Hitler
1889–1936: Hubris
by Ian Kershaw
Penguin: £10.99
ISBN 0-14-013363-1
1936–1945: Nemesis
by Ian Kershaw
Penguin: £10.99
ISBN 0-14-027239-9
![[Image: cover of 'Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris']](../images/bk/hubris.png)
![[Image: cover of 'Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis']](../images/bk/nemesis.png)
Adolf Hitler shaped the world we live in. He has become an icon of evil, the ultimate bogeyman in numerous tacky stories, television programmes, comics and movies. Even today film of Hitler can produce a frisson of horror in a way that footage of Stalin — who was directly responsible for many more deaths than was Hitler — does not. Yet when one looks at the life and character of the man, the only word one can honestly find which adequately describes him is mediocre.
These two volumes examine Hitler’s character as thoroughly as possible, and place Hitler firmly in the context of his times, looking at how he was or may have been influenced by events, and how Germans responded to him; they also describe how the Third Reich functioned around him. The first volume follows Hitler’s life from birth to the absolute pinnacle of his popularity in 1936; the second, the downward path from there to his suicide in a bunker at the heart of a Berlin lying in ruins.
The title of the first volume is very apt: hubris would seem to be a trait Hitler had in bucketloads from his youth — when he would daydream of how he would one day rebuild Linz — right through to his days as Führer when the former corporal was never in doubt he knew better than all his generals.
For the young Hitler, dreams were really all he had: never one to apply himself to work, he gave every sign of never amounting to more than a drop-out, getting by on money made by selling pictures of famous landmarks. When it came time for him to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army he avoided this, not through cowardice but from a hatred of the Austrian state: in Vienna he loathed the “foreign mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture.” The authorities eventually caught up with him in Munich, but when he did finally present himself in Salzburg for military service he was found to be too weak; he returned to Munich and his life there:
Seven years after [failing to get into the Vienna Art Academy], the ‘nobody of Vienna’, now in Munich, remained a drop-out and nonentity, futilely angry at a world which had rejected him. He was still without any career prospects, without qualifications or any expectation of gaining them, without any capacity for forging close and lasting friendships.…
And so he would very likely have remained, had the First World War not intervened. As Kershaw says, “The First World War made Hitler possible.”
Without the War, Hitler would not have found the sense of purpose which army life gave him, nor any opportunity to become involved in politics. His one indisputable talent was as a speaker, able to sway the hearts of (almost) everyone who listened to him. Yet even though he later would speak of his “destiny”, he initially saw himself as the “drummer” who would pave the way for the leader who would save Germany. Only gradually did he come to see himself in that rôle. His advancement to leader of the Nazi party was never an inevitability, nor was his progress to leadership of Germany. Kershaw shows how easily things could have worked out differently, right up to the point when Hitler finally achieved the Chancellorship — had von Schleicher held on, had the other right-wing politicians had the nerve to freeze Hitler out for only a few weeks longer, it is very likely he would never have gained office (as it was, the popularity of the Nazis was already on the wane). Hitler always spoke of himself as a “man of destiny”, but really he was a gambler who hit it lucky.
Kershaw examines meticulously the operation of the Nazi state, noting the inefficient and slapdash way in which the Nazis ran the Third Reich, and observing how the German people regarded Hitler. This is quite fascinating: his personal popularity consistently outstripped the Nazis’, at least until very near the end when it was clear he was dragging Germany to destruction. Although aware of the brutality of the regime, many Germans believed that “if only the Führer knew” he would stop it.
Hitler, of course, knew all too well. The question of exactly what Hitler ordered or did not order has often been raised, often by those seeking for reasons of their own to demonstrate his hands were somehow clean of the “Final Solution”, but Kershaw’s description of the operation of the Third Reich makes it clear that such questions fail to grasp how Nazi Germany worked. Hitler did not need to issue orders over every specific policy. Kershaw quotes Werner Willikins, State Secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry:
Very often … it has been the case that individuals … have waited for commands and orders. Unfortunately, that will probably also be so in future. Rather, however, it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.
Kershaw notes: “These comments, made in a routine speech, hold a key to how the Third Reich operated.”
When it came to anti-Jewish policy, Kershaw shows that Hitler always took pains to be distanced from it, even before the War when no one had even conceived of extermination camps (in fact there seems to have been some notion that Jews would serve as “hostages” which would prevent the United States from going to war against Germany), yet the anti-Jewish actions were always undertaken with his tacit approval. On one occasion, his only concern was that nothing should happen to mar an imminent visit by Mussolini. The fact that this distancing was a political necessity which did not signify his disapproval was widely understood. When the Nazis began to organise the “Final Solution” he had no need to get involved in the practical arrangements:
In contrast to military affairs, where his repeated interference reflected his constant preoccupation with tactical minutiae and his distrust of the army professionals, Hitler’s involvement in ideological matters was less frequent and less direct. Hitler had laid down the guidelines in March 1941. He needed to do little more. Self-combustion would see to it that, once lit, the genocidal fires would rage.… When it came to ideological aims, in contrast to military matters, Hitler had no need to worry that the ‘professionals’ would let him down.…
Just as … he had seen no need to involve himself in the ‘euthanasia action’ any further, once he had authorized its commencement, so now he would see no cause to participate in the daily business of the dirty work of genocide.… There was no shortage of those keen to ‘carry out practical work for our Führer’. It was sufficient that his authorization for the major steps was provided.…
Where matters of Nazi ideology were not directly involved, though, real problems arose for the Third Reich because Hitler was always reluctant to delegate authority. Kershaw puts it this way: “no semblance of collective government and rational decision-making within the Reich was compatible with Hitler’s personal rule.”
The futility of the Committee[“of Three”]’s efforts and the hopeless irrationality of government in the Führer state were revealed in all their starkness by the deliberations, lasting six months in all at one of the most critical junctures of the war, about whether to ban horse-racing.
This six months of deliberating resulted in — no decision at all.
Little could demonstrate more clearly the absurdity of the dictatorship’s patterns of rule (or lack of them). Hitler’s power was intact. His imprimatur had been sought on several occasions by all the parties concerned. No one else could settle the matter. But nor, except by the ultimate retreat from a decision, could Hitler. His wavering, fluctuating interventions — often evidently following the advice of the last person to have spoken to him — dragged out the affair. But it was scarcely rational in the first place that a head of state and commander of the armed forces should be repeatedly bothered in the middle of a world war by various underlings involved in petty disputes over horse-racing. The problem was, here as in other instances: he had delegated no genuine authority to the “Committee of Three”.… As a system of government, Hitler’s dictatorship had no future.
Hitler was no better a military commander than he was a head of government. He had no grasp of strategy and no understanding of how to run an army, caring little for the lives or well-being of his troops; worse, he had not the slightest insight into his own failings as a leader. Mistaking the luck which brought him easy victories at the start of the War for evidence of his own genius, he was under the spell of his own myth. Later, as the War turned against Germany, Hitler withdrew from the people, and became more and more distanced from reality, still seeing himself as the man of destiny: at the end, he believed it was Germany which had been found unworthy.
Anyone wanting to understand how Germany fell under Hitler’s spell should read these exhaustively researched books. To judge from the references at the back of the volumes, there can hardly be any documentation from the period which Kershaw has not read — yet the books remain superbly readable. Hitler’s character is laid bare as much as the evidence will allow, making apparent the mundane mediocrity of the man. Understanding that, and seeing what he did, the horror he can still evoke is explicable:
Never in history has such ruination — physical and moral — been associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of this one man has been evident.… That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler’s name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.
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