THE CHARACTER and talent of an individual do not change in the course of his life. But what the person’s significance to society may be, the sum of his experiences, successes, and achievements, those things which all together constitute his personality—this is the outcome of a process of slow growth. And understanding of a personality, knowledge of a man’s true being, is also acquired slowly. We do not gain insight into a man’s real nature if we only see him or talk to him now and then, or if we have only heard or read about him. We must study him for many years in his daily life; we must observe his habits. Only then can we, at the end, estimate the success or failure of his existence in terms of his ideas and desires.
Hitler was a demonic personality obsessed by racial delusions. Physical disease is not the explanation for the weird tensions in his mind and the sudden freaks of his will. If any medical term applies to his mental state at all, it would undoubtedly be “megalomania.” But he was in no sense mentally ill; rather he was mentally abnormal, a person who stood on the broad threshold between genius and madness. It is not the first time in world history that such a figure has come to the fore. In mind and soul Hitler was a hybrid creature—double-faced. Ambivalence is often the concomitant of genius; inner stresses can strengthen the entire personality. But in Hitler the inner contradictions had got out of hand; the split in his nature had become the determinant of his whole being. For that reason his essential nature cannot be understood in simple and natural terms; it can be grasped only as a union of opposites. Therein lies the secret of his unfathomability. It is this that makes it so difficult to explain the gulf between his outward show of being a selfless servant of the nation and the monstrousness of his actions, which became obvious only in the latter part of his rule.
This fundamental dichotomy in Hitler’s nature was apparent in the intellectual realm also. Hitler had extraordinary intellectual gifts—in some fields undoubted genius. He had an eye for essentials, an astonishing memory, a remarkable imagination, and a bold decisiveness that made for unusual success in his social undertakings and his other peaceful works. On the other hand, in many other respects—such as his treatment of the racial question, his attitude toward religious matters, and his astonishing underestimation of all the moral forces in life—his thinking was both primitive and cranky. These intellectual failings resulted in a frightful blindness, a fateful incapacity to deal with foreign policy or to make the proper military decisions. In many situations he could act logically. He was sensitive to nuances. He had the intelligence and boldness to restore seven million unemployed to places in industry. Yet at the decisive moment this same man did not have the spark of understanding to realize that an attack on Poland would necessarily touch off the world war which would ultimately lead to the destruction both of himself and of Germany. Creative intelligence and blind stupidity—these two aspects of his mind, which emerged again and again throughout his life, were the outcome of a basic abnormality.
In Hitler’s soul, sincere warmth and icy heartlessness, love of his fellow-creatures and ruthless harshness, dwelt side by side. We have seen him as a kindly person, the enthusiastic patron of artists, affectionate toward children, always considerate of his guests, and gallant toward women, sympathizing with the sufferings and sharing the joys of others. But—as we know today—there raged in that same person the primitive forces of inhumanity. His decisions were based on utter mercilessness. Today, when the frightful facts have been made known and some of the victims have come forward to tell their story, we can only shudder at such repulsive lack of all human feeling. The very same Hitler whom we saw so frequently in newspaper photographs looking into the faces of delighted children gave the order for the imprisonment of innocent wives and children who happened to be related to wanted men. For decades he strongly promoted humane treatment for animals; in conversation he repeatedly stressed his love of animals. And this same man, given the comprehensive powers that were his, must have known of, tolerated, and ordered the horrible cruelties which have been inflicted on men.
To what extent was Hitler aware of his own duality? This question is of crucial importance in any estimate of him. Was he conscious that his actions were monstrous, or was he so caught up in his delusions that he thought them inescapable necessities justified by lofty ends? As I see it, his fantastically exaggerated nationalism—his deification of the nation—was the key to his demonic character. Hitler’s unrealistic concept of the nation sprang from his racial delusions. It is the explanation for his passionate ambitions for Germany and for the inhuman crimes he did not hesitate to commit.
Hitler considered himself a very great genius, but not a superhuman, supernatural being. However, he viewed the nation as supernatural, as a god whose prophetic high priest he felt himself to be. He was ready to lay even the most frightful sacrifices upon the altar of the Fatherland in order to preserve the immortality of the nation. When he acted as “Supreme Judge of the Nation,” deciding the destinies of human beings, he felt himself raised to a higher level of dignity. Whatever he did for the “higher good of the nation” was exempted from the ordinary strictures of conscience. In all his actions he practiced the notorious principle that the end justifies the means. He did not consider the weal or woe of the people who were actually alive in the present; he thought only of the abstract concept of an unending succession of future generations. His concept of “nation” was something quite different from the people who composed it. That alone explains the frightful tragedy—that in the name of the “nation” he destroyed the actual nation of which he was part.
This unrealistic, this almost transcendental idea of the nation, was expressed in Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches. He thought of the nation in terms of thousands of years. He reveled in nationalism when he sat in Bayreuth listening with passionate reverence to Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, or when he strode through the mad King Ludwig’s “Valhalla” at Regensburg.
