Becoming Hitler

by Thomas Weber

  And yet, while looking at Rubenstein’s Alberich, I could not help but feel that the fresco gets Hitler fundamentally wrong. (See Image 32.)Presented as a dwarf who through the denial of love manages to turn gold into a magic ring that will allow him to rule the world, Hitler is reduced to an opportunist for whom nothing but a lust for power and domination counts. This view is well in line with that of the most famous Hitler biographer of the immediate post–Second World War era, Alan Bullock, and many others since.

  Rubenstein and Bullock at least understood that Hitler really did matter. Recently, in the country that he once ruled as a dictator, Hitler has become almost a nonentity as a new generation of Germans understandably but ahistorically worries that placing emphasis on Hitler may appear apologetic and deflect the responsibility of ordinary Germans for the horrors of the Third Reich. Today it is as common to question whether Hitler was a historical “figure of the highest significance” as it is to portray him as little more than an empty canvas onto which other Germans painted their wishes and their goals.2

  As this book reveals, Hitler was anything but merely an empty canvas that had been filled with the collective wishes of the Germans. Neither was he an opportunist for whom power mattered only for its own sake. Studying his metamorphosis between 1918 and 1926 helps us understand what fueled him, as well as the Third Reich, during the 1930s and 1940s.

  In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he would use his rhetorical style of demagoguery, in the form in which he had developed it between 1919 and 1923, to exploit the volatile and desperate public mood during the Great Depression. That would allow the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to grow rapidly from having the support of just 2.6 percent of the population to being the largest party in Germany. Hitler would not repeat his tactical mistakes of 1923. And this time, he would not have to compete with a well-organized conservative party—the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP)—but with another—the German National People’s Party (DNVP)—that had recently been weakened by its takeover by a populist businessman, Alfred Hugenberg.3

  The making of Hitler in postrevolutionary Munich gave birth to an ideology that would provide the central impetus for his actions between 1933 and 1945. And the emerging dynamics of how he defined and pursued political ideas in 1919 and the five years that followed would become the central driving force behind the progressive radicalization of both Hitler and the Third Reich after 1933. His intention to recast Germany so as to make the country sustainable within a rapidly changing world originated in his initial politicization and radicalization in the summer of 1919. It would remain the same until the day he died. All his policies, once in power, were thus directed toward that goal.

  Hitler remained as vague about some of his policy goals after 1933 as he had been when first devising them in the early 1920s. That vagueness encouraged improvisation by those working for him, counterintuitively establishing a highly successful system of political operations not in spite of, but precisely because of, its flexible and reactive character. In many cases, it fanned radicalization, as his followers tried to figure out what he would like them to do and competed with one another for his favor, each striving to offer the most comprehensive and the furthest-reaching solution. In such cases—in other words, in which people were trying to work toward the wishes of the Führer that had remained unspecific—his followers, rather than Hitler himself, fueled the regime’s radicalization.

  Yet in policy areas that for Hitler lay at the core of recasting Germany and allowing it to survive for all time, he was not vague at all. Here he himself drove his regime’s progressive radicalization between 1933 and 1945. Unlike many populists in history, he did not merely preach to make his country great again. He always was a person who wanted to understand the nature of things and to translate his insights into politics. When it came to the two policy areas that during the postrevolutionary period he had defined as key to overcoming the primary source of his country’s weakness—that is, Germany’s Jews and Germany’s territory—Hitler’s only flexibility lay in his preparedness to settle, for as long as was necessary, for second-best solutions if his preferred solution was (still) proving elusive.

  Hitler’s two central policy goals, in the form in which he had defined them in 1919, would dominate his thinking and policies for the next twenty-five years. And they explain his willingness to start another world war and embarking on genocide. They were: the total removal of any Jewish influence from Germany, and the creation of a state that had sufficient territory, people, and resources to be geopolitically on equal footing with the most powerful states in the world. By the time of the writing of Mein Kampf, it had become clear that Hitler’s preferred final solution to both problems—the supposedly poisonous influence of Jews and Germany’s lack of space—would have genocidal consequences.

  Even from the perspective of 1924, once Hitler had abandoned the idea of a permanent alliance with a restored tsarist Russia in favor of a sustainable Germany created through the grabbing of Lebensraum, the developmental logic of a pursuit of his goals was already genocidal. It is simply impossible to imagine how his goals could have been realized without an implementation at the very least of an ethnic cleansing of Poles, Russians, and other Slavs.

  Irrespective of whether Hitler himself fully realized the genocidal developmental logic of his geopolitical goals, there can be no doubt what his preferred final solution to the “Jewish question” was. As the letter of Ully Wille to Rudolf Heß from late 1922 revealed, by that time, Hitler and Heß must have already floated the idea of using machine guns to exterminate the Jews. In addition, in an interview that Hitler gave to a Catalonian journalist not long before his putsch attempt of 1923, he was even more explicit: In response to Hitler’s statement that carrying out a pogrom in Munich was pointless, as afterward the Jews in the rest of country would still continue to dominate politics and finance, the journalist asked him: “What do you want to do? Kill them all overnight?”

