The Voice of Hitler
The significant thing about Hitler's broadcast on New Year's Eve was not in what he said, but that it should have been thought so necessary to put him up to say something, if only this poor, attenuated exhortation to the German people to have faith, among their suffer- ings, in a better future. This voice, though it is believed to have been Hitler's own, was not that of the vigorous, combative, arrogant, exuberant man who led Germany into war. It seemed to be no more than an automatic utterance emerging from the shell of the Fiihrer who, if not already a spent force, has been for some time shut off from the active conduct of affairs in what Goebbels calls his " icy solitude." But if Hitler has ceased to be the real leader among the Nazis, he remains a myth, and a myth which is essential to the Nazi creed. His personality has been built up into that of a superman, a demigod, an agent of Providence appointed to lead the chosen people to their destiny, and that is a myth which the Nazi leaders dare not sacrifice. The more ineffectual he becomes as a man, the more Goebbels and Himmler, appealing to the paganism of modern Germany, extol him as a god. " He is the German miracle," said Goebbels, in his last article in Das Reich. "He has the gift to see what is hidden from the human eye. He knows about things to come. He is truth personified "; and it may be that he was rightly gauging the mind of a credulous audience when he told them to " forswear their false God " and turn to worship Hitler—the idol
into whose mummified life the Nazi priests were preparing to pump a New Year's message. But this idol serves a purpose. It is no negligible influence in Gernian life.
