PEOPLE have tried many times to find in Hitler’s psychological make-up an explanation for the part he played in history. We now know a great deal about Hitler. Nevertheless, neither vengeful rage, nor a love of cakes with whipped cream, nor a sinister ability to play on the basest instincts of the crowd, nor a love of dogs, nor a combination of paranoia and furious energy, nor an inclination towards mysticism, nor intelligence combined with a memory of great power, nor a fickle capriciousness in his choice of favourites, nor cruel treachery and the exalted sentimentality that accompanied it, nor any number of other traits—some ordinary, some exceedingly repulsive—can ever be enough to explain what he achieved.
Hitler came to power because, after the First World War, as the country inclined towards fascism, Germany needed such a man.
After being defeated in 1918, Germany was looking for Hitler, and she found him.
Nevertheless, a knowledge of Hitler’s character will help us to understand the process by which he became the head of the Nazi state.
In his life, in his character and in everything Hitler did, there was one important constant: failure. Astonishingly, it was his repeated failures that constituted the foundation for his success. A mediocre student, who twice failed the entrance exams for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts; a failure in his relationships with women; a failed politician, who began his political career as an intelligence agent for the German army, informing on the activities of the party he later went on to lead.
Deep in his heart he always felt the uncertainty of a young man who did badly at school and who, in a world of free competition, was denied entry into even the most modest provincial artistic circles.
Failure propels people along many different paths. It drives some to a state of sullen resignation and others to religious mysticism. Some fall into despair; others turn embittered and envious; others become hypocrites, adopting a false air of humility; still others become suspicious and timid. Some start manically concocting the most hare-brained plans. Some find security in sterile contempt, some in wild ambition; others turn to robbery and crime.
Both before and after he came to power Hitler was essentially the same person—a petty bourgeois, a philistine and a failure; the immense power he wielded allowed him to display on a pan-European stage all the propensities of an embittered, mistrustful, vindictive and treacherous psyche. The peculiarities of his character brought about the death of millions.
Hitler’s coming to power did not in any way lessen his sense of inferiority, which was too deeply rooted. His apparent arrogance was no more than a mask.
Hitler embodied and gave expression to the peculiarities of a German state broken by the First World War.
For five or six decades the German state had known little but failure. Its striving towards world mastery had led nowhere. German imperialism had failed to win markets by peaceful means.
In 1914, attempting to win markets by other means, Germany began a war—but this too proved a failure. The German strategy of swift strikes and pincer movements proved misguided, and the German army was defeated.
Meanwhile, Adolf Schicklgruber,44 still unnoticed by anyone, was setting out on his own path of failure, parallel to Germany’s. Hatred of freedom, hatred of social and racial equality, were becoming ever more important to him.
His appeal to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and master race coincided with Germany’s turn, after its repeated experience of failure, to the idea of some wild and criminal super-supremacy. The ideas adopted by Hitler, as he trod his little path, were exactly what the defeated country needed. We can now see more clearly than ever that the superman is born of the despair of the weak, not from the triumph of the strong. The ideas of individual liberty, internationalism, the social equality of all workers—these are the ideas of people confident in the power of their own minds and the creative force of their own labour. The only form of violence countenanced by these ideas is the violence inflicted by Prometheus on his chains.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that equality benefits only the weak, that progress in the world of nature is achieved solely through the destructive force of natural selection, and that the only possible basis for human progress is racial selection, the dictatorship of race. He confused the concepts of violence and strength. He saw the vicious despair of impotence as a strength and failed to recognize the strength of free human labour. He saw the man sowing a vast wheat field as inferior to the thug who smashes him over the back of the head with a crowbar.
This is the philosophy of a loser who has fallen into despair, who is unable to achieve anything through labour but who is endowed with a strong mind, ferocious energy and a burning ambition.
This philosophy of inner impotence, to which so many reactionary German minds succumbed, was in accord with the philosophy of industrial and national impotence that had seized hold of the country as a whole. This philosophy proved equally attractive to individual dregs and failures, unable to achieve anything through their own labour, and to a state that had begun a war with the aim of world domination and ended it with the Treaty of Versailles.
