Yet Hitler could not always have his way. This is true, first of all, of his core domestic policy, namely the attempt to produce a population that was completely bound by solidarity and geared to war. It is also true of his efforts to make his ‘racial policies’ popular with the population at large and of his radical anti-Church policies. Again, during the war he was unsuccessful in reconciling the conflicting aims of his occupation policy and his alliance policy in a single strategy that could fully mobilize the resources of the territory he controlled to support the war he was waging.
What then were the foundations of this dictator’s extraordinarily extensive powers? The idea that Hitler’s regime was primarily based on charisma and thus derived above all from the enthusiastic assent to his policies on the part of a large majority of the German nation, who credited him with superhuman abilities, is most definitely inadequate. For any attempt to interpret him as expressing the longings and hopes of ‘the Germans’ comes up against the fact that, before National Socialism came on the scene, German society was split into various camps and even the Nazi state was able only to a very limited extent to build bridges between them. The Nazi ‘national community’, united in solidarity behind Hitler, turns out more than anything to be an invention of contemporary propaganda. Hitler’s ‘charisma’ is not primarily the result of the masses believing him to possess extraordinary abilities (let alone of his actually having any), but rather, in an age of mass media, bureaucracy, and social control, is more than anything the product of a sophisticated use of technical means to exert power.
This approach has two consequences for the analysis I am offering: First, by contrast with the ‘structural’ analysis put forward by Ian Kershaw in his Hitler biography, this study does not explain Hitler as a phenomenon primarily on the basis of social forces and the complex of factors that determined the Nazi system of power.4 My contention is that we have to abandon once and for all the image of a man who, overshadowed by his own charisma, allegedly became increasingly estranged from reality, let things take their course, and to a great extent withdrew from actual politics. This is the view of Hitler as an, in many respects, ‘weak dictator’, as Hans Mommsen pithily summed up this thesis.5 Instead I emphasize Hitler’s autonomous role as an active politician. Secondly, I examine critically the claim often made that ‘the Germans’ largely welcomed Hitler’s policies and identified with their dictator as a person. The result is a more nuanced picture: Throughout his dictatorship there was both active support from broad sections of the population and a significant undercurrent of discontent and reserve. The fact that Hitler’s regime nevertheless functioned more or less without a hitch was above all the result (and this factor is frequently underplayed) of the various means of coercion available to a dictatorship. In addition to institutionalized repression there was the Party’s local surveillance of ‘national comrades’, as well as Nazi control of the ‘public sphere’.
Over and above the specifics of their lives, biographies of politicians who direct and control complex systems of power provide insight into the distinguishing features of power structures and decision-making processes, in particular when, as in this case, these structures and processes were created in large measure by the protagonist himself. In addition, as a result of his presence in a variety of political spheres Hitler was repeatedly able to reconfigure complex and problematic situations to suit his purposes by ‘dropping a bombshell’. What is more, the history of the Nazi dictatorship as told from the perspective of the man who stood at the pinnacle of this structure provides insights into the connections between the individual political spheres in the so-called Third Reich and creates an opportunity to combine the specialized discourses developed by historians in their particular fields in an overview linked by a single, overarching chronology. Thus a biography of Hitler also produces a history of his regime.
Joachim Fest’s dictum that Hitler was basically a ‘non-person’6 is typical of the prevalent disinclination of historians to encounter Hitler on a ‘human’ level. By contrast, this biography assumes that, in common with everyone, Hitler had a personality, that this personality demonstrates certain constants, developments, and discontinuities that can be described and analysed, and that this analysis of his personality can be productive in explaining his political career. This personal element not only played a significant role in some important political decisions, but it contributed fundamentally to his political outlook as a whole. Thus the behaviour and attitudes of a dictator in possession of absolute power were necessarily and fatefully influenced by his deeply rooted tendency to develop megalomaniacal plans and projects, by his inability to accept humiliations and defeats, and by the resulting reflex to react to his fear of obstacles and opposition by a strategy of annihilation. Whenever Hitler’s use of this absolute power is being discussed, these personality factors must be given due weight, though not to the extent of reducing his decision-making and policies to them alone. Hitler’s psyche, his emotions, his physical being, his life-style, his interactions with others and so on – such aspects cannot replace analysis of complex historical material, but nor can they be treated in a voyeuristic manner in a special chapter called ‘Hitler, the private man’. Rather, the challenge is to view them as integral to this person and, where fruitful, to make them part of the biography.7
By writing his autobiographical work Mein Kampf [My Struggle], Hitler, supported by the Nazi propaganda machine, later contributed significantly to the creation and manipulation of his own history. Whereas he described his pre-1914 years as a time when he taught himself the things that laid the foundation for his political career, this version was frequently reinterpreted after the Second World War as the history of a failure, who in the narrow provincial world of Linz, in the slums of Vienna, and in the cafés of Munich internalized the resentments that he was then able to act out in his later life. Yet this interpretation too reads purpose and linearity into Hitler’s development when there is in fact no evidence for these. Hitler’s extraordinary later career – and this is my focus in this book – cannot be explained by the first three decades of his life. It is therefore important to resist later reinterpretations and exaggerations. Only then do we see clearly that what we are dealing with is no more or less than the history of a nobody.
