Any understanding of Adolf Hitler has to begin by acknowledging the fact that he was extravagantly admired and even worshipped by millions of normal people for more than a decade. Of course Leni Riefenstahl staged the camera angles and tracking shots for films like Triumph of the Will—in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans were shown in transports of delight over their Führer—but no one suggests that the people she was filming were acting, like extras on a film set. It was really happening, and it went on for years. Hitler was accorded adoration to a degree seldom seen for any politician before or since.
Yet despite this prolonged hero worship by millions, which continued even after it was apparent that he was losing the most devastating war in human history, the focus of it all, Adolf Hitler, was himself a completely mediocre individual. Because he was the central figure of the first half of the twentieth century—perhaps even the emblematic individual of that terrible century of resentment, hatred, violence, and cruelty—one could be forgiven for assuming that he must be intrinsically interesting as a person. He simply was not. Physically unprepossessing; with a relatively high IQ but a mind that worked on extremely narrow tramlines; incapable of normal one-on-one human interaction on the basis of equality; uncomfortable in anything approaching debate or discussion; a terrible know-it-all, bore, and conspiracy theorist; absolutely no sense of humor; very little traveled, even in Europe—even when he dominated Europe—Adolf Hitler was a nullity as a human being. (He was also a vegetarian teetotal nonsmoker; maybe one or possibly two of those afflictions might be acceptable, but he had all three.) He had absolutely no sense of self-awareness; was immensely boastful (even worse than Mussolini); a bad prose stylist; and, as it turned out, a useless military strategist. Even as an orator, where he was successful when playing on the resentments of his people, it is easy now to spot the rhetorical gimmicks he used.
So why was this pathetic excuse for a human being—the kind of person you would pass in the street without noticing, rather than actively crossing the street to avoid—worshipped to distraction for well over a decade by the people of the most socially and scientifically advanced state in continental Europe, even as he deliberately plunged it into the second global war in a generation? And once that war had started, why did so many people follow him to the bitter end? Why, by their own admission, did so many generals who had visited him to tell him that the war was lost come away convinced by him and ready to make further efforts to try to win it?
Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly charismatic, but charisma is a harlot’s trick. Babies are not born charismatic; one can choose to acquire charisma, and when you had geniuses of the talent of Joseph Goebbels in charge of propaganda, Albert Speer organizing the mass rallies and their architectural backdrops, and Leni Riefenstahl in charge of the lights, action, and cameras, it proved possible to turn this entirely mediocre man into a charismatic superstar, especially when he himself had been thinking carefully about how it could be done. He would use little ruses, such as staring into people’s eyes without blinking, and never being photographed wearing spectacles or a bathing suit. His deliberate policy of not marrying Eva Braun until the day before his and her suicides was intended to increase his allure to German womanhood—he received thousands of love letters and proposals of marriage from Aryan Mädchen during his rule. The method he used in his speeches of gradually and imperceptibly increasing the tempo and volume as the oration went on, while shortening the words and sentences, created an excitement in his audience that contributed to his charisma. Above all, his totalitarian control of all news outlets in the Reich meant that he could be presented as a charismatic near deity continually for twelve years through the radio and newspapers. When a lie is told often enough, loudly enough, and without contradiction, it ultimately tends to be believed in the absence of obvious evidence to the contrary.
It certainly wasn’t his writing ability that made Hitler so attractive to the German Volk. Mein Kampf is repetitive, discursive, and very heavy going, even more boring than Das Kapital. Hitler exposes himself in it as a poor man’s Nietzsche without Nietzche’s capacity for epigram, who tried to extend Darwinism into politics in a way that Darwin himself would have dismissed out of hand. The phraseology of Mein Kampf is such that there’s hardly a memorable, quotable sentence in the entire book, which is astonishing considering its author’s role in the twentieth century and that this was his central testament.
Fortunately, we know what Adolf Hitler was thinking privately during the central part of the war, as well as what he was willing to say publicly. Night after night at the Berghof at Berchtesgaden in Obersalzburg, and also at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia, he would keep his guests and hangers-on up until the early hours of the morning with endless monologues, and from September 1941 to the end of 1942 it was all dutifully taken down by Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party chancellery, and transcribed after the war by the great British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, under the title Hitler’s Table Talk.
