A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Indeed, the flabby thirty-five-year-old beer-hall agitator eventually had to declare a new regime and order visitors away, so that he could have some quiet time to settle down at his desk and slowly start to dictate a book. Its original snappy title had been ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice’,5 which was shortened by his editor to My Struggle, or in German, Mein Kampf. Hitler would do more than any other human being to unleash hell into the twentieth century, but nobody who bothers to read Mein Kampf, which had sold six million copies by 1940, could claim that he tried to disguise his plan. Far from it. He too was sincere.

  Hitler is of course best known for his determination to rid Germany, and later Europe, of the Jewish people. Some historians have questioned his personal involvement in the Holocaust. Others have argued that the industrial mass murder began almost by accident, once Germany had invaded Poland, Baltic Russia and the Ukraine. As he sat composing Mein Kampf, surrounded by his flowers and his boxes of chocolates, Hitler put the Jewish question like this. Was there, he asked, any ‘form of filth or profligacy . . . without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a kike!’6 He compares the Jews to ‘pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death’, and to blood-sucking spiders.

  Some have said that, despite this, Hitler only wanted the Jews moved elsewhere and bore them no personal ill-will. In Mein Kampf (the second volume, written after his release from prison) he says: ‘If at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.’7 Hitler equates Bolshevik Communism and Jewry, but also finds the Jews pulling the strings of its apparent enemy, international capitalism. The Jews are weak, yet also everywhere in control; they are tiny in numbers but dominate Germany. They control the press, the left-wing parties, the banks, everything. They have to be destroyed.

  Hitler was a rare human. Biographers and historians believe he had almost no capacity for empathy, perhaps because of a cold and violent childhood. He was a fantasist who happened to live at a time and in a place already so disrupted that he could make his fantasies come true, though only for a few years, before they collapsed in on themselves. Poorly educated, lazy, physically unappealing, he was nevertheless able to mesmerize audiences, hypnotize individuals who met his dark stare, and whip a nation into a frenzy of adulation. Yet without Germany’s defeat in the First World War, without Lenin’s triumph in Russia or the long history of European anti-Semitism, he would have been a nobody.

  Almost nowhere in Europe had been immune from anti-Semitism. The first Jewish ghetto had been created in Venice. English kings had burned, persecuted and expelled Jews. During the crusading period, French monarchs had confiscated Jewish wealth and expelled them. The Catholic Inquisition had offered them a choice of conversion or death. The history of the Russian empire is littered with murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. And in the early twentieth century, few places were as passionate in their anti-Semitism as Austria and Germany. Vienna, where the struggling would-be artist Hitler had spent some of his hardest formative years, had a particularly vicious anti-Jewish political and newspaper culture, epitomized by its populist mayor Karl Lueger. As Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw says, ‘It was a city where, at the turn of the century, radical anti-Semites advocated punishing sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews as sodomy, and placing Jews under surveillance around Easter to prevent ritual child-murder.’8

  Hitler must have imbibed some of this, but he knew Jews and indeed used Jewish acquaintances to help market his not very good paintings of the city at a time when he was living in a home for destitute men. Though a ‘pan-German’ who wanted all Germans to unite in a single Reich, and an early lover of Richard Wagner’s art which is shot through with anti-Semitism, there is no reliable evidence that he was a notable anti-Semite during his early years, and there are even suggestions that he sympathized with the left-wing Social Democrats.

  Much was written later, when he was Germany’s ruler, claiming a consistent line, but that turns out difficult to prove. Hitler says in Mein Kampf that he was shocked during the Great War, when he was home on leave, by how many Jews were not fighting. The book seethes, too, with claims about Jewish involvement in prostitution. Hitler may have been impotent, and he certainly expressed feelings of repulsion, even horror, about sexual licence; which may have become somehow mixed up with stories about Jews going back to medieval times. It is likely, however, that Hitler’s loathing of the Jews really began shortly after Germany’s defeat in 1918, when he returned with his regiment, as a highly decorated corporal, to Munich.

  As a native Austrian he had been lucky to be accepted by a Bavarian regiment, and had fought in the trenches as a message-carrying runner with considerable bravery. The defeat of the Imperial German Army was something he found hard to accept. Almost worse was that when he returned, with few prospects, Munich was a hotbed of revolution. Over the winter and early spring of 1918–19, anarchists and Communists established a revolutionary ‘Red Republic’ in Bavaria, mimicking the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. There followed a time of food shortages, assassination, seizure of property, violence and left-wing censorship. It fell far short of the ‘red terror’ experienced to the east, and it was soon ended by a right-wing military counterattack, but it left deep scars.

  Many of its leaders had been Jewish. Hitler, who had been an elected military representative during the Red Republic, understood early on the advantage to an agitator of having a single easily definable enemy. In that milieu of small, angry meetings and small, angry parties, he made a name for himself for the extremism of his language and his one-culprit rhetoric. In the bars and cafés of Munich, German army ‘handlers’ used him to promote their campaign against the left and against the moderate republican government in far-off Berlin. Jews, Bolsheviks, swindling capitalists and the traitors who had allowed Germany to be beaten were all, for Hitler, essentially parts of the same nest of enemies.

