by A. N. Wilson
A. N. WILSON
Hitler
A Short Biography
Dedication
To Ruth, with love.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1 ‘In that Hour it Began’
2 ‘Our Leader’
3 My Struggle
4 The Politics of Catastrophe
5 ‘A Simple Cowherd can Become a Cardinal’
6 Old Surehand
7 The Road to War
8 War Lord
9 The Final Solution
10 Defeat
11 The Bunker
12 Final Verdict
Notes
Select Bibliography
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
‘In that Hour it Began’
As the German Chancellor, Hitler instigated the mass-murder of as many as 6 million Jews. He forced Western Europe, and eventually the whole world, into a calamitous war in which over 50 million Europeans were killed. When he committed suicide in 1945, he left his country a burning heap of ruins, financially bankrupt, militarily abject, physically wrecked. It is not surprising, then, that his reputation in history is demonic. Even though Mao Tse-tung and Stalin killed more people, and history since 1945 has thrown up such monsters as Pol Pot, Hitler has retained his place as the Demon King of history, the ultimate horror-tyrant. For this reason alone, we feel compelled to revisit the story of his life. In so doing, we perhaps want to pretend that his repellent life-views, which drove him to his acts of mayhem and murder, were somehow unique to himself, or if not quite unique, then at least special to the Nazi movement he led. To some degree – if we are thinking of the crazier theories relating to blood purity, or the quasi-religious cult of violence based on a return to the mythologies of the pagan north – then we should be right to think that Hitler had nothing in common with the decent bourgeois majority of Europeans of his generation. He was a freak, a satanic oddity, a demon.
But this picture of him is not completely tenable. In general, Hitler embodied the views of any popular newspaper, any bar-parlour bore, from England to Russia, from Finland to Sicily, during his lifetime: that is, that science had replaced religion; that Darwin had mysteriously ‘explained’ everything about the struggles of history, that the fittest would survive, and that among the differing peoples of the earth, it was the ‘Aryan’ or Eurasian race who were superior to the ‘savages’ found in Africa and South America, or to the Jews. His view, ranted aloud through microphones to rallies of thousands, that the Jews were both the sinister powers at work behind the banks and the stock markets, contriving the world’s ruin, and at the same time they were the ‘disease’ eating away at your savings with anti-capitalist, Bolshevist plots, was a fear which did not vanish even when his whole regime had been ground to rubble by his enemies.
A spectre was haunting Europe. It was not Communism, as Marx and Engels had proclaimed in 1848, though Communism was a part of the spectre. It was bankruptcy. And that spectre had haunted Europe ever since the prodigy of modern industrial capitalism began in England in the eighteenth century. When things went well, the system produced comfort and leisure of a kind unimagined by the human race at any previous period of history. But there always existed, like some curse in a fairy tale, the possibility that things would go wrong, and that the safe, comfortable world created by capitalism could, through no fault of the families or individuals concerned, plunge the working classes into starvation and the middle classes into the disgrace of debt and penury. The prosperous parfumeur César Birotteau in Balzac’s novel of that name suddenly becomes an abject pauper. He did not realize that in expanding his business he was taking on debts with a scurrilous banker. Like so many of the characters in Balzac’s great Human Comedy, that series of books which defined the nineteenth century to itself much more vividly than did Karl Marx, Birotteau is one minute prosperous, and the next up to his neck in debt. That swoop, from prosperity to absolute degradation, is the single greatest dread among the middle classes created by nineteenth-century capitalism. You see it in the novels of Dickens and Balzac over and over again. You see it in the genre paintings, of a middle-class family having to sell up their last belongings. Whether you are upper middle class, like the Sedleys in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or lower middle class like Adolf Hitler, the spectre is haunting you all the time. Something might happen in the world’s stock markets which suddenly ruins you.
‘Old John Sedley was ruined’ … and Thackeray shows us all his belongings being picked over and sold off at auction. ‘The Hebrew aide de camp in the service of the officer at the table bid against the Hebrew gentleman employed by the elephant purchasers and a brisk battle ensued over this little piano.’1 Part of the mythos of capitalism was that mysteriously it was controlled and exploited by the Jews. When there is a lurch in the stock market or when there is a run on the banks, the Jews will somehow emerge from the crisis unscathed – having made their profit out of your misfortune.
The basic self-contradiction of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory – that Jews control both the capitalist system and the Communism which sought to overthrow it – did not die with Nazism. It resurfaces even now, either implicitly or explicitly, in journalism and commentary in any country in the world. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a mania of advanced degree but it was very far from being unusual, and although few like to admit it, his hatred of the Jews was one important element in his easy rise to power. Hitler and the Nazis expressed themselves with a crudity you may not think would have gone down well in, say, a London publishing house. Yet his prejudice was one shared with the poetry editor of Faber and Faber, T. S. Eliot – ‘The Jew is underneath the lot.’