This book contains the Führer’s theories and thoughts about everything imaginable. As they sat up there in the Bavarian Alps, as the logs burned in the gargantuan fireplaces in the vast hall-like dining rooms and drawing rooms, with their hideous art on the walls and with chairs placed yards away from one another, Hitler would talk and talk and everyone in the room would listen and nod and laugh deferentially on cue at his attempts at jokes. Nowhere in the 745 pages is anyone ever recorded as questioning, interrupting, or disagreeing with him—as he came out with one utterly weird idea after another.
Here, therefore, are some of Hitler’s beliefs, taken from his own mouth, as vouchsafed to his adoring entourage, without addition or deletion by anyone, especially not Bormann, who clearly believed they were insights of surpassing genius worth saving for posterity.
“It is enough for a Czech to grow a mustache for anyone to see, from the way it droops, that his origin is Mongolian,” Hitler stated in January 1942.1 “It has been proved that a vegetarian diet—and particularly a diet of potato peelings and raw potatoes—will cure beri-beri within a week,” he told his courtiers on another occasion of the severe thiamine deficiency disease then found in Africa.2 He also believed he knew what dogs were thinking, saying that “when a dog looks in front of him in a vague fashion and with clouded eyes, one knows that images of the past are chasing each other through his memory.”3 Hitler also gave vent to dozens of curious antipathies, for example to the grass lawns found on English country estates, which for some reason he loathed.
“Like chamois, girls are rare in the mountains,” he said of his native Austria. “I must say, I admire those lads who tramp for hours through the night, carrying a heavy ladder and running the risk of being badly bitten by the watchdog—or having a bucket of cold water thrown over them for their pains! . . . In Austria it is in Carinthia that these happy practices are most prevalent, and it is there one finds the loveliest maids!”4 He claimed that one of the reasons that he was so physically hardy was that his father kept bees, which often used to sting him. It wasn’t unusual for his mother to take forty or fifty bee stings out of his father after he’d visited the hives, because his father refused to wear the protective gear and relied on smoking a cigar to protect him, despite ample daily evidence that it did not work.
A recurring feature of the Führer’s table talk was grinding, unrelenting misogyny. The reason he preferred buffets to sit-down dinners was that in the latter, where there was placement, “one is afflicted the whole evening with the same female neighbour.” He said he always preferred a stupid “kitchen-frau” to an intelligent woman. “Nobody like Wagner has had the luck to be entirely understood by a woman,” he said.5 “A woman who loves her husband lives only for his sake.”6 On another occasion he told his listeners, “I detest women who dabble in politics. And if their dabbling extends to military matters, it becomes utterly unendurable. In no local section of the Party has a woman ever had the right to hold even the smallest post.”7
Women had only four roles in life as far as Hitler was concerned: motherhood, primary school teaching, charitable works, and interior decoration. “A man who shouts is not a handsome sight, but if it’s a woman it’s terribly shocking,” he once said with staggering hypocrisy, considering the decibel levels his own speeches attained. “The more she uses her lungs the more strident her voice becomes.”8 On March 10, 1942, Hitler claimed that “man’s universe is vast compared with that of woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. . . . Woman’s universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that’s why she’s capable of loving so deeply.”9 On the same evening he also said, “I never read a novel. That kind of reading annoys me.”10 It was not that as Reichschancellor he had no time to read novels, but the entire world of fiction, that is, of the human imagination, annoyed him.
There were also endless predictions, virtually none of which ever came to pass. “England and America will one day have a war with one another, which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable,” he said. “One of the two countries will have to disappear.” On another occasion: “It will be a German-British army that will chase the Americans from Iceland.”11 Hitler made many long-term predictions about the world over page after page of his table talk and got almost every single one of them wrong.
