by Ian Kershaw
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany)
NSDAP
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party)
NSFB
Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung (National Socialist Freedom Movement)
NSFP
Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei (National Socialist Freedom Party)
NS-Hago
Nationalsozialistische Handwerks-, Handels- und Gewerbe-organisation (Nazi Craft, Commerce, and Trade Organization)
OKH
Oberkommando des Heeres (High Command of the Army)
OKW
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (armed services)
OT
Organisation Todt
RSHA
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office)
SA
Sturmabteilung (Storm Troop)
SD
Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service)
SPD
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)
SS
Schutzstaffel (lit. Protection Squad)
Maps
1 The legacy of the First World War
2 Poland under Nazi occupation
3 The Western offensive: the Sichelschnitt attack
4 The German Reich of 1942: the Nazi Party Gaue
5 Nazi occupied Europe
6 Limits of the German occupation of the USSR
7 The Western and Eastern fronts, 1944–5
8 The Soviet drive to Berlin
1. The legacy of the First World War
2. Poland under Nazi occupation
3. The Western offensive: the Sichelschnitt attack
4. The German Reich of 1942: the Nazi Party Gaue
5. Nazi occupied Europe
6. Limits of the German occupation of the USSR
7. The Western and Eastern fronts, 1944–5
8. The Soviet drive to Berlin
Preface to the New Edition
It has been a source of immense satisfaction to me that the original two-volume biography, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, published in 1998 and 2000 respectively, was so well received, as also in the numerous countries where foreign-language editions were published. The warm reception in Germany was particularly gratifying.
My biography was above all intended to be a study of Hitler’s power. I set out to answer two questions. The first was how Hitler had been possible. How could such a bizarre misfit ever have been in a position to take power in Germany, a modern, complex, economically developed, culturally advanced country? The second was how, then, Hitler could exercise power. He had great demagogic skills, certainly, and combined this with a sure eye for exploiting ruthlessly the weakness of his opponents. But he was an unsophisticated autodidact lacking all experience of government. From 1933 he had to deal not just with Nazi roughnecks but with a government machine and circles used to ruling. How could he then so swiftly dominate the established political élites, go on to draw Germany into a catastrophic high-risk gamble for European domination with a terrible, unprecedented genocidal programme at its heart, block all possibilities of a negotiated end to the conflict, and finally kill himself only when the arch-enemy was at his very door and his country physically and morally in total ruins?
I found the answer to these questions only partially in the personality of the strange individual who presided over Germany’s fate during those twelve long years. Of course, personality counts in historical explanation. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. And Hitler, as those who admired him or reviled him agreed, was an extraordinary personality (though, however varied and numerous the attempts at explanation are, only speculation is possible on the formative causes of his peculiar psychology). Hitler was not interchangeable. The type of individual that Hitler was unquestionably influenced crucial developments in decisive fashion. A Reich Chancellor Göring, for instance, would not have acted in the same way at numerous key junctures. It can be said with certainty: without Hitler, history would have been different.
But Hitler’s disastrous impact cannot be explained through personality alone. Before 1918, there had been no sign of the later extraordinary personal magnetism. He was seen by those around him as an oddity, at times a figure of mild scorn or ridicule, definitively not as a future national leader in waiting. From 1919 onwards, all this changed. He now became the object of increasing, ultimately almost boundless, mass adulation (as well as intense hatred from his political enemies). This in itself suggests that the answer to the riddle of his impact has to be found less in Hitler’s personality than in the changed circumstances of a German society traumatized by a lost war, revolutionary upheaval, political instability, economic misery and cultural crisis. At any other time, Hitler would surely have remained a nobody. But in those peculiar circumstances, a symbiotic relationship of dynamic, and ultimately destructive, nature emerged between the individual with a mission to expunge the perceived national humiliation of 1918 and a society ready more and more to see his leadership as vital to its future salvation, to rescue it from the dire straits into which, in the eyes of millions of Germans, defeat, democracy and depression had cast it.
To encapsulate this relationship, as the key to understanding how Hitler could obtain, then exercise, his peculiar form of power, I turned to the concept of ‘charismatic authority’, as devised by the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber, who died before Hitler had been heard of – at least outside Munich beerhalls. I did not elaborate on this concept, which had figured prominently in my writing on Hitler and the Third Reich over many years. It lay unmistakably, however, at the heart of the inquiry. ‘Charismatic authority’, as deployed by Weber, did not rest primarily on demonstrable outstanding qualities of an individual. Rather, it derived from the perception of such qualities among a ‘following’ which, amid crisis conditions, projected on to a chosen leader unique ‘heroic’ attributes and saw in him personal greatness, the embodiment of a ‘mission’ of salvation. ‘Charismatic authority’ is, in Weber’s conceptualization, inherently unstable. Continued failure or misfortune will bring its downfall; and it is under threat of becoming ‘routinized’ into a systematic form of government.
