Why Hitler’s Rise and Rule Continues to Haunt

At the end of the century on which Hitler left his terrible mark, three questions continue to haunt: How could a human being become so monstrous a criminal? How was he permitted to carry out his crimes for so long without being stopped? And what, at bottom, was the relationship between Hitler and the German people in whose name his bloody deeds were committed?

The answers remain elusive despite the millions of words that have been written since World War II ended nearly 55 years ago. Two new books help clear up a number of misconceptions and myths. Ian Kershaw’s enormously erudite but ultimately frustrating biography and Brigitte Hamann’s careful and revealing scholarship together create a rich panorama of Hitler’s early career, experiences and attitudes. A remarkable synthesis of the work of hundreds of scholars over the last seven decades, Kershaw’s tome gives us a Hitler who nonetheless remains a familiar figure: a hesitant, bold, erratic, emotional, indolent and insecure megalomaniac given to outbursts of temper. Acknowledging that Hitler’s “hidden personality disorder must have been one of monumental proportions,” Kershaw seeks to explain the paradox of Hitler’s personal success by locating Hitler’s rise to power in both the charisma of personality and in Germany’s social and historical circumstances. His attempt is not altogether successful.

Who was Adolf Hitler?

The son of a middle-ranking customs official, Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Austria. The persistent myth that Hitler was of Jewish descent is disproved by both Kershaw and Hamann. Young Adolf attended village primary schools and secondary schools in Linz and Steyr, left school in 1905, lived on his doting mother’s modest means (his ruthlessly stern father died in 1903) and whiled away two years by dabbling in drawing, reading and attending the opera and theater, fancying himself a great artist. He failed twice to gain admission to the prestigious art academy in Vienna and remained in the city for five years (1908-1913) as an indolent bohemian. When his meager orphan’s pension, a small inheritance and loans had run out, he slept in a doss-house for the homeless for several months in 1909 with, as Kershaw writes, “tramps, winos, and down-and-outs,” until an aunt helped him with a little more money; he also sold his own watercolor copies of postcards. Both Kershaw and Hamann demonstrate that Hitler’s anti-Semitism, while virulent, wasn’t violent, contrary to later oft-repeated stories, including Hitler’s own account in his “Mein Kampf” (1925).

In 1913, Hitler left Vienna for Munich. When World War I broke out, he volunteered for military service, distinguishing himself at the front. After Germany’s defeat, he managed to stay in the army, now his home, as a political instructor. After his discharge in March 1920, he became a beer-hall agitator and eventually leader of the small right-wing extremist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in Munich. Thirteen years later, in January 1933, Hitler, astonishingly, became chancellor of Germany and immediately began preparing to embark on a new war, which he began in September 1939 by invading Poland. When, on April 30, 1945, he shot himself in his Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 6 million Jews, 9 million East Europeans, 20 million Soviet citizens (including nearly 14 million soldiers), close to 1 million Western Allied soldiers, 4 million German soldiers and 2 million Germans who were killed in the course of “ethnic cleansing” in the German eastern provinces.

Among the most enduring and vexing conundrums of Hitler’s career is when, how and why Hitler acquired his lethal hatred of Jews. Despite Kershaw’s and Hamann’s strenuous efforts, the answer remains out of reach, although both authors bring us closer. Kershaw shows that only after 1918 did Hitler rationalize his anti-Semitism as a “world view.” As a result of experiences with anarchist and communist uprisings in Munich in April 1919, Hitler joined anti-Semitism and anticommunism in a single unified concept. Kershaw argues that the consequences of this concept--the murder of the Jews and the beginnings of the genocide of the Polish and Russian peoples--had not been elaborated in detail at that time. Yet so fearful was Hitler of the specter of Jewish and communist power that he came to believe in “a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’--that was almost unconquerable--even for National Socialism.”

But surely Kershaw’s analysis is far too lenient of Hitler and his open ambitions. Hitler’s murderous obsession with the Jews was apparent from the start of his career. Kershaw, however, does not record or analyze explicitly a series of death threats Hitler made against the Jews--from his speech of Aug. 13, 1920, when he announced that only the death of the Jews could eliminate their alleged influence, to the second Four-Year Plan of August 1936, in which Hitler demanded “1. A law providing the death penalty for economic sabotage, and 2. A law making the whole of Jewry liable for all damage inflicted by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German economy, and thus upon the German people.”

Until he became chancellor in 1933, Hitler’s anti-Semitic message, according to Kershaw, fell on deaf ears to all but the most fanatical of his followers. It was ineffective with the overwhelming majority of the German electorate. Anti-Semitism did not bring the Nazis many votes from 1929 to 1933, concludes Kershaw, writing that “anti-Semitism was relatively unimportant as a drawing card.” Of course, Hitler proved a seductive figure for many in the Nazi rank and file. Like any successful guru, Hitler had the gift of gab; his modus operandi included the ritual of exhausting hours-long speeches to transport his hearers into a kind of collective trance by screaming out their own unarticulated feelings of anguish and resentments--resentments rooted in, as Kershaw puts it, “lost war, revolution and a pervasive sense of national humiliation.” It was these factors, even more than anti-Semitism, which made Hitler “possible” as a political figure and without which “Hitler would have remained a nobody.”