So, from the failures of Schicklgruber was born the success of Hitler; so Hitler’s inner impotence led directly to his years of brief, terrible, senseless power over the nations of Europe. His understanding of post-war Germany was unsophisticated yet penetrating, and in his quest for power he was able to draw on a reckless energy and a wild demagogic fury. He managed to bring together the personal amorality of post-war Germany’s many losers—shopkeepers, officers, waiters, even some despairing industrial workers—with the state amorality of a defeated imperialist power, ready to follow a path of unabashed criminality. More consistently than any ruler in history, he appealed to the basest of human instincts, to which he himself was in thrall; he was born of these instincts and, day after day, he helped bring them to birth in others. But he also knew the power of virtue and morality—and he saw it all the more clearly for being a stranger to it. He knew how to appeal to mothers and fathers, to the feelings of farmers and workers. He suppressed the resistance of the revolutionary forces of the German working class and he made short shrift of the democratic intelligentsia. He silenced all dissent, transforming Germany into an intellectual desert.
He deceived many who might have stood against him; they mistook his lies for truth, and his hysteria for sincerity. They saw his religion of hatred as a love of Germany, his powerful animal logic as a token of genius, and his criminal dictatorship as a promise of freedom.
Even after assuming unlimited power, Hitler sensed that he still remained weaker than those whom he hated. He knew that, however many people he had managed to deceive, the constructive, creative forces of German labour and the German people did not stand behind him. He saw that neither hunger, nor slavery, nor the camps, nor any other abuse of power could grant him a sense of superiority over those he had defeated through violence. Then, in the grip of the most powerful hatred on earth—the hatred a conqueror bears towards the indestructible strength of those he has conquered—he began murdering millions of people.
His powerlessness manifested itself in many ways. He lied to the German people, saying that his aim was to combat the unjust provisions of the Treaty of Versailles while in reality he was preparing an unjust war. He deceived 2 million unemployed, giving them work building roads of military importance while persuading them that this heralded the beginning of an era of peaceful prosperity. Post-war Germany had been like the deranged mechanism of a large clock, with hundreds of cogwheels and levers spinning, whirring and clicking at random and to no purpose. Hitler’s role was to be the malign cog that united all the disparate parts of this mechanism: the despair of the hungry, the viciousness of the rabble, a thirst for military revenge, a bleeding, inflamed sense of German nationhood and the general fury at the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles.
To begin with, Hitler was no more than a splinter of wood, floating with the current, then snatched up, as if by a wave, by the post-war dream of military revenge. Then, in 1923 he struck lucky; Emil Kirdorf, the devilish old coal-king of the Ruhr, became his financial backer.45 This was at a time when Hitler and his entire National Socialist Party could fit inside a Munich beer hall or the cells of a Munich prison.
Tragically, many people believed that by working for Hitler, they were working for Germany. Through violence, treachery and deceit, he was able to exploit German science, German technology and the enthusiasm of German youth. He enabled the whole vast national mechanism to function once more—by declaring that German capitalists without markets and German workers without work were, in reality, a super-race, destined for power and glory. He was able to give complete expression to the paradigm of a fascist state.
And so it came about that Hitler’s failures were the precondition of his success. As head of the fascist state, he was swept onto the world stage. At first, he was the instrument of individuals, then of unimportant and isolated groups, and then of industrial barons and the German General Staff. Finally, he became the instrument of the principal reactionary forces of world politics.
But in the summer days of 1942 he thought of himself, with a secret, slightly furtive joy, as the embodiment of free, all-powerful will. At times he imagined himself as immortal. There was nothing he could not do. He dismissed the idea of any kind of reciprocity between himself and the world. He was blind to the huge forces that determine the course of events. He did not see that by the time of his greatest success and seemingly most absolute freedom of action, when his will alone appeared to determine whether his battering ram would fall on the West or the East—he did not see that, by this time, he had become a slave. In August 1942, it seemed that his will was being realized, that he was indeed inflicting on Soviet Russia the deadly blow he had spoken about to Mussolini at their 29 April meeting in Salzburg. He did not understand—nor did he ever understand—that his will was no longer free; it was his absolute lack of free will that had led him to embark on a campaign where every additional kilometre of conquered territory brought the fascist empire closer to its end.
