Kershaw tried to show that in many situations Hitler didn’t need to do very much at all since German society—everyone from the underlings surrounding him to ordinary people on the street—were increasingly inclined to anticipate and fulfil the Führer’s every wish, “working towards him.”27 Critics accused Kershaw of supporting an image of Hitler that made the dictator look “interchangeable, superfluous or at most weak.”28 In fact, Kershaw did not minimise the historical role played by Hitler and his insane, ideological fixations, but he did illustrate that without the readiness of many people to work for the man in charge, there would have been no way he could have achieved his murderous aims. Kershaw’s main thesis was that the dynamism of the Nazi regime arose from the interplay of Hitler’s intentions with activism emanating from subordinate individuals and institutions. The results were ever more radical “solutions.” With this explanation, Kershaw ended the long-standing, fruitless debate between “intentionalist” and “structuralist” schools of German historiography.29
—
“Our libraries contain 120,000 studies of Hitler—Kershaw’s is their Central Massif,” concluded Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in his rave review of Kershaw’s work.30 So after such a monumental Hitler biography, is there really a need for another one? More than fifteen years have passed since Kershaw’s first volume appeared in 1998. Since then the wheels of historical research have continued to turn—at an ever-faster pace. Recent works on Hitler himself encompass everything from the Führer’s relationship to Munich and Berlin and an analysis of his physiognomy to wild speculations about his alleged homosexuality. There has also been a tremendous amount published on surrounding figures, from Goebbels and Eva Braun all the way to Nazi sculptor Arno Breker and Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt. In addition, a host of scholars have written monographs on topics ranging from the economy and the German Foreign Ministry under Nazism to consumerism and corruption in the Third Reich. Last but not least, recent years have seen the editing and publication of Hitler’s complete notes and speeches up until 1933, the official Reich Chancellery documents under Hitler’s reign, and Goebbels’s complete diaries. All of this material first appeared after Kershaw had finished his work.31
Bringing it all together and synthesising it would be justification enough for a new Hitler biography, but that is not all I intend to do. On the contrary, my aim is to refocus attention on Hitler, who necessarily had to remain a bit anaemic in Kershaw’s account, without neglecting the social factors that propelled his meteoric rise. Along the way, I hope to put to the test several assumptions that recur throughout the literature on Hitler. One of them is that the Führer was basically an ordinary person with limited intellectual horizons and severely restricted social skills. As Karl-Dietrich Bracher once formulated it, the basic problem with approaching Hitler is to explain “how such a narrow-minded, unpleasant fellow could found and carry a movement of such immense dimensions and consequences.”32 Kershaw rephrased the question as: “How do we explain how someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes…could nevertheless have such an immense historical impact, could make the entire world hold its breath?”33
But what if those premises are wrong? What if Hitler’s horizons and intellectual abilities were not so crassly underdeveloped? Kershaw, like most of the Hitler biographers before him, sees the Führer’s sole talent as his ability to excite the base instincts of the masses.34 Hitler was undoubtedly an extraordinarily gifted speaker, and that capability was of inestimable importance to his rise to power during the 1920s and ’30s. But the chairman of the NSDAP was not just an excellent demagogue. He was also a fairly gifted actor who had mastered the art of appearing in a variety of masks and roles. Perhaps no one realised this better than Charlie Chaplin in his 1940 film The Great Dictator. When Albert Speer saw it in 1972, he praised the comedian for “having penetrated Hitler’s character a lot further than any other contemporary person.”35
Joachim Fest wrote of Hitler leading “a strange existence characterised by roles”—this will be one leitmotif for my depiction of the Führer.36 The artistry with which Hitler was able to conceal his real intentions from both friends and foes was another main key to his success as a politician. Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, in his memoirs the former Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk identified “bottomless mendacity” as Hitler’s primary personal characteristic. “He wasn’t even honest towards his most intimate confidants,” Krosigk recalled. “In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognise the difference between lies and truth.”37 Krosigk’s moral condemnation reveals that Hitler—the consummate role player who had repeatedly got the better of his conservative allies—continued to fool them even after his death.
Hitler liked to present himself as a frustrated artist who had been driven involuntarily into politics, and the myth of the “artist-politician” has influenced many biographies. This obscures the fact that Hitler was a well-below-average painter and architect, however: his great gift was for politics alone. In his ability to instantaneously analyse and exploit situations, he was far superior not only to his rivals within the NSDAP but also to the politicians from Germany’s mainstream parties. There is no other way to explain why he emerged victorious in all of the crises within the Nazi Party leading up to 1933. Or how he was able, within a few months after his appointment as chancellor, to subjugate his conservative coalition partners in the “cabinet of national concentration,” although they were convinced that they had co-opted him for their ends. This astonishing process will be discussed in detail in the chapter entitled “Totalitarian Revolution.” Furthermore, I will try to show that Hitler’s unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler’s own supremacy essentially unassailable.
