Hitler

Profile of a Dictator

Martyn Housden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136401282
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Hitler: Profile of a Dictator is a fascinating exploration of Hitler and his role in the Third Reich. The book unravels the complex historiographical debate surrounding this notorious figure by examining his personality, his ideas and the nature of his power.
Hitler: Profile of a Dictator surveys Hitler's career chronologically and includes coverage of:
* the young idealogue
* the Führer State
* Hitler's role in the outbreak of the Second World War
* Hitler's involvement in the Holocaust.
This second edition brings the continuing debate up to date in light of the most recent reseach, and speculates on the implications of the Irving trial.

CHAPTER ONE

The young ideologue

There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of Adolf Hitler and his party the NSDAP. His rise to power was perfectly resistible. His early life provides little indication of a precocious talent or of the demagogic leader who was to have such a profound impact on the world stage. In 1923 when he was jailed for the abortive Munich Putsch the Bavarian authorities ought to have imprisoned him for longer and on his release he should have been deported to Austria. Had this happened it is very difficult to see how he could have resurrected his political career. He would have been finished as a political figure in Germany. Moreover, as late as 1928, Hitler and the Nazis were still peripheral political forces and in the elections of that year were rejected by 97 per cent of the electorate. Even when he was appointed Chancellor in March 1933, 56 per cent of voters still rejected him.

In order to understand Hitler’s personal motivation and the psychological forces that propelled it, I have constructed this chapter around the six formative stages in Hitler’s early political career. First there are the years 1904–6, his final years of school in Linz; secondly the formative political years in Vienna, 1907–13; thirdly, the experience of the Great War and the traumatic defeat of Germany; fourthly, the post-war period up to 1923 in Munich which resulted in the formation of the NSDAP and the abortive Munich Putsch; fifthly, the brief period of imprisonment in 1924 in Landsberg where he dictated Mein Kampf (My struggle); and finally, the ensuing years of political consolidation for both Hitler and the NSDAP culminating in electoral victory and the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor and “Führer” of Germany.

To understand Hitler’s rise we need to look first at the man and his ideas. Ian Kershaw, who has subjected Hitler to considerable scrutiny, has warned that we should not overrate Hitler’s personality as a factor in his power (Kershaw 1991: 16). What do we know about the man as opposed to the demagogue? Physically and intellectually he was unremarkable. He was of medium height. His somewhat stooped body was dominated by a large head featuring stern, unblinking eyes, a long nose and a trimmed moustache that has become synonymous with Hitler and used by cartoonists the world over. Photographic and film records reveal a mean, unforgiving face with little trace of humour or kindness. In his early political years he retained a dishevelled look, habitually wearing a dirty trench coat or raincoat and apparently caring little about his personal appearance (referred to by his biographer, Alan Bullock, as “a touch of Austrian Schlamperei”). On the other hand he retained a fetish for cleanliness and washing – psychologists have made much of this in analyzing a repressed, obsessive personality. He disliked work, was disorganized and incapable of personal discipline, and tended to live the life of listless bohemian pleasure. However, contemporaries noted that he was capable of stirring himself over an issue or an event that captured his imagination (Kubizek 1955). Although he liked the company of women there is no evidence during this period of his life of a long-term relationship or of sexual liaisons with the opposite sex (or indeed his own sex). He did not smoke, he rarely drank alcohol and (from the early 1930s onwards) he was a vegetarian. His passions were reading and talking (not debating) politics, listening to Wagner and watching films (one Christmas, for example, Goebbels’ present to Hitler consisted of 30 serious films and 18 Mickey Mouse films). Hitler read widely though unsystematically. He possessed a prodigious memory and his tastes included the philosopher Nietzsche, Karl May, a writer of Westerns, and works on medicine, biology, astrology and occultism. Each in turn would excite him but he was incapable of sustaining intellectual curiosity in any single field. Nevertheless, he considered himself an expert on history, art and architecture. Commenting on reading in Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: “Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end … One who has cultivated the art of reading will instantly discern, in a book or journal or pamphlet, what ought to be remembered because it meets one’s personal needs or is of value as general knowledge” (Hitler 1939: 42–3).

