This file expands on the principles in my monograph on power, Narcisso-Fascism, showing how they apply in real life.
(If this is too long for an email, go to the website: https://www.niallmclaren.com/)
Prof. Ian Kershaw, now retired, is regarded as the foremost living authority on the life of Adolf Hitler. Among other works, he has written a 1,000 page biography of the fascist dictator which many see as the definitive account of his life. On April 30th, 2005, the 60th anniversary of Hitler’s death, Kershaw gave an invited lecture entitled “Hitler’s place in history.” In this, he set out his view of how we should see Hitler in the historical context, free of caricatures such as “madman” or “weak dictator.” The lecture was a brief summary of some his published work and what follows is a summary of his summary (times in the lecture are given in brackets).
Apart from describing how, in his pre-WWI years in Vienna, Hitler was a complete non-entity, Kershaw didn’t give any detail of the dictator’s early life. Life for Hitler began with the outbreak of war in August, 1914. Within a few days, he enlisted in a German regiment and went to the Western Front where he remained with practically no breaks until the war’s end in November, 1918. While he always said his years in the Army were the best days of his life, the dreadful destruction of the war marked him for life: “…he became hardened to human loss, indifferent to suffering, indifferent to death.” (12.28).
On November 11th 1918, Hitler was in hospital recovering from a mustard gas attack when he heard the devastating news of Germany’s capitulation [1, 132]. At first, he thought it couldn’t be true but, of course, it was. He needed a scapegoat (13.21) and soon found one: Germany’s defeat was, he believed, the work of traitors, a “stab in the back” by a cabal of international Jewish financiers, socialists, Marxists and communists (many of whom were Jewish) “… whose final objective was and is and will continue to be the destruction of all non-Jewish national States” [1, 113]. Out of this, Kershaw says, Hitler developed two beliefs which governed his life and political career. The first was that Jews had to be eliminated from Germany, if not from Europe as a whole. The second was to avenge the sublime humiliation of defeat in the war.
At 10.55, the speaker says: “Hitler was made by one war, he fought another to undo its consequences. The first war left in him an extraordinary will to destruction. The second war, his war, saw him carry out that destruction.” These points are repeated at different points in the lecture:
Another war, for Hitler, had to be a war against the Jews. It had to be the unfinished business of WWI. More than anything else, it had to expiate, to atone for, the shame of the capitulation of November, 1918. … for Hitler, WWII was revenge for WWI (15.20).
In one of the very few letters he wrote to his family, Hitler said that the goal of the national government must be to build “… a purer homeland, a homeland purged of alien elements.” In the context that Kershaw develops, alien elements meant Jews, and removal meant genocide. He repeated this in another letter, September, 1919: “The ultimate aim of a national government has to be the removal of the Jews altogether.” Kershaw quotes from Mein Kampf where Hitler said (in 1925) that if, in 1914, 12-15,000 well-placed Jews had been “put under poison gas” (sic), then the war would have been different. In his speech of January 30th, 1939, the sixth anniversary of the Nazi assumption of power, Hitler said: “If international Jewry should succeed in precipitating another war, it will not lead to the bolshevisation of Europe but to the annihilation of Jews in Europe” (16.00). Kershaw concluded that this statement “ … did reveal Hitler's truly genocidal mentality … he wasn’t sure how but somehow, (he intended) the destruction of the Jews.”
At 17.25, Kershaw states: “Genocide against the Jews wasn’t separate from the war, it was central to the war itself.” For Hitler, WWII “… was an apocalyptic struggle for revenge and salvation.” It was his war, he started it and he kept it going to destroy the Jewish people in Europe and to humiliate both the Western powers and the Bolsheviks, all of whom he believed were controlled by Jews. This, Kershaw suggests, was why, in 1944-45, Hitler was adamantly opposed to the idea of capitulation, even when it was clear to all that defeat loomed. Capitulation would mean cowardice, it would defile the nation yet again. The very purpose of the war had been to expunge the capitulation of November 1918 and to wipe out the Jews and, while he drew breath, Hitler was certainly not going to give up the fight. However, by late April, 1945, “… when the Russians were literally at the door,” he accepted that defeat was inevitable. Having already dictated his political testament [2], he married Eva Braun and, next day, shot himself. Within a week of his suicide, the European war was over. He had kept it going by sheer force of his personality.