Adolf Hitler – remarkably, in a man whose father was the son of an illegitimate housemaid – had grown up with the middle-class confidence that he need never earn a living. When he first emerged so astonishingly onto the European stage, he might have appeared provincial and uncouth. But he belonged to a class which had savings. He belonged to the shabby-genteel class, the class which perhaps more than any other feels the shame of social descent through poverty. Aspirant members of this class, throughout Europe and America, have traditionally struggled to ‘better’ themselves, fearing idleness, bohemianism, any of the eccentricities or cultivations which might lead grander social classes to an amusing decadence, but which lead the petits bourgeois back to the working classes from which they struggled.
Had his father, a customs official in various border towns between Austria-Hungary and Germany, lived to see the publication of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he might well have asked, ‘What Struggle?’ Alois Hitler had indeed known struggle, and so had his third wife, Hitler’s mother, Klara Pölzl. Alois, whose early life had marked a real struggle to leave poverty behind, and to acquire respectability and savings through boring government service in customs offices, had urged young Adolf to find paid employment. The boy had preferred to lounge about, to wear dandified clothes, to attend the opera and to imagine that one day he would become a famous artist, or maybe a composer of operas, like his hero Richard Wagner. When his father died in 1903, and his mother followed him to the grave four years later, Hitler had never in his life looked for paid work. He had assumed that he would be able to live on savings. He would study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and maybe become a great architectural artist, perhaps an architect who would rebuild Linz, the provincial city where he had attended the Realschule and not done especially well. A fellow pupil was another oddball, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but there is no evidence that they even spoke to one another at school. Wittgenstein was not noted, at any period of life, for his easy manners, and Hitler, until he had completed military service, appear
s to have been paralysed with shyness and silence in most circumstances.
Wittgenstein at different times of his life had paid work – as a village schoolmaster, as a lab assistant in a London hospital, and as a don at Cambridge. Hitler never had any paid employment, so far as one can make out, except when manual work was forced upon him as a temporary necessity when he was living in men’s hostels and dosshouses on the outskirts of Vienna. In fact, he had not done well enough at school to get a good job. He failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and gradually slithered downhill from the position of comfort and prosperity into which he had been born to one of penniless indigence. He lived among the homeless in men’s hostels, tried to sell his (usually postcard-size) architectural paintings. When this was happening, Europe was not going through a phase of unemployment, such as plagued the 1920s and 1930s. He could have taken a job as a waiter or a clerk or done something in exchange for pay, the way that almost everyone in the world is expected to do. Never once did he do so. Nor, as far as history throws any light on the matter, did he ever consider it necessary to pay his own way. The flats he lived in when he became successful, the cars he drove, the clothes he wore were all supplied by other people. Even his beloved dogs, Prinz, Muckl, Wolf and Blondi, were gifts. He was a domestic incompetent. When his niece killed herself he needed to import housemaids immediately into his Munich apartment.
Hitler’s indolence was to remain one of his most mysterious characteristics. Many would assume that a man who, in his heyday, strutted about in uniforms, and who presided over a militaristic dictatorship, who expected not merely his intimates but everyone in the country to click their heels and salute at the mere mention of his name, would have been up in the morning early, taking cold baths and performing Swedish exercises. By contrast, like many depressives, he kept strange hours, and spent most of his days on this planet sitting around doing nothing much, dreaming his terrible dreams, and talking interminable nonsense. In this he was extraordinarily unlike the archetypical Germans who looked to him in the 1920s and 1930s as their saviour. They were hard-working, home-loving people who, by the end of the 1920s, had received two catastrophic buffets from fate. The first was their country’s defeat in the First World War, and the second – a direct consequence of the first calamity – was financial ruin. Hitler’s own ‘struggle’ had in fact been entirely of his own making, and was due to simple laziness. There had been nothing to stop him, as a young man, giving up his unrealistic plans to become an artist and taking a job in an office. But he could not bring himself to get out of bed in the mornings. Hence his own slide into poverty. But he made his ruin into a personal myth with which a whole bankrupted nation was able to identify. All those hard-worked clerks and small businessmen and waiters and factory workers who voted for Hitler – while they were still allowed to vote – and who saw him as their national saviour, were quite, quite different from Hitler. Their ruin had not been as a result of idleness, or dreaminess. It had been caused by their militaristic Kaiser and his right-wing government leading them into a disastrous and costly war. For this war, the German people were made, by international treaty, quite literally to pay. Whenever there was a chance of economic recovery in the 1920s, Germany had to face the reparations demanded by France. Had the Germans been able to mine the coal in the Ruhr or exploit the great steelworks of that industrial region, there would have been some chance of a post-war economic recovery. But this industrial heartland had been occupied by the French in 1923. So in this impossible situation, the German people found themselves seduced by a political movement which appeared to offer them a solution, led by a man whose own life-journey, as set to the weird opera which must have played itself continually inside his head, matched their own national crisis.
