policeman, one of great ability, ranking perhaps with the notorious Fouché of the French Revolution, but out of the question as Fuehrer. Goebbels, the advertising director, is the cleverest man in the Party, but he would be lucky to remain alive twenty-four hours after Hitler’s protective hand was removed. He and Himmler are rivals in unpopularity. Who are the rest? Minor figures, as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, the upstart “Bismarck” of the champagne trade, who if anything is more widely disliked and despised than Goebbels. Hess, of course, has fled. Dr. Ley, the head of the Labor Front, is the type of drunken, racketeering labor gangster who in this country would have gone to the penitentiary under the lash of Westbrook Pegler. Alfred Rosenberg, the Party’s “brain,” could no more succeed Hitler than he could take Joe Louis’s place.
The more one scrutinizes the German scene the more one realizes that the war has moved all the big party figures far into the background, leaving only Goering a modest place miles beneath the Fuehrer. The outside world has believed Goering would be an improvement on Hitler, in that he would be more amenable to reason, less aggressive. He would be an improvement only in that he would be weaker. His instincts and intentions are not more Christian than Hitler’s. He would have neither Hitler’s magic hold on the German people nor Hitler’s genius in action, but he is as cruel a man as ever exercised power in a modern state. At the same time he has all the sentimentality which is an almost invariable accompaniment of brutality in this type of German. During the period of the worst Terror, the active Nazi revolution in 1933, Goering was over Himmler in charge of the concentration camps, and at the moment when the Nazi sadists and criminals in charge of the camps were beating to death and torturing and hanging scores of men daily, Goering decreed the severest law against cruelty to animals ever to be passed anywhere.
Goering’s most marked characteristics, aside from his high animal spirits, his callous cruelty, and his sentimentality, are his energy, courage, and will power. He looks too fat to be self-disciplined, but he twice cured himself of the morphine habit, which he had contracted after his wounding in the World War, and again after his wounding on the Odeon’s Platz during the Munich Putsch. A glandular derangement resulting from his wounds made him monstrously obese, but appears to have endowed him with an excess of energy which he demonstrates by doing the work of half a dozen men. He works incomparably harder than Hitler who by any ordinary standards is a fitful worker, given to long spells of dreamy idleness.
Everybody else in Germany quails before Goering, but Reichs Marshal Goering becomes a trembling, whipped child when Hitler yells at him, despite fanciful newspaper stories about Goering’s disputing with der Fuehrer. The Army prefers Goering to any other Nazi leader except Hitler, because Goering is the only soldier and the only gentleman by birth among the Nazi chiefs. Yet when one has reviewed all the points in favor of Goering’s position, it becomes more and more obvious that the war has made a successor to Hitler almost unthinkable. Hitler has the power now more than ever, but the power now is the Army; it is no longer, as it was until September 1939, the Party. If Goering were to take over automatically, after Hitler’s death, how long could he keep the apparatus running; what would the Army do; how would the German people and the people of Europe respond to their new and obviously so immensely inferior master? The more one considers the condition of Germany today the more it seems that Hitler is indispensable to German success. His successors would probably succeed one another with Blitz speed.
Q. What about Karl Haushofer, who is said to be his one-man brain trust?
A. Haushofer is one of the men Hitler consults. Hitler likes Haushofer’s theory of what they call Geopolitik because it fits in with Hitler’s own theory that politics should always go ahead of economics, which is his particular way of proving the Marxists wrong. But Haushofer has no more influence than perhaps half a dozen of Hitler’s advisers. Hitler hates experts, because they advance objections to his projects. The only experts who have a chance with him are yes-men, except in the Army. He listens to technical advice from generals he respects, although even from them he would tolerate no shadow of opposition to his grand strategy. You may be sure Haushofer has never said no.
Q. Is Hitler also in the military sphere the real war lord? Does he actually direct his battles as did Napoleon?
A. Hitler is the nearest thing to Napoleon since Napoleon. I remember just before the beginning of the war, in August 1939, I asked a Colonel of the French General Staff if they had heard that Hitler had taken over active command of the Army, in fact, and that when war began he would direct the fighting. The French Colonel said yes, that the French General Staff knew that was true. Then he surprised me by saying that they did not like it.
I had expected him to rub his hands and exclaim over French good luck in having an amateur at the head of the German Army. Not at all. This French Colonel went on to explain that Hitler had already demonstrated the most miraculous sense of timing, and this was perhaps the most important talent a field marshal could have, and that with the technical advice of his generals, Hitler might prove a formidable adversary indeed. Less than a year later the French Colonel who had foreseen so well was one of the vast army of military refugees fleeing before the New Napoleon.