I believe both of these ideas give entirely the wrong impression of the causes and motivation for the European War of 1939-45. I will argue that Hitler did not launch a massive war to destroy Jews, and revenge for the defeat of the Great War of 1914-18 had practically nothing to do with it. Indeed, he had always hoped that Britain, which he saw as another superior country, would be reasonable and, if not join his war against Bolshevism, at least remain neutral.
In his testament, Hitler said: “… you can rely on the Jews: as long as they survive, antisemitism will never fade. In saying this, I promise you, I am quite free of all racial hatred” [2, 53]. We can ignore this: Adolf Hitler was racist to the core but this has to be seen in its proper context. Despite a great deal of white-washing since 1945, during Hitler’s lifetime, practically everybody in any position of influence in the Western world was, by modern standards, seriously racist. It was absolutely normal, as this quote from a British minister in 1937 makes clear. Following extensive rioting in the British-administered territory of Palestine in 1936-37, an enquiry chaired by Lord Peel delivered its verdict. This was scornfully dismissed by His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Colonies, who said:
I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
In saying this, Mr Winston Churchill was putting in words what practically every other educated, or wealthy, or powerful person believed fervently: that there is a hierarchy of races, with whites at the top and all the rest down below. Nobody argued with this view. Every influential Western country had its eugenics society (many still do) which, among other projects, advocated for restricted immigration and sterilisation of the mentally defective. For Hitler, top place wasn’t open to just any whites: despite being as white as the next German, the Slavic peoples and Jews, of course, were also regarded as inferior. Asians he didn’t mind, as long as they stayed in their part of the world because, as the quote above continues: “It is … undesirable that one race should mix with other races” [2, 53].
For Hitler, what he called the Aryan race, meaning Germans and Nordics, were the pinnacle of creation. As he makes crystal clear in Mein Kampf, he believed that anything valuable that humans had ever created came from an Aryan mind. The British and French he regarded as superior types, good in their own way but he didn’t trust them and had no compunction in attacking them when the time came. A state is composed of its natural people who give it its vitality but the national strength will be sapped by foreign elements. This matters, as life is a struggle for survival:
All the great civilisations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood … the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist [3, 182].
This is social Darwinism in purest form. In the 1930s, it was absolutely normal for the elite in all countries to believe this, and Hitler believed heart and soul: “Should (the Aryan) be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years, human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert” [1, 183]. The second last sentence in Mein Kampf could be taken as the credo of the international eugenics movement: “A State which, in an epoch of racial adulteration, devotes itself to the duty of preserving the best elements of its racial stock must one day become ruler of the Earth.” Throughout the book, this message repeats in different form: We Germans are the best; we should be masters of the world; only we can build a superior civilisation; we were cheated in the war, betrayed by Bolsheviks and by the racial poison in our midst.
Crucially, Hitler could communicate this to his audience in a way few others could, constantly delivering the message: We can make Germany great again. His vast audiences were ecstatic, moved to tears of joy by the passion he triggered but, as he said over and over, the central problem was that Germany didn’t have enough space. A great nation needs a great homeland and ample room to grow, but the Fatherland was hemmed in by inferior races. Britain and France had their overseas empires where they could spread and build and grow but Germany had no such scope. To make it worse, the pure German Volk were slowly being contaminated by inferior races, chief among whom were the Jews. This defined his goal which later became his war aims.
Hitler believed the primary goal was to build the nation so it could take its rightful place at the head of humanity. To do this, there were two tasks. The first was to secure enough territory so Germany could grow by encouraging the best people to have lots of children:
… the importance of our own Reich is constantly declining more and more … Without respect for ‘tradition’ and without any preconceived notions, the (National Socialist) movement must find the courage to organise our national forces and set them on the path which will lead them away from that territorial restriction which is the bane of our national life today, and win new territory for them. Thus the movement will save the German people from the danger of perishing or of being slaves in the service of any other people … (we will) abolish the present disastrous proportion between our population and the area of our national territory … [1, 398].
