Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HITLER 1889 – 1936

  ‘An exemplary biography – trenchant, thorough, sane, beautifully organized’ John Gross, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

  ‘Ian Kershaw’s Hitler counts among the most significant works on contemporary history in the last decades’ Frank Schirrmacher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

  ‘This is the most impressive biography of Hitler in the English language… Kershaw’s work supersedes Bullock’s celebrated book in every sense, as well as the excellent book by the late William Carr’ John Lukacs, Spectator

  ‘What emerges is an entirely original thesis, a new insight into how this uniquely calamitous dictator managed to come so close to fulfilling his terrible aims’ Gitta Sereny, The Times

  ‘A path-breaking biography [which places] all previous biographies of Hitler in the shade’ Hans Mommsen, Frankfurter Rundschau

  ‘By the end of this volume, we understand how Hitler could have become so identified with Germany, and it with him. Kershaw is able to clarify, perhaps better than any biographer who preceded him, what made Hitler’s dictatorial power possible’ Walter Reich, The New York Times Book Review

  ‘It is now perhaps the best explanation in English of why so many Germans subordinated themselves to this absurd, obsessive outsider’ John Simpson, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

  ‘Magisterial’ Anthony Julius, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

  ‘Compelling… his study will undoubtedly become the standard work, superseding even the superb biographies of Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest’ Piers Brendon, Mail on Sunday

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ian Kershaw is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield and one of the world’s leading authorities on Hitler. He was the historical adviser to the two BBC series The Nazis: A Warning from History and War of the Century. He is also the author of ‘The Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–45 and The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation; the editor of Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail? and Hitler: A Profile in Power; and co-editor, with Moshe Lewin, of Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Hitler 1889–19 36: Hubris was shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Biography Award and the first Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis was shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award, and was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year and the Wolfson Literary Award for History for 2000.

  HITLER

  1889–1936: HUBRIS

  Ian Kershaw

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  On the World Wide Web at: www.penguin.com

  First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1998

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  Published in this format in Penguin Books 2001

  13

  Copyright © Ian Kershaw, 1998

  All rights reserved

  Extracts from the translation of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler are reproduced by permission of Random House

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192579-0

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Reflecting on Hitler

  1. Fantasy and Failure

  2. Drop-out

  3. Elation and Embitterment

  4. Discovering a Talent

  5. The Beerhall Agitator

  6. The ‘Drummer’

  7. Emergence of the Leader

  8. Mastery over the Movement

  9. Breakthrough

  10. Levered into Power

  11. The Making of the Dictator

  12. Securing Total Power

  13. Working Towards the Führer

  Glossary of Abbreviations

  Notes

  List of Works Cited

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention. (Photographic acknowledgements are given in brackets.)

  1. Adolf Hitler in his Leonding school photo (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  2. Klara Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

  3. Alois Hitler (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

  4. Karl Lueger (Hulton Getty, London)

  5. August Kubizek (The Wiener Library, London)

  6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, 2 August 1914 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  7. Hitler with Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

  8. German soldiers on the Western Front (Hulton Getty, London)

  9. Armed members of the KPD Sektion Neuhausen (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  10. Counterrevolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  11. Anton Drexler (Hulton Getty, London)

  12. Ernst Röhm (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  13. Hitler’s DAP membership card (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  15. NSDAP mass meeting, Munich, 1923 (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)

  16. Paramilitary organizations on ‘German Day’, 1923 (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)

  17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, Friedrich Weber and Christian Weber (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

  18. Armed SA men manning a barricade (Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich)

  19. Armed putschists from the area around Munich (Stadtsmuseum, Landeshaupstadt Munich)

  20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  21. Hitler immediately after his release from imprisonment (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  22. Hitler in Landsberg (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart)

  23. Hitler in Bavarian costume (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  24. Hitler in a raincoat (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  25. Hitler with his alsatian, Prinz (Collection Rudolf Herz, Munich)

  26. The Party Rally, Weimar, July 1926 (Ullstein Bilderdienst, Berlin)

  27. The Party Rally, Nuremberg, August 1927 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  28. Hitler in SA uniform (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  29. Hitler in rhetorical pose (Karl Stehle, Munich)