Although it cannot be denied that Hitler possessed a sharp-witted intelligence, it is equally clear that Hitler attempted to convey the impression of wider learning than, in fact, he possessed. As a boy his formal education had been disrupted and his reliance on self-learning went hand in hand with his contempt for “intellectuals’” and formal education. Hitler was a man with a closed mind for whom reading was a means of reinforcing his own prejudices. A.J.P. Taylor perceptively noted, for example, that he was not a close student of Nietzsche; it would be nearer the truth to say that he translated Wagner into political terms (Taylor 1979: 201). The shadowy figure that emerges from his time in Vienna is a selfish, frustrated, distant, unapproachable, lonely young man unloved and unloving, a man convinced of his superior abilities but frustrated that they were not recognized by others.

To the end of his life it is difficult to conceive of Hitler having a friend. Perhaps the closest was the architect and later Armaments Minister, Albert Speer. Interestingly enough, Speer never allowed himself to feel that he was Hitler’s “friend”, for, according to Speer, friendship requires mutual warmth that Hitler was incapable of giving. In conversation with Gitta Sereny, Speer confirmed that while he “enjoyed living in [Hitler’s] aura of reflected glory” they never consciously thought of each other with affection. Sereny has speculated that Hitler was bedevilled from childhood by thwarted, imagined and withheld love – “a deficiency which rendered [him] virtually incapable of expressing private emotions … though surrounded by people, [he] remained alone” (Sereny 1995: 102, 13).

What marks the young Hitler from the crowd is the extraordinary strength of his political convictions and his unwavering belief in his own rightness and destiny. The combination of “evangelical” zeal and vision partially explains his opaque philosophy and why he could not accept criticism or alternative proposals. For Hitler (and his followers) there could only be one path for the Nazi movement and for Germany. Hitler was not an original thinker. He drew upon a fund of ideas that he had gleaned from his eclectic reading as a boy and his time in Vienna (referred to by Sternburg as a ‘nonsensical porridge of ideas’ (Sternburg, 1996, p. 52)) and later as a soldier in the First World War. Hajo Holborn perceptively suggested that Hitler possessed ‘an unkempt and primitive mind that lacked the power of discrimination but excelled in reducing simple ideas to even simpler terms while believing thereby to have achieved higher wisdom’ (Holborn, 1952: 542ff.). Recent studies have tended to confirm that Hitler’s personal worldview was neither a hotchpotch of racial nonsense nor merely a missionary desire to secure an electoral victory prior to 1933. What is incontestable is that the young Adolf Hitler drew upon a well-established German tradition for four of his main ideas: his unshakeable belief in the superiority of the German race and particularly of Aryans; his utter contempt for parliamentary democracy; his belief in the heroic leader figure; and his vehement anti-Semitism. (If one adds a strident nationalism, a hatred of equality and peace and a belief in the heroic virtues of war then we can identify the emergence of a full-blown fascist ideology.) Such ideas were in fact based upon various strands of intellectual thought which date back at least a century and which constitute the völkisch doctrine, which was essentially a product of late-eighteenth-century Romanticism. The major themes that recur in Hitler’s Weltanschauung (worldview) reflect the roots and antecedents of völkisch (nationalist/racist) thought. Hitler’s ideas – or more accurately, his “utopian visions” – were therefore entirely unoriginal. The originality was in Hitler’s ability to mobilize a mass movement and eventually secure power on the basis of these ideas.

Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, (on the Austrian border with Germany) on 20 April 1889. The son of a 52-year-old customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the region of Lower Austria, the young Hitler was hostile to his authoritarian father, and strongly devoted to his protective and indulgent mother. There is little to suggest anything remarkable about Hitler as a boy. The school records show that he was not an outstanding student academically. His school career lasted for ten years, of which the last four were a struggle. He finally left school in September 1905 without taking any final examinations and with a poor school report that drew particular attention to his inadequate command of the German language. In Hitler’s defence it should be noted that as an adolescent he was disturbed by the deaths of his younger brother Edmund (1900), his father (1903) and his beloved mother (1908). Without delving too deeply into psychological speculation about Hitler’s state of mind, some biographers have suggested that these deaths (and his own survival) convinced Hitler that he was marked out by destiny for a special future.

In 1907, Hitler had moved to Vienna to seek admission to the Academy of Fine Arts. Embittered at his rejection by the Academy, he returned briefly to Linz after the death of his mother. Alone and without an occupation he left for Vienna again. Hitler later described this break with his provincial, middle-class past in dramatic terms: “With my clothes and linen packed in a valise, and with an indomitable resolution in my heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done some fifty years before. I was determined to become ‘something’” (Hitler 1939: 29). He was to spend five years of “misery and woe”, as he later recalled, in Vienna, leading a bohemian, vagabond existence and generally undergoing an identity crisis.

