This series of far-reaching interventions demonstrates the extent to which, by the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler had succeeded in freeing himself from the original constraints of his Chancellorship and taking control into his own hands – and the supreme confidence with which he had done so. He had established a regime in which he enjoyed virtually unrestricted freedom of action. The many deliberate and often brutal interventions also indicate, however, that Hitler’s position of power was not primarily rooted in consent based on charisma. Admittedly, his ‘successes’ in the years after 1933 were in time acknowledged beyond his core support by the majority of the population: among these were the elimination of the political Left, the replacement of a weak democratic system with a dictatorship, the regaining of ‘military sovereignty’ and the gradual revision of the Treaty of Versailles, national unity as paraded by the regime under the banner of the ‘national community’ or the bombastic displays of renewed national confidence. It is also evident that, once in power, Hitler’s regime had considerable success in galvanizing the population. Thus new energy and dynamism were released, not only by the development of the Party and state apparatus, the reestablishment of the army, and the armaments boom, but the Hitler Youth also offered the young new scope for activity; the key concepts of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ seemed to open up breathtaking new perspectives for young intellectuals in the cultural and academic spheres; committed careerists sniffed the chance to make their way regardless of traditional class barriers and social prejudice.
All these factors played their part in strengthening the dictatorship and Hitler’s standing. But it would be wrong to assume that his position rested on the identity of ‘Führer’ and nation. For it must be remembered that Hitler failed to achieve his key domestic policy goal, namely to weld the Germans together into a united ‘national community’ conscious of its ‘racial identity’, one that would willingly make any sacrifice in order to form a united ‘defence community’ to take up the fight for ‘living space’ that, as the regime propounded, would ensure the future security of the nation. The immense pressures put on German society by the rapid pace of rearmament showed it even then to be distinctly disunited and disinclined to bear stoically the material deprivations expected of it. People’s sense of belonging to particular social classes, groups, and milieus endured. Among large swathes of the population a well-developed awareness of their social status, as well as of conflicting social and economic interests, was undiminished, even if under the conditions of a dictatorship people in the main limited themselves to expressions of general dissatisfaction and annoyance. Confessional loyalties proved similarly stable and as a result Hitler did not succeed in his efforts to marginalize the Churches completely. Although the exclusion and persecution of the Jews, the central pillar of his ‘racial policy’, gave rise to mixed responses, it would be incorrect to claim that these were enthusiastically supported by the majority of the population. National enthusiasm for Hitler’s foreign policy successes was in the end always overshadowed by the fear of war that his high-risk policies provoked. When in September 1938 he took Germany to the brink of armed conflict the population demonstrated a pronounced unwillingness to go to war.
In practice, therefore, Hitler’s position was based not on charisma, whatever the regime liked to claim, but on the powers available within a dictatorship: control of the public sphere, which prevented the formation of any views outside the limits prescribed by the regime; a well-organized system of repression that spread an atmosphere of terror, combined with surveillance conducted locally by ‘national comrades’ through the omnipresent apparatus of the NSDAP and its affiliated organizations. By consistent use of these instruments Hitler as dictator secured himself maximum freedom of action. The conditions of war only intensified this state of affairs.
The Second World War was Hitler’s war: he not only determined the individual moves extending the war, but he conducted it as a racially motivated war of extermination with the aim of establishing an empire built on the criteria of ‘race’ and ‘space’. These key ideas determined his actions from the outset. Immediately after the outbreak of war he initiated a radical racial policy: he made the key decisions to subject Poland to a brutal policy of Germanization; it was his initiative to make a first attempt to deport the Jews from the ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ to a death zone in Poland; on Reich soil he instigated the systematic murder of patients in mental institutions, which by the summer of 1941 would claim 70,000 lives.
Hitler’s determination to take the war to the western powers dictated his next moves to extend it: the invasion of Scandinavia, the war in western Europe, the unsuccessful attempt to construct an anti-British continental bloc and thus to neutralize the British Empire’s power in the Mediterranean (Britain being unwilling to accept his conquests). They also included the war against Yugoslavia and Greece, which, in the wake of the failed campaign against Greece mounted by Germany’s ally Italy, was designed to frustrate British attempts to establish a foothold in the Balkans.
From the summer of 1940 onwards he had also been pursuing a plan to attack the Soviet Union, motivated initially by the thought of depriving Britain of her last potential ally on the continent. During the preparations for Operation Barbarossa, however, he broadened his perspective and ensured that this war was conducted as a campaign of racial extermination to conquer ‘living space’. He was now determined to turn the ideological goals he had been pursuing since the 1920s into reality. In the absence of institutions at the top of the regime to provide safeguards and counterbalancing powers, his far-reaching war plans inevitably led to hubris, not least because of his notorious overestimation of his own abilities. Thus as early as the spring of 1941 Hitler was making large-scale plans for the time after the anticipated rapid victory over the Soviet Union: he aimed to expand the Mediterranean strategy that had failed during the previous year and swiftly establish an unassailable position stretching from strategic bases on the west coast of Africa and the Atlantic islands via the south coast of the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula as well as to Transcaucasia and Afghanistan. He thus developed a vision of a blockade-proof empire that would extend over three continents and would be capable of defying not only Britain but any conceivable intervention by the United States.