Another cliché holds that Hitler’s personal life outside politics was completely irrelevant—indeed, that the Führer didn’t have a genuine private life. Even his first biographer Heiden wrote that Hitler was a demagogue who could only connect with people en masse and lacked the “courage” to have a private life.38 Bullock characterised him as an uprooted individual without a home or a family, while Fest described “a human void around [Hitler],” simply dismissing the idea of his having personal relationships.39 Kershaw expanded on this thesis, arguing that Hitler was entirely consumed by his role as Führer. “Hitler’s private life was his life as a political creature. If you take away the political, little to nothing remains,” the historian told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung when the first volume of his biography appeared. “In a sense, he was an empty shell.”40 Not surprisingly the leading exponent of structuralist German history, Hans Mommsen, also favoured this interpretation, writing that there was actually no private sphere whatsoever behind Hitler’s public appearances—a striking example of how the mythology surrounding the Führer has influenced the writing of history.41
This book will attempt to correct that picture and show that the putative void in Hitler’s non-political existence is a myth. In a sense, previous biographers have fallen for the role Hitler played best, the one that concealed his private life and cast him as someone who had renounced all personal relations to devote himself to “Volk and Reich.” The chapters concerning Hitler’s relationships with women and the circles he entertained at his country house in Bavaria will show how little the cliché of the impersonal Führer corresponds to reality. Hitler’s private life was in fact far more varied than many of his contemporaries and later historians imagined. It is untrue that he was fundamentally incapable of having personal relationships. Characteristically, however, he made no clear distinction between political and private spheres: for him the two were unusually intertwined. This realisation sheds new light on Hitler’s specific style of rule.
“Are we permitted to depict Hitler as a human being?” the German media asked in 2004 with the release of Bernd Eichinger’s film Downfall, which depicted the Führer, played by veteran actor Bruno Ganz, during his final days in the bunker in Berlin.42 The only answer is: not only are we permitted, we are obliged to. It is a huge mistake to assume that a criminal on the millennial scale of Hitler must have been a monster. Naturally it would be simpler to reduce him to a psychopath who used political action to realise his homicidal impulses. For a long time this tendency to demonise Hitler dominated historical research and prevented us from having a clear view of the actual man. In February 1947, from the isolation of his cell in Spandau prison, Albert Speer remarked on the growing tendency in post-Nazi German society “to depict Hitler as a carpet-chewing hotheaded dictator who blew his stack on the slightest of occasions.” Speer thought that was both wrong and dangerous, noting: “If there are no human characteristics in the picture of Hitler, if one ignores his power of persuasion, his winning qualities and the Austrian charm he was capable of displaying, one will never do justice to him as a phenomenon.”43 In the mid-1970s, after reading his memoirs, the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl wrote to Speer that, for her, the question remained:
What was it about Hitler that allowed him to impress and indeed bewitch not just the German people, but many foreigners as well?…I can never forget or forgive the terrible things that happened in Hitler’s name, nor do I want to. But I also don’t want to forget what a massive effect he had on people. That would be to make things too easy for us. These two seeming contradictions within his personality—this schizophrenia—were likely what produced the enormous energy within his person.44
Such references to Hitler’s unique dual nature, the conjunction of winning characteristics and criminal energy, should not be dismissed as mere attempts by Speer or Riefenstahl to distract attention from their own culpability. On the contrary, we must take such statements seriously if we want to understand the seductive force Hitler possessed not just for his own entourage, but for large segments of the German population. In the chapter with the somewhat unsettling title “Hitler as Human Being,” I have tried to use just this approach to go beyond what Fest called examining an “un-person” and gain insights into Hitler’s habits and characteristics.45
Hitler was without doubt the focal point of the Nazi regime, and the Third Reich lived and died with him. For that reason, anyone who wants to understand both the monstrous and attractive sides of National Socialism must also examine both Hitler as a motivating force and the forces that motivated him. That will be the subject of the chapter entitled “Cult and Community,” which will seek to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between the dictator and German society and the reasons for Hitler’s enormous popularity.
To depict Hitler in human terms is not to elicit sympathy for him or to downplay his crimes. This biography seeks to show the sort of person he was since the 1920s: a fanatic Jew-hater, who could tactically conceal his anti-Semitism but who never lost sight of his aim of “removing” Jews from German society. For that reason, I will pay special attention to the question of how Hitler, once in power, tried to realise this goal and what sort of support he received.
Sections devoted to German foreign policy after 1933 will illustrate how doggedly Hitler pursued the goal, which he had also maintained since the mid-1920s, of conquering “living space in the east.” This remained true even when he appeared publicly in the guise of a man of peace who was only striving for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The subsequent chapter, entitled “The Way to War,” will then describe how the dictator gradually turned from the politics of revision to the politics of expansion, which aimed to give the Third Reich not only undisputed hegemony on the Continent but world domination.