  Apart from his time in the army, it could be said that up to then Hitler had really done nothing with his life except talk. He had made bad paintings, loafed around, lived off small amounts of family money . . . and talked. His rants about art, music, Germany, history and politics had echoed around the cheap boarding houses, cafés and bars of Linz, Vienna and Munich. Now, talking became his job.

  Young Hitler is so buried under the leprous grime of his reputation, the Holocaust and our image of his pallid white face with its ridiculous moustache, that it is hard to imagine back to a time when he seemed charismatic. He clearly was, though. The small right-wing party he joined and which eventually evolved into the Nazi party quickly came to depend on him as their most popular speaker. He could hold a room for two hours of sarcasm, shouting, joking, smearing and preaching, interrupted by cheers, boos and laughter. In between denouncing the German government and the victorious Allies, he was calling for Jews to be sent to concentration camps to keep them away from good Germans, and for them to be expelled from Germany. He was soon being compared to Luther and even to Napoleon. His audience, which seems to have been made up of small-time businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks, demobilized soldiers and a surprisingly high proportion of women, found him the best entertainment, as well as the best teacher, to be had.

  By the early 1920s Germany seemed to many to be on the edge of Communist revolution. Right-wing ‘folkish’ thinkers and military men were constantly debating about how to respond. They discussed the need to depose the government in Berlin, so keen to appease the French; to win back a larger German homeland; and to rebuild the German fighting forces. Paramilitary groups stockpiled guns. Funding was available from business tycoons terrified of socialist revolution. Parties formed, quarrelled, split and reformed. General Ludendorff, who had helped lead Germany in the war, re-em
erged as a hero of the right. And Munich, after its brief experience of revolution, had become a centre of reactionary thinking. Hitler was in the right place. He had formed alliances with paramilitary organizers, notably Ernst Röhm. He had won powerful admirers in the army, including Ludendorff. He had the backing of extremist newspapers and gangs of organized thugs.

  He had even personally designed the flag that would soon be known globally, the black swastika on a white circle against a red background. The swastika had long been a symbol of German anti-Semitic thinking. An ancient and common symbol of happiness, used by Hindus, Buddhists and animists, it had become popular after the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered examples from ancient Troy and proposed them as signs of Aryan identity. The swastika was used by German nationalists before Hitler: what he did was to refine a design and colour combination for the tense, rotated broken cross to make it, in the words of a recent art critic, ‘perhaps the most potent graphic emblem ever devised’.9

  Hitler may have been a bad painter but he was a brilliant propagandist, obsessively careful about image. He had hundreds of photographs of himself taken in different poses and different clothes, hats and coats, rejecting almost all of them until he got the right image of the lonely, driven leader. He pored over the uniforms of his storm-trooper guards and his party followers, as well as later architectural visions, with an attention he never gave to policy or bureaucracy. In an age of political brands, Hitler was an evil genius of a brand-manager.

  How had he come, then, to find himself in prison in 1924? He had led a ludicrously bungled attempt at a coup, initially against the regional government in Bavaria but directed ultimately against Berlin. His party, the German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP, ‘Nazi’ for short, was still relatively small. But the general movement of ‘patriotic organizations’ and similar parties was big. German army generals and even the local political rulers in Munich seemed broadly sympathetic. By the autumn of 1923 there had been long discussions about overthrowing the government, a putsch to be led either by the army or by the paramilitary groups, or perhaps following a Mussolini-style march on the capital. Hitler, by now described as ‘the German Mussolini’, believed that, given the right impetus, Ludendorff, with the army in Bavaria, would join in a general uprising against Berlin. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable hope. All that was needed was the spark.

  This came from the barrel of Hitler’s Browning revolver at around 8.40 p.m. on 8 November 1923, in a huge beer-hall, Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller. Beer-halls were, and are, where Munichers did their politics – large, cavernous spaces well suited for speeches and high emotion. That night, most of the leading men of the city had gathered for a long-advertised anti-Communist meeting – there were about three thousand people in the hall. Gustav Ritter von Kahr, a right-wing politician now installed as Bavaria’s leader, was in full flow when storm-troopers led by Hermann Goering, the former fighter ace, burst into the room.

  Immediately, Hitler jumped onto a chair, fired his pistol at the ceiling and declared that the Bavarian government was deposed and a national revolution had begun. He shepherded the political leaders and a general into a neighbouring room, and told them they would join him in a new German government. If things went wrong, he had a bullet in his gun for all of them, including himself, and he later declared to the crowd: ‘Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’10 Ludendorff was fetched and, though taken aback, joined in. Hitler announced that in order to ‘save the German people’, there would be a march ‘on that sinful Babel, Berlin’.11

  He had assumed that the army and Bavaria’s political elite would be marching behind him. Faced by his storm-troopers and his threats, they had briefly agreed, but given neither proper preparation nor plan, they had no intention of starting a civil war. So as soon as they could they defected, and Hitler’s putsch began to sputter. While his restless mob was wondering what to do, the army and police were closing in. What the historian Alan Bullock called Hitler’s ‘revolution by sheer bluff’ had failed. The following morning, he and Ludendorff led about two thousand Nazis on a march through Munich towards the war ministry, though it was unclear just what they meant to do next. In face of a police cordon, shooting broke out, killing four policemen and sixteen Hitler supporters. Hitler either threw himself to the ground, or was pushed; the man standing next to him was killed. Ludendorff, the old soldier, had simply kept on marching towards the police. They stood aside. But nobody followed him.

