Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Brendan Simms
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Basic Books
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Originally published in 2019 by Allen Lane in the United Kingdom
First US Edition: October 2019
Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947304
ISBNs: 978-0-465-02237-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1820-6 (ebook)
E3-20190910-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
PART ONE
Humiliation
1 Sketch of the Dictator as a Young Man
2 Against a ‘World of Enemies’
3 The ‘Colonization’ of Germany
PART TWO
Fragmentation
4 The Struggle for Bavaria
5 Anglo-American Power and German Impotence
6 Regaining Control of the Party
PART THREE
Unification
7 The American Challenge
8 Breakthrough
9 Making the Fewest Mistakes
PART FOUR
Mobilization
10 The ‘Fairy Tale’
11 The ‘Elevation’ of the German People
12 Guns and Butter
PART FIVE
Confrontation
13 ‘Living Standards’ and ‘Living Space’
14 ‘England is the motor of opposition to us’
15 The ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have-Nots’
PART SIX
Annihilation
16 Facing West, Striking East
17 The Struggle against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘Plutocracy’
18 The Fall of ‘Fortress Europe’
Conclusion
Discover More
About the Author
Praise for Hitler
Notes
For Katherine
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‘In the end man takes his livelihood from the earth, and the earth is the trophy which destiny gives to those peoples who fight for it.’
Adolf Hitler, 1943, quoted in Helmut Krausnick, ‘Zu Hitler’s Ostpolitik im Sommer 1943’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2 (1954), pp. 311–12
Abbreviations
In order to reduce the already very large number of references, documents from these collections, which are easily available, have been cited in shortened form.
ADAP Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945. Aus dem Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes. Series C. (1933–7), Series D (1937–41) and Series E: (1941–5) (Göttingen, 1950–81)
BAK Bundesarchiv Koblenz
BayHSTA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. IV, Kriegsarchiv
BT Klaus Gerbet (ed.), Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock. Zwischen Pflicht und Verweigerung. Das Kriegstagebuch (Munich and Berlin, 1995)
DVW Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (ed.), Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Westfeldzuges, 1939–1940 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1956)
DW Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (ed.), Dokumente zum Westfeldzug, 1940 (Berlin, Göttingen and Frankfurt, 1960)
ES Hildegard von Kotze and Helmut Krausnick (eds.), ‘Es spricht der Führer’. 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden (Gütersloh, 1966)
ET Hildegard von Kotze (ed.), Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 1938–1943. Aufzeichnungen des Majors Engel (Stuttgart, 1974)
FE Martin Moll (ed.), Führer-Erlasse, 1939–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997)
FK Willi A. Bölcke (ed.), Deutschlands Rüstung im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Hitlers Konferenzen mit Albert Speer, 1942–1945 (Frankfurt, 1969)
GT Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels im Auftrag des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte und mit Unterstützung des Staatlichen Archivdienstes Russlands, ed. Elke Fröhlich, 24 vols. (Munich, 1993–2006)
HB Wolf Rüdiger Hess (ed.), Hess Briefe, 1908–1933 (Munich, 1987)
HP Lothar Gruchmann and Reinhard Weber (eds.), Der Hitler-Prozess 1924. Wortlaut der Hauptverhandlung vor dem Volksgericht München I, 4 vols. (Munich, 1997–9)
HT Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (ed.), Franz Halder. Kriegstagebuch. Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939–1942, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1962–4)
HW Walther Hubatsch (ed.), Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegsführung, 1939–1945 (Frankfurt, 1962)
IMT Der Prozess gegen die Hauptskriegverbrechen vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof (Nuremberg, 1949)
KB Martin Vogt (ed.), Herbst 1941 im Führerhauptquartier. Berichte Werner Koeppens an seinen Minister Alfred Rosenberg (Koblenz, 2002)
KP Willi A. Boelcke (ed.), Kriegspropaganda 1939–1941. Geheime Ministerkonferenzen im Reichspropagandaministerium (Stuttgart, 1966)
KTB, OKW Helmuth Greiner and Percy Ernst Schramm (eds.), Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, 4 vols. (in 7 parts) (Frankfurt, 1961–5).
LB Helmut Heiber (eds.), Hitlers Lagebesprechungen. Die Protokollfragmente seiner militärischen Konferenzen, 1942–1945 (Stuttgart, 1962)
LOC Library of Congress
LV Gerhard Wagner (ed.), Lagevorträge des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine vor Hitler 1939–1945 (Munich, 1972)
MK Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger and Roman Töppel (eds.), Hitler. Mein Kampf. Eine kritische Edition (Munich and Berlin, 2016).