Virtually every conversation recorded by Bormann contains references to Jews, about whom he believed all the standard anti-Semitic tropes of course, but also several extra ones that are not to be found even in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “No beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate,” Hitler claimed of Jews in April 1942. “Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia.”12 He was convinced that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was Jewish: “The completely negroid appearance of his wife is also a clear indication that she, too, is a half-caste,” he said.13 He particularly disliked Jewish philanthropists: “They become philanthropists,” he complained in January 1942, “they endow foundations. When a Jew does that, the thing is particularly noticed—for it’s known that they’re dirty dogs. As a rule, it’s the most rascally of them who do that sort of thing. And then you’ll hear those poor Aryan boobies telling you: ‘You see; there are good Jews!’”14
Hitler’s hatred of Jews could not abide the clear archaeological fact that they had a long lineage in ancient Palestine, so he proclaimed a belief in “a disaster that completely destroyed a humanity which already possessed a higher degree of civilization. The fragments of our prehistory are perhaps only reproductions of objects belonging to a more distant past. . . . What is there to prove to us that the stone axe we rediscover was really an invention of those who used it? It seems to me more likely that this object is a reproduction in stone of an axe that previously existed in some other material.”15 He thought it was likely that “the civilization that existed before the disaster” flourished in the three quarters of the Earth covered by the oceans. Belief in Atlantis often goes hand in hand with nutty sci-fi beliefs, and sure enough the Führer had plenty of them, too.
“It’s not impossible, in fact,” he told his surely by now incredulous listeners, “that ten thousand years before our era there was a clash between the earth and the moon that gave the moon its present orbit. . . . One can imagine that, before this accident, man could live at any altitude—for the simple reason that he was not subject to the constraint of atmospheric pressure.”16 Any of his listeners with the barest smidgen of scientific knowledge must have known this to be tripe, but there is no indication that any wanted to risk a one-way trip to Dachau by contradicting him. It is the kind of thing that mentally disturbed people used to write in green ink to newspapers, along with their theories that the Vatican, CIA, and Bilderbergers were in a secret conspiracy to prevent the world from discovering what really happened in Roswell in 1947. The closest modern analogies to what Hitler was spouting night after night might be the ravings of Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana or David Koresh in Waco, except this man was in overall control of a modern industrial economy, the most powerful country in Europe with huge offensive military capacity.
Hitler’s acolytes stayed up till the early hours of the morning, night after night, listening to all of this, only rarely saying anything during these endless solipsistic monologues, and then usually only to move the conversation on to another topic rather than to question anything he had said. In a democracy, if one’s boss starts to tell you that he can read dogs’ minds, that a higher civilization once existed in regions under the sea, that young men routinely wandered around Carinthia at night carrying ladders on the off-chance of being able to seduce local girls, that Jews cannot feel the cold, and that potato peelings can cure virulent tropical diseases, there are steps that can be taken to marginalize him. Yet in Nazi Germany one could only internalize the feeling that maybe this man’s plan to invade Russia—the largest country in the world, a country twice the size of Europe—was not so brilliant after all. Some generals tried to blow him up in July 1944, of course, but no one in his entourage seems to have ever tried to contradict him or even ask for evidence to back up his ludicrous theories.
One of the reasons that Hitler’s intellect was so mediocre, and prey to such moronic ideas and almost every conspiracy theory going, was that he would not take any notice of anything created by Jews. He ignored or denounced the product of centuries of civilization if it had been originally thought or written or painted or composed by Jews. The lacunae in his understanding and appreciation of history and culture were, therefore, vast.
He was also a terrible show-off. Obviously it is something of a prerequisite for fascist—or any—dictators to be monomaniacal, but Hitler’s endless boasting was extraordinary even by those standards. Having no one to contradict him in his immediate circle meant that he could make outlandish claims about himself, always to his own vainglory. Of his schoolteachers he said: “I was not a model pupil, but none of them has forgotten me. What a proof of my character!” On another occasion: “I haven’t been ill since I was sixteen,” which he put down to his superior willpower and the fact that he wore lederhosen all year round as a child.17 In pretty much all his anecdotes he came out on top, defeating everyone with his brilliance.
He only once came out badly from one of his own stories, and that was the one he told about the only time in his life he had ever been drunk. It was the night he received his school certificate, signifying that he had passed his exams. He and his friends drank a quart (that is, 2 pints or 0.94 liter) of wine and at dawn the next morning—after being waked by a milkmaid on her way to work—he found he had lost his certificate. “In the absentmindedness of intoxication,” he recalled during World War II, “I had confused the precious parchment with lavatory paper.” When he reached the school he found to his dismay that “my certificate had been brought back to the school, but torn into four pieces, and in a somewhat inglorious condition. . . . I was overwhelmed.”18 He was told off by his teacher and still felt embarrassed about the incident decades later. Yet even in this trivially sordid tale he somehow won out ultimately, boasting: “I made a promise to myself that I would never get drunk again, and I’ve kept my promise.”
