Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945), for 12 years Chancellor and dictator of Germany, instigator of World War II and author of the Holocaust, was directly responsible for the deaths of about 40 million people, including at least 6 million Jews murdered by his agents. He brought ruin to Germany and death and destruction to every country he was able to impose his rule on.

Childhood and youth

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 at Braunau-am-Inn, a small town near Linz in the province of Upper Austria, near the German border, in what was then Austria-Hungary. His father Alois (1832-1903) was a minor customs official. His mother, Klara Hitler (née Pölzl), was Alois's third wife. Of their six children, only Adolf and his sister Paula survived infancy.

Alois Hitler was born illegitimate, and as a young man he used his mother's surname, Schicklgruber. In 1876 he legally adopted his natural father's surname, Hitler. (The name had been simplified from Heidler in an earlier generation.) Adolf Hitler never used the name Schicklgruber: this was a canard circulated later by his political enemies—as were insinuations that he was of Jewish descent.

Hitler was an intelligent but moody boy, and he twice failed to pass the examinations to gain admission to the high school in Linz. He was devoted to his indulgent mother and developed a hatred for his father, whom he later portrayed as a sadistic tyrant, although in fact he was no more than a normally strict German father.

Vienna and Munich

On January 3, 1903 Alois Hitler died. On December 21, 1907 his widow Klara died of cancer. Eighteen-year-old Adolf was orphaned and he soon left home for Vienna, where he had vague hopes of becoming an artist. He was entitled to an orphan's pension, and eked this out by working as an illustrator. He had a little artistic talent but was rejected by Vienna schools of art and architecture. He lost his pension in 1910, but by then he had inherited some money from an aunt.

It was in Vienna that Hitler became an active anti-Semite, a passion that was to rule his life and was the key to all his subsequent actions. Anti-Semitism was deeply ingrained in the south German Catholic culture in which Hitler was raised. Vienna had a large Jewish community, including many Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe. Hitler later recorded his disgust on encountering Viennese Jews.

In Vienna anti-Semitism had developed from its religious origins into a political doctrine, promoted by publicists such as Lanz von Liebenfels, whose pamphlets Hitler read, and politicians like Karl Lueger, the Mayor of Vienna. From them Hitler acquired the belief in the superiority of the "Aryan race" which formed the basis of his political views. Hitler came to believe that the Jews were the natural enemies of the "Aryans," and were also in some way responsible for his poverty and his failure to achieve the success he believed he deserved.

In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich to avoid military service. But on August 1, 1914 when Germany entered World War I, he at once enlisted in the German Army. He attained the rank of corporal and saw active service in France and Belgium. He was wounded and gassed and won the Iron Cross for bravery. During the war he acquired a passionate German patriotism, despite not being a German citizen (a detail he did not rectify until 1933). He was shocked at the German capitulation on November 11 1918, when the German army was (so he believed) undefeated. He, like many other German nationalists, blamed civilian politicians (the "November criminals") for the surrender.

The Nazi Party

After the war Hitler stayed in the army, which was now mainly engaged in suppressing the socialist revolutions which were breaking out across Germany—including in Munich, where Hitler returned in 1919. He would not be discharged until March 31, 1920. While stil in the army he was assigned to spy on the meetings of a small nationalist party, the German Workers' Party. Hitler joined the party as member number 555 in the spring of 1919. By April, 1919 he managed to become its leader. He changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), usually known as the Nazi party from the first two syllables of the German word Nationalsozialistische. The party adopted the swastika (supposedly a symbol of "Aryanism") and the Italian fascist salute.

The Nazi party was but one of a large number of small extremist groups in Munich at this time. But Hitler soon discovered that he had two remarkable talents—for public oratory and for inspiring personal loyalty. His street-corner oratory, attacking the Jews, the socialists and liberals, the capitalists and Communists, began to attract adherents. Early followers included Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering. Another admirer was the wartime Field-Marshall Erich Ludendorff. Hitler decided to use Ludendorff as a front in a rather ridiculous attempt to seize power, the "Beer Hall Putsch" of November 8, 1923, when the Nazis marched from a beerhall to the Bavarian War Ministry. They were quickly dispersed and Hitler was arrested.