Applying this concept of ‘charismatic authority’ seemed to me to offer a useful way of tackling both of the central questions I had posed. To my mind, the concept helps in evaluating the relationship between Hitler and the mass following that shaped his rise – though in conditions never, of course, imagined by Max Weber, and where the image of ‘heroic’ leadership attached to Hitler, exploiting pre-existing pseudo-religious expectations of national salvation, was in good measure a manufactured propaganda product. And I also found it invaluable in examining the way Hitler’s highly personalized rule eroded systematic government and administration and was incompatible with it. Of course, by the middle of the war, Hitler’s popularity was in steep decline and any ‘charismatic’ hold over government and society was now waning sharply. By this time, however, Germany had been wedded for a decade or so to Hitler’s ‘charismatic’ domination. Those who owed their own positions of power to Hitler’s supreme ‘Führer authority’ still upheld it, whether from conviction or necessity. They had risen with Hitler. Now they were condemned to fall with him. He had left them no way out. Hitler’s authority within the regime started to crumble only as Germany faced imminent and total defeat. And as long as he lived, he posed an insuperable barrier to the only way the war he had brought about could be ended: his country’s capitulation.
I linked ‘charismatic authority’ to another concept as a way of showing how Hitler’s highly personalized form of rule functioned. This, as referred to in the text and operating as a kind of leitmotiv throughout the biography, was the notion of ‘working towards the Führer’, which I tried to use to show how Hitler’s presumed aims served to prompt, activate or legitimate initiatives at different levels of the regime, driving on, consciously or
unwittingly, the destructive dynamic of Nazi rule. I did not mean, with this notion, to suggest that people at all times asked themselves what Hitler wanted then tried to put it into practice. Some, of course, especially among the party faithful, did more or less just that. But many others – say in boycotting a Jewish shop to protect a rival business, or denouncing a neighbour to the police on account of some personal grievance – were not asking themselves what the Führer’s intentions might be, or operating from ideological motivation. They were, nevertheless, in minor ways, helping to sustain and promote ideological goals represented by Hitler and thereby indirectly promoting the process of radicalization by which those goals – in this case, ‘racial cleansing’ of German society – gradually came more sharply into view as realizable short-term aims rather than distant objectives.
The approach I chose meant the two volumes were necessarily long. But even beyond the text itself there was much to be added. I was keen to provide full reference to the extensive documentary sources – both archival and printed primary sources, and the wealth of secondary literature I had used – first, so that other researchers could follow these up and re-examine them if need be, and second to remove distortions in some accounts or dispose of myths which had attached themselves to Hitler. At times, the notes became in themselves minor excursions on points of detail which could not be expanded in the text, or offered additional commentary upon it. I provided lengthy notes in Hubris, for example, elaborating on points of interpretation in historiography, and on differing views of Hitler’s psychology; and in Nemesis on the authenticity of the text of the final ‘table talk’ monologues of early 1945 and on the complex (and sometimes conflicting) evidence about the circumstances of Hitler’s death and Soviet discovery of his remains. All of this meant that the two finished volumes became massive in size, totalling over 1,450 pages of text and almost 450 pages of notes and bibliography. Of course, not all readers are able to devote sufficient time and energy to a work of such length. And, naturally, not all readers are interested in the scholarly apparatus.
After much consideration, I decided, therefore, to produce this condensed edition. On undertaking it, I was reminded of the passage in the film Amadeus, where the Kaiser tells Mozart that he likes his opera – apart from the fact that it contains too many notes. ‘Too many notes, Majesty?’ an indignant Mozart interjects. ‘There are neither too many, nor too few. Just exactly the right number.’ That is more or less how I felt about my original two volumes. These took the form and shape that they did because I wanted to write them in exactly that way. So the drastic pruning that has gone into the present edition – losing over 650 pages (more than 300,000 words) of text and the entire scholarly apparatus – was nothing if not painful. And of course, it goes against the grain for a historian to produce a text lacking references and scholarly apparatus. But I console myself that the notes and bibliographical references are all there for consultation by those who want to check them in the full text of the two-volume original version, which will remain in print. And the abridged text, though greatly shortened to create this single, more approachable volume, stays completely true to the original. I have cut out much which provided context, eliminated numerous illustrative examples, shortened or removed many quotations, and deleted some entire sections which described the general social and political climate or the setting in which Hitler operated. In two cases, I have blended chapters together. Otherwise the structure is identical with the originals. The essence of the book remains completely intact. I did not want to, and saw no need to, change the overall interpretation. And, in an exercise devoted to reducing the size of the text, I naturally did not want to add to its length. Apart from insignificant wording adjustments, I have incorporated only one or two minor amendments to what I had written earlier. Since the original notes have been excluded, there seemed no point in including the lengthy bibliographies in the original two volumes of works I had used. I have, however, provided a selection of the most important printed primary sources for a biography of Hitler, on all of which (apart from a couple of recent publications) I drew. Most are, of course, in German, though I add where relevant a reference to English translations.