Hitler had a shrewd understanding of mass psychology, of what people wanted to hear and were willing to die for. He had a thoroughgoing self-confidence and an ability to convince his hearers that he had both superior knowledge and, always, “a plan.” He perfected the guru’s trick of establishing a personal bond of loyalty by making each believer feel that he “knew” him and “looked” after him. He cultivated the practice of giving chosen individuals, and sometimes an entire hall of people, one after another, a long firm handshake while firmly fixing his steely blue eyes on his opposite’s eyes for as long as 15 seconds. It was a seduction that few disciples could resist.

Yet for many years, Hitler did not enjoy any genuine mass success. The bullying of his Brownshirts failed to appreciably advance his cause with the broad populace. After the failed putsch of November 1923, seeing that the army would not support or tolerate his illegal methods, Hitler decided to use the constitution to attain power and then, once successful, to destroy the republic. Nevertheless, according to Kershaw, Hitler’s message was ineffective to more than 90% of the national electorate between 1924 and 1930. Currency stabilization and economic recovery during those years had removed “the major props of Nazi success before 1923.”

Hitler’s new strategy of mobilizing the masses to win electoral power when Germany was in the throes of the Great Depression would also prove to be a failure. Despite gaining more than 37% of the vote in national parliamentary elections in 1932, with voter participation above 80%, it was not enough to win power. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi party’s propaganda chief, expressed his frustration by declaring that “something must happen. . . . We won’t get to an absolute majority this way.” He was right. In the end, Hitler would come to power through the backdoor.

When economic crisis and ill-advised policies rocked the Weimar Republic to its foundation, Hitler found himself (within limits) a beneficiary. The final crisis came just in time. As Kershaw observes, Hitler might otherwise have been “witnessing the beginnings of the breakup of his movement and the onset of his own political demise.”

How, then, did Hitler come to power when, until 1933, Hitler’s Nazi movement only found minority support within the German electorate? The answer lies partly in the economic crisis that began in 1929 and the plunge into wholesale Depression, which made it possible for Hitler to gain a more welcoming and popular echo for his ideas. According to Kershaw, “although two-thirds of the people had not voted for Hitler, many were less than root-and-branch opposed to all Nazism stood for and could fairly easily be brought in the coming months to find some things in the Third Reich that they might approve of.”

But Kershaw blurs an important chronological dividing line before and after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor--from a time when most Germans were opposed to his party (as expressed in the free elections) to a time when he won the public support despots engender among the populace after their ascendance to absolute rule and their subsequent (usually ruthless) consolidation of power. Kershaw doesn’t make the issue any clearer by his frequent references to anecdotal evidence suggesting popular support, while giving short shrift to contrary evidence. Nor is his case helped by his neglect of quantitative evidence that either does not support his argument or is not available.

Kershaw gives little attention to those who sought to express their opposition to Hitler after January 1933--an opposition conducted in the repressive conditions of a terrorist police-state in which the government controlled all media and in which hundreds of thousands of Germans were imprisoned in concentration camps in the first three years of Hitler’s rule. The murder of Ernst Rohm and other leaders of the Nazis’ own stormtroopers at the end of June 1934 signaled to all opponents what their fate might be if Hitler considered them dangerous.

To be sure, as Kershaw concedes, there was discontent because of low wages, high prices and food shortages. There was, Kershaw writes, in 1935 a “wide disparity” between Hitler’s own “massive popularity and the poor image of the party,” but by 1936 “even the Fuhrer was increasingly being drawn into the criticism.” In fact, there exists evidence of discontent in the years after 1936, which this volume (the first of a projected two-volume work) does not cover. Perhaps the next one will.

The plain fact is that Hitler was unable to win power on the basis of popular support. This is a truth that is simply incompatible with a theory of Hitler’s charisma. Kershaw seems to sense this but oddly wants to have it both ways. Hitler was distrusted by Germany’s president, who refused to consider him for the office of chancellor. It was the former Chancellor von Papen’s intrigues with four or five other influential people that tricked the president into turning over Germany’s government to a gang of criminals. Kershaw inexplicably gives scant attention to these sinister machinations that were to prove so helpful to Hitler, summing them up with his observation that Hitler had “help in high places.”

Kershaw has written an informative but confused book. The combination of biography with social history is useful in places but is too often broken up by separate, lengthy commentaries on social conditions and marred all too frequently by chronological and thematic incoherence. After first rejecting the notion of Hitler as the “culmination of a malformed history,” a theory Kershaw excoriates as a “crude misreading of the past,” and then asserting that “nothing in its [Germany’s] development predetermined that path to the Third Reich,” Kershaw argues, almost in contradiction, that, despite the crises besetting the young republic, “what made Hitler’s triumph possible were important strands of continuity in German political culture stretching back beyond the First World War--chauvinistic nationalism, imperialism, racism, anti-Marxism, glorification of war, the placing of order above freedom.” Only buried in an endnote does Kershaw reveal that he believes there were “also important and long-standing counter-continuities in German history--such as ideas of democracy and liberalism--that suffered an abrupt and lengthy break in 1933.”

The charismatic pull of Hitler’s personality, which Kershaw seems also to believe to have been in some measure decisive, ultimately fails as a convincing explanation of Hitler’s success because it does not explain why and how Hitler was levered into power in January 1933 after he had failed to mobilize the German people and to win majority support at the polls.

The enigma of Hitler’s rise and rule continues to haunt.