Hitler

Ian Kershaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317874577
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Adolf Hitler has left a lasting mark on the twentieth-century, as the dictator of Germany and instigator of a genocidal war, culminating in the ruin of much of Europe and the globe. This innovative best-seller explores the nature and mechanics of Hitler's power, and how he used it.

Chapter 1 Power of the ‘Idea’

10.4324/9781315837673-2

Hitler's personality should not be overrated as a factor in his power. Nor, however, should it be ignored. Its greatest impact was upon the circle of the earliest, most fanatically devoted followers, his most committed ‘inner circle’ of disciples. Looking for a cause and a leader before they ‘found’ Nazism and Hitler, they formed the core of the ‘charismatic community’ which saw greatness in Hitler.

The ‘charisma’ in Hitler's own personality, so influential among his close followers, was rooted in the power which flowed — for those already open to it — from his ‘idea’, his political credo, together with the remarkable ability he showed from the moment he entered active politics to sway the masses. In this chapter, therefore, we examine the emergence of the ‘conviction politician’, and the response to the personality and ideas of Hitler of his early followers who became some of the most important personages in the Third Reich.

In physical appearance, Hitler was unprepossessing.¹ He was of medium height and fair complexion. His head seemed to dominate the whole of his body. His high forehead was concealed by the drooping forelock. The centre-point of his face seemed to be his trimmed moustache. He never looked smartly dressed. His teeth were poor and in later years the deterioration in his formerly good eyesight eventually necessitated him wearing reading glasses (though he was anxious not to be seen in public in them). His slightly protruding eyes and unblinking gaze were his most striking feature.

Hitler's personal habits were repetitive, conservative, but at the same time rather quirky. He held as far as possible to fixed daily routines, was near teetotal and (from the early 1930s onwards) vegetarian, did not smoke or drink coffee, and had a fetish for cleanliness which saw him washing with abnormal frequency. He needed little sleep, read avidly and widely (though unsystematically), and possessed an extraordinary memory for factual detail. He monopolised conversation with opinionated views on a wide range of subjects. On anything connected with history, art and architecture, he considered himself particularly expert. He was also especially interested in medicine and biology. His reliance upon his self-learning went hand in hand with an utter contempt for ‘intellectuals' dependent upon a formal education. There is no doubt, however, that, though his knowledge was half-baked, one sided and dogmatically inflexible, he was intelligent and sharp-witted.

Though, even in his regular entourage, Hitler remained in human terms distant and unapproachable, he could show great consideration in trivial matters, such as what to give his secretaries as birthday presents. He liked the company of women, and was invariably courteous and gracious towards them, especially if they were beautiful. He could make those around him laugh with a cutting humour and a talent for mimicry. And he had a strong sense of loyalty towards those of his comrades who had endured sacrifices to support him from the early days.

These personal characteristics would have been insufficient to single out Hitler for attention had they existed in isolation from his political world view and his ability to sway an audience by the force of his public speaking. Seen in purely personal terms, detached from his political philosophy, Hitler was indeed a mediocrity. But his political creed and the conviction with which he expressed it transformed him into a personality of quite extraordinary dynamism.

It was for long thought after the collapse of the Third Reich that Hitler's message consisted of no more than the empty phrases of the power-thirsty demagogue, that the man behind the message was as devoid of genuine ideas as were the classical tyrants of old. It is now universally recognised, however, that behind the vague missionary appeal lay a set of interrelated ideas — however repulsive and irrational — which congealed by the mid 1920s into a cohesive ideology. While Hitler's fixed ideas, which remained unchanged in essentials down to his death in 1945, could not individually or in themselves go far towards explaining his mass appeal, or the growth of the NSDAP, they did amount to a personal driving-force of unusual strength. They provided Hitler with the all-encompassing world view which gave him the opportunity exclusivist ideologies offer of ordering every idea within his own comprehensive philosophy and of ruling out as absolutely untenable any alternative proposals. They gave him, too, the ‘missionary’ zeal of the leader who appears to combine the vision with the certainty that his path is the right one — in fact, the only one which can be taken.

Though he was often indecisive about precise political actions, Hitler never wavered about the certainty of his ideas. To those in his proximity, who shared his general prejudices, the strength and certainty of conviction, extending beyond that of the average bigot or crank into a grandiose and irrevocable formula for a glorious future, was a major factor in establishing his personal supremacy. The simplicity of his dualistic world-view of a Manichean struggle between good and evil in which everything was reduced to absolutes -all or nothing — was matched by the fanatical ferocity and unyielding tenacity with which his views were upheld. Such ‘attributes’ made him a notable figure in the circles of the völkisch Right in which he mixed in the early 1920s. And the fact that his public appearances rapidly made him the leading propaganda exponent of such views and opened up contacts to leading circles of Munich's moneyed bourgeoisie made him indispensable and assured him of the support of others on the extreme Right.

The essence of Hitler's personal world-view comprised a belief in history as racial struggle, radical anti-Semitism, a conviction that Germany's future could be secured only through conquest of Lebensraum (‘living space’) at the expense of Russia, and the uniting of all these strands in the notion of a life-or-death fight to the finish with Marxism — most concretely embodied in the ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ of the Soviet Union. These interlocking ideas were significant not only in the sense that they were held to with extraordinary tenacity for over twenty years, but above all in that the ideological aims arising from them came to be put into actual practice during the Second World War. We have to take them seriously, therefore, in an evaluation of Hitler's power. Before proceeding further we need to look at their formation, development and content.

