by Ian Kershaw
14. John Toland, Adolf Hitler, London, 1976, a work of 1,035 Pages, begins with the comment (p.xiv): ‘My book has no thesis.’ Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler. Eine Biographie, Berlin, 1960, is far briefer but still a ‘cradle-to-grave’ description of Hitler’s life which appears to lack a specific interpretative framework.
15. Joshua Rubenstein, Hitler, London, 1984, 87; Wulf Schwarzwäller, The Unknown Hitler, Bethesda, Maryland, 1989, 9. Guido Knopp’s description (Hitler, Eine Bilanz, 13) of Hitler as ‘a sick swine’ (kranker Schweinehund) might be seen to point in the same direction, though was actually framed within a multi-faceted attempt to grapple with the problem of understanding Hitler.
16. The descriptions are those, in turn, of Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, 2 vols., London, 1973–4, i.II, and Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich, Stuttgart, 1966, 98 n.26. The clash of these interpretations has been surveyed in Manfred Funke, Starker oder schwacher Diktator? Hitlers Herrshaft und die Deutschen: Ein Essay, Düsseldorf, 1989. See also Wolfgang Wippermann (ed.), Kontroversen um Hitler, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, and Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, ch. 4.
17. Eberhard Jäckel has never deviated, in numerous publications, from the position that Hitler’s rule was a ‘monocracy’, and ‘sole rule’ (Alleinherrschaft). See, for example, his Hitler in History, Hanover/London, 1984, 28–30; Hitler’s Herrschaft, (1986) 2nd edn, Stuttgart, 1988, 59–65; and – strongly implied – Das deutsche Jahrhundert. Eine historische Bilanz, Stuttgart, 1996, 164. An emphatic argument against interpretations which diluted Hitler’s ‘monocracy’ was advanced by Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Monokratie oder Polykratie? Hitlers Herrschaft und das Dritte Reich’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds.), Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, Stuttgart, 1981, 73–97.
18. Lines of interpretation which arise, most notably, from the numerous studies of Hans Mommsen and, to a lesser extent, of Martin Broszat. See especially Hans Mommsen, ‘Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrshaftssystem’, in Hirschfeld and Kettenacker, 43–72, and his brief text Adolf Hitler als ‘Führer’ der Nation, Deutsches Institut für Fernstudien, Tübingen, 1984; also Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, Munich, 1969, and ‘Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus’, VfZ, 18 (1970), 392–409.
19. See Ernst Nolte’s essays, ‘Zwischen Geschichtslegende und Revisionismus?’ and ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, in ‘Historikerstreit’. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Munich, 1987, 13–35, 39–47, and his Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Berlin, 1987, esp. 501–2, 504, 506, 517.
20. Rainer Zitelmann, Adolf Hitler. Eine politische Biographie, Göttingen/Zurich, 1989, 9; and for the full unfolding of Hitler’s statements over many years, on which the generalization rested, Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler. Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs, Hamburg/Leamington Spa/New York, 1987. See also the critical review by Reinhard Bollmus, ‘Ein rationaler Diktator? Zu einer neuen Hitler-Biographie’, Die Zeit, 22 September 1989, 45–6.
21. The thesis that Hitler’s conscious intention was Germany’s modernization was advanced in Rainer Zitelmann’s essays, ‘Nationalsozialismus und Moderne. Eine Zwischenbilanz’, in Werner Süß (ed.), Übergänge. Zeitgeschichte zwischen Utopie und Machbarkeit, Berlin, 1990, 195–223, and ‘Die totalitäre Seite der Moderne’, in Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung, Darmstadt, 1991, 1–20.
22. Fest, Hitler, (paperback edn, 1976), 25.
23. The role of the individual – directed by the notion that ‘men make history’ – was a central feature of the German ‘historicist’ tradition which tended to idealize and heroize historical figures (notably Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck) in its emphasis on the idea, intentions, and motives of great personalities as the framework of historical understanding. Even if ‘greatness’ could override conventional laws of morality, it was taken to embrace a certain – indefinable – nobility of character. ‘We cannot look, however imperfectly, on a great man,’ wrote the British Germanophile biographer of Frederick the Great, Thomas Carlyle, himself much admired by Goebbels and Hitler, ‘without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near,… of native original insight, of manhood, and heroic nobleness.’ (Cited, from Carlyle’s ‘Lecture One’ ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History. From Voltaire to the Present, 2nd Macmillan edn, London, 1970, 101.) In the last weeks of the Third Reich, Goebbels spent time reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great and recounted parts of it to Hitler who, the Propaganda Minister claimed, knew the book very well (TBJG, II.15, 384 (28 February 1945)).