To-day there are eighty million Germans in Europe. And our foreign policy will be recognized as rightly conducted only when, after barely a hundred years, there will be 250 million Germans living on this Continent, not packed together as the coolies in the factories of another Continent but as tillers of the soil and workers whose labour will be a mutual assurance for their existence. [1, 415]
This was unquestionably his primary goal in life. He worshipped the idea of the Germanic people but was also aware that, in the struggle of life, they were seriously disadvantaged by lack of sufficient home territory. Tied to this was his secondary goal, the elimination of the racial contamination that was “poisoning” the nation from within. Here, he included Jews, Romany, Slavs, the black races, the mentally ill and the criminal, homosexuals, epileptics, syphilitics, and so on. In Mein Kampf, apart from selective breeding, there was no indication how this would be done:
In 1918, there was nothing like an organised antisemitic feeling ... Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood. Bear in mind the fact that this poisonous contamination can be eliminated from the national body only after centuries, or perhaps never [1, 347].
In Kershaw’s lecture, his reference to Hitler’s talk about gassing 12-15,000 Jews in 1914 does not carry the genocidal significance Kershaw attaches to it:
At the beginning of the War, or even during the War, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison-gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every trade and calling had to face it in the field, then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: If twelve thousand of these malefactors had been eliminated in proper time probably the lives of a million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, might have been saved [1, 418].
Does ‘eliminated’ mean killed or does it mean ‘made to suffer as we suffered, and pushed out of their comfortable offices’? At best, it is ambiguous. It is important not to read into something written in 1925 what we learned after 1945. I read it as “If all those Jewish saboteurs having a good time at home while we struggled with poison gas at the Front had tried it themselves, they wouldn’t be so cocky.” To interpret the quote as a direct statement of massive genocidal intent goes too far. If something as vague as that carried such a diabolical meaning, then remember that the other imperial ruling classes were constantly making such comments, and still do (see explicitly genocidal statements by Israeli politicians over many years). During the 1930s, as per the Haavara Agreement, the Nazis would willingly have expelled all Jews from their territory if anybody would accept them, but nobody would (see, for example, the experiences of two Jewish immigrants entering the US in the late 1930s, Thomas Szasz and Erik Kandel, as described in their autobiographies; for comments on the British attitude to taking in Jewish refugees, see comments made by a witness at Eichmann’s trial in Israel in 1961).
Kershaw emphasises how Hitler dragged the German nation into the pits of bestiality. At 26.00, he says the Nazi project was “… a seismic break with the Judaeo-Chistian values that had been the very basis of European civilisation … (Hitler) looked to the grandeur but also didn’t baulk at the cruelties of the ancient classical world …” All responsibility rested with Hitler himself:
Hitler’s own boundless fantasy of the future German Reich breaches all the moral and legal constraints that had shaped European civilisation. It opened the floodgate to murderous initiatives of all kinds. … He alone was capable of such a monstrous vision, he alone had the imagination, he alone was prepared to think the unthinkable, he alone was prepared to take the most radical options, to burn his bridges behind him. (28.25).
Near the end of his lecture, he summarised his view: “Hitler represented the most fundamental, the most frontal assault ever launched on all that we associate with humanity and civilisation” (48.15).
Two questions immediately arise from this very polished speaker’s summary of Hitler’s place in history. Firstly, is it true that he launched World War II partly to avenge Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, and for the rest, to wipe out the Jewish race in Europe? Second, it is true that “He alone was capable of such a monstrous vision… etc.”? That is, was he the only person to have acted in such a way in history, and if so, what caused his personality to take this form – or was it mental disorder? If World War II was just a matter of personal psychopathology, doesn’t it put some sort of duty on us to work out how it happened and, ideally, to prevent it happening again? I believe it does.
For the first question, that Hitler was a dominating character with cosmic-level self-confidence is not in question; nobody has ever suggested Hitler was ordinary, in the sense that our politicians today are so painfully ordinary. I should add that he was also not mad in any sense of the word. After the July 1944 assassination attempt, his mental state deteriorated somewhat but the drugs administered by his physician had a lot to do with that. At all times, he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was as he said: an empire for Germany. I believe Hitler’s own statements throughout Mein Kampf and constantly repeated thereafter show that revenge had nothing to do with the War. The word ‘revenge’ occurs only three times in Mein Kampf, two of which are irrelevant (“nature’s revenge”) while the third specifically eschews revenge as such: “In this way the struggle against the present State was placed on a higher plane than that of petty revenge and small conspiracies. It was elevated to the level of a spiritual struggle …” [1, 338]. His goal was to provide Germany with the land and resources for it to grow to dominate the western half of the Eurasian continent, allowing the nation to take its rightful place at the top of the racial/national hierarchy. He had a program, and he enacted it.
