Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939

by Volker Ullrich

“Are we permitted to depict Hitler as a human being?” the German media asked in 2004 with the release of Bernd Eichinger’s film Downfall, which depicted the Führer, played by veteran actor Bruno Ganz, during his final days in the bunker in Berlin.42 The only answer is: not only are we permitted, we are obliged to. It is a huge mistake to assume that a criminal on the millennial scale of Hitler must have been a monster. Naturally it would be simpler to reduce him to a psychopath who used political action to realise his homicidal impulses. For a long time this tendency to demonise Hitler dominated historical research and prevented us from having a clear view of the actual man. In February 1947, from the isolation of his cell in Spandau prison, Albert Speer remarked on the growing tendency in post-Nazi German society “to depict Hitler as a carpet-chewing hotheaded dictator who blew his stack on the slightest of occasions.” Speer thought that was both wrong and dangerous, noting: “If there are no human characteristics in the picture of Hitler, if one ignores his power of persuasion, his winning qualities and the Austrian charm he was capable of displaying, one will never do justice to him as a phenomenon.”43 In the mid-1970s, after reading his memoirs, the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl wrote to Speer that, for her, the question remained: What was it about Hitler that allowed him to impress and indeed bewitch not just the German people, but many foreigners as well?…I can never fo...

Hitler was not a “man without qualities.”47 He was a figure with a great many qualities and masks. If we look behind the public persona which Hitler created for himself and which was bolstered by his loyal followers, we can see a human being with winning and revolting characteristics, undeniable talents and obviously deep-seated psychological complexes, huge destructive energy and a homicidal bent. My aim is to deconstruct the myth of Hitler, the “fascination with monstrosity” that has so greatly influenced historical literature and public discussion of the Führer after 1945.48 In a sense, Hitler will be “normalised”—although this will not make him seem more “normal.” If anything, he will emerge as even more horrific.

“We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present—not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”50

“It will always remain one of the great mysteries of the Third Reich,” wrote Victor Klemperer in LTI, his 1946 analysis of Nazi language, “how this book could have been disseminated throughout the public sphere, and how nonetheless Hitler achieved his twelve-year rule. The bible of National Socialism was in circulation years before his rise to power.”103 Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had spelled out with exemplary clarity everything he intended to do if he was ever given power. Did the people who voted for him and who cheered him on not read it? Historians have long assumed they did not.104 Many of them cite the anecdote which Otto Strasser told in his 1940 book Hitler and I. When at the party conference in Nuremberg in 1927 Strasser had admitted to a circle of party functionaries that he had not read all of Mein Kampf, but merely memorised some of the more striking sentences, he claimed that others, including his brother Gregor and Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged not having read it either.105 If that was the case among Hitler’s most immediate subordinates, must it not also be true for his millions of followers—not to mention the many people who were not involved in the NSDAP?

more frequently. And by no means were the majority of the opinions as critical as the one published by Hellmut von Gerlach in the June 1932 issue of Die Weltbühne. “Whoever has read Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf,” Gerlach wrote, “will ask himself in horror how a sadistic master of confusion could become the preferred leader of a good third of the German people.”

Hitler’s oft-repeated contentions that the street fights were “without exception the work of Communists and Social Democratic activists” and that the SA was “mostly outnumbered and only defending itself” were a crass reversal of the facts.85