Many books not written in German playfully use the German word for Leader – Führer – to refer to him. It has become a sort of nickname: the Führer. But although the Leader appeared quite literally as a saviour to the unemployed Germans whom he restored to labour, to the homeowners and rentiers whose lifetime investments he appeared to make safe, he was far from being a typical German. He was indeed not a German at all and only received German citizenship in 1932, shortly before becoming Chancellor. The fact that he found himself in Munich in May 1913, as an indigent, penniless artist and layabout, was owing to the fact that he was a draft dodger from the Austro-Hungarian army.
From 1910 – when Hitler was twenty to twenty-one – the Austrian authorities had been pursuing him to do his national service in the Imperial army. When they came after him, he denied that he had left Vienna to avoid the army. It was poverty, he claimed, which prevented him from coming to Salzburg in order to plead ill health. After a long exchange of letters he did eventually go to Salzburg, a comparatively short journey by train from Munich, and submit to a medical examination, and it was agreed that the underfed, gloomy young man was too weak to bear arms and should be pronounced unfit for military service.
And herein lies the peculiar mystery of the Hitler phenomenon. Hitler was almost without any skills at all. He had very little energy, a modest education, no obvious ‘leadership’ qualities, and in many respects almost no interest in politics. In party politics he had no interest whatsoever. Nor, when in power, was he a ‘micromanager’. He was a peculiar combination of absolute controller and idler. There was scarcely any area of government business or military organization over which he did not wish to exercise personal control; but the day-to-day business either of civil or military administration was often something to which he appeared to demonstrate airy indifference. The tantrum was used as a workable substitute for practical common sense. Presumably he had known since childhood that most people will do anything to avoid a scene, so that a willingness to make scenes, explosive scenes, over the most trivial of upsets, or for no observable reason at all, would give him power over almost anyone with whom he came into contact – party apparatchiks, generals, foreign heads of state.
For twelve years, this man who had no obvious talent for anything except public speaking, the manipulation of crowds, and the manipulation of individuals through emotional bullying, dominated European history. For the first six of those years, he performed what appeared to be an economic miracle: he led his country out of the gravest economic crisis ever to face a developed economy in the Western world, and he gave it full employment and apparent prosperity. He then proceeded to invade, annex or conquer Austria, the greater part of Czechoslovakia and the disputed German lands which had been appropriated by the French. All this was accomplished with astonishingly little loss of life. No wonder he was regarded, in the period 1933–9, as a hero. The British Prime Minister who had presided over victory in the First World War, the Liberal leader David Lloyd George, was overwhelmed when he visited Hitler’s Germany in 1936. Lloyd George’s daughter mockingly exclaimed ‘Heil Hitler!’ ‘Certainly Heil Hitler!’ replied Lloyd George in all seriousness, ‘I say it because he is a really great man.’ On his return to England, Lloyd George wrote an article for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express (then a newspaper which was taken seriously), describing Hitler as a born leader of men, trusted by the old, idolized by the young, who had lifted his country from the depths.
Anyone meeting Hitler twenty years before, however, and staring into the face of that pale, lonely youth, would have agreed that he was not fit either for military life or for anything else of a very practical bent. His Munich landlady in 1913–14, Frau Popp, a tailor’s wife, afterwards described her lodger as quiet, who spent much of his time painting his postcards – characterless little architectural studies which leave no impression at all. He was also, she remembered, a voracious reader. She does not tell us what he was reading. Hitler’s later conversation suggests retentive, rather than wide, reading. He could quote whole pages of the gloomy philosopher Schopenhauer, who had been of such profound influence over Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner. He probably read Wagner’s libretti as poetry. He read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels an
d Don Quixote. His favourite author, however, was Karl May. Even as Reich Chancellor Hitler would still be urging his generals to try May’s novels – upbraiding them for their lack of imagination when they failed to see the point of them. May is not a popular author in the English-speaking world but he still has his following in Germany. He modelled himself on Fenimore Cooper and his best-known stories are set among the American Indians. The American Indian Winnetou and the cowboy Surehand are the best known of his heroes. As a devoted pacifist, May was in many ways a surprising choice of literary hero for a future war leader. His stories, both those set in the American West and those which deal with the Near East, such as In the Land of the Mahdi and From Baghdad to Istambul, are stories set in exotic landscapes in which heroes battle against impossible odds and triumph through an exercise of the will.
Hitler’s childhood and family background have been endlessly studied for clues which would explain his later development. At the beginning of My Struggle, he himself emphasized the geographical importance of having been born in Braunau am Inn, a town in a provincial part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in 1923–4, he saw the unification of the two great German states as desirable. ‘German-Austria must once more be reunited with the great German Motherland: and not just for economic reasons. No, no! Even if reunification had no economic advantages one way or another, even if it were positively disadvantageous, it must still take place. One Blood belongs together in One Reich.’2 It was one of the fundamental planks of his foreign policy, and it could clearly be seen with hindsight that the expansionism which lay behind this idea would lead inevitably to the European war which followed in the year after the Anschluss (literally, the ‘Connexion’; it is the word used for the annexation of Austria by Germany).