  Though some of the other putschists escaped, Ludendorff turned himself in and Hitler was arrested at a friend’s house. The trial of nine men accused of high treason began on 24 February 1924 in the former Munich infantry school. Hitler, perhaps embarrassed that he had ducked down so quickly at the first gunshots, then proved himself again a master propagandist. He took full responsibility, denied nothing, and spent much of the trial delivering long and defiant political speeches. The judges seem to have been largely sympathetic, and for the crime of treason, which had led to the deaths of police, hostage-taking and robbery, Hitler was given a sentence of only five years. He would in fact be let out much more quickly, serving just thirteen months. Had he been standing a foot to one side during the coup and been shot, or had he received a more serious sentence, or had he served the sentence he was given, then undoubtedly mankind would have been luckier. Hitler’s closing speech at his trial made him famous around Germany. One of the many adulatory letters sent to him in prison was from a young PhD student in Heidelberg called Josef Goebbels. Even his jailers saluted him with ‘Heil Hitler’ and, partly through Mein Kampf, he had ample time to further develop his personality cult – though he never developed his ideas. There was still a long way to go before Hitler would finally be installed as German Chancellor, in 1933, able to dismantle the legal state and build his regime of expansionist terror. That journey depended upon a new world economic crisis that would snuff out Germany’s slow and steady postwar return to economic health; and upon bad leadership by other countries as well as a series of disastrous mistakes by rival German politicians.

  For his part, Hitler had learned the hard way that, in order to seize power, he could not simply co-opt the German army, however bitter and resentful many of its officers might be. He would have to win politically.

  In many ways this suited his talents better. By 1924 he had already assembled his armoury of uniformed intimidation, quiet business backing and extreme rhetorical provocation, which would take him nine years later to power in Berlin. The leader cult was growing. Inside the party, which had been banned but which he would refound in 1925, he had established the principle of personal leadership untrammelled by democracy or voting, which he would later impose on all of Germany. His chaotic working patterns, which forced those around him to second-guess what he might want, thereby allowing him to distance himself from any mistakes, were also becoming familiar. Above all, the ideology was clear: a single worldwide enemy, the Jewish people, were behind all the misfortunes Germany had suffered. They must be eradicated.

  By the time of the Munich putsch, Hitler had also decided that Germany could not be content with regaining her old imperial borders and uniting herself with Austria, nor simply with wreaking revenge on France. Germany needed more land. It could be found only in the east, including Russia, which was now under Jewish control and therefore a lesser civilization. In Mein Kampf we read that ‘the new Reich must again set itself on the march of the Teutonic knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plough’.12 Later, Hitler says, ‘State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.’ The German nation is ‘penned into an impossible area’, and a reckoning with France is only useful ‘if it offers the rear cover for an enlargement of our people’s living space in Europe’.13 No clearer warning of the attacks to be launched on Poland, the Ukraine and Russia herself could have been given. It was all there, in black and white, from the day Mein Kampf
was first published.

  For Germans of the 1920s, the trauma of near-starvation in the latter part of the Great War was a recent memory. Britain’s Royal Navy had imposed a blockade on Germany that had reduced middle-class Germans to chewing unripe potatoes – Germany’s attempt in turn to starve Britain through her U-boat campaign was, as we have seen, a close-run failure. But though Germany had been defeated on the Western Front, she had triumphed in the east against the Russian empire. During the Great War, Germans had ruled their own mini-empire in Poland, the Ukraine and Belarus. In Hitler’s view, to stop Germany being starved again, she had once more to seize the rich agricultural lands to her east. One recent historian of the mass killings in the ‘bloodlands’ of central Europe puts it like this: ‘The true Nazi agricultural policy was the creation of an eastern frontier empire . . . by taking fertile land from Polish and Soviet peasants – who would be starved, assimilated, deported or enslaved. Rather than importing grain from the east, Germany would export its farmers to the east.’14

  Naive credulity, too, is part of the recurring pattern of human history. Had so many people who thought themselves worldly-wise, from Stalin to the British government, American ambassadors to French statesmen, not preferred to believe that Hitler didn’t really mean it, some of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century could have been avoided. There seems to be a deep desire to look at our enemies and believe we are looking in a mirror – that, deep down, we are all the same – so that we flinch from the rare reality of outspoken, frank evil. In this case it was all there, in cold print, unequivocal, from the beginning. Whatever one might say of Hitler, nobody could accuse him of not giving fair warning.