The present volume is concerned with the “years of ascent,” but by no means do I want to give the impression that Hitler enjoyed an uninterrupted success story. On the contrary, I will show that his career was permanently threatening to come undone—most significantly after his failed putsch in 1923 and the Nazis’ disastrous electoral defeat in November 1932. Hitler’s path to power was anything but inevitable: in January 1933, it would have been eminently possible to prevent his nomination as Reich chancellor. The chairman of the NSDAP profited from a unique constellation of crises that he was able to exploit cleverly and unscrupulously. He also benefited from his domestic adversaries’ tendency, from the very inception of his political career, to underestimate his abilities. A similar lack of appreciation for Hitler’s gifts later convinced foreign statesmen that they could control his aggression. That was an illusion, from which the world first awoke when Hitler crassly violated the Munich Agreement in March 1939. With that, the dictator had crossed the line. Nemesis was at hand—although none of Hitler’s contemporaries, and certainly not the man himself, realised how close it was.
This book does not pretend to offer a fully new interpretation of history. In light of the achievements of my predecessors from Heiden to Kershaw, that would be utterly arrogant. But I do hope that the first volume of this biography succeeds in bettering our understanding of the man Stefan Zweig described as “bringing greater disaster upon the world than anyone in our times.”46 In particular, I hope that Hitler’s personality emerges more clearly in all its astonishing contradictions and contrasts so that our picture of the man is more complex and nuanced. Hitler was not a “man without qualities.”47 He was a figure with a great many qualities and masks. If we look behind the public persona which Hitler created for himself and which was bolstered by his loyal followers, we can see a human being with winning and revolting characteristics, undeniable talents and obviously deep-seated psychological complexes, huge destructive energy and a homicidal bent. My aim is to deconstruct the myth of Hitler, the “fascination with monstrosity” that has so greatly influenced historical literature and public discussion of the Führer after 1945.48 In a sense, Hitler will be “normalised”—although this will not make him seem more “normal.” If anything, he will emerge as even more horrific.
Writing about the pivotal figure in German and European history is without doubt the most difficult task for a historian and demands the greatest responsibility. There will always be aspects of Hitler we cannot explain. German publisher Rudolf Augstein was probably right in his review of Fest’s work when he questioned whether there could ever be the definitive biography of Hitler.49 People will never stop pondering this mysterious, calamitous figure. Every generation must come to terms with Hitler. “We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present—not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”50
1
The Young Hitler
“I have no idea when it comes to my family history,” Hitler remarked in August 1942 in one of his countless monologues at his Wolfsschanze headquarters. “I’m the most limited person in the world in this area. I am a fully non-familial being, someone who by his very nature isn’t focused on relationships. It’s not in me. I belong to my ethnic community.”1 The German dictator had good reason to declare his lack of interest in family history. Several obscure bits of his family story had already begun to occasion rumours and speculation when Hitler began his political career in the early 1920s. They have made historians rack their brains ever since, and even today not all of the questions surrounding Hitler’s origins have been cleared up.
Hitler’s family biography takes us to Waldviertel, an agricultural region of northern Austria that borders on Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic. On 17 June 1837, in a village called Strones, an unmarried daughter of a small farmer, named Marie Anna Schicklgruber, gave birth to a son she named Alois. Children born out of wedlock were nothing unusual—that sort of thing happened a
ll the time in the countryside. But at the age of almost 42, the mother was extraordinarily old for the times. Nonetheless, five years later she married the 50-year-old miller’s assistant, Johann Georg Hiedler, from the village of Spital. The couple apparently lived in poverty, and as far as we know, even before Marie Anna’s death in 1847 the child was entrusted to Johann Georg’s younger brother Johann Nepomuk, who was one of the wealthier farmers in Spital. The younger Hiedler brother—who spelled his last name Hüttler—raised his foster son as his own. Alois grew up in a sheltered environment with Hiedler’s three daughters. He went to a vocational Volksschule and then learned the cobbler trade in Vienna.
For a young man of such humble origins and limited education, Alois Schicklgruber had a remarkable professional career. In 1855, at the age of 19, he decided to give up his trade and get a job in the financial administration of the Austrian monarchy. A shining example of both ambition and devotion to duty, he climbed the social ladder, rung by rung. By 1875 he had become a customs official in the town of Braunau, a rank in the Austrian civil service normally reserved for people who had attended a university-track academy or Gymnasium.2 But then, one year later, something strange happened. In early 1876, Johann Nepomuk and three witnesses turned up at the office of notary Josef Penker in the town of Weitra, not far from Spital, and declared that Alois Schicklgruber was actually the biological son of his brother Johann Georg Hiedler, who had died nineteen years previously. In the protocol drawn up by the notary and signed by the three witnesses, the name was recorded as “Hitler”—in those days the spelling of names seems to have been considered relatively unimportant. One day later, the pastor in the township of Döllersheim, where Strones is located, amended the parish register, adding “Georg Hitler” as Alois’s father, striking the name “Schicklgruber” and replacing “illegitimate” with “legitimate.”3
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