Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (2 page)

1.32
 Hitler’s first meeting with Mussolini, Venice, 14 June 1934 (
ullstein bild/Roger-Viollet
).

1.33
 Hitler supporters making the pilgrimage to the Berghof (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/BSB/Heinrich Hoffmann
).

1.34
 Albert Speer unveiling his “dome of light” on the Zeppelin Field at the Nuremberg rally of 1936 (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 183-1982-1130-502, Scherl
).

1.35
 Leni Riefenstahl during the filming of
Triumph of the Will
, September 1934 (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Friedrich Rohrmann
).

1.36
 “Pillory parade” in Gelsenkirchen in August 1935 (
Stadtarchiv Nürnberg Sig. E39 Nr. 1747/17-20
).

1.37
 Hitler enters Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, 1 August 1936 (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 146-1976-033-17
).

1.38
 Hitler looking at blueprints and models for the Nuremberg rally site (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 146-1971-016-31
).

1.39
 The planned North–South Axis in Berlin (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 146III-373
).

1.40
 Hitler’s office in the New Reich Chancellery, 1939 (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/BSB/Heinrich Hoffmann
).

1.41
 The concealable window in the Great Hall at the Berghof.

1.42
 Hitler and Eva Braun on the Obersalzberg, autumn of 1938 (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/BSB/Heinrich Hoffmann
).

1.43
 Group photo from the Berghof New Year’s Eve party in 1938 (
ullstein bild/Roger-Viollet
).

1.44
 Defaced windows of Jewish-owned businesses in Berlin, June 1938 (
Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum
).

1.45
 Onlookers watch as the Old Synagogue in Essen burns, 9 November 1938 (
Stadtbildstelle Essen
).

1.46
 Mussolini in Berlin during his state visit, 27 September 1937.

1.47
 Hitler speaks from the balcony of Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, 15 March 1938 (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 183-1987-0922-500
).

1.48
 Hitler at the German Gymnastics and Sports Festival in Breslau, 31 July 1938 (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Hans Hubmann
).

1.49
 Czech president Emil Hácha with Hitler in his office at the Chancellery, 15 March 1939 (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
).

1.50
 Hermann Göring congratulates Hitler on his fiftieth birthday, 20 April 1939 (
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 183-1988-0202-503, Scherl
).

1.51
 A military parade on Berlin’s new East–West Axis in honour of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/BSB/Archiv Heinrich Hoffmann
).

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to correct any mistakes or omissions in future editions.

Introduction

“The fellow is a catastrophe, but that’s no reason not to find him interesting as a personality and destiny,” wrote Thomas Mann in his essay “Brother Hitler,” adding that no one should feel “above dealing with this murky figure.”
¹

As the Third Reich recedes ever further into the past, one might think that interest in the most malevolent person in twentieth-century history would diminish. The exact opposite has been the case. Both in Germany and without, the public’s fascination with Hitler comes in recurrent waves, and the obsession with the Führer seems only to have increased in the new millennium. “There’s never been so much Hitler,” wrote the historian Norbert Frei in 2005, sixty years after the end of the Second World War and the demise of the Third Reich.
²
Indeed, on the occasion of that anniversary, unprecedented media attention was paid to the Führer and his cohorts. Hitler was everywhere—in the cinema and on television, on the covers of magazines and in the pages of popular history books. There is no reason to believe the situation will be any different at any future anniversary.

The global entertainment industry has long since appropriated and transformed Hitler into a sensationalist, pop-cultural icon of horror, guaranteed to send the maximum shivers down audiences’ spines. The leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP, and the man who so dominated the course of world events from 1933 to 1945 remains—to cite journalist Jens Jessen—the “hardest of all drugs for generating attention.”
³
Hitler stirs up more emotions than any other historical figure, including Stalin. That is, of course, due to the scale of the crimes that Germans committed under his leadership.

Parallel to but largely independent of the entertainment market, academic historians around the world have pressed forward with investigations concerning nearly every aspect of Hitler and National Socialism. No historical topic has been more thoroughly researched in all its nooks and crannies—today the literature on the subject fills whole libraries. And yet academic interest in this “murky figure” never wanes. The riddles surrounding Hitler—the questions of how and why he could come to power and hang on to it for more than a decade—demand ever-new explanations. There has been no shortage of biographical approaches to these questions, but only four have stood the test of time: Konrad Heiden’s two-volume
Hitler: A Biography
, written in the mid-1930s from Swiss exile; Alan Bullock’s canonical
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
from the early 1950s; Joachim Fest’s sweeping portrait
Hitler: A Biography
, first published in 1973; and Ian Kershaw’s standard-setting
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris
and
Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis
from 1998 and 2000.
⁴

Heiden’s biography represents an attempt to “identify the historical significance of the phenomenon of Hitler at the height of his power.”
⁵
As the Munich correspondent for the liberal
Frankfurter Zeitung
newspaper between 1923 and 1930, Heiden witnessed Hitler’s rise to national prominence first-hand. The book is based both on the author’s own observations and on information from sources close to Hitler in his days as a political agitator, and Heiden resisted the twin temptations of mythologising or ridiculing its subject. “The ‘hero’ of this book,” Heiden wrote in his preface, dated 1935, “is neither a superman nor a puppet. He is a very interesting contemporary and, viewed quantitatively, a man who has stirred up the masses more than anyone else in human history.”
⁶
Later research has corrected a number of biographical details Heiden got wrong. Nonetheless, his work is full of convincing conclusions and clever analyses, for instance concerning Hitler’s skill as an orator and his uncanny “dual nature.”
⁷

