Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris Read online

  Hitler and Nazism amount, unsurprisingly, to a lasting trauma for German society and of course, though in very different ways, for the regime’s millions of victims. But the legacy of Hitler belongs to all of us. Part of that legacy is the continuing duty to seek understanding of how Hitler was possible. Only through history can we learn for the future. And no part of history is more important in that respect than the era dominated by Adolf Hitler.

  Ian Kershaw

  Sheffield/Manchester, April 1998

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The greatest pleasure at the completion of a book is to thank publicly those who have contributed directly or indirectly, in a major or minor way, to its creation. In a work on this scale my debts of gratitude are naturally extensive.

  I am grateful, first of all, for the expert assistance in dealing with my inquiries and requests of the Directors and staff of several record repositories and libraries which have allowed me access to their archives and supplied me with unpublished material. These include, in Germany, the Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie, Bonn; the different departments of the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; the Berlin Document Center (where I was helped, quite especially, by the former Director, Dr David Marwell); the Bundesarchiv Koblenz; the Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus in Hamburg; the former Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, Zentrales Parteiarchiv, in East Berlin (GDR); the Niedersächisches Staatsarchiv, Oldenburg; the Staatsarchiv München; and the former Zentrales Staatsarchiv, Potsdam (GDR); in Great Britain, the BBC Archives; the Borthwick Institute (York), notably its Director, Professor David Smith, for access to the Halifax papers; the Public Record Offices in London and Belfast; the University of Birmingham Library (for use of the Chamberlain papers); and the excellent Wiener Library, London (whose Director, Professor David Cesarani, and librarians and staff I would particularly like to thank); in the USA, the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California (where I was helped especially by Myriam Beck and Christoph Schlichting); the Library of Congress, Washington; the National Archives, Washington; and Princeton University Library; in Austria, the Archiv der Stadt Linz; the Obeösterreichisches Landesarchiv (where I was especially grateful to Dr Gerhard Marckhgott); and the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv; and in Russia the former Sonderarchiv (Special Archive), now the Centre for Historical and Documentary Collections, Moscow.

  I am also grateful to the editors and publishers of those works from which I have cited extracts, and for the owners of the copyright of the photographs reproduced in the book for permission to publish them.

  The major debt of gratitude owed to the Director, Professor Horst Möller, and all the staff of the incomparable Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich will come as no surprise to anyone who has undertaken research on the Nazi era. I have always been made extremely welcome in the Institut since first working there in the mid-1970s. Like so many others engaged in research on twentieth-century German history, I have benefited enormously both from its outstanding library and archival holdings and from the expertise of its researchers, archivists, and librarians. In particular, I would wish to single out Norbert Frei (recently moved to the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum), a good personal friend over many years, alongside Elke Fröhlich, Hermann Graml, Lothar Gruchmann (who made available to me parts of the new edition of Hitler’s trial material in advance of publication), Klaus-Dietmar Henke (now Dresden), Hermann Weiß (who gave generous help with a number of archival queries), and Hans Woller. I am also extremely grateful for the kindness shown on many occasions by Georg Maisinger, the business manager of the Institut. Not least, I would like to thank the staff of the Institut’s archive and library for all their assistance in dealing so patiently and efficiently with all of my many requests.

  Essential time for reflection, reading, and writing was provided by a stay in 1989–90 at the marvellous Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Preliminary work for this biography was undertaken at the time, and I was able to profit from interchanges with scholars of widely varying disciplines. I am grateful to the Rector, Wolf Lepenies, and his staff, all the Fellows, and not least to the librarians for complying with my innumerable requests. A good part of the writing was undertaken during a spell in 1994–5 away from my regular duties, thanks to support from a Leverhulme-British Academy Senior Scholarship and from the University of Sheffield. The Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung continued the generous support of my work which began in 1976–7 with the funding for a month in the summer of 1997 spent checking references in Munich. My son, David, kindly took a week’s holiday from his work to help me for part of this time.

  I have enjoyed great (and exceedingly patient) support from my publishers in Britain, Germany, and the USA while this book has been in preparation. At Penguin, Ravi Mirchandani (who commissioned the book in what seems an age ago) and Simon Winder (who adopted it and has skilfully overseen all stages of its completion) have been pillars of strength. Their encouragement has been of great importance to me. I would also like to express my thanks to Thomas Weber for his work in drawing up the bibliography, to Diana LeCore for compiling the index, and, quite especially, to Annie Lee for her excellent copy-editing. At Norton, Donald Lamm’s meticulous and constructive suggestions for amending or improving points of the text were invariably perceptive, and I greatly appreciated his insights. At Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt I have benefited from the expertise of Ulrich Volz and Michael Neher, while Jörg W. Rademacher (who translated the bulk of the text) and Jürgen Peter Krause, assisted by Cristoforo Schweeger, performed heroics in the speed of their accomplished translation. And at Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Margit Ketterle and Andrea Wörle have taken the keenest interest in the project since its inception and have been unfailing in their good advice.

