by A. N. Wilson
Because we still regard him as the Demon King of history we think that if we say the opposite of what Hitler said, we shall somehow be living a better life. Hitler was a racist, so we shall be anti-racist. Hitler made homosexuals wear pink triangles, so we shall have gay marriages. Hitler was the ultimately Incorrect Person, so we shall invent Political Correctness, a system of thought which is in fact dominated by the unmentioned memory of Hitler and by being his opposite in all things, things to purge his baleful influence from the earth.
Yet in other ways, Hitler’s commonplace beliefs have been less easy to shake off. He was convinced that the twentieth century was somehow different from all previous centuries, that the human race had come of age, that, having thrown off the shackles of religion, humanity was now different. ‘The man of today, who is formed by the disciplines of science, has ceased taking the teaching of religion very seriously’ … ‘Christianity is the worst of regressions that mankind can ever have undergone … Since the age of fourteen I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach … We can be grateful to Providence which causes us to live today rather than three hundred years ago. At every street corner in those days there was a blazing stake. What a debt we owe to the men who had the courage to rebel against lies and intolerance …’4
It was clear from Table Talk that, just as he believed he had achieved a bloodless revolution in Germany, so, in some strange way, National Socialism was the natural consequence of the Enlightenment. He believed in a crude Darwinism as do nearly all scientists today, and as do almost all ‘sensible’ sociologists, political commentators and journalistic wiseacres. He thought that humanity in its history was to be explained by the idea of struggle, by the survival of the fittest, by the stronger species overcoming the weaker. Unlike the Darwinians of today, Hitler merely took this belief to its logical conclusion.
Hitler’s crude belief in science fed his unhesitating belief in modernity. He abolished the old black-letter Gothic typeface in which Germans had been producing books since they invented printing, and replaced it with a typeface in conformity with the rest of the Western world. He liked the idea of every family possessing a car. He built a system of motorways all over Germany. The mechanized age was one which he assumed to be good. In this respect, Hitler was like almost every politician of influence since. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, he called for every child in every British primary school to be given a laptop computer. He was echoing, almost exactly, Hitler’s view – ‘I find it a real absurdity that even today a typewriter costs several hundred marks. One can’t imagine the time wasted daily in deciphering everybody’s scribbles. Why not give lessons in typewriting at primary school? Instead of religious instruction, for example.’5
Hitler’s zest for the modern, his belief that humanity would become more reasonable when it had cast off the shackles of the past – olde-tyme handwriting, religion, and so forth – and embraced science and modern roads, was a belief shared with almost all forward-thinking people at the time, and it continues to be the underlying belief-system of the liberal intelligentsia who control the West. His belief led directly to genocide and devastating war. At the same time, he believed himself to be enlightened and forward-looking, non-smoking, vegetarian, opposed to hunting, in favour of abortion and euthanasia.
Have we asked ourselves the right questions about Hitler’s ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ beliefs? By eliminating some of his more grotesque prejudices from our moral vocabulary, have we really cast off his legacy? Do not the politicians in today’s Western world, when they wish to impose their values on some other nation or group of peoples, still feel themselves entitled to employ war as the ultimate weapon? Far from having cast off Hitler’s legacy, many of the world’s politicians, and especially those who consider themselves most enlightened, are in fact his heirs. For that reason, we will perhaps always be compelled to think about his life – and the chilling fact that in all his world-outlook and his views, Hitler was an embodiment, albeit an exaggerated embodiment, of the beliefs of the average modern person. Moreover, in the choreography of modern life, with our love of spectacularly large football stadia, pop festivals and open-air religious celebrations, are we quite sure that we are not displaying a collective, subconscious re-enactment for the Nuremberg Rallies? The modern Olympic Games, for example, are modelled on the Berlin Games of 1936. The Olympic torch was a Nazi invention.