24. See the ‘aesthetic’ more than moral doubts which Fest (Hitler, 19–20) emphasizes. Fest’s answer to the question he himself raised (Hitler, 17): ‘should he be called “great”?’ is, accordingly, ambivalent. Elsewhere, however, he was less ambiguous. ‘Any consideration of the personality and career of Adolf Hitler will for a long time to come be impossible without a feeling of moral outrage. Nevertheless he possesses historical greatness’ (Joachim Fest, ‘On Remembering Adolf Hitler’, Encounter, 41 (October, 1973), 19–34, here 19).·Fest’s biography was written at a time when the biographical genre had fallen in Germany into disrepute, as part of the general rejection of the historicist tradition and its replacement by ‘structural history’ and ‘historical social science’ from the 1960s onwards. The introduction to his biography seems in part at least to have been a self-conscious defence against the contemporary scepticism. For the difficulties facing biography through the advance of ‘structural history’, see Imanuel Geiß, ‘Die Rolle der Persönlichkeit in der Geschichte: Zwischen Überbewerten und Verdrängen’, and Dieter Riesenberger, ‘Biographie als historio-graphisches Problem’, both in Michael Bosch (ed.), Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte, Düsseldorf, 1977, 10–24, 25–39. Attempts to rehabilitate biography – though not of ‘great’ figures – as part of ‘social’ and ‘mentality’ history can be seen in Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch, and Helga Merkel, Biographie – sozialgeschichtlich, Göttingen, 1988.
25. Fest, ‘On Remembering Adolf Hitler’, 19, explained that what he saw as Hitler’s ‘greatness’ lay chiefly in the fact that ‘the things which happened in his time are inconceivable without him, in every respect and in every detail’.
26. Churchill’s remark was his characterization of Russia in speaking of the uncertainties of Soviet actions in a broadcast he made on 1 October 1939 (Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, 403). I am grateful to Gitta Sereny for providing me with the reference.
27. Fest, Hitler, 697–741, devotes a chapter to a ‘glance at an unperson’ (Blick auf eine Unperson).
28. Cited in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1991, xxvi. This is a somewhat loose translation of the passage, defending the prowess and virtue of Alexander the Great, in Plutarch’s Moralia, Loeb edn, vol. 4, London/Cambridge, Mass., 1936, 443f. I am grateful to Richard Winton for locating the text for me.
29. An insight offered in an extraordinarily perceptive early study by Sebastian Haffner, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, London, 1940, 16. For an evaluation of this study, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Ein schlecht getarnter Bandit. Sebastian Haffners historische Einschätzung Adolf Hitlers’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 November 1997.
30. See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5th revised edn, Tübingen, 1972, 14off. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘30 January 1933 – Ein halbes Jahrhundert danach’, Aus Parlament und Zeitgeschichte, 29 January 1983, 43–54, here 50, expressively recommended the application of Max Weber’s concept of ‘charismatic rule’ as an interpretative model capable of overcoming some of the deep divides in approaching the historical problem of Hitler. See also Schreib
er, Hitler. Interpretationen, 330.
31. See Franz Neumann, Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism, London, 1942, 75.
32. Haffner, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, 24. Sebastian Haffner’s later work, Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Munich, 1978, remains, in its seven brilliant thematic essays, one of the most impressive studies of the Nazi dictator.
33. This stands in contrast to Alan Bullock’s announced aim (13), at the beginning of his early and magisterial biography: ‘My theme is not dictatorship, but the dictator, the personal power of one man.’
34. For the term and its implications, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Cumulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship’, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge, 1997, 75–87.
35. See note 1 to Chapter 13, below, for the reference to this document, which was published for the first time (in English translation) in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919– 1945. A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, Exeter, 1984, 207.