Hitler was put in trial for high treason. On April 1, 1924 he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. Here he dictated a book called Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to his faithful deputy Hess. This ponderous work contained Hitler’s views on race, history and politics, including plenty of warning of the fate that awaited his enemies, particularly the Jews, should he ever attain power. The book was first published in two volumes: the first on July 18, 1925 and the second a year later. The prospects of Hitler attaining power seemed so remote at the time that no-one took his writings seriously.

Considered relatively harmless Hitler was given an early amnesty. He was released on December 20, 1924. By this time the Nazi party barely existed and its leader would have a long effort in trying to rebuild it. During these years he established two groups which later became his key instruments in carrying out his objectives. The first was the Sturmabteilung ("Stormtroopers" or SA), originally a gang of street brawlers which developed into a militia known as the Brownshirts. It was placed under the leadership of Ernst Röhm. The second was his personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel ("Protection Unit" or SS). This elite black-uniformed corps was commanded by Heinrich Himmler, who became Hitler's real deputy and the principal executor of his plans.

A key element of Hitler's appeal was the sense of offended national pride caused by the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany by the Allies. Germany lost territory to France, Poland, Belgium and Denmark, and had to admit sole responsibility for the war, give up her colonies and her Navy, and pay a huge reparations bill. Since most Germans did not believe that Germany had started the war, and did not believe that they had been defeated, they bitterly resented these terms. Hitler played on Germany's culture of ingrained anti-Semitism to blame all these humiliations on the machinations of "international Jewry."

The Road to Power

Hitler walking out of Brown House after 1930 elections
After the 1930 elections
Larger image

The turning point in Hitler's fortunes came with the Depression which hit Germany in 1930. The democratic regime established in Germany in 1919, the so-called Weimar Republic, had never been genuinely accepted by conservatives, and the powerful Communist Party also rejected it. The Social Democrats and Liberals were unable to deal with the shock of the Depression, and at the 1930 elections the Nazis suddenly rose from obscurity to win 107 seats in the Reichstag. In 1931 they did even better, winning 230 seats and becoming the largest party. This made the formation of a majority government committed to democracy impossible.

Hitler's success was based on winning over the bulk of the German middle-class, who had been hard hit by the inflation of the 1920s and the unemployment of the Depression. Farmers and war veterans were other groups who supported the Nazis. The urban working classes generally ignored Hitler's appeals, and Berlin and the Ruhr towns were particularly hostile. But in these cities the Communists were strong, and the Communist Party also opposed democratic government and refused to co-operate with other parties to block Hitler's rise. In 1932 Hitler ran for President and polled 36% of the vote in the second round.

The deadlock in the Reichstag resulted in President Paul von Hindenburg governing by decree on the advice of weak minority Chancellors. A cabal of reactionary politicians led by Franz von Papen influenced events behind the scenes. It was they who persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933, despite the fact that at the November, 1932 elections the Nazis had lost votes and seats.

The German Communist Party and its masters in Moscow must take a large part of the blame for Hitler's rise to power. Since 1929 Stalin had directed the Comintern to adopt a policy of extreme sectarianism towards all other parties on the left—Social Democrats were to be treated as "social fascists" and no alliances were to be made with them. This suited Stalin's domestic political ends, but it had disastrous consequences in Germany. The Communist Party not only failed to oppose the Nazis in alliance with the Social Democrats, it tactically co-operated with them (most notably in the 1932 Berlin public transport strike).

They soon realised the error of this policy. Using the pretext of the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Hitler issued the Reichstag Fire Decree of February 28, 1933. The decree supressed several significant civil rights in the name of national security. A series of decrees followed and had the effect of suppressing the other parties and banning all opposition. The Communist leaders, along with all other opponents of the regime, soon found themselves in prison. At the same time the SA launched a wave of violence against the labour movement, the Jews and other enemies. Within a few months Hitler was effectively dictator of Germany, although the Weimar constitution was never formally suspended.

It has become an established myth that Hitler came to power by democratic means. Although he was legally appointed Chancellor by an elected President, Hitler never had a democratic mandate. At the last free elections, the Nazis polled 33% of the vote and won 196 seats out of 584. Even at the March, 1933 elections, carried out in an atmosphere of terror and violence, the Nazis won only 44% of the vote. It was not until the Communist Party was banned that Hitler was able to secure a majority in the Reichstag.

