This style of leadership, which favored the role of “chancelleries” in the political decision-making process, meant an enormous increase in power for Lammers, since he was responsible for setting the business of the day—not Otto Meissner, now head of the Presidential Chancellery; nor Philipp Bouhler, who had received the “Blood Order” (a prominent Nazi decoration) and reported directly to Hitler as head of the “Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP.” It was among Lammers’s duties to report to Hitler every morning, about situations in progress and tasks on the agenda.22 In addition, Hitler assigned Lammers to manage his—the “Führer’s”—bank accounts, and to run a “disposition fund” from which ministers and important Party members were remembered with tax-free gifts. Lammers himself, for his sixty-fifth birthday, received a gift of 600,000 reichsmarks along with a hunting lodge in the Schorfheide. Lammers also settled bills for the purchase of artworks meant for the “Führerbau” dedicated in Munich in September 1937, or the art museum in Linz that was planned, but never completed.23 Lammers was thus Hitler’s “right-hand man” and a powerful and influential figure for years within the National Socialist hierarchy.
This is the context in which a branch of the Reich Chancellery was established in 1937 in Stanggass-Bischofswiesen, northwest of Berchtesgaden and a little less than four miles from Obersalzberg. At the roofing ceremony on January 17, 1937, with Lammers present, Hitler made a short speech in which he said that he was “bold and gained trust and confidence” only at the Berghof, which was why his state secretary also had to “be here with the Reich Chancellery.”24 Already during the planning phase of the new service buildings, in September 1936, Lammers remarked in writing to Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Minister of Finance, that Hitler was planning to stay in Upper Bavaria “even more often and for even longer periods in the future.”25 There was already a “Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden Government Airport” to provide a transportation connection with the capital.
Hitler now preferred to govern from the Berghof and carry out official functions there. There, and not at the actual seat of government in Berlin, was where he sketched out his decisive political and military plans in the years to come, and passed laws and decrees. The Berghof also served to receive foreign guests and gave Hitler the chance to present himself as a statesman: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and, after his scandalous abdication, the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of Great Britain and Ireland) were among his most prominent visitors. The question arises whether Hitler was thereby simply escaping the prescribed course of official business, or whether his changed relationship with Eva Braun played a role as well. She was always at Berchtesgaden whenever he was. In the final analysis, Berlin was a turbulent and uncontrollable environment, where it would hardly have been possible to avoid inconvenient people and burdensome duties. On the Obersalzberg, in contrast, an atmosphere of a “closed society” held sway. In truth, Hitler’s residence after 1937, logistically as well as due to the installation of the most modern communications technology, was perfectly connected with the outside world—there was no question of “mountain solitude” in virgin nature, as the Nazi propaganda liked to claim.26 Nevertheless, many Party members and representatives of the Nazi government did have the experience of finding that the “Führer” was unreachable on the “mountain” when he did not want to be reached. After the new Berghof was finished, Fritz Wiedemann claimed, the Reich Chancellor had less and less to do with day-to-day government business. “Work hours,” previously “regulated to a certain extent,” grew shorter and shorter, so that it was “harder and harder” to “get decisions [from Hitler] that he alone, as head of state, could make.” On the Obersalzberg this situation was “even worse” than in Berlin.27
For example, Lammers, residing in his second seat of government a few miles away, often tried in vain to be admitted to see Hitler. Daily meetings between the two men, which had been the rule in the early years of the Nazi government, no longer took place, and the head of the Reich Chancellery, despite having risen to the rank of Reich minister, now had to seek audience through Hitler’s personal adjutants, Wilhelm Brückner and Fritz Wiedemann. In 1938, after the signing of the Munich Agreement and the entry of German troops into the Sudetenland (the region of western Czechoslovakia occupied primarily by ethnic Germans and already carved off from the Czechoslovakian state), Lammers was often unable to see Hitler for weeks at a time. He wrote to Brückner on October 21 that he had not been able to give the “Führer” a “detailed report” since September 4, but now had to present to him “several laws to execute,” which “could not be postponed.” Lammers begged Brückner “most humbly to give the Führer this information” and to “communicate [to Lammers] a time when he might be received as soon as possible.” In a second letter the same day, Lammers attempted to get an appointment for Economic Affairs Minister Walther Funk,28 who had returned earlier that week from an extended trip to Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Bulgaria and now wanted to report on his successfully concluded foreign trade offensive in the southeast. SA-Obergruppenführer Brückner replied on October 24, however, that “the Führer was not prepared” to “receive” the report from Funk “on the Obersalzberg,” and that he would see the minister “only after his eventual return to Berlin.”29
In his own regard, Lammers followed up with a further request to the adjutant, informing Hitler that a meeting was “urgently necessary.”30 Now that so-called Reichsgan Sudetenland had been “annexed,” its administration had to be reorganized, and that included among other matters the “administrative persecution” of its Jewish population.31 The corresponding “Law Concerning the Reunification of the Sudeten-German Region with the German Reich,” prepared by the Chancellery, was awaiting his signature. Even then, Wiedemann recalled, Hitler was “not in the mood to see Lammers.” And so “Herr Reichsminister” waited another week, less than four miles away at the base of the Obersalzberg, before finally being permitted to set foot in the Berghof and give his “report” on October 31, 1938.32
This incident reveals more than an “unmethodical, even negligent style” of governing. The claim that Hitler was interested only in foreign politics by that point, and considered domestic matters inconsequential, is also incorrect,33 since Lammers and Funk simply tried to promote Hitler’s aims by implementing Funk’s trade agreements concerning the Balkans, which were a preparatory step to carry out the policy of foreign expansion.34 What we see here is how the Nazi leader, surrounded by his personal staff and his closest social circle, repeatedly created a distance between himself on the Obersalzberg and his leading political associates. Hitler postponed decisions or simply refused to make them. This in no way implies that he was weak in his exercise of power, or inefficient—such was not the case.35