36. While a tension in method between classical biography and social (or structural) history is undeniable, the irreconcilability is arguably fictive if ‘power’ is taken as the key focus of inquiry – particularly if the view of one prominent social historian is accepted that ‘power, after all, is the key concept in the study of society’ (Tony Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Work-shop Journal, 7 (1979), 66–94, here 72).
37. Gerhard Schreiber ends his superb historiographical survey of differing interpretations of Hitler with a plea to seek, through a pluralism of methods, an understanding of the dictator and his regime – for which he sees the notion of ‘charismatic rule’ as offering a framework – anchored in a ‘depiction of the National Socialist epoch’ (Schreiber, Hitler. Interpretationen, 329 – 35). See also Gerhard Schreiber, ‘Hitler und seine Zeit-Bilanzen, Thesen, Dokumente’, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Die Deutsche Frage in der Weltpolitik, Stuttgart, 1986, 137–64, here 162: ‘What is still missing is an interpretation of Hitler and his era which integrates all essential components of the National Socialist system, acknowledging – and deploying where necessary – in unprejudiced fashion the given plurality of methodological approaches.’
38. For the phrase, see Mommsen, ‘Hitlers Stellung’, 70.
39. As Jürgen Kocka put it (‘Struktur und Persönlichkeit als methodologisches Problem der Geschichtswissenschaft’, in Bosch (ed.) Persönlichkeit und Struktur, 152–69, here 165); ‘Every worthwhile explanation of National Socialism will have to deal with the person of Hitler, not reducible just to its structural conditions.
CHAPTER 1: FANTASY AND FAILURE
1. August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler. Mein Jugendfreund, Graz (1953), 5th edn 1989, 50.
2. Hans-Jürgen Eitner, ‘Der Führer’. Hitlers Persönlichkeit und Charakter, Munich/Vienna, 1981, 12.
3. Franz Jetzinger, Hitlers Jugend, Vienna, 1956, 16–18.
4. Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler. His Family, Childhood, and Youth, Stanford, 1967, 19. Thomas Orr, ‘Das war Hitler’, Revue, Nr 37, Munich (13 September 1952), 4, states – though without a source – that Maria Anna (whom he misnames Anna Maria) brought 300 Gulden, the price of fifteen cows, into the marriage, contributed by her relatives and probably the reason why Hiedler was prepared to marry her at all. Thomas Orr was a pseudonym for a former employee of the NSDAP-Hauptarchiv (Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler. Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit, 3rd paperback edn, Munich, 1973, 541).
5. Smith, 19 n.7; Jetzinger, 19.
6. His initial opportunity came, it seems, through a recruitment drive to take on more lower civil servants from rural areas (Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 5).
7. Smith, 23; Jetzinger, 21, 44–6.
8. Smith, 20; Maser, Hitler, 43–4.
9. Smith, 30–31; Jetzinger, 21–2; Kubizek, 59.
10. Anton Joachimsthaler, Korrektur einer Biographie, Munich, 1989, 12–13.
11. Jetzinger, 16, 22.
12. Jetzinger, 22; Smith, 30.
13. Jetzinger, 22; Rudolf Koppensteiner (ed.), Die Ahnentafel des Führers, Leipzig, 1937, 39.
14. Maser, Hitler, 47; Jetzinger, 19–20.
15. See Jetzinger, 22–5, and Smith, 29, for the dubious character of the legitimation; see also Joachimsthaler, 12–13.
16. Maser, Hitler, 41–2; Smith, 48.
17. See Maser, Hitler, 34–5. Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, London (1944), 1967 edn, 38–9, had already noted this suggestion. Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 4, referred to village rumours that Nepomuk was the actual father.
18. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Munich, 1943 edn, 2: ‘eines armen, kleinen Häuslers’.
19. See Koppensteiner, 39–44. Jetzinger’s claim (10–12) that the name ‘Hitler’ was of Czech origin has been shown to rest on flimsy grounds. ‘Hüttler’, meaning cottager or smallholder, was not an uncommon name in Austria. See Anton Adalbert Klein, ‘Hitlers dunkler Punkt in Graz?’, Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Graz, 3 (1970), 27–9; Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 6; and also Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators, Munich, 1996, 64. Since the various forms of the name had evidently been for decades interchangeable, it is unclear why Maser, Hitler, 31, can be so adamant that Nepomuk (who himself had used more than one form) insisted at the legitimation upon ‘Hitler’ rather than ‘Hiedler’ as being closer to his own name of ‘Hüttler’.