Yet he was unable to achieve the crucial precondition for all this, namely rapid victory over the Soviet Union, while the United States’ growing support for Britain indicated it would soon enter the war. Hitler responded in the summer and autumn of 1941 to the prospect of a war on two fronts by further radicalizing and intensifying the ideological element in his conduct of the war, which he now geared up to be a comprehensive ‘war against the Jews’. This imaginary opponent, who was presumed to be behind the emerging enemy coalition, was to be utterly annihilated. Not only did he support Himmler’s actions in extending the mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the Soviet Union to an out-and-out genocide, but he gave orders that the Jews in Germany and other European countries under German control should be deported to the East – a move that in his distorted, anti-Semitic vision of the world was ‘retribution’ for the threatened entry of the United States (which he claimed was controlled by ‘the Jews’) into the war. At the same time, in December 1941 he considered himself secure enough to declare war on the United States in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, even though the German advance was grinding to a halt before Moscow in the winter of 1941. Hitler’s calculation was that America would be diverted from Europe by an extended war in Asia, in particular because his declaration of war on the United States was linked to his agreement with Japan that they would wage war together to the end. Thus his plans to create an empire on three continents did still appear realizable, provided that the Wehrmacht succeeded in 1942 in delivering a crippling blow to the Soviet Union through its summer offensive on the southern sector of the front. In the spring and summer of 1942 his hubris appeared to be turning into reality.
By his own decree Hitler’s empire was to be based on the ruthless plundering and exploitation of the human and economic resources of the occupied territories and on the brutal suppression of their populations. Jews had already been excluded. He himself established the different kinds of treatment meted out to the occupied territories in accordance with the racial ‘value’ of their inhabitants, by determining the structure, personnel, and political guidelines for the individual occupation regimes and repeatedly intervening in and adjusting the occupation policies for particular countries. It was Hitler who made the basic decisions regarding the colonization of conquered territory by German and ‘Germanic’ settlers and the expulsion of the native inhabitants, and it was he too who, in the spring and early summer of 1942, made the decisions intended to bring about the murder of all European Jews while the war was still in progress. On top of this, Hitler wanted to retain absolute freedom of action and thus flatly refused to give any assurances to the occupied and allied countries about their future position within the vague concept of a ‘New Europe’. Even at this point his guiding principle remained to prevent the emergence of any structures he had not created himself or had total control over.
In the spring of 1942, when he thought he was on the point of realizing his dreams of an empire, he immediately set about eliminating the final remnants of the rule of law in Germany by abolishing the independence of the judiciary and securing a Reichstag resolution empowering him to suspend the laws governing the civil service in individual cases – measures intended to give symbolic expression to the ‘Führer’s’ autocracy. And since the outbreak of war he had in fact managed to extend his powers even further: Carefully avoiding, even under the conditions of war, any form of collective decision-making, he ruled primarily by means of Führer decrees, aided by the various chancelleries, all vying with each other, as well as by direct instructions issued to a limited circle of intimates, who held the most important offices within the power structure. By means of these instruments Hitler monitored and directed not only the military conduct of the war, foreign and occupation policy, and the Europe-wide mass murder of the Jews, but also important areas of the war effort as it affected civilians, for example the provision of food; he continued to give the instructions for armaments production, reserved for himself the right to make any significant change to administrative structures in Germany, and set the parameters for the regime’s propaganda.
In the course of the war, the population of his own country had also to be subjected to stricter discipline and the ‘mood’ more tightly controlled; sceptical voices were for the most part reduced to silence. At first Hitler carried on interacting with ‘the people’ in the way he had developed before the war, by repeatedly using his appearances at high-profile occasions to address topics of widespread interest and concern. Thus he knew how to combine his triumphs over Poland and France with the impression that in each case he was now looking for a way to bring armed hostilities to a rapid close. As early as October 1941 he made fulsome declarations that the war against the Soviet Union, which had created great anxiety in its first months, was won. When the promised victory refused to materialize, in the autumn of 1941 he banned the question of how long the war would last from public discussion and gave unmistakable signals that the war must not be lost, if only because the ‘extermination’ of the Jews, announced so many times, was now really happening and that as a result the regime and the nation had burnt their bridges. But from the winter of 1941/42 onwards, with the first telling reverses and defeats, he withdrew increasingly from the public eye and thereby gradually surrendered the charismatic façade to his power. Facing up to failures and defeats and taking responsibility for them fundamentally conflicted with his self-perception as a triumphal leader; his personality made it impossible. In the event, the regime, albeit with some difficulty, was able to create an appearance of the population’s permanent ‘consent’ to its policies, even without the actual presence of the ‘Führer’.
