This is
an intimidating book. It gives the reader over 1,000 pages on the life of Adolf
Hitler, which means that not only is it long, it is long and filled with lots
of unpleasant stuff. Kershaw writes very well and this is a really full
account. If you still want more, you can read the larger version, split into
two volumes. I felt like I got enough Hitler for the next year or so.
As a
child, Hitler was strange from the get-go. It might have had to do with an
unloving father who beat him and a very loving mother who tried to spoil him.
He was basically a loner and only ever had a few friends at a time. He was
smart, but as a result, he didn’t try hard in school and never developed much
discipline. When he went to Vienna to apply to art school, he didn’t work very
hard and failed to get in. Crushed, you would think he would study hard for the
next exam. However, supported by funds from his family, he didn’t get a job,
didn’t prepare, and didn’t pass the exam the next year. This was the start of dark
times for him. He would soon end up in a shelter for men and had nothing when
family funds dried out. He made some money selling his art (through Jewish
dealers) and sustained himself for the time being in Vienna. There’s not a lot
of evidence of anti-Semitism in his life at this point, but he was definitely predisposed
to it just as much as most Europeans were at the time.
Hitler
wasn’t good at anything. He had no discipline. He had no will to work. But
then, luckily for him, World War One started. He loved the war. Unbothered by all
the death around him, he found it exciting and was swept up in the German
nationalism that motivated many. He did not care much for his fellow soldiers
and they made fun of him for his complete lack of emotional attachments.
Instead, the only living thing he cared about was his dog Foxl, which he lost
towards the end of the war.
When he
returned from the war, he was extremely bitter at the result. Like many
Germans, he felt that they had been sold out and blamed the result on the Jews.
Of course, the Jews had nothing to do with German failure in the war. While a
few worked in finance in London, the vast majority were barely scraping by in
Poland and Russia. Hitler would take out his rage eventually on those Polish Jews
especially, killing 90% of them, including my great-grandparents. Channeling
his rage, Hitler discovered that his one real talent was delivering a good
rant. He could go on about politics for hours and this got him a job with the
Reichswehr (the army), where he handled political education, inculcating
soldiers with nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, the latter of which he
associated with the Jews.
One day,
he was assigned to go as a spy to a political party in Munich. While at a
meeting, he couldn’t resist and gave a speech that went over extremely well. He
was immediately asked to join and he did so, joining the NSDAP, better known as
the Nazi Party. Leaving the Reichswehr, Hitler became a major Nazi orator,
giving speeches that attracted thousands to Munich beer halls. At these
meetings, the goal was to incite violence and get Communists to show up so they
could fight them. Eventually, the NSDAP attempted to take over the Munich
government, but they failed and Hitler went to jail.
At the
trial, Hitler was allowed to give an hours-long diatribe by the sympathetic
judge and was given little jail time. While in jail, he received constant
visits from admirers to the point that he had to restrict his own visiting
hours. The guards in prison were also admirers, frequently favoring him. He was
only there for a few months though, which he mainly used to write his famous
book, Mein Kampf. The book sold
around 23,000 copies by 1929 and the numbers would rise stratospherically after
1933, when the Nazis took power. By 1936, an edition would be given to every
newlywed couple on their wedding day.
In his
speeches, Hitler emphasized the need for centralized power and leadership in
one man. Through most of the 1920’s, he stressed that it was not him, but that
a pyramidal structure was important and should culminate in one man at the top.
It would invariably be a man since Hitler had no regard for women as anything
more than babymaking machines. He did not make many outright attacks on the
Jews in his early speeches, realizing that it would put him out of the mainstream.
Instead, like many racists do today, he focused on economic issues while
dog-whistling his opinions on the Jews. By the end of the 1920’s, the message
developed further to focus on the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the
uselessness of democracy. The experiment in Germany had not turned out well, as
those in power abused it, and those without it, like Hitler, certainly did not
defend democracy either. Things started to develop in such a way that while the
various parties in the Weimar Republic stood for certain interest groups, the Nazi
party, now completely led by Hitler, was making arguments for the nation as a
whole.