The Nazi regime

Within a short time, however, Hitler had won the support of the great majority of Germans, and retained it until the very end of his regime. He was a master orator, and with all of Germany's mass media under the control of his propaganda chief, Dr Josef Goebbels, he was able to persuade most Germans that he was their saviour—from the Depression, the Communists, the Versailles Treaty and the Jews. For those who were not persuaded, the SA, the SS and the Gestapo (Secret State Police) were given a free hand, and thousands disappeared into concentration camps. Many thousands more emigrated, including about half of Germany's Jews.

To consolidate his regime, Hitler needed the neutrality of the Army and the industrial magnates. They were alarmed by the "socialist" component of National Socialism, which was represented by the mainly working-class Brownshirts of Ernst Roehm's SA. To remove this barrier to acceptance of his regime, Hitler unleashed his lieutenant Himmler to murder Roehm and dozens of other real and potential enemies during the night of June 29-June 30, 1930. The event is remembered as the Night of the Long Knives. When Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934 Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor, appointing himself Leader (Führer) of the German State, and extracting an oath of personal loyalty from every member of the armed forces.

Those Jews who had not emigrated in time soon regretted their hesitation. Under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws they lost their status as German citizens and were expelled from government employment, the professions and most forms of economic activity. They were subject to a barrage of hateful propaganda. Few non-Jewish Germans objected to these steps. The Christian Churches, steeped in centuries of anti-Semitism, remained silent. These restrictions were further tightened later, particularly after the 1938 anti-Jewish operation known as Kristallnacht. From 1941 Jews were required to wear a yellow star in public.

On March 16, 1935 Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles by reintroducing conscription in Germany. His set goal seemed to be the building of a massive military machine, including a new Navy and an Air Force (the Luftwaffe). The later was set under the command of Hermann Göring, a veteran comander of World War I. The enlistment of vast numbers of men and women in the new military seemed to solve Germany's unemployment problems, but seriously distorted its economy.

On March 7, 1936 he again violated the Treaty of Versailles by reoccupying the demilitarised zone in the Rhineland. When Britain and France did nothing to stop him, he grew bolder. On July 17, 1936 the Spanish Civil War begun when the military led by General Francisco Franco rebelled against the elected Popular Front goverment of Spain. Hitler sent troops to help the rebels. The Luftwaffe was also first put in use during this Civil War; one of its first actions was the destruction of Guernica, which had little military significance, on April 26, 1937. Spain served as a testing ground for Germany's new armed forces and their strategic methods.

On October 25, 1936 Hitler formed an alliance with the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. This alliance was later expanded to include Japan, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. They are collectively known as the Axis Powers.

On March 12, 1938 Hitler bullied Austria into unification with Germany (the Anschluss) and made a triumphal entry into Vienna. Next he created a crisis over the German-speaking Sudetenland district of Czechoslovakia. This led to the Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938 where Britain and France weakly gave way to his demands, averting war but sealing the fate of Czechoslovakia. The Germans entered Prague on March 10, 1939.

At this point Britain and France decided to make a stand, and they resisted Hitler's next demands, for the return of the territories ceded to Poland under the Versailles Treaty. But the western powers were unable to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union for an alliance against Germany, and Hitler outsmarted them. On August 23, 1939 he concluded an alliance (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with Stalin. On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Hitler was surprised when Britain and France honoured their pledge to the Poles by declaring war on Germany.

World War II: Victories

File:Hitlermusso.jpg
Mussolini with Hitler

Over the next three years Hitler had an almost unbroken run of military success. Poland was quickly defeated and partitioned with the Soviets. In April 9, 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. On May 10 Germany initiated a lightning offensive that quickly overran The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, which collapsed within six weeks. In April 1941 Yugoslavia and Greece were invaded. Meanwile German forces were advancing across North Africa towards Egypt. These invasions were accompanied by terror bombing of undefended cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam and Belgrade. Hitler's only setback was the failure of his attempt to bomb Britain into submission during the Battle of Britain.