Exactly when, how and why Hitler's fanatically held ideas took their hold on him is far from clear. But the gradual forging of the various strands of his thinking into a composite ideology was completed by the time of the writing of Mein Kampf in 1924, and scarcely wavered thereafter. An important formative period was his time in Linz in 1905–6 after leaving school and especially in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. The experience of war and, quite traumatically, of Germany's defeat was a second, even more vital influence upon Hitler. Finally, the years 1920 to 1924 saw some crucial modifications to his ideas, under the impact, not least, of the Russian civil war.

Hitler's deepest hatred was of the Jews. The roots and causes of his visceral anti-Semitism have been much discussed but can still not be established with absolute certainty. Some theories are outrightly fanciful. The notion that Hitler's anti-Jewish paranoia can be attributable to the fact that he himself was of part-Jewish descent is without foundation.² That he feared or believed that his father's father had been Jewish is more plausible, but cannot be proved.³ Even more speculative is the attempt to link Hitler's pathological hatred of Jews to his hysterical trauma while suffering from mustard gas poisoning at the end of the First World War, which he allegedly associated with the death of his mother in 1907 following a gas anaesthetic delivered by a Jewish doctor.⁴ Apart from the fact that Hitler had been grateful enough to the doctor at the time to give him one of his water-colour paintings as a present,⁵ this theory ignores the evidence for Hitler's anti-Semitism during his Vienna days.

In fact, we remain in the dark about why Hitler became a manic anti-Semite. Psychological explanations revolving around sexual fantasies and a persecution complex bear differing degrees of plausibility but ultimately amount to no more than guesswork. All that can with some certainty be presumed is that Hitler's personal frustrations at the discrepancy between his own self-esteem and his drop-out existence as a failed artist and social outsider found a focus in an ever stronger negative image which provided both explanation for his own failure and also ‘proof that history was ultimately on his side.⁶

Hitler's own story, retailed in Mein Kampf, tells of his conversion to anti-Semitism after encountering a kaftan-garbed figure with black hair locks in the streets of Vienna.⁷ This was probably a dramatisation. Hitler was already reading pan-German anti-Semitic newspapers in his Linz days and was even then an admirer of the Austrian anti-Semite and pan-German leader Georg von Schönerer.⁸ But there seems no doubt that whatever views he already had on Jews were inordinately strengthened while he was in Vienna. At this time he became greatly impressed by the vehemently anti-Semitic demagogue Karl Lueger, the mayor of the city, whom he later described, in a rare show of admiration for others, as ‘the greatest German mayor of all times’.⁹ Though the ‘Kaftan Jew’ story is probably embellished, it seems likely that it does reflect some telling experience of Hitler during this period, when he was obviously soaking up anti-Semitic literature, confirming and sharpening his embryonic prejudice. At any rate, it seems to have marked the change in him from the conventional anti-Semite of the Linz period to the manic obsessive anti-Semite which he remained to the end of his days. From this time, wrote Hitler, ‘wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity’.¹⁰

The Vienna years were also a formative period in the development of other aspects of Hitler's world-view. According to his own account — plausible in its general tone if not accurate in detail — his own ‘drifting’ existence among the Viennese underprivileged meant that he tasted the crass social injustices of bourgeois society at first hand, and plunged him thereby into contemplation of the ‘social question’. His encounters with Viennese social democracy led to a violent rejection of its class-based, anti-nationalist doctrine. His detestation of the Habsburg monarchy was part of his already pronounced, fanatical German hyper-nationalism which he had soaked up since his attachment to the Schönerer movement in his Linz days.¹¹ Once his ‘recognition’ of the Jew as the ‘culprit’ for all these ills took its place as the dominant ingredient, the essentials of an ideology based on burning revulsion towards existing society coupled with a Utopian vision of a future order to be created by the strong and ruthless authority of an ethnically German national state began to slot into place.

Hitler's world-view was, then, already formed in good measure by the time he served in the trenches. A core element — the social Darwinistic view of history as a struggle between individual races with victory going to the strongest, fittest and most ruthless — seems to have occupied its place at the centre of this world-view by 1914–18 at the latest.¹² His hysterical reaction, while lying blinded in the Pasewalk hospital, at the news of the triumph of the forces he hated with all the fibre of his being appears to have led to an intensification of his already fixed dualistic world-view -above all, his conviction that guilt for the catastrophe which had befallen him and all he believed in lay at the door of the ubiquitous Jew.¹³

Hitler had apparently earlier discussed with one of his comrades at the front whether after the war he would become an architect or a politician.¹⁴ While in the military hospital, he claimed, he took the decision to become a politician.¹⁵ In reality, the ‘decision’ to involve himself in active politics came less self-consciously and more indirectly. Still in the army, he returned to a Munich scarcely recognisable from the city he had left in 1914. Political conditions were in turmoil. After the revolution, government had been headed by a left-wing socialist, Kurt Eisner, a Jew. The assassination of Eisner in February 1919 by a young right-wing aristocrat led to political chaos and a republic of Soldiers' and Workers' Councils — several of whose leaders were Jewish — being proclaimed in April; and this in turn was within weeks bloodily overthrown by forces of the paramilitary Right.

Hitler refrained from any active involvement. But from his army barracks, he observed what was taking place and read widely in right-wing tracts, which presumably confirmed his own diagnosis of events. During the late spring and summer he attended army indoctrination courses. These introduced him to deeper consi...