There can be no doubt that Hitler had no selfish desires for private riches or superficial comforts. In his whole mode of life he remained amazingly modest and undemanding. He had no taste for pomp; in his manner he remained simple and close to the common people. Nevertheless, at bottom, he exemplified a particular kind of selfishness. He possessed a hunger for power that had nothing to do with cold egotism; his impulse to dominate was a consuming fire. Now that his life stands before me in its completeness, I cannot escape the impression that Hitler’s own imagination unconsciously created a vast delusional world in order to give his egotism room to hold sway. Nationalistic megalomania and personal passion for power made him the great, unselfish leader of his people—and made for his tragic failure.
Hitler’s dominant characteristic was his extraordinary will power. Jokingly describing in conversation how strong willed he had been even as a boy, Hitler mentioned that he had fallen to the ground, faint from rage, when he could not have the last word in an altercation with his father over some gardening task. He always had to have the last word. So choleric was his disposition that the slightest contradiction would infuriate him. In later years his will became an absolute tyrant, utterly uncontrollable. As long as there was a spark of life left in him, he never yielded. His powerful will could be inspiring and constructive, or it could be depressing and destructive. His will united the people, but his immoderateness tore the nation to pieces again. There was no way of influencing that will of his. That is to say, he allowed himself to be influenced only along the lines he was already impetuously following. Contradiction and resistance only fortified his obstinacy, as friction produces sparks of electricity. This will of his blocked off all attempts to affect it; he enclosed himself in his own authority. And as his power grew, his arbitrariness became more and more absolute. We must understand this in order to put the “influences” upon him into their proper place.
As far as I know, no one influenced Hitler’s important decisions. He made them by himself, in retirement, and considered them intuitive inspirations. When he appeared among his close associates around noon I heard him time and again use the phrase: “I thought about that last night and have come to the following decision ...” Sometimes he would temporarily shelve such decisions, but he never abandoned them. There were occasions when he would refrain from answering pertinent objections right off in his usual domineering fashion because at the moment he had no counterarguments. But in such eases he would return to the subject again and again, with incredible stubbornness, until he had his way. His decision would be proclaimed in the form of an even more insistent order. That was his pattern in the case of less important decisions, with which I was familiar; his behavior in the more important, secret matters was probably the same.
These decisions were not reached in conference; they were handed down. There simply were no meetings of leading members of the government or Party at which decisions were taken. All such supposed conferences belong to the realm of fable. Today we know that the Cabinet of the Reich did not meet at all for many years before the war, and throughout the entire war Hitler never called a meeting. The Party Senate, which Hitler had promised to form and for which the Senate Hall in the Brown House at Munich had been completely furnished, never came into existence. Decisions were made by Hitler alone, then passed on to the government and the Party as accomplished facts. Having announced his decrees, Hitler declared that they were essential to the “welfare of the nation.”
He was unteachable. I shall have more to say later about the amazing amount of information he had at his finger tips, and about how enormously well-read he was. On the basis of this he simply insisted that he knew better than anyone else. With unparalleled intellectual arrogance and biting irony he dismissed anything that did not fit in with his own ideas. He spoke with contempt of the “intellectuals.” Alas, if only he had had a little more of their despised intelligence and circumspection, what frightful experiences might have been spared the German people. His intellectual arrogance was expressed with an egotism which was often embarrassing. In conversation at table, for example, I have sometimes heard one of his associates correct him on some point of fact in any one of a number of fields of knowledge. No matter how valid the correction, Hitler would not admit his mistake; he would insist upon his version of the thing until the objector would drop the argument from tact and a sense of propriety.
Hitler had a method of impressing foreigners and strangers and preventing them from bringing up any issue. He immediately took control of the conversation, kept the floor uninterruptedly, and talked so long and so vehemently that the interview was over before the visitor had a chance to reply—if he had any desire left to do so. Only once did I see a foreign visitor spoil this trick of Hitler’s. He was the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Eighty years old at the time, he was hard of hearing and therefore, consciously or unconsciously, interrupted Hitler repeatedly. He took occasion to voice his complaints about the behavior of the German civil government in Norway with such coolness, and in such drastic terms, that Hitler cut the interview short. After the old gentleman left, Hitler vented his fury in no uncertain terms. Days passed before he succeeded in living down that conversation.
At one and the same time Hitler possessed the power of suggestion and the power to paralyze opposition. By oratory he was able to transmit the suggestive power of his will to the masses, so long as he personally confronted them. It may seem strange today that a very large majority of the Germans voted for Hitler in peacetime, thereby confirming his right to hold the power which old President von Hindenburg had handed to him. But we must realize that over the years Hitler spoke directly to some thirty-five million Germans—aside from the many millions who thronged to see him whenever he rode through the streets of towns and villages. Most of these people were caught and carried away by the suggestive power of his will. We must recall the economic misery of those early days. Hitler had pledged himself to realize the social, economic, and national aims of the people. He had preached to the people in the moving terms of morality and national purity. It is not strange, therefore, that Germans were spellbound by his personality, that they placed their trust in him. His initial successes justified that trust, strengthened it. Even in his later years his followers remained under his influence. For that influence operated on an emotional plane; the intellect could not shake it off, even when doubts arose. His personality acted upon the emotions of the masses in such a way as to paralyze their reasoning processes. That fact explains many things that otherwise appear incomprehensible today.
