German Nazism was identified with Hitler. At the end of his biography, Alan Bullock concluded that ‘the evidence seems to me to leave no doubt that no other man played a role in the Nazi revolution or in the history of the Third Reich remotely comparable with that of Adolf Hitler’.9 His success was certainly remarkable. In 1939 he had taken Germany in six years from being a country with millions of unemployed, disarmed and subject to restrictions by various international treaties, supervised by powerful neighbours, to being the dominant military power in Europe, with the treaties torn up and unemployment almost vanished. As one of his opponents remarked, ‘It is not an achievement anyone can belittle.’10
The scale of this achievement often seemed out of key with his person-ality and intellect. Despite his immense powers of oratory and his ability to hold a mass audience in thrall, one of his German biographers has written
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that ‘he coined not a single memorable phrase’.11His one published book, Mein Kampf, is commonly dismissed as confused and absurd. He is some-times depicted as a madman, perhaps in a technical sense a psychopath, an abnormal personality, given to abnormal concepts and reactions. Lord Halifax, on the other hand, in his aristocratic way, claimed to have mis-taken Hitler for a footman.
The danger of all such comments is that of underrating the man. A nonentity or a psychopath cut adrift from reality could scarcely have done what Hitler did. It is more realistic to agree with John Lukacs: ‘The mind of Adolf Hitler was a very powerful instrument. To deduce from his awe-some defects of the heart that he was wanting insight or intelligence is the commonest mistake most people make about him. Nor was he mad.’12 George Orwell, unfashionable as always, wrote a review of a translation of Mein Kampf in March 1940, arguing that it was too easy to say that Hitler succeeded because he was backed by industrialists – ‘They would not have backed him . . . if he had not talked a great movement into existence already.’ It was necessary to accept the attractive power of Hitler’s out-look: ‘he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. . . . Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, commonsense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.’13
In Hitler’s lifetime it was safer to take him seriously than to under-estimate him; and those who failed to do so paid the price. It is better not to fall into that trap, but rather to see what Hitler had to say in writings which contained what has been variously described as a programme, a world outlook, or a world picture.14
As so often, Churchill set the pattern in the immediate post-war years.
He wrote of Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
When eventually he [Hitler] came to power there was no book which deserved more careful study from the rulers, political and military, of the Allied Powers. All was there – the programme of German resurrection;
the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit of the world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war:
turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.15
It was frequently said that if only British and French statesmen had read Mein Kampf they would have known what Hitler was going to do, and
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would not have been bamboozled by his professions of moderation in the 1930s. There was little substance in these lamentations and accusations.
Western statesmen had Mein Kampf summarised for them and the salient elements drawn out by thoroughly competent ambassadors like Sir Horace
‘Drums, flags and loyalty-parades’: the Nuremberg Rally, September 1934. These massive demonstrations inspired support at home and fear abroad.
Source: Hulton Archive /Getty Images
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Rumbold and André François-Poncet. The problem was not to know what Hitler had written, but to know what to make of it.
This has remained the crucial question: what is to be made of Hitler’s writings? Some forty years after the start of the war, German historians went back to Hitler’s books and their background, and concluded that their substance was of real importance. Werner Maser noted the many defects of Mein Kampf as an account of Hitler’s early life, but argued that in its pronouncements on politics and race the book was an authentic reflection of Hitler’s mind and a guide to what he intended to do. On occa-sion, he took an almost fundamentalist view: ‘Mein Kampf in fact sets out a clear and detailed programme of the fearful catastrophe which Hitler loosed upon Germany and the world by faithfully following the declara-tions and forecasts in his book.’16Eberhard Jäckel, in a closely reasoned book on Hitler’s Weltanschauung, concluded that, even if Hitler did not have in the fullest sense a ‘world outlook’, he had at least a ‘world picture’, with a ‘systematic and inherent coherence’.17 He draws attention to Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that ‘The enormous difference between the tasks of the theoretician and the politician is also the reason why a union of both in one person is almost never found.’ Politics is the art of the possible, but the theoretician must demand the impossible and be content with the fame of posterity. ‘In long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the theoretician.’ Jäckel observes, surely with justice, that Hitler believed he was such a man.18 Historians outside Germany have also concluded that before Hitler came to power he had some firm ideas on foreign policy, which were closely connected with his fundamental ideological outlook.19
It may be argued that such considerations should be discounted on the ground that after he became Chancellor in 1933 Hitler showed signs of finding Mein Kampf something of an embarrassment. He told Hans Frank in 1938 that if he had known he was going to become Chancellor he would not have written Mein Kampf. In 1940 he refused to allow pages from the original typescript of the book to be exhibited during that year’s Nuremberg rally. But actions speak louder than words. In 1934 the Prussian Ministry of Education ordered that extracts from Mein Kampf should be included in all school-books dealing with racial questions, genetics, or demographic policy. In 1936 the Ministry of the Interior recommended that a copy of Mein Kampf should be provided for every couple married in a registry office in Germany, or a consulate abroad. In 1939 the Nazi Party stated it was the Party’s duty to ensure that every German family should one day possess a copy of ‘the Führer’s fundamental
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work’. In 1940 a special rice-paper edition was published for issue to the troops.20 If Mein Kampf had become an embarrassment, these were strange measures; what they in fact indicate is the official standing of the work with the Nazi regime.