  Many friends and colleagues have helped enormously (at times unwittingly) over the years, through discussions or correspondence, through encouragement, and through their own published work, to shape my thinking on the Nazi era. I hope that a collective expression of my most sincere thanks will not appear like a diminution of my great indebtedness to each of them.

  My warmest thanks are also owing to Gerald Fleming, Brigitte Hamann, Ronald Hayman, Robert Mallett, Meir Michaelis, Stig Hornshøh-Møller, Fritz Redlich, Gitta Sereny, Michael Wildt, and Peter Witte, all of whom were generous in supplying me with documentary material, giving me insight into their work prior to publication, and engaging in extensive discussion or correspondence on some issues of interpretation. Eberhard Jäckel has kindly allowed me to exploit his great expertise on Hitler on a number of occasions. I am grateful, too to Richard Evans for suggesting in the first place that I should undertake the biography, and to Niall Ferguson for inspiration with the subtitles of the two volumes. I would also like to thank Neil Bermel (Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield) for translating for me an article on Hitler published in Czech.

  To Jeremy Noakes my debt is of a very special order. His exemplary regional study of Lower Saxony was one of the works, in the early 1970s, which inspired me to consider undertaking research on Nazi Germany. Since that time, he has remained a good friend as well as an outstanding scholar of modern German history. The documentary collection he has put together over many years (Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader,4 vols., Exeter, 1983–98) is a gathering of primary sources in English (with superb commentary) on the Nazi regime which surpasses in range and quality any German collection. A good number of the sources referred to in the chapters which follow, which I have cited wherever possible from a specific German location, will be found in the collection. This applies to one document quite especially, quoted in Chapter 13, which was first published in English translation in the second volume of Jeremy’s collection. This somewhat obscure document, citing a speech by a Nazi functionary which spoke of ‘Working towards the Führer along the lines he would wish’, immediately attracted my attention by its strikingly simple insight into how a dictatorship oper
ated. Having adopted the idea, I developed it to inform my overall approach to Hitler. But I owe it to Jeremy’s collection that I was alerted to the document in the first place. I am also grateful to him for casting his expert eye over the entire typescript.

  Two German scholars had the most profound influence on my work, and I would like to express my especial gratitude to them here. I had the privilege of working for a time with the late Martin Broszat, Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, and profited immensely both from his expertise and from his inspiration. Working in Munich in the late 1970s under his guidance was a formative experience for me. A second crucial influence has been that of Hans Mommsen, formerly of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, with whom over many years now I have enjoyed good friendship as well as continued scholarly dialogue. When I first told Hans that I had decided to write a biography of Hitler, his immediate response was: ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you.’ I fear the biographical approach to Hitler is not one he will ever find fruitful. But even where our interpretations of Hitler differ, I hope he will detect unmistakable traces of his own influence on my approach. My admiration for his own scholarly achievement goes hand in hand with my most sincere thanks.

  Some friends have contributed more than they perhaps realize. This applies especially to the late William Carr, and to Dick Geary, as it does to Joe Bergin, John Breuilly, Joe Harrison, Bob Moore, Frank O’Gorman, and Mike Rose. Not least, it applies to Traude Spät.

  The support I have received from the University of Sheffield, especially from my colleagues in the Department of History, which I have felt privileged to be part of over the past few years, has been of great importance to me. Above all, I would like to thank Beverley Eaton for her quite exceptional help and encouragement during the entire period that I have been writing this book, and even before that arduous task began.

  Finally, as always, I would like to thank my family for all they have done to make this work possible. Only Betty, David, and Stephen know the full extent of my debt of gratitude.

  I. K.

  April 1998

  REFLECTING ON HITLER

  ‘Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social conditions are set. The Leader’s charismatic power is not a mere phantasm – none can doubt that millions believe in it.’