After
major wins in Parliament, Hitler demanded to be made Prime Minister, despite
failing to win a majority. At no point in his career did he or the Nazi Party
ever win a majority of the vote of the German people. Yet, he insisted to
President Hindenburg and sabotaged others. In the chaotic Weimar system, they
held 5 elections in 1932 and only the Nazis were able to keep their people
mobilized. He gained the support of the right wing, desperate to avoid socialism
and communist elements. Business leaders soon through their support behind
Hitler. Once in power, the Fuhrer cult had a powerful effect on policy. While
Hitler did little day-to-day, everyone wanted to “work toward the Fuhrer,”
enacting policies they thought he would like. This led to a rapid, though chaotic
transformation of the government. This system promoted the best people with the
most initiative who could stay on Hitler’s good side. Certain people who
thrived in chaos did very well.
In treatment
of the Jews, you could see the “working towards the Fuhrer” in action. Things
were done at the grassroots level and filtered up. For example, there would be
an act like some sort of raid on Jewish stores and businesses. They would then
get a green light from above to continue or a red light to pause them and wait
for criticism to pass. However, this created too much criticism. The Nazis
realized that the German people like order and that the messy persecution drew
too much attention to them. That’s why they passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935,
so that non-Nazis could say that at least they were organized about it.
In the second
half of the 1930’s, Hitler was hungry for land and started to expand German
territory in the Saarland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and eventually Poland. He
met very little resistance until 1939, when Britain and France finally got fed
up with it all and declared war on Germany. This part is very long in the book
but I’m not gonna write much about it here except to say that Chamberlain came
off pretty well in the book actually and seemed more or less reasonable and not
like the pushover that he’s known as.
Kershaw writes that Hitler had a gambler’s
instinct. He really knew how to “fail forward” and keep pushing through to more
success. With the invasion of Poland, his luck ran out. It’s really hard to see
how, once Britain and France declared war, he was going to triumph. Things looked
good early on and it was definitely not for sure that he would end up toppled
in 1945. Two things clinched it for him by 1942. The first was British persistence
to stay in the war, aided by a miraculous retreat from Dunkirk. Second was the
invasion of Russia, fueled by a huge underestimation of Russian power. The first
could have been overcome if not for the second, which was a massive blunder not
just on the part of Hitler, but the entire German military elite, who supported
the decision. The major problem was that Germany was not ready for a full-scale
war in 1939 and certainly not the two front war that would break out by 1939.
By 1942, the Nazis had lost momentum and the Russians were pushing back. It
became an impossible war for the Germans by 1943 when their second offensive
against Russia stalled in the winter.
By 1944,
when it was clear to all that the war was lost, Hitler refused to admit defeat
and wanted to take the entire German nation with him. It was due to his
obsession with the capitulation in World War One that he felt he had to do
this, so that even if he couldn’t win in his war, he could at least lose in the
way he wanted to. He achieved that, killing himself with a gunshot to the head
as the USSR troops closed in on his bunker, with German forces fighting until
the very last moment possible. Hitler felt that if the war was to be lost, the
people should be lost as well, as the Germans had proven the weaker in the
struggle.
In
conclusion, this was a really good book and great insight into who Hitler was
and why he did the things he did. IT gets into his head and into the
machinations of the German state, explaining basically anything you’d want to
know in detail. Five stars.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Hitler kept his relationship with Eva Braun so secretive that the German people only learned of it after the war ended.
- Until the war made the Nazis realize they would not have the sea control to achieve it, there was a serious plan to move the Jews to Madagascar.
- Shortly after Hitler invaded Poland, there was an attempted assassination that came very close. The would-be assassin drilled a hole in a column behind where Hitler would give a speech and inserted a time bomb, but due to the fact that Hitler finished early, the bomb exploded ten minutes after he left and the attempted assassin was captured, dying in a concentration camp.
- Due to how badly the war was going, Hitler did not give a single speech in 1944.
- In the last days of the war in April 1945, communications were so bad that Army High Command resorted to using a telephone directory to ring random numbers and ask them if they had seen any Russians.
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