  Hitler replied, “That would of course be the best solution, and if one could pull it off, Germany would be saved. But that is not possible. I have looked into this problem from all sides: It is not possible. Instead of thanking us as they should, the world would attack us from all sides.” He added, “Hence, only expulsion is left: a mass expulsion.”4

  Hitler’s answer is revelatory in explaining the emergence of the Holocaust, as he makes it perfectly clear that his preference by 1923 was for genocide but that, if an outright genocide was not possible, he would be pragmatic and go for the second-best option: mass expulsion. What he had had in mind when talking about mass expulsions becomes apparent from the temporal context in which the interview took place. As people on the radical right in Munich had just been exposed to Hans Tröbst’s article about the “Armenian lessons” for the “Jewish question,” Hitler’s response could hardly mean anything but a championing of Armenian-inspired ethnic cleansing.

  Once in power, Hitler initially encouraged Jewish emigration. Yet his support for emigration has to be understood as a third-best solution fueled by tactical pragmatism rather than as evidence that he had not yet envisioned his preferred solution. As a savvy political operator, he also understood that at times he had to downplay his anti-Semitism. For instance, during the election campaigns of 1932, he barely mentioned Jews.

  Nevertheless, once he would pursue his two primary political goals in tandem—the creation of a sufficiently large Germany through the grabbing of new territory in the East and the removal of Jews from the state he was attempting to create (as the harmful influence of Jews, according to him, was the primary reason for Germany’s internal weakness)—one thing was clear: Hitler no longer had any plausible alternative to either outright genocide or ethnic cleansing with genocidal consequences. Expulsion was not a practical solution in wartime: there simply was no country to which Jews could have been sent. And unlike in the Armenian case in the First World War, due to the realities of Germany’s war fortunes in the 1940s, Jews coul
d not be dislocated from their core areas of settlement to some other area under German rule.

  It may well be true that, in a technical sense, the physical extermination of Jews in Poland began with decisions made on the ground, without clear orders coming from Berlin. However, they were only made because Hitler had embarked on a war aimed at the simultaneous grabbing of territory and removal of Jews, in a context in which his preferred solution arguably always had been genocidal, as had been the developmental logic of his actions and intentions. Moreover, orders coming directly from Hitler had started the war and directly resulted in subsequent orders by Hitler that mandated rounding up the Jews of Poland as well as mowing down, by machine gun, the Jews of the Soviet Union. Thus, the idea that the Holocaust only started in the second half of 1941—i.e., when hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed in the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa—does not add up. Their murder emanated from Hitler’s desire to create a German empire not only with sufficient territory, but one that had been cleared of Jews in a way that he had already envisaged as early as 1922 and 1923, as evident in Heß’s and his own interactions with Ulrich Wille and the Catalonian journalist.

  Once the systematic killing of Jews in Poland got under way, there was no real alternative left for decision makers on the ground to making genocidal choices due to decisions Hitler had taken earlier on. In other words, Hitler’s earlier decisions had set his administrators in Poland on a path on which the only plausible solutions to the problems they had to face were genocidal. Any belief that initiatives resulting in the Holocaust genuinely had come from below is thus an illusion. Hitler himself lay at the heart of the emergence of the Holocaust.

  The progressive radicalization of Hitler’s policies, and of the Third Reich in general, was also a direct result of his metamorphosis between 1919 and the mid-1920s, for a different reason. Due to his narcissism and his desire to stand out in the busy marketplace of Munich in postrevolutionary Bavaria, Hitler almost always tried to be more extreme than his competitors, so as to attract attention. This had set in motion a process of progressive radicalization that would be fed by confirmation cycles. In the process of further developing the ideas to which people had responded the most in his speeches, he made his ideas even more extreme to get even more of a response, thus setting off a self-reinforcing cycle of radicalization.

  Hitler’s hunger for ever more attention was ultimately his own undoing. It planted the seed of the Third Reich’s self-destruction, even though, of course, many other factors helped drive the radicalization of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s narcissism and its reinforcement by his admirers, as well as the confirmation cycles through which he went, left him little choice but always to go for more extreme solutions. In that sense, Hitler’s Germany was a vehicle with no reverse gear and with no breaks, which inevitably at some point would go over a cliff.

  None of this is to suggest that if Hitler had made it to Austria in the wake of his failed coup, or if, like Dietrich Eckart, he had died in 1923, Germany would not have taken an authoritarian route through the 1930s and 1940s. After all, in the interwar period, liberal democracy fell from within everywhere to the east of the Rhine and to the south of the Alps, with the notable exception of Czechoslovakia. And elsewhere in Europe it often only barely survived. Likewise, none of this is to take the responsibility away from the millions of Germans who supported Hitler and who carried out the crimes of Nazi Germany. Without them, Hitler would have remained a nobody. However, the story of his becoming does reveal a crucial insight: that the void left by the collapse of liberal democracy in Germany and filled by Hitler, rather than by most others among the demagogues-in-the-making who were competing with him, increased manifoldly the risks of a cataclysmic war and genocide.