RH Friedrich Hartmannsgruber (ed.), Regierung Hitler. Akten der Reichskanzlei, 7 vols. (Berlin and Munich, 1983–2015)
RSA Institut für Zeitgeschichte (ed.), Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften und Anordnungen. Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, 17 vols. (Munich, 1992–2003)
RT Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr (eds.), Alfred Rosenberg. Die Tagebücher von 1934 bis 1944 (Frankfurt, 2015)
SA Eberhard Jäckel with Axel Kuhn (eds.), Adolf Hitler. Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924 (Stuttgart, 1980)
SD Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939–1941, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1967–70)
WA Henry Ashby Turner (ed.), Otto Wagener. Hitler aus nächster Nähe. Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929–1932 (Frankfurt, 1978)
Acknowledgements
My greatest debt is to my wife, Anita Bunyan, for all her support over more than thirty years and for help on this project. I also thank Christopher Andrew, Mark Austin, Maximilian Becker, Ilya Berkovich, Tim Blanning, James Boyd, Christopher Clark, Norman Domeier, Alan Donahue, Andreas Fahrmeir, Bi
ll Foster, Eric Frazier, Allegra Fryxell, Bernhard Fulda, Claire Gantet, Manfred Görtemaker, Christian Goeschel, Bobby Grampp, Tom Grant, Neil Gregor, Henning Grunwald, Christian Hartmann, Daniel Hedinger, Winfried Heinemann, Lukas Helfinger, Dorothy Hochstetter, Luisa Hulsroj, Nora Kalinskij, Gerhard Keiper, Jennifer Jenkins, Klaus Lankheit, Charlotte Lee, Clara Maier, Heinrich Meier, Mary-Ann Middlekoop, David Motadel, Marlene Mueller-Rytlewski, William Mulligan, Fred Nielsen, Mikael Nilsson, Jeremy Noakes, Wolfram Pyta, Phillips O’Brien, Darren O’Byrne, William O’Reilly, James Carleton Paget, Nathalie Price, Helen Roche, Gabriel Rolfes, Ulrich Schlie, Klaus Schmider, K. D. Schmidt, Klaus Schwabe, Constance Simms, Daniel Simms, Maja Spanu, Alan Steinweis, Benedict Stuchtey, Hans Ulrich Thamer, Liz Wake, Thomas Weber, Steffen Werther, Jo Whaley, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin and Rainer Zitelmann. I dedicate this book to my youngest daughter, Katherine.
Prologue
By July 1918, the First World War had raged for nearly four years. Private First Class Adolf Hitler of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment had served in it almost from the very beginning. He had seen the German Reich defy the mighty coalition consisting of the Entente empires Britain, France and Russia as well as a number of smaller powers. Towards the end of the previous year, one of them–the Tsarist Empire–had been brought to its knees by a combination of military defeat and revolution. In the meantime, however, the Reich had provoked the antagonism of another and even more formidable power: the United States.
Germany was now in a race to smash France and drive Britain back across the Channel before American troops could arrive in force. At first, her efforts were crowned with success. German armies surged forward along the western front. Adolf Hitler marched with them, only to witness the moment at which the tide began to turn during the Second Battle of the Marne.
Fresh, numerous and driven by an enthusiasm which compensated for their lack of experience, the Americans burst among the exhausted Bavarian reservists. They had a shattering effect on the morale of Hitler’s comrades and left an enduring impression on the man himself. He encountered at least two of these new enemies directly. On 17 July 1918, the brigade adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, wrote that ‘Private First Class Hitler dropped off two American prisoners (taken by R[eserve Regiment] 16) at the headquarters of 12 Royal Bavarian Infantry Brigade.’1
Who these men were and what Hitler made of the incident at the time are not recorded. We do know, however, how he later interpreted what became a seminal moment in his life and thus in the history of the twentieth century.
Hitler was convinced that these ‘doughboys’ were the descendants of German emigrants, lost to the Fatherland for lack of ‘living space’ to feed them, who had returned as avengers in the ranks of an unstoppable enemy army. In subsequent speeches, he repeatedly came back to the moment ‘in the mid-summer of 1918, when the first American soldiers appeared on the battlefields of France, well-grown men, men of our own blood, whom we had deported for centuries, who were now ready to grind the motherland itself into the mud’.2
This, then, is where it all began: the preoccupation with Germany’s demographic weakness, for which Lebensraum in the east was ultimately to become the only remedy; the respect for and fear of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers with their apparently infinite spatial, demographic, natural and economic resources; and the determination to avoid another racial civil war between Anglo-Saxon and Teuton–incited by ‘world Jewry’–if possible or to survive it should a renewed contest prove unavoidable.
Introduction
Just over twenty years ago, a German reviewer counted more than 120,000 books and articles on Hitler and the Third Reich,1 a figure which has increased substantially since. The best of the biographies have reflected their times and scholarly trends. Alan Bullock’s pioneering Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, written just nine years after 1945 and at the height of the Cold War, saw him as an exemplar of the ‘Age of Unenlightened Despotism’, but also as an ‘opportunist entirely without principle’.2 Intentionally or not, this interpretation chimed with the wider intellectual context of totalitarianism theory, and the more local propensity of his colleague A. J. P. Taylor to privilege happenstance and contingency over deeper patterns of explanation. Two decades later, Joachim Fest wrote a celebrated biography which was more literary than scholarly, but admired by many professional historians. It was the first large-scale imaginative attempt to explain how a man like Hitler could gain and keep power in an economically advanced and culturally sophisticated country such as Germany.3 This was a milestone in the history of the Federal Republic, and the culmination of thirty years of research and soul-searching. Fest’s biography was thus as much a book about Germans as it was about Hitler.