  30. Hitler speaking to the NSDAP leaders
hip (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

  31. Geli Raubal and Hitler (David Gainsborough Roberts)

  32. Eva Braun (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  33. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg (AKG London)

  34. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning with Benito Mussolini (AKG London)

  35. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen with State Secretary Dr Otto Meissner (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

  36. Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  37. Ernst Thälmann (Hulton Getty, London)

  38. Nazi election poster, 1932 (AKG London)

  39. Candidate placards for the presidential election (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

  40. Discussion at Neudeck (AKG London)

  41. Reich Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher (AKG London)

  42. Hitler in evening dress (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  43. Hitler bows to Reich President von Hindenburg (AKG London)

  44. SA violence against Communists (AKG London)

  45. The boycott of Jewish doctors (AKG London)

  46. An elderly Jew being taken into custody (AKG London)

  47. Hindenburg and Hitler on the ‘Day of National Labour’ (AKG London)

  48. Hitler with Ernst Rohm (Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich)

  49. Postcard designed by Hans von Norden (Karl Stehle, Munich)

  50. Postcard: ‘The Führer as animal-lover’ (Karl Stehle, Munich)

  51. Hitler justifying the ‘Röhm purge’ (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

  52. Hitler, Professor Leonhard Gall, and architect Albert Speer (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  53. Hitler with young Bavarians (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  54. The Mercedes-Benz showroom at Lenbachplatz, Munich (Stadtarchiv, Landeshauptstadt Munich)

  55. Hitler with Karl Krause, Albert Vögler, Fritz Thyssen and Walter Borbet (AKG London)

  56. ‘Hitler in his Mountains’: Heinrich Hoffmann publication (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  57. New recruits at the Feldherrnhalle, 1935 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich)

  58. German troops entering the Rhineland (AKG London)

  PREFACE

  I had never thought, until a few years ago, that I would write a biography of Hitler. For one thing, a number of biographies of the Dictator which I rated highly already existed. I had read as a student, with endless fascination, Alan Bullock’s early masterpiece. And on its appearance in 1973 I immediately devoured Joachim Fest’s new biography, admiring as all did its stylistic brilliance. It was only with initial reluctance, and due sense of modesty in the light of the achievements of Bullock and Fest, that I allowed myself in 1989 to be persuaded to undertake the present work.

  Another reason for hesitation was that biography had never figured in my intellectual plans as something I might want to write. If anything, I was somewhat critically disposed towards the genre. From the early part of my scholarly career onwards, first as a medievalist, I had been much more drawn to social history than to a focus on high politics, let alone a focus on any individual. These tendencies were enhanced when I encountered the prevalent trends – strongly anti-biographical – in German historiography in the 1970s. When changing course at that time to undertake research on the Third Reich, it was the behaviour and attitudes of ordinary Germans in that extraordinary era that excited my attention, not Hitler and his entourage. My early works, arising from my involvement in the pioneering ‘Bavaria Project’ and profiting from the enormous stimulation offered by a brilliant mentor, Martin Broszat, pursued those interests by exploring popular opinion and political dissent under Nazi rule, and by examining Hitler’s image among the population. The latter work certainly exposed me to the historiographical debates raging in Germany in the 1970s about Hitler. But as a non-German, primarily interested in the reception of Hitler’s image and the reasons for his popularity rather than Hitler himself, in his actions and role, I remained essentially an outsider to the debates.

  This I felt to be less so after participating, as little more than a novice at the scene, in an important conference at Cumberland Lodge near London in 1979, attended by most of the German ‘big guns’ writing on the Third Reich, and revealing in graphic and startling force the chasmic divisions of interpretation among leading historians on Hitler’s role in the Nazi system of rule. Experiencing the conference was a spur to immersing myself much further in the differing approaches in German historiography, prompting the publication of a survey in which my sympathies for the ‘structuralist’ approaches to Nazi rule, looking beyond and away from biographical preoccupation with the Nazi Dictator, were evident.