Physicists usually feel free to ignore the infinitesimally small value that expresses the earth’s gravitational attraction to a stone. They do not deny the theoretical reality of this attraction, but it is only the stone’s gravitational attraction to the earth that they need take into practical account. Hitler, at the height of his success, wanted to do the opposite; he wanted to ignore the gravitational attraction of a stone, or a grain of sand, to the earth. A mere grain of sand himself, he wanted to restructure the world according to the laws of his own will and intuition.
The only means at his disposal was violence. Violence towards states and nations; violence in the education of children; violence towards thought and labour, with regard to art, science and every emotion. Violence—the violence of one man over another, of one nation over another, of one race over another—was declared a deity.
In this deification of violence Hitler was looking for supreme power; instead, he toppled Germany into an abyss of impotence.
Never had the world seen such a glorification of racial purity. Defending the purity of German blood was proclaimed a sacred mission. Yet never in all German history was there more mixing of blood than during the years of the Third Reich, with vast numbers of foreign slaves flooding German factories and villages.
Hitler believed that the state he had created, founded on unprecedented violence, would endure for a thousand years.
But the millstones of history were already at work. Everything of Hitler’s would be ground to dust: his ideas, his armies, his Reich, his party, his science and his pitiful arts, his field marshals and gauleiters, he himself and the future of Germany. None of Hitler’s failures proved more catastrophic than his success. None brought more suffering to mankind.
Everything Hitler proclaimed was overturned by the course of history. Not one of his promises was fulfilled. Everything he fought against grew stronger and put down deeper roots.
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There is more than one path by which an individual can take their place on the stage of history and remain in the memory of mankind. Not everyone goes through the main door, following the path of genius, labour and reason. Some slip quietly through a half-open side entrance; others break in at night; others are simply swept onto the world stage by a wave of events.
The measure of a historical figure’s true greatness is their ability to divine and give expression to a central, though still barely visible, line of human development, a line that will determine the evolution of human society for generations to come. Someone with this ability is like an experienced swimmer; at first, they appear to be swimming against the current, but, as they swim on, it becomes clear that the opposing forces were mere eddies and backwaters. With perseverance, they get the better of these surface currents. Their own strength and the deepest, most powerful current then join together and the swimmer is able to move freely and powerfully.
Many years—and many miles—later, this current in turn comes to seem secondary. Another swimmer, another great figure appears, able to sense in the hidden depths the first stirrings of some powerful new movement.
A swimmer of this kind, able to distinguish between the false and the real, between surface eddies and the mainstream of history, is no mere splinter of wood. He is, of course, moved by the currents, but he decides for himself which to fight and which to follow. And with the passage of time it becomes clear to almost everyone that he has followed the truest and most important current.
The path followed by the blind madmen of history is very different.
Can we call someone a great man if he has not brought into people’s lives a single atom of good, a single atom of freedom and intelligence?
Can we call someone a great man if he has left behind him only ashes, ruins and congealed blood, only poverty and the stench of racism, only the graves of the countless children and old people he has killed?
Can we call someone a great man because his unusual intelligence, able to detect and co-opt every dark and reactionary force, proved as virulent and destructive as the bacteria of bubonic plague?
The twentieth century is a critical and dangerous time for humanity. It is time for intelligent people to renounce, once and for all, the thoughtless and sentimental habit of admiring a criminal if the scope of his criminality is vast enough, of admiring an arsonist if he sets fire not to a village hut but to capital cities, of tolerating a demagogue if he deceives not just an uneducated lad from a village but entire nations, of pardoning a murderer because he has killed not one individual but millions.
Such criminals must be destroyed like rabid wolves. We must remember them only with disgust and burning hatred. We must expose their darkness to the light of day.
And if the forces of darkness engender new Hitlers, playing on people’s basest and most backward instincts in order to further new criminal designs against humanity, let no one see in them any trait of grandeur or heroism.
A crime is a crime, and criminals do not cease to be criminals because their crimes are recorded in history and their names are remembered. A criminal remains a criminal; a murderer remains a murderer.
History’s only true heroes, the only true leaders of mankind are those who help to establish freedom, who see freedom as the greatest strength of an individual, a nation or a state, who fight for the equality, in all respects, of every individual, people and nation.