So why was this absurd, mediocre, boorish, self-regarding, physically unprepossessing excuse for an Aryan superman so popular for so long? There are a number of reasons: He was thought to be selfless, not personally corrupt. Many Germans believed the racial theory of their own superiority, hence the importance of the Nazis’ explanation—the Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back myth) by which the defeat of the German Army on the western front in 1918 was blamed on Jews, Communists, defeatists, aristocrats, and Untermenschen (subhumans) back home in Germany. The German people were longing for an excuse for their defeat on the western front that was not based on the truth—that their armies had been overwhelmed and categorically routed on the field of battle by the Allies in the late summer and fall of 1918. Any account—however implausible—that blamed others for the catastrophe would be a vindication for them, one that they clutched at psychologically, however irrational it sounded. By blaming everyone other than the German Army for the defeat, Hitler was fulfilling a profound craving for the German people—the Volk—that even they themselves did not appreciate they needed. It is the principal explanation for why such a lazy and essentially mediocre man was able to command the German people for so long. In that, and of course the efficiency of the German general staff before and during the Second World War, lies the reason why Hitler was able to achieve so many of his goals up to the fall of Stalingrad to the Soviets in February 1943. He tightened his grip on the strategic aspects of the war only when things were starting to go wrong, which was precisely the time that he ought to have given a longer rein to those commanders who understood far more about military strategy than he—career soldiers such as Gerd von Rundstedt, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel.
In the 1930s, the right resented Jewish involvement in Berlin politics, and Hitler adopted the views and policies of the paramilitary Freikorps groups, which had many ideas—about anti-Semitism, the Dolchstosslegende, the use of the swastika, and the title Führer—that existed long before the Nazi Party. The Freikorps grew up after the defeat in 1918 as a result of the political and social dislocation of Germany, and were right-wing nationalist militias, to which several future Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler, Gregor Strasser, and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, had all belonged. Hitler took much of his anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalistic, and revolutionary ideology from the Freikorps.
While still in the army, working as an intelligence agent in 1919, Hitler was ordered to infiltrate the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party), which soon afterward changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP, known as the Nazi Party). He became its fifty-fifth member and an effective public speaker for it, and quickly became enamored of its ideology, which closely mirrored the Freikorps’ and which he began to shape himself. In July 1921, having recognized he had a talent for oratorical techniques that allowed him to play on the myriad resentments of defeated ex-soldiers, Hitler became its leader. The key moment for his rise, however, was the attempted Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923, in which four policemen and sixteen Nazis were killed. A heroic myth was built up around the putsch, with anniversary reenactments, flags, relics, icons, the “Horst Wessel Song,” and so on. The cryptoreligious imagery and icons were a deliberate attempt to form a movement in which Hitler was the prophet, but it needed a bible. Hitler’s short and comfortable incarceration in Landsberg Prison gave him the ideal opportunity to hone the ideology and write Mein Kampf, which argued that “those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”19
By May 1928 the Nazis were still getting only 2.6 percent of the vote. Hitler openly called for the destruction of thirty other political parties in the late 1920s, but no one took any notice. What propelled Hitler to power was something that Americans did in New York rather than anything he himself had failed to do in Munich. Because of the Wall Street crash, and the Great Depression that followed it, the German economy was subjected to another bout of hyperinflation, on top of the one that had devastated it earlier in the decade. Capitalism was thought to have failed, and as so often happens during periods of high unemployment, people turned to political parties of the extreme right and left. By 1932 the Nazis were the biggest political party in Germany. President Hindenburg had dismissively called Hitler the Bohemian corporal, but Hitler turned down his offer of becoming vice chancellor under the former general staff officer Franz von Papen. In January the following year, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, with Papen as his vice chancellor.
Despite being loved by the German people, Hitler never lost his hatred. Such adulation and success might in others have lessened their fury at the world, but not him. He defined his enemies carefully. Less than 1 percent of Germans were Jewish or Communist organizers or Social Democrat politicians. So the overwhelming majority of Germans were never at risk of arrest under the Nazis, at least not until the very final few months of the war, when ordinary Germans were shot in large numbers for defeatism. Furthermore, by concentrating adulation on the head of state for twelve years, rather than on the party itself, Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda system had made it possible to despise Nazis yet admire Hitler. “If only the Führer knew” what was being done by his bad advisers was a common refrain, just as it had been said of the czars in Russia for many decades before the Revolution.