  There is no little irony, therefore, in my eventually arriving at the writing of a biography of Hitler in that I come to it, so to say, from the ‘wrong’ direction. However, the growing preoccupation with the structures of Nazi rule and with the gulf in the divides on Hitler’s own position within that system (if ‘system’ it can be called) pushed me inexorably to increased reflection on the man who was the indispensable fulcrum and inspiration of what took place, Hitler himself. It drove me, too, to considering whether the striking polarization of approaches could not be overcome and integrated by a biography of Hitler written by a ‘structuralist’ historian – coming to biography with a critical eye, looking instinctively, perhaps, in the first instance to downplay rather than to exaggerate the part played by the individual, however powerful, in complex historical processes.

  What follows is a work which reflects, through the medium of a biography of Hitler, such an attempt to bind together the personal with the impersonal elements in the shaping of some of the most vitally important passages in the whole of human history. What has continued in the writing of the book to interest me more than the strange character of the man who held Germany’s fate in his hands between 1933 and 1945 is the question of how Hitler was possible: not just how this initially most unlikely pretender to high state office could gain power; but how he was able to extend that power until it became absolute, until field marshals were prepared to obey without question the orders of a former corporal, until highly skilled ‘professionals’ and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses. If the answer to that question cannot be presumed in the first instance to lie in those attributes, such as they were, of Hitler’s personality, then it follows that the answer must be sought chiefly in German society – in the social and political motivations which went into the making of Hitler. To search out those motivations and to fuse them with Hitler’s personal contribution to the attainment and expansion of his power to the point where he could determine the fate of millions is the aim of the study.

  If I have found one concept more than any other which has helped me find a way to bind together the otherwise contradictory approaches through biography and the writing of social history, it is Max Weber’s notion of ‘charismatic leadership’ – a notion which looks to explanations of this extraordinary form of political domination primarily in the perceivers of ‘charisma’, that is, in the society rather than, in the first instance, in the personality of the object of their adulation.

  An attempt to undertake a new biography of Hitler, bold though it may be, found further encouragement (as well, it must be admitted, as some discouragement or even dismay) through the massive outpouring of first-rate scholarly research on practically all aspects of the Third Reich since the major biographies of Fest – even more so of Bullock – were written. It is surprising, in retrospect, for instance, how little anti-Jewish policy and the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ figured in such earlier biographies. The difficulties of pinning down Hitler’s own, often shadowy, involvement in the ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ is, of course, among the reasons for this. But the major advances made in research on this area make it both necessary and possible now to redress the
balance – something which Marlis Steinert’s most recent major biography had already begun to do.

  Not only the extent of the secondary literature, but the availability of primary sources on Hitler makes the time for a new biography opportune. The superb multi-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches and writings between the refoundation of the Nazi Party in 1925 and his appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933 is one major addition to scholarship. This now makes it possible, in tandem with the equally excellent edition of his speeches and writings down to 1924, to survey the development of Hitler’s ideas, as he publicly expressed them, for the entire period before he took power. A second indispensable source which can now be used for the first time in full in a biography of Hitler is the diary of the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, only recently discovered in its entirety, surviving on glass plates (an early form of photocopy) in formerly inaccessible state archives in Moscow. For all the caution which must naturally be attached to Goebbels’s regularly reported remarks by Hitler in a text which the Propaganda Minister, intent on later publication, wrote for ultimate self-glorification and for securing his place in history high in the Nazi pantheon of heroes, the immediacy as well as the frequency of the comments makes them a vitally important source of insight into Hitler’s thinking and actions. One alleged source, used for decades as an authentic guide to Hitler’s thoughts and plans, prominently deployed by both Bullock and Fest, has, however, fallen by the wayside. I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether. Other sources, too, particularly memoirs but even the ‘table-talk’ monologues of the last months (the so-called ‘Bunkergespräche’), of which no original German text has ever been brought to light, have to be treated with due caution. The combination of Hitler’s innate secretiveness, the emptiness of his personal relations, his unbureau-cratic style, the extremes of adulation and hatred which he stirred up, and the apologetics as well as distortions built into post-war memoirs and gossipy anecdotes of those in his entourage, mean that, for all the surviving mountains of paper spewed out by the governmental apparatus of the Third Reich, the sources for reconstructing the life of the German Dictator are in many respects extraordinarily limited – far more so than in the case, say, of his main adversaries, Churchill and even Stalin.