Remember he had to carry the German people with him. If he had told the nation: “We are going to invade everybody for revenge,” he would almost certainly have lost government. But, as Kershaw put it, he painted an irresistible picture: “Hitler offered a breathtaking vision of Germany’s future, of regeneration, resurgence, redemption, a vision of grandeur and glory, and millions were taken in by it” (22.40). They were indeed taken in because, after the humiliation of defeat, the misery of hyperinflation and then the Depression, he was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. His sincerity was never in doubt and, by what he believed was his unique gift of oratory, he was able to convey this directly to his audience and inspire them. Revenge didn’t get a look in.
Germany did not invade one country after another to snatch their Jews and exterminate them. He invaded Poland to recover Prussia’s lost territories; he then invaded France and the Low Countries so he would not have to fight on two fronts. Clearly, he had in mind another front, and that was the glittering prize of the USSR, home of his mortal enemies and of riches unbound. His plan, set out perfectly clearly in Mein Kampf, was to destroy the Soviet Government, to take all the territory and natural resources they wanted, to eliminate up to 30million “excess Slavs,” and to reduce the surviving Slavic population to the level of peons. Kershaw says the slaughter was to take place over 25 years; I had understood it to be much faster but that’s immaterial. What counts is that, sitting in comfort in Berlin or Berchtesgaden, the Nazi inner circle calmly looked at the map and worked out how many people they didn’t need, then started planning how to get rid of them. Their goal was not revenge but empire. I would be surprised if such committed people would allow revenge to interfere in their decisions but, if the opportunity arose, I’m sure they would have taken it. Notably, the destruction they planned to deliver on the Slavic people eclipsed all they had in mind for Europe’s Jews. Their singular interest was the treasures they knew lay in the East; the Jews were just a cleaning up job along the way. They did not invade a single country for the prize of slaughtering its Jewish population. In my view, Kershaw’s suggestion is a serious misrepresentation of the historical record. In the event, perhaps 25million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War.
Why doesn’t Kershaw see this point? I cannot recall any point in Mein Kampf or his Testament where Hitler said or implied: “My goal is revenge, my need to humiliate and shame the Allies comes before anything.” The reason he never said it was because he never meant it: first and always foremost in his mind was his drive for Germany to acquire enough land and workers to escape the death by slow strangulation that he foresaw. However, it must be remembered that in this goal, he was always aware that he was planning nothing that Britain, France, the US, Belgium, Holland, Spain and even tiny Portugal hadn’t been doing for centuries: invading other people’s lands to enslave them or drive them off in order to build and profit from empires. Kershaw therefore can’t criticise Hitler as an empire builder without damning his own country for its centuries-old brutality and criminal venality. By shifting the emphasis from empire-building to revenge, Kershaw’s narrative of Hitler’s war becomes much less threatening to his modern Western audience who would rather not think about their imperial past.
In realising his ambitions, did Hitler “breach all the moral and legal constraints that had shaped European civilisation”? Absolutely not. Based wholly on the example set by the West’s imperialists and regardless of how they behaved at home, when it came to building empires, there were no legal or moral constraints. It was wholly a case of “Get it while you can.” When the troopships set sail for distant conquests, Europe’s precious legal constraints and delicate moral sensitivities were left on the wharf. Kershaw is a professional historian. Has he never heard of the unspeakable atrocities Belgium’s Leopold II heaped on the defenceless heads of the people of the Congo? The German genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia? Or of Britain’s centuries-long subjugation of the vast Subcontinent, not to mention their brutal wars in South Africa, in which they invented concentration camps? Does he not know of Britain’s Opium Wars, its engineered famine in Bengal in 1943 that caused 3.5million deaths or the savagery of its conduct in 1950s Kenya? The American wars on the native people? Of slavery itself? France’s brutality in Algeria? Repression and later apartheid in South Africa? The pointless destruction of Dresden? Hiroshima? The American carpet bombing of North Korea and later of North Vietnam, not to mention Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Serbia and so many others? In fact, he does, he knows all these and many other atrocities but he puts them aside. When he says Hitler “breach(ed) all the moral and legal constraints that had shaped European civilisation,” what he means is that he breached the unwritten code that the way the imperialists behaved in their colonies was not to be how they behaved at home. Hitler was simply doing what they all did except, quel horreur, he had the unspeakably bad taste to do it in Europe itself.