My many debts of gratitude remain unchanged from the lists of acknowledgements in Hubris and Nemesis. In addition, however, I would like to add my thanks in connection with this edition to Andrew Wylie, and to Simon Winder and the excellent team at Penguin. It is a great pleasure, finally, to add Olivia to the family roster alongside Sophie, Joe and Ella, and to thank, as always, David and Katie, Stephen and Becky, and, of course, Betty, for their love and continuing support.
Ian Kershaw
Manchester/Sheffield, August 2007
Reflecting on Hitler
Hitler’s dictatorship has the quality of a paradigm for the twentieth century. In extreme and intense fashion it reflected, among other things, the total claim of the modern state, unforeseen levels of state repression and violence, previously unparalleled manipulation of the media to control and mobilize the masses, unprecedented cynicism in international relations, the acute dangers of ultra-nationalism, and the immensely destructive power of ideologies of racial superiority and ultimate consequences of racism, alongside the perverted usage of modern technology and ‘social engineering’. Above all, it lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity, culminating in ideological war, conquest of scarcely imaginable brutality and rapaciousness, and genocide such as the world had never previously witnessed. Hitler’s dictatorship amounted to the collapse of modern civilization – a form of nuclear blow-out within modern society. It showed what we are capable of.
The century which, in a sense, his name dominated gained much of its character by war and genocide – Hitler’s hallmarks. What happened under Hitler took place – in fact, could only have taken place – in the society of a modern, cultured, technologically advanced, and highly bureaucratic country. Within only a few years of Hitler becoming head of government, this sophisticated country in the heart of Europe was working towards what turned out to be an apocalyptic genocidal war that left Germany and Europe not just riven by an Iron Curtain and physically in ruins, but morally shattered. That still needs explaining. The combination of a leadership committed to an ideological mission of national regeneration and racial purification; a society with sufficient belief in its Leader to work towards the goals he appeared to strive for; and a skilled bureaucratic administration capable of planning and implementing policy, however inhumane, and keen to do so, offers a starting-point. How and why this society could be galvanized by Hitler requires, even so, detailed examination.
It would be convenient to look no further, for the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s calamity, than the person of Adolf Hitler himself, ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945, whose philosophies of breathtaking inhumanity had been publicly advertised almost eight years before he became Reich Chancellor. But, for all Hitler’s prime moral responsibility for what took place under his authoritarian regime, a personalized explanation would be a gross short-circuiting of the truth. Hitler could be said to provide a classic illustration of Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own history … but … under given and imposed conditions’. How far ‘given and imposed conditions’, impersonal developments beyond the control of any individual, however powerful, shaped Germany’s destiny; how much can be put down to contingency, even historical accident; what can be attributed to the actions and motivations of the extraordinary man ruling Germany at the time: all need investigation. All form part of the following inquiry. Simple answers are not possible.
Since he first entered the limelight in the 1920s, Hitler has been viewed in many different and varied fashions, often directly contrasting with each other. He has been seen, for example, as no more than ‘an opportunist entirely without principle’, ‘barren of all ideas save one – the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which
he had identified himself’, preoccupied solely with ‘domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race’, and consisting of nothing but ‘vindictive destructiveness’. In complete contrast, he has been portrayed as fanatically driving on a pre-planned and pre-ordained ideological programme. There have been attempts to see him as a type of political con-man, hypnotizing and bewitching the German people, leading them astray and into disaster, or to ‘demonize’ him – turning him into a mystical, inexplicable figure of Germany’s destiny. No less a figure than Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, then Armaments Minister, for much of the Third Reich as close to the Dictator as anyone, described him soon after the end of the war as a ‘demonic figure’, ‘one of those inexplicable historical phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind’, whose ‘person determined the fate of the nation’. Such a view runs the risk of mystifying what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945, reducing the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s catastrophe to the arbitrary whim of a demonic personality. The genesis of the calamity finds no explanation outside the actions of an extraordinary individual. Complex developments become no more than an expression of Hitler’s will.
An absolutely contrary view – tenable only so long as it was part of a state ideology and consequently evaporating as soon as the Soviet bloc which had sustained it collapsed – rejected out of hand any significant role of personality, relegating Hitler to no more than the status of an agent of capitalism, a cypher for the interests of big business and its leaders who controlled him and pulled the strings of their marionette.