This first Hitler biography was enthusiastically received by German exiles. “Constantly with Konrad Heiden’s scorching Hitler biography,” noted Thea Sternheim, the ex-wife of playwright Carl Sternheim, in late October 1935. “A spotlight upon Germany. Suddenly, you thank God for the existence of this sort of human conscience. Might not this book be the first decisive breach in the infernal crime that is taking place right now in Germany?”
⁸
The art patron and diplomat Harry Kessler, who like Sternheim lived in French exile, was also full of praise. “A clever and convincing book,” he wrote in his journal. “ ‘A failed man and a failed people have joined forces.’ How accurate.”
⁹
The Gestapo and the Security Service tried to track down Heiden, who had moved to France, but when the Wehrmacht invaded that country in 1940, he was able to flee via Lisbon to the United States.
¹⁰

Alan Bullock’s thrilling 1952 debut,
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny,
has been the starting point for all subsequent academic study of the “Hitler phenomenon.” The British historian had advance access to confiscated German documents which had been used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials and which were about to be made public.
¹¹
Bullock depicted the German dictator as a completely unprincipled opportunist driven solely by lust for power at its most raw and pure.
¹²
In his conclusion, Bullock cited the former Danzig (Gdansk) Senate President Hermann Rauschning, a German exile whose 1938 book
The Revolution of Nihilism
had greatly influenced views of Hitler at the time. In it, Rauschning asserted that National Socialism was “the very essence of a movement, pure dynamism, a revolution with various slogans that it was always willing to change.” One thing, according to Rauschning, that National Socialism was
not
was “a world view and a doctrine.”
¹³

The thesis that Hitler was basically a power-hungry political opportunist came in for some heavy historical revision in the following decades. Above all, historian Eberhard Jäckel convincingly demonstrated in the late 1960s that Hitler did indeed maintain a consistent world view, no matter how extreme and insane, and that this perspective guided his actions. Jäckel argued that the two most important elements of Hitler’s world view were the “removal of the Jews” and the conquest of “living space in the east.” Ever since the 1920s, Jäckel showed, Hitler held true to these two axiomatic, fixed ideas with rigorous consistency.
¹⁴
Both Fest and Kershaw adopted this insight, and the present book will reaffirm it as well.

Joachim Fest’s Hitler biography, coming more than twenty years after Bullock’s, is impressive for its style—Jäckel gushed that “No one since Thomas Mann has written about Hitler in such good German prose”
¹⁵
—while historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher praised “the author’s talent for dense and sweeping interpretation.”
¹⁶
Somewhat sheepishly, many academic historians asked why the journalist Fest, and not one of their own, had been able to achieve this.
¹⁷

Fest not only came up with an unprecedented psychological portrait of Hitler’s personality, he also located the Führer firmly in the context of his epoch. Fest identified the most important phenomenon in Hitler’s rise as the convergence of individual and general factors, “the difficult-to-decipher correspondence between the man and the times and the times and the man.”
¹⁸
To illustrate what he meant, Fest interspersed his chronological narrative with “intermediary reflections” that brought together individual biographical details and collective historical developments. The result was the paradoxical conclusion that Hitler, who despised revolution, was “the German form of revolution,” idiosyncratically combining both modern and reactionary elements.
¹⁹

Fest’s interpretation, based on already-published sources rather than original archive research, has attracted criticism. Some scholars have rightly pointed out that Fest dramatically downplays the role of the conservative elites who ushered Hitler through the doors of power.
²⁰
And it is impossible to overlook the educated, bourgeois contempt for the half-ignorant
arriviste
that Fest displays on several occasions, for instance, in his snide critique of Hitler’s poor writing in
Mein Kampf
.
²¹
Fest’s assessment of Hitler is also heavily influenced by the Führer’s favourite architect and Nazi armaments minister, Albert Speer. As a journalist, Fest had helped Speer write his 1969 memoirs; in return Speer provided information for Fest’s Hitler biography. As a result, Fest’s account guilelessly passes on a number of legends, for instance the idea that Speer was an apolitical specialist who fell under the helpless sway of the dictator.
²²

Yet despite all these objections, Fest landed a real coup. In one review, historian Klaus Hildebrand predicted that Fest’s pioneering work would represent “the definitive book on Adolf Hitler for quite some time.”
²³
That held true for twenty-five years until another British historian, Ian Kershaw, took up the challenge of a major Hitler biography. Kershaw had access to sources not available to Fest, most significantly the diaries of Joseph Goebbels from his years as Gauleiter of Berlin and then propaganda minister.
²⁴

In his introduction, Kershaw confessed that, to an extent, he approached Hitler from the “wrong” direction—from the structures of Nazi rule, which had been the subject of his earlier research. In contrast to Fest, Kershaw was less interested in the “strange” character of the man than in the social conditions and forces that had made Hitler possible. “The task of the biographer…,” Kershaw wrote, is “to focus not upon the personality of Hitler, but squarely and directly upon
the character of his power—the power of the Führer
.” To explain the sinister force of this power, Kershaw argued, it was necessary to focus more on the expectations and motivations of German society than on Hitler himself.
²⁵
He was aiming for nothing less than a biography that embedded Hitler in a social and political context.
²⁶