Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris by Ian Kershaw Penguin Press 845pp, £20 in UK
When the first World War ended in November 1918, Corporal Adolf Hitler lay in a military hospital in Pomerania recovering from temporary blindness caused by poisoned gas. He was, as he himself said later, "a human nothing", without influence, money, or career prospects. Yet in fifteen years he was to become Chancellor of Germany - Bismarck's old post - and a source of bad dreams to most of the politicians of Europe.
Hitler's actual career as a soldier was not brilliant, though he did win the Iron Cross First Class - a high honour, which, ironically, had been recommended for him by a Jewish lieutenant. He was never promoted beyond the rank of corporal because his superiors - ironically, again - could see no "leadership qualities" in this odd, humourless, obsessive loner who was convinced that mere shells and bullets could not kill him.
Even odder, though Hitler joined the Bavarian army as a volunteer on the outbreak of war in 1914, he had originally moved from his native Austria across the border to Munich in order to escape military service. According to himself he had grown to hate the Habsburg Empire. A more likely motive was his feeling of personal failure and the corrosive memory of the years in Vienna, where he had gone originally with the intention of becoming an artist or an architect, only to be rejected by the art colleges because his drawing was not good enough. For a time he lived well enough there on money inherited from his mother and aunt, then slowly slid downwards until he was living in a doss-house and peddling his trite little paintings for small sums.
Hitler never forgave Vienna, which he was to enter triumphally behind his troops as part of the Anschluss in 1938. The town he loved was Linz, where he had some happy memories of his childhood - though his father, Alois, a minor civil servant, was a domestic tyrant and a petty bureaucrat of the old school. The good star of his early years was his mother Klara, who appears to have been gentle and affectionate and rather spoiled him. Incidentally, Ian Kershaw disposes finally of the story that Hitler may have had a Jewish grandfather; the Austrian province of Styria (Steiermark) did not admit Jews in the mid-19th century. His father was certainly illegitimate, but the only obvious candidates for Alois's real father are two brothers whose name was quite legitimately Hiedler, or Hitler, or Hittler (a quite common surname meaning "smallholder").
The punitive Versailles Treaty came as a traumatic shock to the obscure corporal, and his anti-Semitism seems to have been born in the aftermath of the war and defeat rather than - as is often stated - during his years in Vienna, where the Jews had dominated the arts, the stock exchange, the theatre, and journalism. Hitler clung to the Army when most of his contemporaries were being demobilised, and after the short-lived Communist takeover in Bavaria he seems to have become a kind of low-grade military agent keeping an eye on local politics in case of further subversion. In this capacity, he was sent to a meeting in Munich of an obscure grouping called the German Workers' Party. Here, unexpectedly, he was drawn into contradicting one of the speakers publicly and spoke himself from the floor with a fire and fluency which impressed the party's leaders. He was invited to join them, and inside a few years his oratory made this harmless fringe group famous as the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, later shortened to Nazi).
The farcical collapse of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 should have made him and his associates mere comic figures, but shrewd publicity turned the subsequent trials into a propaganda victory, and Hitler served only part of his sentence in Landsberg Prison. After that he was taken up by influential people in Bavaria, including society hostesses and opportunist journalists, while he showed unexpected industry and organising abilities in building up his party into a national force in German politics. It was in these years that he attracted followers such as Goebbels, Goering and Streicher - Himmler had been with him from early on.
The Weimar Republic never really put down strong roots, and in a country bedevilled by anarchy, inflation and frequent street violence Hitler was in his natural-born element. He posed as a national shield against Communism, which was in fact a very strong threat - although his hatred of Marxism was perfectly genuine and went back to his early days. However, with the world slump and the withdrawal of American credits from Europe, the Weimar regime lost what little stability it had gained; and Gustav Stresemann, Germany's sole statesman of European stature, died prematurely of strain and overwork.
With unemployment mounting dizzily, and savings and incomes wiped out for millions of men and women, recruits poured into the NSDAP.