On June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa begun. Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, rapidly seizing the western third of European Russia, besieging Leningrad and threatening Moscow. In the winter the Germans were repelled from the gates of Moscow, but the following summer the offensive was resumed. By July 1942 Hitler's armies were on the Volga. Here they were defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad, the first major defeat of Nazi Germany. In North Africa the British defeated the Germans at the battles of El Alamein, thwarting Hitler's plans of seizing the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

The Holocaust

It is sometimes asked why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union while leaving Britain undefeated in the west. The answer is that Hitler had two overriding objectives: creating an eastern empire for the Germans, and exterminating the Jews. The Soviet Union was harbouring the second-largest Jewish population in Europe after Poland. For Hitler, the war against the western allies was only a necessary prelude to the conquest of Russia. Here he intended enslave, expel or kill the Russians, Poles and other Slavic peoples to make room for German settlers. This was an onjective many Germans shared. But his personal obsession had always been the extermination of the Jews.

The Wannsee conference took place near Berlin on January 20, 1942 with the participation of fifteen of Hitler's officials, including Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. It developed a plan to execute the 11 million Jews in Europe and North Africa. Between 1942 and 1944 the SS, assisted by collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries, killed between 5 and 7 million Jews. Two-thirds of these were systematically killed in six camps in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The rest were killed less systematically elsewhere, or died of starvation and disease while working as slave labourers. Many thousands of ordinary Germans were complicit in these crimes. This attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe is now generally called the Holocaust, although the Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some Jewish writers.

Other ethnic groups and social categories were also subject to persecution and in some cases extermination. Thousands of German socialists, communists and other opponents of the regime died in concentration camps, as did a large but unknown number of homosexual men. The Gypsies were regarded as an inferior race and were sent to death camps. About three million Soviet prisoners of war also died in camps or as slave labourers. All the occupied countries suffered terrible privations and mass executions: up to three million (non-Jewish) Polish civilians died during the occupation.

World War II: Defeat

Hitler's early military triumphs persuaded him (and many others) that he was a strategic genius, and he became increasingly unwilling to listen to advice or to hear bad news. After Stalingrad his military decisions became increasingly erratic, and Germany's military and economic position deteriorated. The entry of the United States into the war on December 7, 1941 brought the world's greatest industrial and financial power into the coalition arrayed against him. Realists in the German army saw that defeat was inevitable, and some officers plotted to remove Hitler from power. In July 1944 one of them, Claus von Stauffenberg set up a bomb at Hitler's military headquarters (the so-called July 20 Plot), but Hitler narrowly escaped death. Savage reprisals followed and the resistance movement was crushed.

Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini was overthrown in 1943. Meanwhile the Soviet Union was steadily forcing Hitler's armies to retreat from their conquests in the east. But as long as western Europe was secure, Germany could hope to hold the line indefinitely, despite an increasingly heavy campaign of bombing of German cities. On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), American and British armies landed in northern France, and by December they were on the Rhine. Hitler staged a last ditch offensive in the Ardennes (the Battle of the Bulge). But by the new year the western armies were advancing into Germany.

In February the Soviets smashed their way through Poland and eastern Germany, and in April they arrived at the gates of Berlin. Hitler's closest lieutenants urged him to flee to Bavaria or Austria to make a last stand in the mountains, but he was determined to die in his capital. His armies crumbling, Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April, 1945. He was 56. In the testament he left, he dismissed the other Nazi leaders and appointed Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. On May 8 1945 Germany surrendered. His "Thousand Year Reich" had lasted a little over 12 years.

Hitler's partly burnt remains were found by the Russians. They kept this fact secret, and for years the Soviet Union fostered rumours that Hitler had somehow survived the war and was living in Latin America (where many ex-Nazis actually were living). In fact his remains were buried at an undisclosed location in eastern Germany on Stalin's instructions.

More than 40 million people died in World War II and associated events. Hitler was directly and personally responsible for the great majority of these deaths. The decision to launch the war was his alone, although he had the enthusiastic support of most Germans. There is no known document in which he explicitly ordered the Holocaust, but most historians believe he not only knew of it but ordered Himmler to carry it out—certainly it was entirely consistent with his lifelong beliefs.

Hitler Assessed

For more than 60 years Hitler has been seen as the personification of evil. Some writers have assumed that he was insane, but there is no real evidence to support this. Today psychologists speculate that his early childhood experiences left him incapable of emotional empathy and unable to understand, or even see, the humanity of those he condemned to extermination. The dominant emotion in his life was hatred, directed mainly at the Jews, but also at other categories of people he saw as enemies.