What few Germans knew, or could possibly guess from the propaganda put out by every organ of the media without fear of contradiction, was that their Führer was in fact extremely lazy. He often stayed communing with himself until lunchtime and encouraged competition among his ministers, preferring not to make decisions on domestic policy if they could be put off. After 1938 he stopped holding cabinet meetings altogether, and on occasion his private office would ask cabinet ministers not to give the Führer facts on a subject as he preferred to approach issues with his mind uncluttered by any detailed knowledge of the issues at hand.
There is very little evidence that ordinary Germans particularly wanted a war at any stage between 1933 and its outbreak in 1939, but plenty that they trusted him entirely to do what was best for them, and after resounding coups such as the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 this blind trust seemed justified. By May 1937 Hitler had decided on the need for a war against France: “My generals should want war, war, war.”20 When senior commanders did not agree with him, such as Generals Werner von Blomberg and Werner von Fritsch, he deftly replaced them with others who would go along with his revanchist, expansionist plans.
March 1938 saw the Anschluss with Austria, another coup of staggering proportions. The Nazis nicknamed it Blumenkrieg (the war of flowers) because of the red and white roses that were strewn before Hitler as he drove through Vienna by some of the two hundred thousand Austrians who welcomed him there. Not a shot was fired in Austria as that great and ancient state joined the Third Reich, except by those Jews who committed suicide sooner than flee. According to the retrospective referendum on Anschluss, undertaken under Nazi auspices, in which “Nein” voters could be identified by the authorities, 99.7 percent of Austrians supposedly voted “Ja.” (Just to make sure there was no misinterpretation of what was expected, the “Ja” box was much larger on the ballot paper than the “Nein” one.)
Hitler offered Germans and Austrians an unusual but as it turned out heady combination of hope and hatred. To peoples who had seen defeat and then hyperinflation within a decade, it worked. They hardly needed total immersion in Nazi doctrine, but they got it anyhow. By the time the war broke out an eighteen-year-old German soldier had lived for six years—for the most conscious one third of his life, ever since he was twelve—under a regime of totalitarian indoctrination that was spelled out by Goebbels in meetings with newspaper editors in the phrase “The leadership is always right.”
By the time of the fall of France in June 1940—which had happened largely because of General Erich von Manstein’s brilliant surprise “sickle-cut maneuver” that took fast-moving mobile units through the mountainous Ardennes forest behind the French and British armies to the Channel coast the previous month—Hitler’s chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel was describing the Führer as “the greatest warlord of all time.”21 The Wehrmacht had achieved in six weeks what their fathers and uncles had failed to in the four years between 1914 and 1918. Small wonder they thought themselves invincible, and their Führer infallible. He told his generals that the war was won, and all it now took was for the British to accept they had lost.
Of course Hitler loathed Churchill for his rallying of the British people, accusing him of being an alcoholic, unstable, and a puppet of the Jews. “Churchill is the very type of corrupt journalist,” he told acolytes in February 1942. “There’s no worse prostitute in politics. He’s an utterly amoral, repulsive creature. I’m convinced he has a place of refuge ready beyond the Atlantic. In Canada he’d be beaten up. He’ll go to his friends the Yankees.”22 It was extraordinary that a leader such as Hitler should have come to power at much the same time as ones such as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, considering how completely different Hitler was from the other two. The key lay in the way that Churchill and Roosevelt continually attempted to appeal to the better angels of human nature—to honor, duty, sacrifice, fellow feeling, and so on.
Hitler told his generals about Operation Barbarossa as early as July 31, 1940, while the Battle of Britain was being fought and a full eleven months before he launched it. Nazi ideology rather than sound military strategy underlay it, as his generals ought to have spotted. The desire for Lebensraum (living space) for the German people in the east had been a dream of Hitler’s since he wrote Mein Kampf. With more than half of European Jewry living in the USSR in 1941, he also had to invade the Soviet Union if he was going to annihilate the Jews. Finally, he would be able to have what Goebbels and other Nazis called a final reckoning with the Bolsheviks. Despite the fact that Hitler could have launched Barbarossa in 1942 or 1943, once Britain had been chased out of the Middle East (where 80 percent of her oil came from) or starved through an upgraded U-boat campaign, Hitler’s restless ideological need encouraged him to launch the attack far too early. Yet hardly any of his generals balked at it.