Hitler's first bid for power failed when President Hindenburg vetoed his nomination, and shortly afterwards the Nazis lost ground in general elections. It was the crisis of his political career, but he stuck to a Caesar-or-nothing policy and refused to play second fiddle to any other party or politicians. In the end, of course, he took office as Chancellor in 1933, thanks to the intrigues of von Papen, the senility of Hindenburg, the clumsy and self-defeating manoeuvres of General von Schleicher, who saw himself as the strong man of the Army, and the naivete of various prominent people who thought they could "box him in" when in government. In practice, he out-manoeuvred them all.
It is still widely believed that he owed most of his rise to big-business backing, but this is not true; his alliance with Hugenberg, the newspaper magnate, did not last long, and Hitler never received mass support from German industrialists. Neither was his resuscitation of the German economy based solely on armaments manufacture - he had the advice of Schacht, the financial wizard, and he also took the credit for the success of policies which had already been put in train by the previous government. Hitler was also shrewd enough to give many of his previous critics the impression that he had grown and matured in office, that his disreputable career as a troublemaker and rabble-rouser was over, and that he was now getting down soberly to the major task of restoring Germany to national health and equilibrium.
Alas, it was not the case. Freedom of the press was quickly eroded, most of Germany's leading writers were attacked as decadent or Bolshevist, the ominous campaign against the Jews began, and what remained of the old liberal Germany was ground to powder. The Churches were forced on the defensive and, in Professor Kershaw's words, became "largely reactive and inward-looking". The Reichstag Fire, started by a half-crazed Dutch leftist, gave the Nazis the opportunity to turn on the Communists and gut them. Strangely, it was one of Hitler's bloodiest actions, the "Night of the Long Knives", which won a high degree of public approval, since the majority of Germans believed that Hitler had acted in order to prevent a takeover by the unruly left wing of his followers. In fact, he had simply carried out a savage purge, in which old enemies such as Schleicher died as well as Rohm, Strasser and other restive underlings who felt that he had sold them short on the promised social revolution.
With the triumphal march in 1936 into the demilitarised Rhineland, restoring it to the German Reich, Hitler probably reached his apex. He had now cleared his decks by getting rid of the remnants of the Versailles and Locarno treaties and felt himself a free agent in European affairs. More importantly, his achievements - many of them little more than desperate gambles - led him to believe more and more that he was the agent of destiny, a unique genius chosen to play a special role in history. This hubris was to be fatal for himself, disastrous for Europe, and ruinous for Germany. It is at this stage of delusive success that Professor Kershaw leaves him.
In reaching such heights of visionary megalomania, Hitler was only echoing what many of his followers and admirers had told him for years. His personal magnetism is well attested, though various shrewd observers saw no signs of it when meeting him and thought that his private personality was humdrum and unimpressive. Similarly, films of his speeches and public appearances show a rather ugly little man with a harsh voice, angular gestures and a mannered, spasmodic delivery. But his messianic self-belief communicated itself to others at a time when traditional norms had gone by the board, violence and social anarchy had brutalised people, and the old liberal Europe had largely been killed off in the Great War. So the time was ripe to give birth to a Monster, Yeats's "Rough Beast" slouching in from the desert.
The fashionable intellectual scenario for some decades has been to regard Hitler as a kind of German Romantic irrationalist run mad, Wagner's Gotterdammerung carried out in the political sphere and bringing all Europe down in its flaming Valhalla. Hitler did, in fact, react with almost mystical abandon to Wagner's music, but he was not a cultured man and such an interpretation seems as perversely mystical as the tendency it condemns. He read the lessons of the age of mass communications, and his giant rallies, reiterated simplistic slogans, loudspeaker oratory and other techniques were prophetic of much of the politics of our own time (not to mention the selling methods of modern commercial advertising).
There is nothing supernatural about it; Hitler was, above all else, a successful demagogic politician, as this excellent book proves. e crank, but a period of historical breakdown enabled him to play out the nightmare at the expense of millions of lives. He left a smoky pall over Europe which has not lifted yet, and a moral nihilism which is often reflected even in those diametrically opposed to everything he stood for.