There is, of course, another side to all this – the Hegelian antithesis to that thesis. And this is Hitler’s extraordinariness. The man was a prodigy. He was, moreover, a prodigy who kept his extraordinary gifts in reserve. For the first thirty years of life, no one could possibly have guessed that this moody, feckless, shy, pale ‘artist’ would exercise any influence whatsoever upon the people around him, let alone upon the destiny of the human race. Until he was twenty-five, he had done almost nothing with his life except to master a certain level of skill as an architectural draughtsman and water-colourist and to listen to Wagner’s operas with an obsessive attention. There followed the World War in which he believed himself to have been a heroic soldier of exceptional valour. His superiors saw him rather as a reliable messenger-boy, an underling. Even at the end of the war when so many had been killed and second- and third-rate men were needed to fill their shoes, Hitler’s commanding officers still hesitated to promote him to the rank of lance-corporal, because he so obviously lacked ‘leadership qualities’.
Yet, in those months after the war, when he translated his inner dreams and prejudices into spoken rhetoric, he was able to hold audiences in the palm of his hand. And, with studied seductive skill and strong political instincts, he was able, within four years, to take over the shell of a small political unit, the NSDAP, and to hold ever-greater numbers spellbound, to become the voice of the radical Right in Germany, the man whom it seemed right to call the Leader.
This story is a prodigy. He was able to do so much damage, first in Germany, and then in the rest of the world, because, as well as being an ordinary little man with the most commonplace, boringly modern outlook, he was also a species of magician. He was, as his wise critic called him, not the Leader (Führer) but the Seducer (Verführer). While the commonplace, ordinary side of Hitler insisted that the human race had come of age, that it was now led by reason not mumbo-jumbo, that it was rational and scientific, the extraordinary Hitler, the Mage-Hitler, the Wizard Hitler, demonstrated the exact opposite to be the case. His career showed that human beings in crowds behave as irrationally in modern times as they did in the Dark Ages – possibly more irrationally, since the techniques of modern broadcasting, lighting, film and propaganda can appeal to the darker depths of our chaotic souls more immediately than an old village seer or hell-fire preacher could ever hope to do. Hitler’s career proved that human nature was actually as chaotic, as easily led, as superstitious, as passionate as the characters in the wilder of Dostoyevsky’s novels or as the tormented mythological beings in Wagner’s operas. Hitler demonstrated with the most terrifying skill that humanity can be seduced without much difficulty into acts of collective insanity. A man whose published work openly proposed the invasion of Russia and the gassing of the Jews as a solution to his country’s difficulties became not merely the Leader, but the hero and Saviour of a European country which, within a little over a year of his becoming Chancellor, voted enthusiastically for him to become their absolute dictator.
So it is that we can never finish reading the story of his life without a sense of unease. Does our present world contain a Hitler? Maybe not in Linz, maybe not in the dosshouses of Vienna, but does there lurk somewhere, living at present a life of obscurity, a human being somewhere on our planet, who possesses the arcane and sinister gift, when the right historical moment arises, of once more leading the masses to frenzied acts of mutual destruction? The poet’s old question remains –
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward
s Bethlehem to be born?
NOTES
Chapter 1: ‘In that Hour it Began’
1 W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, chapter XVII
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1938) p.1.
3 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998) p.74.
4 Guardian, 20 August 2010.
5 Independent, 21 October 2010.
6 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.220.
7 Ibid., p.223.
Chapter 2: ‘Our Leader’
1 John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York, 1976) p.85.
2 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.116.
3 Ibid., p.98.
4 Ibid., p.405.
5 Ibid., p.308.
6 Ibid., p.406.
7 Ibid., p.406.
8 Kershaw, Hubris, p.159.
9 Quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York, 1952) p.75.
10 Joachim Fest, Hitler (London, 1974) p.240.
Chapter 3: My Struggle
1 Bullock, Hitler, p.90.
2 Andrew Roberts, Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax (London, 1991) p.73.
3 Ernst Hanfstaengl, quoted in Bullock, Hitler, p.108.
4 Quoted in Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.213.
5 Quoted in Fest, Hitler, p.192.
6 Ibid., p.192.
7 Ibid., p.192.
8 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.267.