20. Koppensteiner, 46.
21. Joachimsthaler, 12–13.
22. Kubizek, 50.
23. Maser, Hitler, 12–15. One example of the sensationalism was an article published in the British Daily Mirror of 14 October 1933, purporting to show the ‘Jewish grave of Hitler’s grandfather’ in a cemetery in Bucharest (IfZ, MA-731 (= NSDAP, Hauptarchiv, Reel 1)). The press interest in Hitler’s alleged Jewish forebears had blown up in summer 1932, when the Neue Zürcher Zeitung had picked up on the name ‘Salomon’ that had appeared in the eighteenth century in the official genealogy approved by Hitler. In fact, the name ‘Salomon’ had been an error made by the Viennese genealogist Dr Karl Friedrich von Frank, which he hastily corrected. But the damage was done. See Hamann, 68–71.
24. Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens, Munich/Gräfelfing, 1953, 330–31.
25. Jetzinger’s uncritical acceptance of Frank’s recollection (see 28–32) was above all responsible for the spread of the story. One piece of his ‘evidence’, a picture of Hitler’s father indicating his ‘Jewish’ looks, is self-evidently a portrait of someone other than Alois Hitler. See Jetzinger, picture opposite p. 16; Smith, p1. 5, following p. 24. For an early critical review of Jetzinger’s book, and, particularly, a rejection, based on the findings of the Austrian scholar Dr Nikolaus Preradovic, of his claims that Hitler had a Jewish grandfather, see ‘Hitler. Kein Ariernachweis’, Der Spiegel, 12 June 1957, 54–9, esp. 57–8.
26. Klein, 10, 20–25.
27. Smith, 158–9.
28. Patrick Hitler, ‘Mon oncle Adolf’, Paris soir (5 August 1939), 4–5. The article amounted to no more than a largely worthless diatribe. See also Maser, Hitler, 18.
29. Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, New York, 1977, 129 n.; Maser, Hitler, 15 and n.
30. Smith, 158. Brigitte Hamann, also dismissive of the Frank story, speculates that his motive, as a long-standing Jew-hater himself, could have been to blame the Jews for producing an allegedly ‘Jewish Hitler’ (Hamann, 73–7, here 77).
31. It has been claimed that, as the motivation of his paranoid antisemitism, the more relevant question is not whether Hitler in fact had a Jewish grandfather, but whether he believed he was part Jewish (Waite, 126–31). The origins and sources of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews are something to which we will return. But since there is no evidence to suggest that the idea that he was part-Jewish might have occurred to him before his political enemies started spreading the rumours in the 1920s, by which time his antisemitism was long-established, there is little to support the specula
tion. Concern about whether he was part-Jewish would, of course, in any case have meant that Hitler was already antisemitic. See Rudolph Binion’s review of Waite’s book in Journal of Psychohistory, 5 (1977), 297.
32. According to Maser’s account of the testimony of Adolf’s remaining relatives in Spital long after the war, there was talk while Adolf was visiting Spital on leave from the army in 1917 of Nepomuk as his paternal grandfather (Maser, Hitler, 35). However, the testimony is worthless: Hitler never visited Spital in 1917. See Joachimsthaler, 171; and Rudolph Binion, ‘Foam on the Hitler Wave’, JMH, 46 (1974), 522–8, here 523.
33. Maser, Hitler, 35.
34. Smith, 39; Jetzinger, 39, 54.
35. Smith, 28, 35; Jetzinger, 50.
36. Pointed out by Rudolf Olden, Hitler the Pawn, London, 1936, 16.
37. Jetzinger, 48; Smith, 28; Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 5.
38. Jetzinger, 49; Smith, 28, 47; Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 5. According to Orr, Anna (whom he calls Anna Glasl-Hörer) was the adoptive daughter of a civil servant by the name of Hörer, who was a near neighbour of Alois in Braunau.
39. Jetzinger, 51; Smith, 29, 32–3; Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 6.
40. Smith, 32–3; Jetzinger, 52–3; Orr, Revue, Nr 37, 6, Nr 38, 2.
41. Jetzinger, 44; Smith, 35–7.