  The story of Hitler’s metamorphosis is equally that of how demagogues are made, and of the making of a particular one who should not be mistaken as representing all demagogues. It is a cautionary tale of what happens when extreme economic volatility and breakdown, feelings of disaffection as well as of imminent national and personal decline, come together. It is about how new radical leaders are made when liberal democracy and globalism are in great crisis and when that crisis is translated into a yearning for strongmen and novel kinds of leaders.

  As history teaches, certain common structural conditions make the emergence of demagogues possible. Yet the history of Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s, and of the world throughout the twentieth century, reveals that demagogues come in several varieties. They range from populists with no genuine core beliefs to ideologues of various political convictions. They include rational as well as irrational actors. They encompass actors whose personality will always drive them to the most extreme solutions and who never know where to stop, thus planting the seed of their regime’s self-destruction, as well as those with temperate personalities whose regime can survive for decades. They also range from those believing that any compromise other than a tactical one is rotten to others who ultimately believe that politics is the art of compromise. The fundamental problem in foretelling what sort an emergent demagogue will become lies in the common style of their demagoguery when they first appear in the public arena. Their common language and style, and their common claim to be outsiders who can represent the real interests of the people, blocks from view what kind of demagogue they will likely become. This is why it tends to be impossible to foretell whether somebody will turn into a reincarnated Hitler, a Franco, a Lenin, or into a late-nineteenth-century kind of populist who, while flirting with authoritarianism, ultimately manages to withstand its seduction.

  In short, when confronted with new emerging demagogues, history may not be able to tell us until it is too late whether the writing on the wall points toward a Hitler, an Alberich, or an entirely different person. However, the conditions that imperil liberal democracy and make the emergence of demagogues possible can be detected early on, be responded to, and thus contained before they become as acute as they were in the 1920s. Indeed, we must detect them early on, before they become as acute as during the time of Hitler’s metamorphosis. After all, National Socialism born during the great crisis of liberalism and globalization of the late nineteenth century. Communism, too, was on the rise during that era, and anarchist terror was rampant.

  The fabric that held globalization, common norms, and nascent liberal democracy together was already destroyed by populists in the decades that followed the crash of the Viennese stock exchange in 1873, even though their ultimate goals tended to be very different from the ones of demagogues during the world’s age of extremes between 1914 and 1989.

  And yet it had been the destruction of that fabric in the late nineteenth century that had made the emergence of demagogues in the early twentieth century possible. Without the destruction of the fabric of the world’s first age of globalization, there would have been no Horthy, Metaxas, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Franco, Tito, or Mao.

  Whether one day there will be a new age of tyrants will not only depend on our vigilance against future Hitlers. More important, it will be determined by our willingness to protect and mend the fabric of liberal democracy of our own age of globalization before conditions become such that demagogues of the worst kind will flourish.

  IMAGE 1

  A man without a face: This out-of-focus wartime photograph of Hitler, curiously included in the official 1932 regimental history of his unit, is almost insulting. The blurriness of the photograph is symbolic of Hitler’s still fluctuating political personality. During the war, Hitler has neither the beliefs nor the personality yet of the man who wrote Mein Kampf.

  Credit: Fridolin Solleder, ed., Vier Jahre Westfront: Geschichte des Regiments List R.I.R. 16 (Munich, 1932); photographer Korbinian Rutz

  IMAGE 2

  Hitler’s Munich: Bavaria’s capital was home to Hitler from 1913 to 1914, and from 1919 to 1945. Yet Hitler would always manifest a love-hate relationship toward Munich.

  Credit: Bayerische Staats
biliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich

  IMAGE 3

  A cog in the wheel of the revolution: Hitler at Traunstein POW camp during the winter of 1918–1919, where he carried out duties in the camp’s clothing distribution center. He served the new left-wing revolutionary regime as dutifully as he had served his wartime masters.

  Credit: Stadtarchiv Traunstein

  IMAGE 4

  Soldiers on guard duty at Munich’s Central Station in early 1919: The man standing at the center in the back is widely believed to be Hitler. As he thoroughly destroyed all traces of his actions during the revolution, photographs of this type are key pieces of evidence to reveal what Hitler concealed from the world.

  Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich

  IMAGE 5

  The site where Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s Jewish revolutionary leader, was assassinated on February 21, 1919: His killing resulted in political polarization and the demise of moderate, reformist political gradualism in Munich.

  Credit: Gerd Heidemann, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Hamburg

  IMAGE 6

  Mourning a Jew? Kurt Eisner’s funeral march: There is a long-standing debate about whether the man marked in the photograph is Hitler, and thus about what his stance was toward the revolutionary left in postwar Munich.

  Credit: Bayerische Staatsbiliothek, Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, Munich