What these examples show is that Europe’s vaunted “Judaeo-Christian ethic,” its civilised virtues and moral and legal restraints and the so-called rules-based international order and all that bumf do not exist. They are a huge assembly of lies, half-truths and propaganda, a fairy story that is designed to lull Western people into thinking they’re morally superior to “the rest.” By focussing on evils committed by the West’s enemies, commentators and propagandists are able to shift attention and blame away from the evils visited upon the defenceless by Western countries, artfully inducing a kind of collective amnesia. Hitler’s government did nothing that most other Western countries (and Eastern, and everybody else) didn’t do and aren’t still doing. Being Germans, of course, they did it better and more efficiently than everybody else and, because the opportunities were bigger, on a much bigger scale, but that’s all. The worst hypocrisy is to believe your own propaganda, and then rage at others who aren’t fooled by it.
At 45.20, Kershaw says: “Nazism isn’t on the march again.” Even in 2005, with the invasion and destruction of Iraq in full swing, that was nonsensical but today, with the stubby fingers of Herr Drumpf playing with the big red button in Washington, and the clericalist fascists in Israel slaughtering their neighbours in a manner that makes shooting frogs in a barrel look difficult, we can say that his assessment was simply wrong. He didn’t look at the facts. Fascism was then, and is today, alive and roaring ahead on all fronts. Kershaw continues: “Future threats to world peace are unlikely to arise again within Europe.” Yes, this is possibly true but only in the sense that the West is now much better at exporting its threats to world peace by starting proxy wars in defenceless countries far away. The war in Ukraine is taking place just because the US and its NATO poodles have decided to bleed Russia until it falls apart so that, as Hitler planned just on a hundred years ago, they can loot the place at their leisure. Essentially, they are just completing the job that Hitler started in June, 1941. Syria has just been dismembered to rid the Middle East of an effective opponent of US-Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing. However many Slavs or Arabs die in the process is a matter of as little concern in Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Paris and Berlin today as it was in Berlin and Berchtesgaden in 1936.
For these and many other reasons, I believe Kershaw’s assessment of Hitler’s place in history is wrong. That’s OK, people get things wrong, we all do. But there is a profound difference between “getting it wrong” and “doing it wrong.” With practically everything we do, there is a proper procedure to follow in order to get the correct result. This is particularly true in medicine where results can be matters of life or death. Sometimes, it happens that the surgeon does all the right tests and follows the correct procedure but still the patient dies. As surgeons say, “The operation was a success but the patient died.” They did it right, and got it wrong. Now that’s very different from people who say: “Don’t give that child insulin, we will pray and God will cure her diabetes.” They’re doing it wrong, and they’re culpable.
I think Kershaw has done it wrong. He overlooked the evidence Hitler himself provided in Mein Kampf and in so many other places, that he intended to invade the USSR to build a mighty empire so that the German people could be enthroned where they belonged, at the top of the pile. Instead, Kershaw delved into an area in which historians venture at their peril: their subject’s mental state. Instead of relying on what Hitler said he planned, he brought up some psychological fancy about Hitler’s need for revenge
Similarly, Kershaw shifted persecuting the Jews from a subsidiary goal to equal lead role. Yes, it was important to Hitler but only because he saw them as defiling the German blood, not because he had any particular loathing for them. If, in the few years after 1933, first Germany’s Jews and then the rest of their brethren in Europe had emigrated, would Hitler’s war have still gone ahead? Yes, it would, for the same reason of empire and probably with the same timetable. Indeed, it would probably have encouraged the Nazis to attack with more vigour and confidence. They would have known they could not be “stabbed in the back by traitors” at home, as with the strikes in munitions factories organised by socialists and Marxists in March, 1918, which Hitler saw as the ultimate treachery.
Would Hitler have chased after the Jewish population overseas to eliminate them? That seems vanishingly unlikely. His goal was a German nation free of what he saw as contamination by inferior blood. If they had obliged by migrating, he would have got what he wanted, freeing him to pursue his life’s goal, his glorious new empire in the east. Granted, lots of Germans (and other nationalities) did dislike Jews and cheerfully took part in their destruction but World War II was not fought to destroy the Jewish people. It was a war about Lebensraum so Germany could reach the utopian future that Hitler believed destiny had prepared for them. Hitler was a utopian leader, that’s why people wept when he drove past. For him and his disciples, destroying Europe’s Jews was simply a sideshow on the road to war and glory.