Hitler had the capacity to fend off any attempt by others to influence him. This I know from many important persons who came to confer with him, each time firmly resolved to put forward certain arguments in opposition to his decisions. Hitler would listen only to their first sentences. Then for an hour he would knead and pound the subject with all the rhetoric at his command, would irradiate it with the peculiar light of his own system of thought. In the end his listeners were in a state of intellectual narcosis, incapable of urging their own point of view—even if they had been given the opportunity to do so. Some knew this method of Hitler’s and thought they were immune to it. Some dared to disregard his eloquence and insist on their point. Whereupon Hitler would curtly fall back upon his authority as the Führer. And if the other persisted in holding his ground, an outburst of hysterical rage would freeze the words in the unlucky man’s mouth and the blood in his veins.
Hitler’s arrogance was founded upon his imagined intellectual superiority. With the growth of his power during the war years it grew to be open megalomania, until ultimately the violence of his will was expressed in outright tyranny. Invoking the laws of war, he made himself master over the life and death of all. Anyone who did not obey his orders without question was branded a defeatist or saboteur.
A pathological restlessness was one of the keynotes to Hitler’s character. He never slackened his drive. There was no checking the dynamic thrust of his will. So long as Hitler continued to pursue a policy of peace, such as he had promised and preached, the people still had a choice. But when on his own decision alone he abandoned that policy, the people were left with no choice. It was as if they were in a racing express train with Hitler at the throttle. You cannot get off a moving train; you are on it for good or ill, and must go where it takes you.
Why, we may well ask, was not this dangerous engineer put out of the way in order to bring the train to a stop? But we must remember that this engineer had proved his skill all along, that he assured everybody he would bring the train to its destination. In such an unclarified situation who could take upon himself the tremendous responsibility of depriving the train of its driver, thereby certainly endangering the lives of all? Anyone who had got rid of Hitler would have been branded for all time as the accursed destroyer of the German nation. Since the people still put their belief in Hitler, his death would forever have seemed the cause of the inevitable collapse. The man who killed Hitler would stand before history burdened with the terrible guilt which we now know was Hitler’s own. In retrospect the elimination of such a dangerous despot appears to have been necessary and possible; we may even accuse those who were in a position to carry it out of a grave dereliction. But at the time such an act should have been carried out; it seemed disastrous and impossible.
From the time Hitler took power the German people were subjugated by the dynamism of his will. Later the people could not break the chains of violence which Hitler had bound around them.
Among Hitler’s own justifications for his actions was his privative philosophy of nature. Both in public speeches and private conversation he would repeatedly refer to this philosophy, his purpose being to convince his listeners that this philosophy represented the final truth about life. He took such principles as the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest and strongest, for the law of nature, and considered them a “higher imperative” which should also rule in the community life of men. It followed for him that might was right, that his own violent methods were therefore absolutely in keeping with the laws of nature.
In this respect Hitler was thoroughly old-fashioned, a hangover from the nineteenth century. He had no insight into the deep power of spiritual forces; he believed in violence alone. He considered toughness the supreme virtue of a man and interpreted emotion as weakness. He held it to be more correct in principle to inspire fear than to arouse sympathy. Underlying his acts of violence was always the deliberate intention to intimidate. Brutal intimidation was for him the highest political wisdom, the supreme principle of government in politics, in justice, and in war. He would hear no objections and fell into a fury against anyone who recommended consideration and common sense. “Hard” men enjoyed his respect; humane, “soft” people were never in his favor. Characteristically, he made favorites of the very men who were hated by the people; these he would hold up as models to those other of his associates who were popular. And it is typical of Hitler’s double-faced nature that the very measures which the people found especially oppressive, the ones that gave rise to the phrase, “If the Führer only knew . . .” were those that Hitler had personally ordered.
Hitler deliberately trampled upon the feelings of humanity; that is the ultimate reason for his fall. Feelings are a tremendous force in the life of nations and in the existence of individual men. Injured, they give rise to passion and fanaticism. Whoever violates them will in the end be defeated by them. Hitler was a master at mobilizing the feelings of other nations against himself. He did everything he could to repel them, nothing to win their liking. His complete lack of sensitivity to the psychology of other nations was always incomprehensible to me. By appealing to the emotions he won over the German people in peacetime; by violating the feelings of humanity he destroyed the German people in wartime.
The tragedy was there from the start. The people had chosen for their leader a man of remarkable intellect and powerful will; but they had not suspected that he contained within himself the demonic forces of a grotesque and frenetic netherworld. In the face that Hitler presented to the people, they saw a brilliant and superior man whose leadership they trusted; in his other, hidden face was reflected the diabolism of his soul, which led them to destruction.