Much of the conventional views of Hitler’s political and intellectual roots and antecedents will now have to be revised in the light of Brigitte Hamann’s magnificent portrait of Hitler as a young man (Hamann 1999). Hamann corrects numerous misconceptions. Hitler was not, as some have claimed, of partly Jewish descent and he was never (as he himself claimed) a building worker. Moreover, Hitler did not hold his Jewish family doctor responsible for the death of his mother. In fact Hitler remained on good terms with Dr Bloch and even intervened to facilitate his emigration in 1938. Hamann also disposes of the myth that Hitler was refused entry to the Academy of Art by Jewish professors, nor was this his perception. More surprising is Hamann’s detailed account of Hitler’s Jewish friends and associates during his time in Vienna.

Hitler claimed he had earned a living in Vienna by hard work as a “common labourer” and only later turned himself into an artist. In fact he existed from hand to mouth on casual odd jobs, a family inheritance and hawking sketches around the city. Sleeping most mornings in a Hostel for Men in the Meldemannstrasse, he spent the evenings in cafes where he would rehearse political harangues to anyone who would care to listen. The testimonies of those who knew him during this period confirm Hitler’s own account of his time in Vienna as years of great loneliness and frustration. Nevertheless these were to prove formative years in which he embraced a view of life which changed very little in the ensuing years. He later wrote: “Vienna was a hard school for me, but it taught me the most profound lessons of my life” (Hitler 1939: 32, 116).

Cosmopolitan Vienna helped shape his pathological hatred of Jews and Marxists and he began to indulge in grandiose dreams of a Greater Germany. Hitler had become a passionate German nationalist while still at school. Although the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary gave the impression of stability and permanence, the irreconciliable demands of competing ethnic groups (referred to by Hitler as “bacilli”) were already imposing unbearable strains on the Hapsburg Empire and the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph. Hitler despised the ramshackle and multinational Empire and fervently believed that it should be ruled by Germans without concessions to the Slavs and other subject peoples. There is an irony in the fact that Hitler’s fanatical German nationalism should spring from his Austrian roots. Indeed many of Hitler’s ideas can be traced to turn-of-the-century Austria-Hungary where intense nationalism had even more significance than in Germany itself.

In Vienna he began his political apprenticeship by observing the demagogic techniques of Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social Party and mayor of the city. Hitler admired Lueger because “he had a rare gift of insight into human nature and was very careful not to take men as something better than they were in reality” (Hitler 1939: 94). He shared Lueger’s contempt for the masses and identified with his obsessive anti-Semitism with its brutal sexual connotations and concern with racial purity. In Mein Kampf Hitler tells us that he became a “fanatical anti-Semite” after his return to Vienna in 1908 when he encountered a “phenomenon” wearing a long kaftan and with black hair locks: “Is this a Jew? … is this a German?” he asked. Describing the encounter as the “greatest change I was ever to experience”, Hitler steeped himself in anti-Semitic propaganda. Although we cannot be sure, he almost certainly was familiar with anti-Semitic literature in his Linz days where he had come in contact with the half-baked racial theories of the defrocked monk, Lanz von Liebenfels (and his racist periodical called Ostara), and the Austrian Pan-German leader, Georg von Schönerer. In fact, while Hitler continued to admire Lueger’s demagogic skill, he preferred Schönerer’s type of anti-Semitism as more racist. Vienna, where anti-Semitism was endemic, unquestionably fuelled his own latent anti-Semitism and transformed him into a fanatic which he remained until his death. The Jew became a total explanation for all of Hitler’s hatreds, fears and desires. From now on, since he had discovered “who were the evil spirits leading our people astray”, the Jew became for him the incarnation of evil and the “culprit” for all of society’s ills. Thus while Hitler could sympathize with the poverty and misery of the Viennese working class, he was able to reject the class-based and antinationalist doctrine of social democracy on the grounds that “knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the inner nature and the real aims of Social Democracy” (Hitler 1939: 59, 55).

When, however, did Hitler become a paranoid anti-Semite? The ‘traditional’ view of Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism taking root in Vienna has been challenged by Hamann who argues that when he left Vienna for Munich in 1913 he was not the rabid anti-Semite he later became. This ‘revisionist’ interpretation is substantiated by Ian Kershaw in his monumental two-part biograpahy of Hitler (Kershaw 1998 and 2000). Although Hitler was certainly an anti-Semite before he arrived in Munich, Kershaw convincingly argues that the key period was the Munich period of 1918–19. Hitler’s annihilatory anti-Semitism emerged from the shock of military defeat in 1918 and his extraordinary decision to enter politics (Kershaw 1998: 102–105).

