On 20 April 1939 the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday. It was no ordinary celebration. Orchestrated with painstaking attention to detail by his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, the festivities had begun on the evening of the 19th when Hitler was driven from the Reich Chancellery, at the head of a column of fifty limousines, along Berlin’s newly built east-west axis. The completion of this road marked the start of a massive building programme, planned to transform Berlin into Germania, the new capital of the world.
The limousines swept past cheering crowds, billowing banners and blazing torches to a brief opening ceremony conducted by Albert Speer, Hitler’s court architect. Speer had been charged with the planning of Germania, a megalomaniac fantasy of colossal but lifeless classical buildings, dominated by a four-hundred-foot-high Victory Arch, and a People’s Hall seventeen times bigger than the dome of St Peter’s which would hold a million people.
Hitler then returned to the new Reich Chancellery, also designed by Speer and completed early in 1939, where from the balcony he watched a parade of Nazi Party officials representing each of Germany’s Gaue (units of regional administration). At midnight the leading members of the Führer’s court lined up to shower him with birthday gifts. Speer presented Hitler with a model of Germania’s Victory Arch. Heinrich Himmler, the feared head of the SS, gave him an equestrian portrait of Frederick the Great by Adolf von Menzel. Captain Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, gave him another model, that of the four-engined Focke-Wulf FW200 Condor which would become Hitler’s personal aircraft later that summer.
The climax of the chancellor’s birthday came the next day with a massive military parade of fifty thousand troops and the cream of Germany’s military hardware. The ambassadors of Britain, France and the United States, who had been recalled in March 1939 after Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia, were notably absent. The outbreak of World War II was just over four months away.
Six years later, in a Reich Chancellery now pounded and pockmarked by bomb blasts, Hitler – attended by his Nazi paladins Speer, Martin Bormann, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop – celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in markedly different circumstances. The fall of the Third Reich was imminent, its Führer disintegrating, as Captain Peter Hartmann, a witness to the melancholy afternoon birthday gathering, observed:
Near the very end, on the day he celebrated his last birthday, he seemed closer to seventy than fifty-six. He looked what I would call physically senile. The man was living on nerves, dubious medicaments, and driving willpower. Sometimes even the willpower seemed to slacken. Then suddenly it would flash again with the old drive and fury.
These pages follow the grim career of Adolf Hitler from his modest origins to the pinnacle of power, and trace the downward curve of the descent to his death and that of the Nazi Party, recording the havoc and destruction that was heaped on Russia and Europe by the Führer’s armies – and on Germany itself as a result of his rule.
However, the principal task which confronts any attempt to explain Hitler’s early life and thought is that of disentangling the would-be politician of the early 1920s from the penniless dilletante ranting to his cronies in pre-war Vienna. In 1912 Hitler was a nobody, whose fantasies of fame had been rudely shattered. Twelve years later he was a rising politician, a man with a following, whose world view reached many more than his audience of idlers killing time in the reading room of a Men’s Home to which his poverty had driven him. Adolf Hitler had a story to tell, and few would emerge in later years to challenge him on the facts.
The pre-1914 Hitler was, seemingly, a man with no political ambitions but with a mind nevertheless attuned to the turbulent cross-currents threatening to swamp the ailing Austro-Hungarian ship of state: Pan-Germanism and its antagonism towards the empire’s Slav population; anti-Semitism, sometimes casual, often deep-dyed, which was part and parcel of nationalist politics; and a deep suspicion of both the Catholic Church and of Social Democracy.
The post-1918 Hitler, however, nationalist, xenophobe and zealot, was possessed by high ambition and greed for absolute power. With absolute determination and a gift for oratory, he watered the seeds of hatred that would result in catastrophe for millions.
Adolf Hitler, contradictory and mercurial, was in the end a destroyer who left only chaos and misery behind him.
In the early twenty-first century we are still living with his toxic legacy.
Robin Cross, Kent 2009