It took another twenty years for the next ‘classic’ biography to appear. The two volumes by Ian Kershaw, which remain the standard work, reflected the considerable quantity of research done on the Nazi dictatorship over the previous decades, especially the ‘turn’ towards social history, and the long debate between ‘intentionalists’, who drew a more or less straight line from pragmatic statements in the 1920s to the end of Hitler’s career, and ‘structuralists’, who emphasized institutional rivalries and dynamics.4 Fest had been criticized for abstracting Hitler too much from his surroundings.5 Kershaw’s Hitler, by contrast, was highly contextualized. He undertook to ‘focus not upon the personality of Hitler’, but on the ‘character of his power’, which required him to ‘look in the first instance to others, not to Hitler himself’.6 Kershaw’s biography also took account of the ‘voluntarist’ turn, by which historians increasingly stressed the active collaboration of the population in Nazi initiatives. The enduring power of institutions and groupings was recognized, and individual agency was restored to historical actors, both great and small.7 The ‘myth’ surrounding the Führer was shown to be as much constructed by others as his own confection.8 Kershaw’s Hitler did not control everything, because he did not need to: the principal players ‘worked towards the Führer’ on their own initiative.9 His power rested not so much on his own demonic energy, as on the cooperation of the German elites and the population at large. Hitler was cut down to size, though he still remained highly visible.
Since then, there have been further biographies and specialist studies.10 Volker Ullrich particularly emphasizes Hitler’s personality.11 Shortly afterwards, Peter Longerich has crowned a long engagement with the history of the Third Reich with his own interpretation, which took into account many of the detailed studies that have appeared since the appearance of Kershaw’s two volumes.12 He showed Hitler to be much more than a mere ‘catalyser’ of pre-existing forces in German society and a much more dominant figure than the ‘structuralist’ view had allowed. At around the same time, Wolfram Pyta’s book, though not strictly speaking a biography, showed how the ‘cultural’ turn in historical studies could provide new insights into Hitler’s self-fashioning as a ‘genius’ and the ‘performative’ nature of his rule.13 Most recently, Hans-Ulrich Thamer’s short biography has reminded us once again of the importance of violence and seduction in Hitler’s relationship with the German people.14
There are many respects in which the author’s own offering cannot compete with this field. It can obviously never be the first major work on its subject, nor will it be the last word. It does not aspire to the literary flair of Joachim Fest, the scale and depth of Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich’s profound understanding of the Nazi domestic system, the theoretical sophistication of Wolfram Pyta, or the psychological penetration of Volker Ullrich. Nor does this biography try to reinvent the wheel. It takes account of but does not attempt to synthesize the vast recent specialized research on the Third Reich more generally.15 It cannot explain the profound connection that Hitler had with the German people.16 Instead, this is a book not about the Hitler they voted for, but the Hitler they got. It is not about what he ‘achieved’, but about what he intended. Finally, Hitler’s personality and private life remain elusive throughout, though facets of them–some un
expected–will emerge. That said, while the author cannot provide the ‘whole’ Hitler himself, he hopes to show that our picture of him has hitherto been seriously incomplete.
This biography makes three big and interrelated new claims. First, that Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Secondly, that Hitler’s view of the German Volk–even when purged of Jews and other ‘undesirables’–was highly ambivalent, reflecting a sense of inferiority by comparison with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Thirdly, that we have–for very understandable reasons–focused too much on Hitler’s murderous ‘negative eugenics’ against the Jews and other ‘undesirables’ and not enough on what he regarded as his ‘positive eugenics’, which were designed to ‘elevate’ the German people to the level of their British and American rivals.17 All this means that we have missed the extent to which Hitler was locked in a worldwide struggle not just with ‘world Jewry’ but with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. The author’s ambition here is not merely ‘additive’, the provision of a new dimension to an existing framework. Rather, he wishes his work to be understood as ‘substitutive’. If the claims therein are sustainable, then Hitler’s biography, and perhaps the history of the Third Reich more generally, need to be fundamentally rethought.
This biography therefore breaks with much of the prevailing view, or views, on Hitler. He did not place the German people on a racial pedestal, but was consumed throughout by fear of their enduring fragility. Hitler did not believe that the United States had been crippled by the Wall Street Crash, and it remained a central factor in his thinking from the early 1920s onwards. The book also rebuts the tenacious belief that the principal driver of Hitler’s world view, and source of his virulent anti-Semitism, was fear of the Soviet Union or Bolshevism. It consequently does not accept the centrality, for him, of the eastern front in the Second World War. The book does not see a meaningful ‘conceptual pluralism’ in any area of Nazi domestic or foreign policy which really mattered to Hitler. Hitler was not a prisoner of any force in German society, of competing power centres. If German government was often in a state of ‘polycratic chaos’, this was certainly not the result of any conscious attempt on the dictator’s part to ‘divide and rule’. That said, none of the works cited are totally without either value or error, and this book inevitably concurs with scholars of the Third Reich on some issues and parts company on others. This is reflected in the notes, where the literature is generally cited when in explicit agreement, while errors are usually corrected only by implication.
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