By the end of 1942, with the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and the Western Allies’ successful offensive in North Africa, Hitler’s plan to create an empire had finally failed. But contrary to what leading members of his regime were asking of him, Hitler responded to the turn in the war neither by demanding an unconditional ‘totalizing’ of the German war effort nor by making concessions to the occupied countries or political promises to his allies. Instead he advocated increasing repression and exploitation in the lands he controlled. His form of ‘total war’ focused on stepping up the persecution of the Jews more intensively and making it even more widespread and blatant; the extermination of this ‘world enemy’, a product of his own imagination, acquired top priority for both ideological as well as tactical reasons. Knowing about the persecution and being complicit in it were designed to sustain the German population’s commitment to the war and also guarantee the loyalty of Germany’s allies. He now put Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria in particular under pressure to deliver up their Jews, with varying degrees of success.
At the same time, he placed his faith, above all, in Germany’s ability on the eastern front to hold securely any positions they had captured. His motive was not simply to delay a defeat that, given the relative strengths of both sides, was now inevitable. He was rather pursuing the idea with which he was now obsessed, namely that he could regain the military initiative, if the moment was right, by defending particular areas. Thus he again responded to the loss of his main ally, Italy, with an offensive, occupying northern and central Italy and also the Italian zones of occupation in France and in the Balkans, in order to bring further territory under his control. When he suspected disloyalty among the Hungarian leadership, the country was immediately occupied. Faced with the threat of an Allied landing in western Europe, since the winter of 1943/44 Hitler had clung obsessively to the idea that, if he could successfully repel an ‘invasion’, a second landing by the Allies would be ruled out for a lengthy period. He would then be able to move a large number of troops from the West to the East. Thus he was still hoping to win a military victory in the East or at least to achieve a draw with Stalin. In response to the increasingly catastrophic effects of escalating air raids on Germany, he fostered the illusion that he could use new kinds of weapon systems to inflict such massive ‘retaliation’ that the enemy would be compelled to abandon its air offensive. To the last he went on believing that, by keeping opportunities for offensives open, he could drive a wedge between the enemy Allies and thus still manage to end the war by political means under tolerable conditions. He held on to this illusion up to his last days in the Berlin bunker.
By then Hitler’s regime had long since been in ruins. Incapable of admitting his monumental failure, Hitler tried to cling to the notion of a heroic downfall, evidently linking it with the hope of salvaging the core elements of the National Socialist ‘project’ for the future. Meanwhile, the German Reich had already largely been captured by the Allies and Soviet troops had almost reached the Reich Chancellery. The ‘Third Reich’ could not actually collapse, however, until the dictator who had held it together finally took his own life.
Figure 16. After the defeat: The Allies conduct Germans round Wöbbelin camp, a subcamp of Neuengamme concentration camp.
Source: © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Notes
Introduction
1. Martin Broszat and Klaus Schwabe (eds), Die deutschen Eliten und der Weg in den Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1989), 25–71 (66).
2. On this line of argument see, among others, Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Stuttgart, 1991); Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegführung 1940/1941 (Frankfurt a. M., 1965); Jäckel, ‘Die “Endlösung” und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus’, in Wolfgang Wippermann (ed.), Kontroversen um Hitler (Frankfurt a. M., 1986), 219–47.
3. Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth, 1962).
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4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1998/2000).
5. Hans Mommsen, ‘Nationalsozialismus’ in Sowjetsystem und demokratische Gesellschaft. Eine vergleichende Enzyklopädie vol. 4 (Freiburg, 1971), 702.
6. Joachim Fest’s biography, Hitler (London, 1974), which was praised above all for its brilliant style and its author’s intellectual range, now appears outdated in the questions it poses, its emphases, and its sources.
7. The focus on Hitler’s ‘private side’ is one of the main concerns of Volker Ullrich’s biography Hitler, the first volume of which, Die Jahre des Aufstiegs. Biographie (Frankfurt a. M.) appeared in 2013.
Prologue: A Nobody
1. There are two extensive collections of documents on Hitler’s childhood and youth: BAB (Bundesarchiv Berlin), NS 26/65, collected by the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP, and LHA (Landeshauptarchiv) Linz, NL Jetzinger. The Social Democrat Jetzinger wrote the first important book about this period in Hitler’s life. As a member of the Upper Austrian provincial government, he acquired Hitler’s army file, which he managed to conceal until the end of the Second World War. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich, 1996), 81ff. See also Wolfgang Zdral, Die Hitlers. Die unbekannte Familie des Führers (Bergisch Gladbach, 2008); Hamann, Wien; Kershaw, Hitler 1, 29ff.; Sidney J. Jones, Hitlers Weg begann in Wien, 1907–1913 (Munich, 1999); Dirk Bavendamm, Der junge Hitler. Korrekturen einer Biographie 1899–1914 (Graz, 2009), although the ‘corrections’ arelargely speculative; Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler. His Family, Childhood, and Youth (Stanford, 1967).
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