Prologue
A Nobody
A genius. That was how Hitler saw himself and how he wanted others to see him. Though unrecognized at first, he had, the story went, followed the path predestined for him, thanks to his exceptional abilities, his strength of will, and his determination. Hitler invested a considerable amount of effort in creating this perception of himself. It was at the core of the image that he and his supporters spent a lifetime burnishing. Bound up with this image-making was his attempt to obscure his family background and to portray his childhood and youth as a preparation for his later role as politician and ‘Führer’. He had good grounds for doing so, for when separated out from this subsequent ‘narrative’ and confined to the (relatively sparse) facts that can count as assured, Hitler’s early life presents a very different picture. While providing insights into the development of the young Hitler’s personality, these facts also show that his first thirty years gave no inkling of his future career.1
Hitler’s ancestors came from the Waldviertel, a poor agricultural and forested region in the north-west of Lower Austria. In 1837 Hitler’s father, Alois Schicklgruber, was born in the village of Strones near Dollersheim, the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Whether by chance or not, shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 both of these places were completely depopulated and destroyed when a large Wehrmacht training area was created.2 It is not clear whether Alois was the son of a miller, Johann Georg Hiedler, whom Anna Schicklgruber married in 1842 and who died in 1857, or the offspring of a relationship with his younger brother, a peasant, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In any case, shortly before the early death of his mother in 1847, Johann Nepomuk took the boy to live with him in the village of
Spital and, in 1876, with the aid of three witnesses and in a procedure of very dubious legality, had his elder brother posthumously declared to be the boy’s father.3 In future Alois used the name Hitler, a variation of ‘Hiedler’ that was common in the district. The dubious legality of this procedure (which was seemingly necessary so that Johann Nepomuk, who finally died in 1888, could make Alois his heir) has led to repeated speculation about the true identity of Alois’s father. In 1932, for example, a rumour surfaced, exploited by Hitler’s opponents,4 that Alois was the son of a Jew and so there was no way that his son, Adolf, could (according to his own criteria) claim to be a ‘pure Aryan’. However, despite the persistence of this rumour, it has no basis in fact.5 Nevertheless, it is understandable that, in view of this and other scandalous rumours that kept emerging, Hitler had no interest in discussing his family background, particularly since Johann Nepomuk was also the grandfather of Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl. Given the doubts about who his grandfather was, Hitler’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side may also have been his grandfather on his father’s side.
This uncertainty about Hitler’s family history was not, in fact, untypical among the rural working class of this period and it continued into the next generation. To begin with, Alois Hitler concentrated on his career. Originally trained as a shoemaker, he managed to secure a post in the Austrian customs service and so acquired the status of a civil servant. In view of his poor educational qualifications this represented a significant career achievement. His first posting was to Braunau am Inn on the German–Austrian border in 1871.6
Alois Hitler was married three times and before that had already fathered an illegitimate child. His first marriage, to a woman fourteen years older than him, failed because she discovered his affair with a young servant girl. Alois lived with her and they had an illegitimate child (also called Alois), who was born in 1882. After the death of his wife they married and had another child, a daughter, Angela. The following year his wife became very ill and Alois employed Klara, his niece twice removed, to help out. She had already worked in his household as a maid and, even before his wife died, he had fathered a child with her. They married in January 1885, a papal dispensation being required because they were related. In 1885 Gustav, their first child arrived, followed by Ida a year later, and Otto the year after that. In the winter of 1887/88 they lost all three children, Otto dying shortly after birth, while Gustav and Ida succumbed to diphtheria. However, in 1888 Klara once again became pregnant and on 20 April 1889 her fourth child was born and given the name Adolf.