Chapter 4: The Politics of Catastrophe
1 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.283.
2 Fest, Hitler, pp.159–60.
3 Kershaw, Hubris, p.212; Fest, Hitler, p.111.
4 Kershaw, Hubris, p.236.
5 Quoted in ibid., p.196.
6 Fest, Hitler, p.72.
7 Ibid., p.243.
8 Ibid., p.133.
9 Kershaw, Hubris, p.188.
10 Friedrich Reck-Melleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair (London, 1997) p.24.
11 Hitler, Table Talk 1941–1944 (New York, 1953) p.165.
12 The rhyme continues ‘Goering has two but very small; Himmler has something sim’lar, But poor old Go-balls has no-balls at all.’
13 Kershaw, Hubris, p.293.
14 Ibid., p.310
15 Ibid., p.318.
Chapter 5: ‘A Simple Cowherd can Become a Cardinal’
1 Table Talk, p.322.
2 Ibid., p.189.
3 Ibid., p.91.
4 Ibid., p.101.
5 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.553.
6 Quoted in ibid., p.553.
7 Quoted in ibid., pp.352–53.
8 Kershaw, Hubris, p.367.
9 Ibid., p.387.
10 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York, 1998) p.406.
Chapter 6: Old Surehand
1 Fest, Hitler, p.411.
2 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler (New York, 2001) p.24.
3 Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (London, 1998) p.75.
4 Fest, Hitler, p.428.
5 Quoted in Gellately, Backing Hitler, p.260.
6 Diana Mosley to the author.
7 Gellately, Backing Hitler, p.259.
8 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.501.
9 Fest, Hitler, p. 491.
10 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.507.
11 Ibid., p. 432.
12 Ibid., p.407.
13 Fest, Hitler, p.451.
14 Quoted in Kershaw, Hubris, p.503.
15 Fest, Hitler, p.502.
16 Bullock, Hitler, p.379.
17 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.699.
18 Fest, Hitler, p.479.
19 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.536.
20 Table Talk, p.631.
21 Norman Stone, Hitler (London, 1980) p.55.
Chapter 7: The Road to War
1 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.644.
2 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, p.66.
3 Fest, Hitler, p.511.
4 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2003) p.582.
5 Ibid., p.591.
6 Ibid., p.604.
7 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.736.
8 Stone, Hitler, p.73.
9 Quoted in Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.651.
10 C. V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (London, 1951) p.231.
11 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.682.
12 Ibid., p.559.
13 Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien (Munich, 2000) p.306.
Chapter 8: War Lord
1 Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War (London, 2009) p.39.
2 Table Talk, p.438.
3 Fest, Hitler, p.692.
4 Robert Wright, Dowding and the Battle of Britain (London, Macdonald & Co.) p.104.
5 Roberts, Storm of War, p.141.
6 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.909.
7 Table Talk, p.583.
8 Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, p.124.
9 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.910.
10 Ibid., p 919.
11 Table Talk, p.8.
12 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.977.
Chapter 9: The Final Solution
1 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.49.
2 Ibid., p.295.
3 Table Talk, p.314.
4 Quoted in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, 2001), p.660.
5 Ibid.
6 Table Talk p.618.
Chapter 10: Defeat
1 Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p.68.
2 Fest, Hitler, p.710.
3 Ibid., p.712.
4 Toland, Adolf Hitler, p.1117.
Chapter 11: The Bunker
1 Table Talk, p.81.
2 Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, p.534.
3 Stone, Hitler, p.156.
4 Table Talk, p.135.
5 Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, p.540.
6 Table Talk, p.206.
7 Burleigh, The Third Reich, p.591.
Chapter 12: Final Verdict
1 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lecture VI.
2 Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, p.35.
3 Ibid., p.44.
4 Table Talk, p.323.
5 Ibid., p.322.
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