Certainly what is known of Hitler's personal life reinforces such a view. He is known to have had only two emotional relationships in his life after the death of his mother when he was 18. In 1927 he formed a close friendship with his niece, Angelica Maria Raubal, nicknamed "Geli." She apparently commited suicide with her uncle's handgun in 1931. Whether the relationship was sexual is not known. Soon after, he developed a relationship with Eva Braun, an assistant to Hitler's court photographer. Braun is considered a woman of limited intelligence who offered Hitler total devotion and submission. Hitler married her on April 29, 1945 and they commited suicide together the following day. Again it is not known if this relationship was sexual. It is possible that Hitler died a virgin.

Psychological speculation about Hitler is interesting, but of limited value. The fact, if it is a fact, that Hitler was emotionally or psychologically disturbed does not explain how he was allowed to seize control of a great and cultured nation and lead it to total physical ruin and moral degradation. Every society produces sociopaths, but not every society permits them to come to power, and no other modern society has ever followed one so enthusiastically to catastophe. The important point is not Hitler's mental state, but the mental state of the German people.

In the view of many historians, the key to this puzzle is anti-Semitism. It was anti-Semitism that brought Germany and Hitler together. Germany was far from being the only country in Europe in which there was endemic anti-Semitism, and Hitler was very far from being the only anti-Semitic ranter in Europe. But Germany was the only great European state in which what recent historians have called "eliminationist anti-Semitism"—the belief that the Jews were malevolent enemies who should be killed - was so prevalent that a talented demagogue like Hitler could ride it to power, given the opportunity. It was the political demoralisation of Germany after the defeat of 1918, the divisions on the left that prevented effective resistance, and the catastrophe of the Depression that gave him that opportunity.

The Consequences of Hitler

The impact of Hitler's dictatorship has been felt on events in Europe and elsewhere ever since his death. In the short-term, Germany itself was physically and economically devastated, its sovereignty abolished, its territory filled with millions of refugees expelled from the lost provinces in the east. Stalin took the opportunity to rewrite the map of eastern and central Europe, moving the German border to the Oder-Neisse line. A Communist regime, the German Democratic Republic, was established in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. West Germany (the German Federal Republic) recovered its (de facto) sovereignty in 1949, but it was 20 years before the German economy was rebuilt.

For the Jewish people, Hitler's regime was the greatest calamity in their history since the fall of the Temple in AD 70. Of the world's 15 million Jews in 1939, more than a third were killed. Of the 3 million Jews in Poland, the heartland of European Jewish culture, barely 50,000 survived. Most of the remaining Jews in eastern and central Europe were destiture refugees, unable and/or unwilling to return to countries which they felt had betrayed them to the Nazis. This gave a powerful incentive to the Zionist movement to press for the creation of a Jewish state (Israel) in Palestine.

The peoples of eastern Europe found themselves under Soviet military occupation at the end of the war, and the Soviets rapidly installed subservient Communist regimes in all the countries they controlled. Some of the radical reforms these regimes carried out were initially popular, but it soon became clear that this came at the price of a total loss of national sovereignty. The Communists emerged from the war sharing the vast prestige of the victorious Soviet armed forces, and for a while it looked as though they might take power in France, Italy and Greece.

Britain and France were on the side of the victors, but they were exhausted and bankrupted by the war, and they never recovered their status as world powers. With Germany and Japan in ruins, the world was left with only two dominant powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Economic and political reality would soon force the dismantling of the European colonial empires. This new bipolar world was the setting for 45 years of struggle between the capitalist and Communist powers, the Cold War.

The only positive outcome of the war was the total destruction of Nazism as a political and ideological force. Italian fascism was also destroyed, and although modified forms of fascism lingered in Spain and Portugal under Franco and Salazar, as a serious political force in Europe it was dead. The horrors of Nazism, when fully revealed after 1945, also produced a confrontation with the anti-Semitism which had dominated Europe for centuries. German society, in particular, was radically changed for the better in the postwar years. Other forms of pseudo-scientific racism, such as eugenics, were also discredited by the uses to which the Nazis put these doctrines. The founding of the United Nations on October 24, 1945, and the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, were signs that at least some of the lessons of Hitler's career had been learned.

See also Cultural representations of Hitler

Further reading

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, W W Norton, 1999, and Hitler 1937-1945: Nemesis, W W Norton, 2000
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, HarperCollins, 1991
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Abacus, 1996