  Franz Neumann, 1942

  Has this been Hitler’s century? Certainly, no other individual has stamped a more profound imprint on it than Adolf Hitler. Other dictators – most notably Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao – have engaged in wars of conquest, held subjugated peoples in thrall, presided over the perpetration of immeasurable inhumanity and left their indelible mark on the character of the twentieth century. But the rule of none of them has seared people’s consciousness beyond their own countries, the world over, like the rule of Adolf Hitler has done. In an ‘age of extremes’,1 there have also been political leaders who have symbolized the positive values of the century, have epitomized belief in humanity, hope for the future. Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy, and in more recent times Mandela would be high up a list of such figures. But Hitler’s mark on the century has been deeper than that of each of them.

  Hitler’s dictatorship, far more than that of Stalin or Mao, has the quality of a paradigm for the twentieth century. In extreme and intense fashion it reflected, among other things, the total claim of the modern state, unforeseen levels of state repression and violence, previously unparalleled manipulation of the media to control and mobilize the masses, unprecedented cynicism in international relations, the acute dangers of ultra-nationalism, and the immensely destructive power of ideologies of racial superiority and ultimate consequences of racism, alongside the perverted usage of modern technology and ‘social engineering’. Above all, it lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity, culminating in ideological war, conquest of scarcely imaginable brutality and rapaciousness, and genocide such as the world had never previously witnessed. Hitler’s dictatorship amounted to the collapse of modern civilization – a form of nuclear blow-out within modern society. It showed what we are capable of.

  Important questions still remain open. What in that catastrophic process was peculiar to Germany? What was peculiar to the epoch? What was part of a more general European malaise? Was what happened a product and a feature of modern civilization itself? Is its potential still perhaps lying dormant, or even as the century closes partly resurgent?

  The twelve years of Hitler’s rule permanently changed Germany, Europe, and the world. He is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.2 Hitler’s immediate legacy, the Cold War – a Germany split by a Wall, a Europe split by an Iron Curtain, a world split between hostile superpowers armed with weapons able to blow up the planet – ended only a decade ago. The deeper legacy – the moral trauma he bequeathed to posterity – has still not passed.

  The century which, in a sense, his name has dominated has gained much of its character by war and genocide – Hitler’s hallmarks. As the century comes to a close, it seems, therefore, a matter of some importance to reassess, as carefully as is feasible and on the basis of the latest scholarship, the forces which made Hitler possible and shaped the barbarity for which his name remains the symbol and the warning. What happened under Hitler took place – in fact, could only have taken place – in the society of a modern, cultured, technologically advanced, and highly bureaucratic country. Within only a few years of Hitler becoming head of government, this sophisticated country in the heart of Europe was working towards what turned out to be an apocalyptic genocidal war that left Germany and Europe not just riven by an Iron Curtain and physically in ruins, but morally shattered. That still needs explaining. The combination of a leadership committed to an ideological mission of national regeneration and racial purification; a society with sufficient belief in its Leader to work towards the goals he appeared to strive for; and a skilled bureaucratic administration capable of planning and implementing policy, however inhumane, and keen to do so, offers a starting-point. How and why this society could be galvanized by Hitler requires, even so, detailed examination.

  It would be convenient to look no further, for the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s calamity, than the person of Adolf Hitler himself, ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945, whose philosophies of breathtaking inhumanity had been publicly advertised almost eight years before he became Reich Chancellor. But, for all Hitler’s prime moral responsibility for what took place under his authoritarian regime, a personalized explanation would be a gross short-circuiting of the truth. Hitler could be said to provide a classic illustration of Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own history, but… under given and imposed conditions’.3 How far ‘given and imposed conditions’, impersonal developments beyond the control of any individual, however powerful, shaped Germany’s destiny; how much can be put down to contingency, even historical accident; what can be attributed to the actions and motivations of the extraordinary man ruling Germany at the time: all need investigation. All form part of the following inquiry. Simple answers are not possible.

  A biography of Hitler is not the only approach that could be attempted.4 But it has potential – as well as pitfalls – as the following chapters hope to demonstrate. A feasible inbuilt danger in any biographical approach is that it demands a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration. The pages which follow must stand witness to the avoidance of this risk. Perhaps, in fact, it is even the case that comprehensive repulsion more than the possibility of sympathy poses the greater drawback to insight.5

  Biography also runs the natural risk of over-personalizing complex historical developments, over-emphasizing the role of the individual in shaping and determining events, ignoring or playing do
wn the social and political context in which those actions took place.6 Avoiding this pitfall has been the very challenge of undertaking this biography at all. It has been the spur to attempting a new approach to Hitler.