In 1892, the family – Klara, Adolf and his two half siblings – moved to Passau, to which Alois Hitler had been reassigned. In 1894 Edmund was born7 and Klara and the children stayed in Passau, while Alois spent his last year of service in 1894/5 in Linz. On receiving his pension Alois moved back to the country, buying a farm in Hafeld near Lambach for his retirement.8 However, he soon sold it and, after a brief stay in Lambach, in 1898 moved with his family to a small house in Leonding near Linz.9 By this time, the family had undergone further changes. In 1896 a daughter, Paula, was born; in the same year, fourteen-year-old, Alois ( junior) had left home after a major quarrel with his father and been disinherited.10 In 1900, their son, Edmund, died of measles.11
During the nineteenth century, marriage between relatives, illegitimate children, a lack of clarity over fatherhood, large numbers of births, and the frequent deaths of children were all characteristic of the lives of the rural working class. Alois Hitler succeeded in climbing out of this social class but, as far as his family life was concerned, continued to be part of it. Although he had achieved a relatively high status as a civil servant, his mind-set did not adjust to the ‘orderly’, petty bourgeois norms of his time and, significantly, on his retirement, he once more sought a rural milieu. It appears that his life was determined by this tension, a tension that Alois was able to overcome through his strong, even brutal, self-confidence. In most of the few surviving photographs he is shown in uniform. To his subordinates he was evidently a pedantic and strict superior who was not very approachable. After his retirement in the village environment of Lambach and Leonding, in which Adolf Hitler grew up, his father’s position as a former civil servant gave him a superior status. To the villagers he appeared lively and sociable.12 However, this cheerfulness was mainly evident outside the house; at home he was an undisputed paterfamilias with distinctly despotic qualities, who frequently beat his children.13 In contrast to Klara, who was a regular churchgoer, he was anticlerical, a committed Liberal.
In 1903 Alois senior suddenly collapsed and died while drinking his morning glass of wine in the local pub. Reminiscences of him proved very varied. In an obituary in the Linzer Tagespost he was described as a ‘thoroughly progressively-minded man’ and, as such, a good friend of free schools, a reference to the fact that he supported Liberal efforts to reform the school system.14 He was described as ‘always good-humoured, marked indeed by a positively youthful cheerfulness’, a ‘keen singer’.15 Years later, the local peasant, Josef Mayrhofer, who was appointed Adolf Hitler’s guardian, painted a totally different picture. Alois had been a ‘grumpy, taciturn old man’, ‘a hard-line Liberal and like all Liberals of that period a staunch German Nationalist, a Pan-German, yet, surprisingly, still loyal to the Emperor’.16
Adolf Hitler himself later maintained that his relationship with his father was the key to the development of his personality. Yet a glance at his family history suggests that his relationship with his mother may well have been more significant. In Hitler’s family death was very present: Adolf lost a total of four siblings, three before his own birth and then, aged eleven, his brother Edmund. Three years later, his father died and, finally, his mother, when he was seventeen.
The fact that his mother had lost her first three children before Adolf’s birth and – everything points to this – had little emotional support from her husband, must have had a strong impact on her behaviour towards Adolf. We do not know how she responded to her fourth child. It is conceivable that she came across as an unfeeling mother, who after her painful losses was afraid to invest too much emotion in a child who might not survive. He would then have experienced her as cool, lacking in feeling, distant, an experience that would explain Hitler’s own emotional underdevelopment, and also his tendency to try to assert his superiority over others and to seek refuge in megalomaniacal ideas of his own greatness. Or, on the other hand, his mother may have thoroughly spoiled her fourth child, placed all her hopes in the boy, and sought in him a substitute for the lack of a warm relationship with her husband. Being brought up as a mother’s boy, as a little prince, and a domestic tyrant would be an equally satisfactory explanation for why Hitler, even in his early years, became convinced he was someone special and how, in the course of his development, his ability to form normal human relationships was severely damaged. This would explain the conflict with his father, whose very existence Adolf must have seen as a threat to his special role in the family. It would also mean that his relationship with his mother was more one of dependence than of a son’s love for his mother. A combination of the ‘dead’ and the spoiling mother is also possible: Klara Hitler may, because of her losses, have treated her son during his first years with a lack of emotion and then, later on, have attempted to compensate for her neglect by showing excessive concern for him.17
The memoirs of Hitler’s boyhood friend, August Kubizek, and his own recollections indicate that the spoiling mother is the more likely scenario. However, even without knowing the details of this mother–son relationship, it is possible (and that is what matters here) to find plausible arguments for attributing Hitler’s evident lack of feeling in his dealings with others, his marked egocentricity, his flight into a fantasy world focused on himself, in short, his narcissistic personality, to his family background.
Adolf Hitler himself emphasized his relationship with Alois, which he described as a classic father–son conflict. In Mein Kampf he mainta
ins that, whereas as a ten-year-old he had hoped to go to university and so wanted to attend the humanist Gymnasium [grammar school], after he had finished primary school in 190018 his father had sent him to the Realschule [vocational school] in order to prepare him for a subordinate career in the civil service. He had massively rebelled against this. At the age of twelve he had again clashed with his father over his decision to become an artist. Thus his poor school results allegedly resulted from his determination to get his way with his father.19
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