Does this matter? I think it does. Kershaw places great emphasis on Hitler’s role: “… he alone was capable of such a monstrous vision, he alone had the imagination, he alone was prepared to think the unthinkable, he alone was prepared to take the most radical options, to burn his bridges behind him” (28.25). I don’t think that’s true. World War I happened without Adolf Hitler at the helm and that was pretty monstrous. Lots of other people have “monstrous visions” of racial cleansing, e.g. a certain US president who wants to deport eleven million foreign rapists and drug dealers, to get rid of their bad genes poisoning his country, and to “clear out” the pesky Palestinians who stand in the way of his “beautiful” Levantine Riviera. That, I suggest, is precisely how Hitler’s vision started.
“Utopian visions” don’t pop into the head fully formed, they start with small, angry ideas and develop from there. When the Nazis decided to remove hundreds of thousands of mental patients from the gene pool, they were pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was: just gas them. It worked once, so they tried it again, which is what humans do (conversely, if somebody is found to be doing something bad, almost certainly, they’ve done it before and got away with it; ask the #MeToo movement). Without running their preliminary, home-grown experiment in medical mass murder, it’s possible the Nazis would never have arrived at die Endlösung. In fact, the expression “final solution” clearly implies they had thought of lots of others before that didn’t work, but they were sure they wouldn’t need any more as this would be the final one.
I submit that casting Hitler in an Olympian role in the causation of World War II shifts our attention, from the fact that it wasn’t the result of a unique individual’s character but the result of shifting social, political and historical forces that produced just that outcome – and from the dreadful risk that therefore, it could happen again. A leader can do no more than trigger sentiment that is already there. He can focus and inflame it, but he can’t create social and political forces that don’t exist. Is there any evidence for this? Definitely. Donald Trump uses many Hitlerian tropes and his ardent followers are reprising the hugely successful Nazi program of hollowing out government from the inside, replacing the functioning bureaucracy with fanatics loyal to the leader, not the state. Similarly, the ultra-extremist Israeli government, fascist in all but name, is unquestionably conducting a genocidal war against the indigenous Palestinian population so it can push them off their land and build its own theocratic utopia. Both governments would furiously deny any intellectual debt to Nazism and they’re right. They’ve discovered it themselves just because the conditions were right. After 80 years of ritual denunciations of Nazism, the tendrils of fascism are once again reaching for our throats. “Never again” has suddenly become “Oh no, not again!”
That, however, is a different subject. What counts here is the questions set previously: Was Hitler’s war launched just to exact revenge and to annihilate Europe’s Jews? Answers:
1. No. Revenge had nothing to do with it. Hitler’s war was a war against the Slavic peoples to kill half of them, steal their land and enslave the rest, in order to build a vast, Thousand Year Reich for the greater glory of the Germanic people.
2. No. First Germany’s and later Europe’s Jews were a job to be attended on the path to war so that the benefits of empire would not later be lost by racial dilution. If the West had agreed to take them, the Nazis would have been delighted but, as we are never told, all the Western nations put obstructions in the way of mass emigration of the threatened people. As they are still doing to other threatened people.
Note:
Some may feel it unfair to judge an eminent historian’s life’s work on a single lecture and not on his corpus. In defence, I say that at this stage of my life, the thought of slogging through another thousand pages of Adolf Hitler’s life of holds no attraction. This lecture, sponsored by the BBC on the 60th anniversary of Hitler’s death, when the speaker was at the peak of his reputation, was important. He appeared to have had notes but generally didn’t look at them. He gave the impression of being very familiar with the material, as though he had given much the same lecture dozens of times. To my mind, he came across as glib and over-confident, i.e. knowing that he would not be challenged. Had I been giving a talk in his position, I would have attended to every possible detail: the lecture would have to be a perfect distillation of my views. That’s how I take it. If I’m wrong, if I have misunderstood his position, then he should pay more attention to what he says in public.
