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“The fellow is a catastrophe, but that’s no reason not to find him interesting as a personality and destiny,”
The artistry with which Hitler was able to conceal his real intentions from both friends and foes was another main key to his success as a politician.
“In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognise the difference between lies and truth.”37
Hitler liked to present himself as a frustrated artist who had been driven involuntarily into politics, and the myth of the “artist-politician” has influenced many biographies. This obscures the fact that Hitler was a well-below-average painter and architect, however: his great gift was for politics alone.
his ability to instantaneously analyse and exploit situations,
Hitler’s unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler’s own supremacy essentially unassailable.
“Are we permitted to depict Hitler as a human being?” the
not only are we permitted, we are obliged to.
The historian Ernst Deuerlein was right when he wrote: “Hitler did not come to politics—politics came to Hitler.”113
politics was the one arena in which he could use his rhetorical talents and demagogic skills.
Hitler instinctively knew how to exploit this situation.
a born public speaker, whose commitment and natural demeanour commands the attention of an audience and forces its members to think.”44
including the idea that Jews were “a racial and not a religious community,” combined into one neurotic complex.
Hitler saw boundless greed, the “dance around the golden calf,” as one of those characteristics.
“Everything that inspires people to strive for something higher—be it religion, socialism or democracy—is for a Jew just a means serving the end of satisfying monetary greed and the desire to rule. His effect on other peoples is that of racial tuberculosis.”53
What seems to have impressed him most, though, was the idea of fusing nationalism and socialism, of freeing the working classes from the “false teachings” of Marxism and winning them over for the nationalist cause.
As a whole the programme left no doubt that the aim was to get rid of the democracy of the young Weimar Republic and create an authoritarian government for an ethnic community, which would no longer have any room for Jews.81
Without Hitler, the rise of National Socialism would have been unthinkable.
without the explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma, the populist agitator Hitler would never have been able to work his way out of anonymity to become a famous politician.
he was more skilful and unscrupulous about using them than any of his rivals on the nationalist far right.
“Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
Like no one else, he was able to express what his audience thought and felt: he exploited their fears, prejudices and resentments, but also their hopes and desires. “A virtuoso playing the soul of the masses like a keyboard” was how Hanfstaengl put it,
“The first thing you felt was that here was someone who meant what he said, who didn’t want to convince you of anything he didn’t believe entirely himself,”
“He spoke from the bottom of his own soul and all of our souls.”25 This was the “unity of the word and the man” that Hitler’s first biographer, Konrad Heiden, identified as the secret to the agitator’s success.
One goal was to seduce workers away from leftist parties, although in the beginning it was worried members of the lower middle classes, uprooted former soldiers and impoverished university graduates who flocked to Hitler’s events.34
His speeches typically began with a look back at “wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war,” in which “orderliness, cleanliness and precision” had ruled and civil servants had gone about their work “honestly and dutifully.”35
Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.
Polemical attacks on the Treaty of Versailles occupied a central position in Hitler’s campaigns,
Even in his earliest speeches, Hitler vowed to annul the Treaty of Versailles:
He never tired of preaching the merits of “a relentless battle against this entire parliamentary brood, this whole system.”55
Because they had never been able to form a state, they had no alternative but to live as “nomads…parasites on the bodies of other peoples…as a race within other races and a state within other states.”
unchangeable goal as “the removal of Jews from our people.”
When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.
Hitler’s hateful anti-Semitic tirades were not just a populist strategy but reflected the core of his political convictions.
Hitler would cling to his conviction that his battle against Jews was a matter of life or death right up until his suicide in his bunker in Berlin in late April 1945.
Indeed, the fact that the conservative elites often failed to appreciate Hitler’s ability to influence people and get his way was a major factor in his success.
“Hitler is becoming a megalomaniac,”
The book served two purposes. On the one hand, by connecting his biography and his political programme, Hitler could portray his life up until his entry into politics as a prelude to his historic mission.
On the other hand, the book underscored his claim to party leadership in an intellectual sense. It was proof that Hitler was both a politician and a theorist, a combination that, as he crowed in Mein Kampf, tended to occur only very rarely in human history.81
the racist pamphlet by American carmaker Henry Ford, “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” which had appeared in German translation in 1922 and became a huge hit. “I regard Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler allegedly told an American reporter.85
for Hitler, races and not classes were the motors of events.
On that score, Hitler was absolutely clear: “Everything we see today of human culture and artistic, scientific and technological achievements is almost exclusively the creative work of the Aryan.”92
“The Jew” was scapegoated into the incarnation of everything evil, and the fight against him was correspondingly the most important part of Hitler’s political mission.
In the course of working on my book, I’ve come to see that in future we will have to employ the most severe means if we are to triumph. I’m convinced that this is a question of survival not just for our people, but for all peoples. The Jew is a global plague.”93
Hitler no longer spoke of deporting or driving out Jews: he now used words like “destruction” and “eradication.”
the language of parasitology,
In Mein Kampf, Hitler now shifted his emphasis to the idea that a nation with an expanding population like Germany needed territory large enough to feed its people and continue to increase its political power.
Hitler’s two most important goals: the destruction of “Jewish Bolshevism” and the conquest of “living space in the east.”
Hitler always insisted on these two goals with dogmatic rigidity.
Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had spelled out with exemplary clarity everything he intended to do if he was ever given power.
