By this time, it is plain, hubris had finally settled in and Hitler began to regard himself as one of the greatest geniuses in history, a chosen agent of destiny accountable to nobody, and so able to put soldiers, politicians and economists in their place. Always callous and utterly egocentric, he grew steadily into a monster, vituperative and violent towards anyone who stood in his way, while his lack of genuine administrative ability made him set up close followers in key positions of authority, who intrigued against one another and had no loyalties except to their leader. When Japan entered the war on his side, he greeted it exultantly: "We are now fighting beside a people who have not been defeated in three thousand years!" Yet when the mighty United States declared war against him, he treated this momentous occasion with relative indifference.
His megalomania led him to intervene repeatedly in military affairs, especially since his intuition had previously proved correct in the case of Poland and France. In Russia, German armies at first rolled irresistibly over the badly-led Soviet armies but Stalin, unlike Hitler, was a monster who knew he was not infallible. After early disasters, he began to depute power to generals such as Zhukov and to listen to the advice of men who could judge the military situation better than he did. As a result, but also through Hitler's persistent over-reaching and meddling, the tide began to turn and at Stalingrad a whole army was annihilated. The German public, mourning sons and husbands and lovers, never really forgave him for this defeat or the callousness he displayed; and not long after it the Soviet tank victory at Kursk put the writing unavoidably on the wall. Mussolini, Hitler's long-term ally, proved as much a burden as a help once the path led irrevocably downwards.
The final chapters of Nazism have been written about many times already and so has the Holocaust, though Ian Kershaw supplies further grim details about both. Finally, with most German cities bombed into rubble by the Allies, the Americans and English across the Rhine and the Russian steamroller rumbling in from the East, even the party faithful began to doubt and fall away. Goebbels, surprisingly, addressed a memo to the Fuhrer pointing out that Germany had never won a war on two fronts and that he should consider a peace with Stalin. Hitler paid no heed - he was planning the Ardennes offensive, which merely drained German manpower further.
In the end, however, Goebbels was almost the only one of the Nazi hierarchy to remain behind in the Berlin bunker and die there with his master (and the pitiable Eva Braun) as the Russians closed in on Berlin. The horrible Himmler had deserted already to the Allies, and Goering had been disinherited for supposed treason; while Martin Bormann, trying to break out of the bunker, seems to have taken poison when he realised there was no escape. The Nuremberg trials disposed of the rest of the surviving Nazi hierarchy, though Albert Speer escaped execution - and luckily too, in the opinion of many qualified to judge.
ABOUT Hitler's personal responsibility for a cosmic catastrophe in which many millions died, the Jews in Europe were almost eradicated, Germany and other lands virtually laid waste, and most of Central and Eastern Europe left open for Stalin, there can be no reasonable doubt and Ian Kershaw makes that plain. He was, in himself, a historical disaster of the first magnitude and a man who dragged his (adopted) nation down with him into ruin and degradation. How far was the German people itself responsible? After all, it elected him, applauded his early achievements in office, exulted in many of his victories (though the actual outbreak of the second World War dismayed most Germans) and fought for him to the end against massive odds.
It will all be argued over endlessly, no doubt, but their faith in him had been created less by his famous mass oratory, or even by relentless propaganda, than by the brilliance of his early achievements which won them over after the failure of Weimar democracy. In any case, the rapid conquest of unpopular neighbours such as Czechoslovakia (an artificial state) and Poland (which had few friends) did not worry the national conscience much, if at all. As for the Soviet Union, it was hated and feared by almost all except the German Left and many people felt that a showdown with it was inevitable, Hitler or no Hitler. And by the time they began to wake up slowly to their leader's iniquity, it was too late and he had become a tyrant with absolute power of life and death, not to mention torture. (The 1944 bomb plot, too, showed what penalties faced anybody who acted against him). Inside a mere 12 years, the former Austro-Bavarian corporal had raised Germany high and then brought her down to the slime.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic