Through the late 1920s and well into the 1930s, foreign governments, journalists and the intellectual ‘elite’ ignored or ridiculed the threat of Hitler. He was simply laughable, beyond the pale.
Stefan Zweig, the bestselling Austrian writer of the time, admitted in his memoir that he and his fellow intellectuals had failed utterly to apprehend the coming maelstrom. ‘The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,’ he wrote. Well into the 1930s, ‘the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement … would inevitably collapse in no time.’1 ‘They took him neither seriously nor literally,’ concluded George Prochnik in an article in the New Yorker.2
In Mein Kampf, Hitler meant what he said. His words were not the ravings of a poser or mere populist, such as Lueger or Schönerer, or any number of fanatics in Bavaria at the time. In Mein Kampf Hitler warned the world what to expect when he seized power: war, persecution, revenge, mass death. He laid it all down with a visceral fury that European governments failed to heed, even after he came to power in 1933.
Among foreign politicians, only Winston Churchill accurately assessed in advance the threat of Hitler. In the Führer, Churchill detected the paranoia of a tyrant and the lawless destroyer of European culture. During his ‘wilderness years’ (1929–38), the British leader repeatedly tried to warn the British government of the malign spirit at large in Germany, notably in his radio broadcasts of November 1934:
Only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly seventy millions of the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war as a glorious exercise, and death in battle as the noblest fate for man. There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by Parliament, or by public opinion …’3
In the transcript to a broadcast the previous night, he had written: ‘In that country all pacifist speeches, all morbid books are forbidden or suppressed, and their authors rigorously imprisoned. From their new table of commandments they have omitted “thou shall not kill”.’4
If Hitler’s political ideas scarcely rose above the level of a beer-hall rant, his multifaceted character was far from ordinary. He possessed a will of iron, a forensic memory, a gift for mass manipulation, and fixative charisma as a public speaker. His violent hatred of the Jews stoked the fires of racial hatred in Germany and around the world, fuelling fascist movements from the Balkans to Great Britain. Though largely a lower middle-class movement, Nazism attracted followers from all social backgrounds; soft-brained English aristocrats found Hitler unusually seductive.
To this day, some claim Hitler was a great, if flawed, leader, crushed by the machinations of others. The historian Joachim Fest asserts that had Hitler died of an assassin’s bullet in 1938 most Germans would remember him today as one of the greatest statesmen their country had produced.5 This astounding remark fails any objective test of ‘greatness’ if the term means a just and enlightened leader.
The inconvenient fact is that by 1938, on Hitler’s orders, the Nazis had viciously consolidated their power, dismantled the legal system, killed off parliamentary democracy, assembled a huge war machine, oppressed ‘non-Aryan’ minorities and erected a one-party dictatorship.
Nor was Hitler the tool of others. Both Marxists and capitalists sought to portray him as the puppet of their opponents, failing to see that Hitler was always his own man, impelling his audiences in the direction he chose through the sheer force of his voice and his irrepressible will.
That is not to say that millions of ordinary Germans approved of the Holocaust – most were unaware of the extent of the Nazis’ crimes, and many of those who knew were indifferent to what they found out;6 it is to say that feelings of violent nationalism and hatred for easily scapegoated minorities were so ingrained in post-war Germany as to facilitate the rise of a politician who articulated, and would later act on, those feelings.
The brutalization of a people, rather than any inherent qualities in Hitler as a man, brought him to power. The First World War debased German society so completely that racist cranks and fascist rabble-rousers were considered ‘rational’ and ‘normal’. As Fest rightly observes, Hitler’s rise to power ‘depended not so much on his demonic traits as on his typical, “normal” characteristics … He was not so much the great contradiction of his age as its mirror image.’7
The First World War did not ‘change’ Hitler; it drew him out. It extrapolated him. And he ran with the memory, distilling and exploiting its essence, as far as it would take him. At every level – psycho logically, emotionally and politically – the war acted like a forge for his character, hammering his embittered mind into a vengeful political machine. Insofar as he personified the forces of hatred and destruction, he personified the war.
His inchoate loathing, his unfocused aggression, his hunt for a culprit, his longing for a role, a ‘fit’, in a world that had rejected him, all coalesced with his fury at Germany’s defeat and its aftermath. Even strategically, the First World War influenced his judgement – in the Second he would disastrously misapply the strategic lessons of the First and grossly underestimate the strength of the Red Army.8
The memory of the humiliation of November 1918 travelled with him like a weeping wound, unhealable, an ever-present reminder of an experience that shaped his thought and action. He was not like most soldiers, of course: Hitler had constantly thrilled to battle, later describing his regiment’s last, doomed offensive action in 1918 as the most ‘stupendous’ experience of his life.9 He passionately loved soldiering, as he always said. He saw something at First Ypres that eluded his fellow men: for Hitler, the soldiers’ sacrifice was not only heroic, it was also necessary, noble and natural.
For young Hitler, the First World War was the final act of ‘the fittest’ in the great drama of the human race, the re-enactment of a vast Teutonic legend from which the Nibelungs would emerge victorious and inherit the earth. When the Germans failed to do so, Hitler identified those he held responsible for the soldiers’ humiliation, and would even describe, in Mein Kampf, their coming punishment.
The war and its aftermath threw him into politics. His memory of the Kindermord, his wounds and gassing, his contempt for the complacency on the home front, his rage against Versailles, his intense idea of himself as a man of destiny and avenger of the army – all served to recast this flint-hearted individual on a political career driven by vengeance and fomented by millions of fellow travellers who had found a man willing to act on their darkest prejudices.
Above all, in mourning the loss of thousands of ‘beardless youths’ at Langemarck in 1914, Hitler would never forgive those he held responsible for Germany’s defeat: the ‘shirkers’, the Jews and socialists who, he claimed, had ‘cunningly dodged death’.10 In largely blaming the Jews, in 1919, for Germany’s ‘stab in the back’, Hitler refused to accept what had been palpably clear to any soldier at the Armistice on 11 November 1918: Germany had lost the war at the front.
The memory lived with the Führer until the very end. In his Berlin bunker he looked back on the First World War as the defining event of his life. He wore his Iron Cross (First Class) at his marriage to Eva Braun on the night of 28/9 April 1945, forty hours before the newlyweds would kill themselves.
The collapse of any society brings forth monsters, to adapt Goya. In this sense, there was nothing uniquely ‘German’ about the Nazis. Hitler and the party he created could have happened anywhere. It is fair to say that Britain, France, America, or any other nation for that matter, left in the same brutalized state as Germany in 1918, would have found their own ‘Führer’, preying on their humiliation and social chaos, and blaming it all on a defenceless minority.
In this light, Hitler was Europe’s creation as much as Germany’s: he sprang from the broken world of Flanders and the Somme, Versailles and hyperinflation. The First World War ploughed a field so barren of hope that Hitler’s murderous manifesto fell on hearts and minds so utterly fraught they were willing to believe in it.
In sum, Hitler was more than the creation of the First World War. In his mind, he was its will and representation, a miracle of survival who imagined he gave voice to the dead, that his howl of hatred spoke for the remains in the mass graves at Langemarck, after a war that had killed 2.5 million German people.
A question often asked is: how could the Nazis have committed their shocking crimes? The conventional moral outrage implicit in the question suggests the Nazis were exceptional – outliers, monsters, freaks, insane. The truth, as we’ve seen, is that Hitler was medically ‘normal’ and completely accountable.
So, too, were most of his staff and the bureaucrats who ran the Nazi instruments of power: ordinary people, in the main, tradesmen and unionists, clerks and bankers, journalists and businessmen, farmers and councillors. Millions of them were persuaded to believe, or were frightened into believing, in the Nazi programme of conquest, racial persecution and German ‘greatness’. When they heard Hitler railing against the Jews, observes Ullrich, ‘hardly anyone seems to have disapproved’.11 Most Germans were not the genocidal automatons of Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, who fell into step with the mass slaughter of their own people. Most conformed to the portrait given here, and in Kershaw, Ullrich and elsewhere, of a broken nation of vengeful soldiers, indifferent functionaries, and a cowed and hungry people.12
The Nazis acted as they did because they genuinely believed in the word of their Führer. The rank and file thought they were building a new society ruled by a higher race, a supreme people. And they did so because they could: the rule of force, party propaganda, European appeasement and, above all, the will of their charismatic leader, legitimized and normalized the hell of Hitler’s Germany.
A more disturbing question is: what could have stopped Hitler? Nothing – not political opposition, foreign intervention, religious forbearance, popular resistance, compassion or the voice of conscience – exerted any restraint on his rise to power.
The tragedy is that Hitler and the Nazis acted with the appeasement, or the complicity, of the world. Encouraged by the blind eyes turned by the few opposing nations and the zealous participation of collaborating ones, the National Socialists reckoned they had received the nod of history. They felt they were acting with political and moral impunity. Goebbels’ outlandish propaganda persuaded a majority of otherwise sentient Germans to think they were part of a quasi-religious movement, on an eternal mission to build a new nation, a good nation.
Without wading too deeply into the thickets of commentary about the ‘normalization’ of the far right in 2016–17, a few points are worth making about Hitler’s legacy.
Were Hitler alive today, it’s a safe bet he would find millions of brawling adherents in the West, many of whom shamelessly flaunt their admiration for him. We need look no further than the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, during which a self-described neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing a young woman, while hundreds of others bore swastikas or the symbols of white nationalist groups such as Vanguard and the Ku Klux Klan and several were seen performing the Nazi salute. In so doing, today’s neo-Nazis unwittingly expose themselves to a devastating charge: by any objective moral test, they are more repellent than the ordinary members of Hitler’s movement, because today’s Nazis go about the grisly business of demonizing whole ‘races’ and religions fully cognisant of the genocidal crimes committed by the man in whose name they act. The same cannot be said of most of the Nazi rank and file in the 1940s, who were ignorant of the existence or the full extent of the Final Solution.
Yet the facts of the Holocaust against the Jews, the death camps, the murder of homosexuals, the disabled and the mentally ill, the medical tests on prisoners and the millions killed in the Second World War on Hitler’s orders don’t seem to persuade the twenty-first century’s Nazis to rethink their affiliation. On the contrary, they revel in it. From Warsaw to Washington, via Athens, Rome, Vienna, Dresden, Paris and London, the self-appointed heirs of National Socialism rally round their home-grown demagogues like hyenas round a carcass, recycling the crudest form of political opportunism, the scapegoat.
Of the many recent examples of violent neo-fascism, two stand out as exceptionally repugnant. Thomas Mair, the murderer of Jo Cox, a British MP and pro-Europe campaigner, drew his inspiration straight from the Nazis: obsessed with Hitler, he decked his home in Nazi memorabilia and shelves with books on SS race theory and white supremacy. On 16 June 2016, two weeks before Britain voted to leave the European Union, he stabbed Mrs Cox multiple times, then shot her three times in the head, while shouting ‘Freedom for Britain’ and ‘Britain First’. A year earlier, on 17 June 2015, twenty-two-year-old Dylann Storm Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot dead nine black worshippers. Roof, who fantasized about the canonization of Hitler and about a Confederate victory, believed he was launching a race war and fulfilling the work of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis, whose ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute was encoded into his website.
Millions of people share the beliefs, if not the ‘methods’, of these murderers. Among them is America’s National Socialist movement, a leading neo-Nazi group that disseminates ‘violent anti-Jewish rhetoric’.13 In 2016 this small but vocal group enjoyed the attention of a New York Times profile14 and a public platform. Surprised, perhaps, by its sudden ‘popularity’, the group’s members decided to replace the swastika worn on their uniforms with a Norse rune, an ‘Aryan’ symbol the Nazis approved of. It was a magnanimous gesture, in the circumstances, to public sensitivities. No such compromise is evident in the group’s ‘25 points’, a direct echo of Hitler’s 1920 manifesto. Point 4, for example, states: ‘Only those of pure White blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation … no Jew or homosexual may be a member of the nation.’15
Of course, America’s Alt-Right (Alternative Right), France’s Le Penists, the UK Independence Party, the Dutch Freedom Party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Greek Golden Dawn, etc., should not be bundled up with the neo-Nazi movement. For while their policies amount to the crassest kind of ‘racial nationalism’, they have operated within the democratic system and not (yet) espoused a violent programme of lawless persecution. All were in the process of failing or unravelling at the time of writing. (Neo-fascist groups inflicted scores of ‘unofficial’ attacks on migrants in 2016, including ten a day in Germany by the AfD and other extremists.)
Insofar as they have any intellectual ballast, Steven Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart News who was sacked as a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump in August 2017, is their anointed guru. Bannon and his followers at Breitbart News and other Alt-Right forums think themselves novel, but they stand in the long tradition of white nationalists whose ideas draw on the writing of ‘Nazi racial theorists’, such as de Gobineau, Chamberlain and Rosenberg, and boil down to a crude alloy of Social Darwinism and racial nationalism. Their twenty-first-century heirs are buttressed by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving – who lost his defamation case in 2000 against a US historian who had accused him of being one (a case brilliantly described in Richard Evans’ book Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial) – and by racial theories purporting to be scientific such as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which claims to find a genetic or ‘racial’ basis for intelligence but in fact finds none, according to a damning assessment by the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs. Perhaps whites are simply more familiar with filling in IQ tests than blacks?16
There is something else insidious about Bannon. A neo-crusader and a prominent champion of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, he believes the Christian armies of the West are destined to fight the mother of all battles against the Islamic world. He speaks like a man determined to avenge the West for the loss of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 and the Muslim siege of Vienna in 1529. In ushering in what we might call the age of ‘Techno-Mediaevalism’ (with apologies to the Middle Ages, which were more complex and enquiring than this crude atavism suggests), Bannon and his disciples would harness the pre-Enlightenment mind – of which he is perhaps today’s most powerful exemplar – to America’s twenty-first-century nuclear arsenal.
In the summer of 2014 Bannon laid out his ‘global vision’ to a conference held by the Human Dignity Institute in the Vatican. ‘We’re now, I believe,’ he said, ‘at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.’ It would be, he warned:
… a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant to … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, [it] will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last two thousand [or] two thousand five hundred years.17
Like all blowhard catastrophists, Bannon resorts to conjuring tricks, rustling up an apocalypse like a magician to terrify the faint-hearted and summon another crusade. It is Bannon and his ilk who are frightened, who are reeling from terror. And his kind of thinking plays straight into the hands of jihadists who think in the same apocalyptic terms, rejoice in what they see as the decline of the West and clamour for exactly the kind of global ‘holy war’ that Bannon sounds eager to give them. At any other time he would have been seen as a ‘holy fool’ or court jester, but for a brief period he had to be taken seriously because of his influence in the White House.
In this light, it is painful to witness the contortions of the credible media as they attempt to report on phenomena they clearly detest. The Economist magazine recently expressed its disgust at having to cover Bannon’s Alt-Right as though it were part of normal discourse, which at the time it clearly was. ‘First an apology, or rather a regret,’ the old liberal magazine confided, ‘The Economist would prefer not to advertise the rantings of racists and cranks. Unfortunately, and somewhat astonishingly, the Alt-Right – the misleading name for a ragtag but consistently repulsive movement that hitherto has flourished only on the internet – has insinuated itself, unignorably, into American politics.’ The movement championed ‘a neo-segregationist “race realism”,’ the magazine reported, ‘which, of course, is really just old-fashioned white supremacism in skimpy camouflage.’18
This time around, people of the Muslim religion are the targets of far-right hatred, in America and Europe, stoked by the atrocious crimes of a small number of Islamic extremists. Demonizing an entire faith, the more poisonous commentators carelessly invoke Hitler’s example. Katie Hopkins, the British media personality and newspaper columnist, tweeted after the Manchester terrorist attack in May 2017: ‘We need a final solution.’ On any other day Hopkins’ opinions would be treated as another passing venom-spill in the great swim of history, but her tweets have catapulted her into the annals of infamy. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, a leading think tank, in December 2016, ‘[T]o those who consider minority faiths to be a threat, Jews have been eclipsed by Muslims, who, in the popular imagination, threaten to destroy the white Christian West physically with terrorism and immigration and culturally with alien laws.’19
While Brookings’ statement lazily conflates Mein Kampf with Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, it captures a sense of the psychological and tactical similarities between the Nazis of the 1920s and the Alt-Right of 2017–18, who seek to project the abhorrent crimes of a small minority of jihadists on to a religion of more than 1.6 billion people. Indeed, extremists on both sides seem determined to accelerate the confrontation, fragmenting our benighted world and drawing us closer to the ‘holy war’ of the jihadist and neo-fascist fantasy.
Hopefully, this story of Hitler’s youth has answered, to some degree, that often asked question, ‘How could Hitler have happened?’ These days, we see how easily it could happen again. And this raises a second question: ‘What can we do to stop another Hitler?’ How can Western governments act to avoid the social and economic chaos that would spawn another genocidal dictator?
The simple answer – but extremely difficult task – is to prevent another global conflagration and economic depression. Hitler was the bastard child of the First World War and the economic and social chaos that followed. In this respect, Western society has little in common with Weimar Germany in the 1920s. In its effect, the Great Recession of 2008–11 bears no comparison to the Great Depression of 1929–31, when millions lost their jobs and life savings. None of us has suffered the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. Our society is, by comparison, prosperous and productive; and most of us are fed, housed, educated and tend to live by the rule of law.
Yet we see signs everywhere of splintering, of a terrible rupture; we hear cries of profound anguish. The obscene division between rich and poor, the social isolation of the chronically jobless, the proliferation of online hysteria, the complacency of Western governments (and indifference towards the disdain in which they’re held) have envenomed large sections of the West against itself, fomenting the politics of hatred and self-loathing.
The solution to these ills does not lie in surrendering to ‘populism’, the grotesquely misnamed ‘movement’ that merely exploits the misery of those it claims to defend. The solution has nothing to do with blaming foreigners, be they Mexicans or Moroccans. Islam will not defeat us by ‘out-breeding’ us, once the economy strengthens and political stability returns. Nor should we yield to the fearmongering of excited catastrophists such as Douglas Murray (author of The Strange Death of Europe), who ache for a non-existent golden age of Christian purity rid of non-whites, and who believe ‘Europe is committing suicide’ because we’ve abandoned our ‘Judeo-Christian values’. No doubt the European Union is in serious need of reform (but that’s another story). Yet Murray seems determined to ignore inconvenient truths, such as the fact that the nations of ‘Europe’ have forged a remarkable peace since the Second World War, enjoyed astonishing post-war economic growth and demonstrated great and unique Christian altruism (i.e. the expression of our ‘values’, as he concedes) towards desperate people. It is striking that London, Paris, Manchester and Berlin, the cities most tormented by terrorists in 2016–17 and which, in Murray’s telling, are plagued by migrants (especially Muslims), voted overwhelmingly for Europe and rejected ‘populism’ in the 2017 elections, and showed extraordinary solidarity across ethnic and religious divides during and after the terrorist attacks.
Western civilization is not about to crumble to a few crazed, straggle-bearded, sexually stunted young men strapped to nail bombs and the seats of trucks. Europeans will be revelling in ‘Western values’, dancing the tango on the banks of the Seine, arguing over flat whites in Borough Market, baptizing their children in cathedrals, applauding concerts in the Bataclan and thronging the gay bars of Soho long after Bannon, Murray and their fellow apocalypticians fade away and people realize that the real threat to our society emanates not from ‘foreigners’ or our ‘Godless decadence’ or populist fearmongering, but from our own chronic economic dysfunction and social injustice.
The solution has everything to do with economic and social policy. It means accepting that ‘trickle-down’ economics championed in recent decades hasn’t worked as hoped or promised, and that large sections of Western society are economically and socially destitute even as the world’s richest echelons concentrate wealth in their hands on a scale not seen since before the outbreak of war in 1914. You only have to glance at French economist Thomas Piketty’s extraordinary research to see how society has reverted to pre-First World War levels of inequity. Social and economic injustice, not the presence of a proportionately small number of asylum-seekers and migrants, lay at the root of the outrage that fuelled the 2016–17 elections. That hard truth was lost in the utterly unscrupulous scapegoating of refugees by politicians and journalists, the Fifth Horsemen of the ‘populist elite’.20
The solution means realizing, and investing for the benefit of all, the treasures of regulated competition and free and fair trade; and rejecting the politics of bigotry towards women, ethnic minorities and people of different faiths.
It means launching, in parallel and in cohesion with other governments and religious organizations, the firmest and most carefully thought-through plan of cooperative vigilance and, when necessary, coordinated military action, against those who seek to harm us.
The solution means reaffirming the Enlightened spirit of scientific enquiry, political reform and creative brilliance that energized the past 300 years and has been so gravely undermined, respectively, by the rejection of evolution and the denial of climate change; the stifling of political thought and ideas; and the slow demise of academic and artistic excellence. It means being able to distinguish value from volume, and experienced insight from the wilful ignorance of the trolletariat. It means reinforcing the Western (or, if you prefer, Judeo-Christian) values of charity, community and compassion, hidden and demeaned in a world in which obscene avarice and egomaniacal individualism are treated as virtues.
The solution, in sum, means finding Western leaders and governments of quiet strength, honesty and surpassing vision who are determined to preserve ‘our way of life’ by reinforcing, not merely defending, the Enlightenment values of freedom of thought and speech, so often maligned or misunderstood, and the great democratic traditions of true liberalism and openness, so often taken for granted or twisted to the point that common decency is mistaken for a malign form of political correctness. It means controlling immigration, of course, not slamming the door; reforming not crushing our institutions; building not destroying our communities (a start might be to revitalize the town hall as a place to meet and dance and debate); and recognizing our shared story in that beautiful and terrible, ingenious and slovenly, chaotic and orderly, brutal and compassionate, and always delicious realm of humanity, Europe.
Without this combined emphasis on enjoying while affirming our values and freedoms, the West will continue to slide into a kind of pre-Enlightened, superstitious gloom, a state of nuclear-armed techno-medievalism, ruled by unread men in gilded houses and ex-bankers dreaming of holy war.21 In such circumstances, extremists may one day find a genuine ‘Führer’ to lead them, from among the cartoonish thugs and blonde cranks who have hitherto held the job.
In the meantime, the far-right excrescences of the early twenty-first century will probably suppurate for a while, causing a lot of grief and damage, before sinking back into oblivion (they are dying as I write this, contrary to the apocalypticians’ warnings) … until a fresh parade of demagogues arrives to exploit another financial crisis or terrorist attack by promising ‘the people’ that their future happiness depends on slamming the door on the wretched, or vilifying ‘Muslims’ or ‘Jews’ or ‘Mexicans’ or another minority group – and all the while failing to deal with the deep economic trauma that is the true scourge of the West.
Indeed, it is a short mental leap to imagine today’s fashionable young fascists signing up for another experiment in organized oppression. Their disciples will presumably be ‘social media experts’, or trolls, rather than beer-hall thugs, but they will do the same job, in effect: rubber-stamping a new programme of savage persecution of innocent people in the name of their late, beloved Führer.
Young Hitler would have been proud of them.