Although his attack on Russia was premature, in another sense it was slightly too late. Because Hitler perceived a need to punish Yugoslavia and Greece for showing pro-British sentiment in the spring of 1941, he lost six vital weeks subjugating those two countries, which would have been invaluable before the winter closed down the Battle of Moscow toward the end of the year. Nonetheless, the early successes of Barbarossa were stunning. The Wehrmacht covered two hundred miles in the opening week of the campaign, with Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre capturing Minsk on July 9. On October 3, 1941, Hitler announced the defeat of the Red Army in a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast with the words “I can say that this enemy is already broken and will not rise again.”23
Such hubris led Hitler to make a cardinal error, diverting large forces south from Operation Typhoon—the capture of Moscow—into Ukraine instead. Although he was to capture Kiev and Kharkov, these were minor victories compared with what the capture of Moscow would have achieved. When one adds his other terrible strategic errors—trying to capture the Caucasus and reach the Volga simultaneously; not retreating from Stalingrad once encirclement looked a possibility; attacking at the Battle of Kursk far too late and once the Soviets were fully prepared; falling for the Allies’ deception during Operation Overlord and then not reacting fast enough once the truth became evident; allowing half a million men to be killed, wounded, or captured during Operation Bagration in July 1944; and so on—one realizes that quite apart from the overwhelming moral issue, Hitler did not deserve to win the war on grounds of military competence. Although of course his generals tried to blame Germany’s defeat entirely on Hitler after his death, whereas they were often willing accomplices in it, it is clear from the transcriptions of the Führer’s conferences that Hitler held a tight daily grip on all strategic aspects of the war from the moment that victory started to seem elusive in the late summer of 1942 until the end.
That Germany nevertheless conquered so much of Europe was a tribute to the capacities of the Wehrmacht. In less than eight weeks in the summer of 1942, it crossed more than five hundred miles in southeast Russia, reaching the Volga in August, which was a full fourteen hundred miles from Berlin. “No human being can remove us from this place,” Hitler boasted on September 30.24 He was wrong again, and in this case the human being’s name was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who commanded the Soviet southwestern front and coordinated the encirclement of Stalingrad.
Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, came partly as a result of his wild underestimation of American productive capacity, which is all the more extraordinary considering Hitler’s Second Book, the sequel to Mein Kampf that he never published, in which he wrote extensively about the might of American industry. Moreover, the United States was uninvadable territory for the Wehrmacht. The sheer lack of a long-term strategy seems yet another schoolboy error in Hitler’s Weltanshauung (worldview). “It goes without saying that we have no affinities with the Japanese,” Hitler said in early 1942, yet only four days after Pearl Harbor he had thrown in his lot with them against the world’s leading industrial power.25
The Holocaust must be counted as another economic and military error, as well as the foulest crime in the history of mankind. Holocaust deniers who quite correctly point out that there is no single document carrying Hitler’s signature that authorized the Holocaust all too often and conveniently ignore that there are certainly words from his lips that do precisely that, again and again and again. At noon on October 21, 1941, Hitler said of the Jews to his entourage, “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”26 Four days later, speaking to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, he said, “From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of the war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. . . . It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumour attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”27 Similarly, on December 18, 1941, at a meeting with Himmler, he ordered the systemization of the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed, but after that meeting the killing was to be industrialized. On February 22, 1942, Hitler added, “We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.”28
In wartime, therefore, Hitler deliberately embarked on the destruction of a well-educated and hardworking section of the German population at precisely the period when the number of Germans engaged in industrial production fell from thirty-nine million in 1939 to twenty-nine million in 1944. Hitler had been awarded one of his Iron Crosses by the Jewish adjutant of his Bavarian Reserve regiment in the Great War; he knew that Jews made fine soldiers. Yet he deliberately committed financial and military resources to exterminating the race that even a glance at the list of Nobel laureates should have told him Germany desperately needed in its existential struggle.
When Berlin was bombed, Hitler eschewed the Churchillian leadership technique of visiting the bomb sites to enthuse the local populace; instead, he drew the curtains of his Daimler-Benz and drove past the incontrovertible physical evidence of Hermann Goering’s lies that no British bomb would fall on the capital. In November 1942 Hitler learned that the Sixth Army had been surrounded in Stalingrad, but he believed Goering’s vainglorious boasting that he could resupply it from the air, just as two years earlier he had accepted Goering’s assurances that the Luftwaffe could prevent the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, without the need to commit the panzers. Hitler was a cynic in many ways, but for some unknown reason he kept believing Goering.
It is untrue to say that Hitler was constitutionally incapable of ordering strategic withdrawals. In 1944 three major ones were undertaken from the south of France, southeastern Europe, and western Latvia (the last by sea)—although not from Courland because he believed Admiral Karl Dönitz, who said the war could be won by a new kind of U-boat, which he needed to dock on the Courland coastline. But in late 1942 he sent out Führerbefehlen (Führer’s orders) to Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus demanding no retreat at Stalingrad, and when Paulus surrendered on February 2, 1943, it ultimately cost the Axis a quarter of a million men. Hitler never spoke in public again, only on the radio and then very rarely, leaving public speaking to Goebbels instead. When Churchill was hardly ever off the radio for long, the Germans heard next to nothing from Hitler from the fall of Stalingrad until his final broadcast of January 1945, except for his 1944 speech after the failure of the July 20 plot, when he claimed his survival had been the work of “Providence.”29 In that last speech in January 1945, with the Red Army at the River Oder only forty miles away, he claimed he would win victory through his “unalterable will.”
On March 19, 1945, Hitler issued his notorious Führerbefehl officially titled “Demolitions on Reich Territory” but known to history as the Nerobefehl (Nero Order). As early as January 1942 he had been saying, “If the German people lost its faith, if the German people were no longer inclined to give itself body and soul in order to survive—then the German people would have nothing to do but disappear!”30 By early spring of 1945, Hitler gave orders for the destruction of Germany. He had become a Teutonophobe who wanted to destroy Germany because it had failed to live up to his expectations for it.
“All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots,” the order read, “as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.”31 Thankfully, these terrible orders—which would have sent Germany back into much the same kind of preindustrial agrarian society that was envisioned by the Allies’ momentary aberration known as the Morgenthau Plan of 1943—were ignored, principally by Albert Speer. (Similarly, the German general Dietrich von Choltitz the previous year had refused to blow up the Eiffel Tower.)
Down in the bunker below the Reichschancellery, Hitler meanwhile spent time with his vast model of what his home city of Linz would look like after his victory. (His parents’ bodies were going to be disinterred from their graves and reinterred in an enormous bell tower.) The Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University has a copy of the marriage certificate for Hitler’s wedding to his girlfriend, Eva Braun, at 4:00 P.M. on Sunday, April 29, 1945. Hitler’s signature was smaller, shakier, and scratchier than on earlier documents, but Eva Braun’s was bold and confident. This was the day her “Adi” was going to make an honest woman of her, after all.
Walter Wagner, the district marriage registrar, confirmed that “the persons mentioned under numbers 1 [Adolf Hitler] and 2 [Eva Braun] state that they are of pure Aryan descent and that they are not afflicted with inheritable diseases which would exclude them from marriage. . . . They also ask to accept an oral publication of the banns and to disregard all legal delays.”32 Wagner then asked, “Eva Braun, are you willing to take our Führer, Adolf Hitler, as your husband?” She most certainly was. They killed themselves just less than twenty-four hours later—at 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945.
Despite charisma’s being something that people are able to manufacture—as with Hitler—we also know genuinely charismatic people in our own lives—teachers who inspired us, bosses who led us, truly remarkable people whom we would trust with our lives. Thank God such people do exist, because sometimes society depends upon them. Yet for all the huge effect Hitler had on the twentieth century, and for all the work put into trying to make him appear charismatic, Adolf Hitler was not such a person. His charisma was artificial and his personality that of a banal, soulless little weirdo with a lot of theories that today wouldn’t have stood up to scrutiny in a single, serious half-hour radio or television interview. The deaths of seven million Germans, thirty-four million Allies, six million Jews, and so many others stemmed from the perverse ideas of one of life’s utter mediocrities. The pity of it all is beyond description and explanation.