Isolated and unsuccessful, Hitler moved to Munich in May 1913 at the age of 24 to avoid service in the Austrian army. However, at the outbreak of war in August 1914 Hitler enlisted in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment, serving as a despatch runner. He proved a courageous soldier, receiving the Iron Cross for bravery on two occasions, and was promoted to lance corporal in 1917. Twice wounded, he was badly gassed in October 1918 and spent three months recuperating in a hospital in Pomerania when the Armistice was declared. At the end of the war, amid considerable revolutionary fervour in Germany, he returned to a Munich undergoing violent political upheavals and joined the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – DAP), a counter-revolutionary movement dedicated to the principles of “German national socialism”, as opposed to “Jewish Marxism” or Russian Bolshevism. In the summer of 1919 he had been assigned by the Reichswehr (army) to spy on extremist groups in Munich and it was as a Reichswehr informant that he was sent to monitor the activities of the nationalist and racist German Workers’ Party, led by the Munich locksmith Anton Drexler. In September 1919 he joined the DAP which comprised of 20 to 40 members and on 16 October he made his first address to the Party. With his demagogic style and strident rhetoric, Hitler discovered he possessed hidden talents for haranguing political meetings. Adolf Hitler was 30 years old and his political career had just began. He wrote in Mein Kampf: “Generally speaking, a man should not take part in politics before he has reached the age of thirty” (Hitler 1939: 67).

In February 1920, the DAP changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP, Nazi for short) and set out its 25-point Party programme. The name at the bottom of the manifesto was not that of Hitler but of Anton Drexler. Although Hitler had only been a member of the Party for a year, the 25 points reveal the influence of his ideas. The programme contained many of the policies that became associated with the Nazis when they gained power constitutionally in 1933. Articles 1 to 3 referred to the treaties drawn up at Versailles and at St Germain (the treaty with Austria) and reflected the widespread humiliation felt by many Germans over what they believed were the “dictated” terms and conditions for peace and the failure of the newly created Weimar Republic to uphold Germany’s interests as a great industrial and political power. Article 4 was explicitly racist and sought to preclude Jews from becoming citizens of Germany despite the fact that many had fought with honour for Germany during the Great War. Articles 10 and 21 referred to the duty of citizens and state to work for and ensure physical and mental fitness. These are early indications of the eugenics policy that would later be implemented by the Nazis. Interestingly, the programme anticipated a degree of state interventionism that goes beyond the staple völkisch ideas of other nationalist groups. War profits and some property were to be confiscated, unearned incomes abolished, trusts nationalized and department stores communalized. The old Roman law (“which serves the materialistic world order”) would be replaced by a German common law. Whether these radical economic and social demands meant much to Hitler is open to doubt; more likely, they were inspired by the “socialistic” ideas of ideologues like Gottfried Feder, the Party’s “economic expert”. Hitler’s influence can be seen in the prominence given to the myth of Aryan race supremacy and the exclusion of Jews from the Volk community (“national community” – Volksgemeinschaft). Although Hitler had presented the programme, which he had partly edited, on 24 February 1920, it had been drawn up largely without his direct help. It is doubtful that Hitler was ever wedded to the “25 points” as a philosophical blueprint; it seems more likely that he viewed it as no more than a means to an end. He had agreed to the programme simply because it reflected the radical anti-capitalism of the time and was more likely to attract disenchanted working-class and lower-middle-class support in the beerhalls and on the streets of Munich. By the late 1920s, having established himself as leader of the Party, the “socialistic” ideas of profit-sharing and nationalization had become an embarrassment and were explicitly disavowed in an attempt to woo big business and the middle classes.

Although Hitler’s nationalistic ideas were scarcely distinguishable from those of a plethora of pan-German agitators, his gift for self-dramatization made an immediate impact in the beerhalls of Munich where he quickly established a reputation as a populist demagogue. The Social Democratic Münchner Post referred to him in August 1920 as the sharpest of all agitators “carrying out mischief in Munich”. Hitler would later claim that his ideas had been firmly established before 1914. While it is true that the core of his obsessive beliefs and prejudices remained constant, in the early to mid 1920s, important modifications took place in the crystallization of his own worldview. In particular, his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Young ideologue
• 2. Gaining power
• 3. The Führer state
• 4. Hitler’s road to war
• 5. Hitler and the Holocaust
• Conclusion
• Timeline
• Select Bibliography
• Index