Having said it isn’t wise to try to reconstruct the mental state of a long-dead person, it is nonetheless possible to use Hitler’s statements to look at the structure of his belief state. For example, at 38.15, Kershaw expresses amazement at how Hitler could be so caring and solicitous toward Goebbels’ children and toward his dog, and then order the wholesale removal of entire neighbourhoods, children and all, to the gas chambers. The answer is: That’s what racists do. I am quite sure that the bomber pilots dropping bombs on crammed children’s hospitals in Gaza today go home and play happily with their children because, for them, and for the great majority of Israelis today, Palestinians are “animals” and “vermin” – Untermenschen, you could say – to be wiped out. The reason for this apparent inconsistency is that everybody has a hierarchy of beliefs [3], in which important beliefs negate the less important. Every situation we come across in life is assigned a value, with some matters being deemed more valuable than others, so they win. That’s how we make decisions – it’s hardly rocket science. If we didn’t have a system like this, all our considerations would carry equal weight and we would be frozen into indecision. Ideally, our decisions should be consistent but all too often, they’re not. As our surrounding conditions change, we lurch from one belief to another to protect our self esteem so our decisions often appear inconsistent or impulsive. Based on Mein Kampf, we can get a fairly good idea of the order of Hitler’s system of beliefs.
First, he believed very strongly in the idea of a hierarchy of races in which the German race was the finest, most noble, most accomplished and most beautiful. This was the basis of his existence. Some people take god as the basis for their existence, and all decisions revolve around that belief but Hitler’s fundamental belief was the mystical concept of race. Everything he said and did was directed at purifying the race so it could ascend to the heights intended by destiny. Anything that threatened that ascent had to be destroyed. He was probably speaking close to the truth when he said he didn’t hate other races, he just didn’t want them in Germany contaminating the pure bloodline of the Aryan race. We all do this. For example, rats are quite amusing little creatures but if they come in my house, I will kill them. I value the safety of my family higher than the life of a rodent but that doesn’t mean I hate rats, because I don’t. I would say that’s how Hitler saw the Jews, except he believed they were also plotting to dissolve the German state and take control in some stateless international system, which made them that much more dangerous than rats. He saw Bolsheviks in the same light, mortal enemies of the ideal German nation/state but also as heavily influenced/controlled by Jews. Marx was Jewish, as were Trotsky, Kamenev, Litvinov and so many others.
Hitler was not a Christian and believed Christianity was not a “natural” religion for Germans, but he had a very strong sense of a higher power guiding destiny. That power, he believed, was focussed on him as the “man of destiny” who would galvanise the German people and lead them to their rightful place in the sun. The idea of the strongman or man of genius who will lead the state out of despair recurs repeatedly [1, 59, 64, 400], not because of any supernatural powers but because one person could start a movement that would become irresistible. He was a very capable speaker and he knew it. He read a lot and had a prodigious memory for detail, which encouraged him in the belief that people who disagreed with him were fools who didn’t know what they were talking about.
He disliked the wealthy and privileged and felt a strong affinity for the common people, which is probably why Chamberlain saw him as “common.” He saw himself as a soldier because, as he said, his army years were the most satisfying of his life. After years struggling to survive in the Viennese slums, the military gave him a purpose and a family. He had a particular dislike of intellectuals, especially the effete type who dominated the social scene during the Weimar Republic. Like all primitive conservatives, he loathed homosexuals. He was not much interested in money or the trappings of wealth and was generally ascetic in his personal life. While he had smoked heavily in his youth, he gave it up as a health hazard after his mother died in 1907. He suffered from peptic ulcers so he ate moderately and drank little. As is so common in self-educated, self-opinionated people, he had fringe or unconventional views on matters of health and soon found a doctor who would indulge him. But for injured soldiers, he wanted the best that German medical science could provide. This is not inconsistent. Everything he did and said was directed at gaining power and wielding it for the greater glory of the nation, not of A Hitler. Where Göring was extravagantly self-indulgent, Hitler was not, which was also part of his appeal to the nation.
Given that constellation of beliefs, Hitler’s drive toward a huge, racially homogenous empire was not far removed from a certain politician who, well before he began to dement, shouted: “It’s never, never, never, ever been a good bet to bet against the United States of America! We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!” Another time, quite calm, he said: “We’re the greatest nation on the face of the earth. We really are … We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism…. There’s no country in the world better positioned to lead the world than America…Just remember who we are. We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.” However, as much as he tried, silly old Joe Biden just didn’t have the Führer’s charisma.
References:
1. Hitler, Adolf (1925). Mein Kampf. Tr. James Murphy, 1939. Facsimile edition: Henley in Arden: Coda Books.
2. Hitler, Adolf (1945/1961). The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler-Bormann documents. Ed: Genoud, F. Cassell: London.
3. McLaren N (2024). Davidson and the logic of paranoia. Chap. 12 in: Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.
Great article, Niall, with a twist at the end
Thank you, that is a remarkable analysis.