“Do not forget what Amalek did to you,” or so we are commanded in the Book of Deuteronomy. If we must remember an enemy of Israel dating back to distant antiquity, surely we must not forget the man we might call the Amalek of the 20th century. And yet I found myself wondering what more there is to say about him when I opened “Hitler: A Biography” by Peter Longerich (Oxford University Press).
Longerich is a leading German historian of the Holocaust and the author of authoritative biographies of both Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. At more than 1,300 pages, “Hitler” is surely the benchmark against which all scholarship on the subject of Nazi Germany, past or future, will be measured. When Longerich has something new to say about Hitler, people listen.
Of course, we cannot help but wonder how Hitler, whom Longerich describes as an “unstable and irascible” man who lived in a homeless shelter in pre-war Vienna, “suffered periodically from depression and spent whole days and nights wandering the streets,” managed to make himself the absolute dictator of one of the great powers of Europe and a seat of Western civilization. To be sure, Hitler suffered from what we would call delusions of grandeur, but his delusions turned into a terrible reality, as Longerich shows us in compelling but also meticulously documented detail.
“Arguably no individual in modern history has managed to accumulate such immense power in such a relatively short space of time as Adolf Hitler,” Longerich writes. “Hitler is thus an extreme example of how personal power can be acquired and monstrously abused — a phenomenon that bursts the confines of a conventional historical biography.”
Longerich debunks the idea that Hitler’s success was an example of the “triumph of the will,” a phrase that Hitler himself fully embraced. Rather, Hitler was swept up by a perfect storm of geopolitics that made him the right man in the right place to start a world war and a campaign of mass murder. “[I]t was only in the particular [post-World War I] situation and in the context of revolution and counter-revolution in Bavaria, in other words very largely as a result of external circumstances, that Hitler was effectively catapulted into a political career,” Longerich writes. At the same time, he insists that we must not overlook Hitler’s “personal responsibility” for the events that took place under his leadership.
To be sure, Hitler suffered from what we would call delusions of grandeur, but his delusions turned into a terrible reality, as Peter Longerich shows us in compelling but also meticulously documented detail.
Indeed, as an accomplished and disciplined scholar, Longerich is attuned to interplay between “structural factors” and “individual personality” in explaining how one of the most civilized countries in Europe descended into barbarism. Above all, he warns us that any attempt to explain the life of Hitler can be treacherous:
“[A]ny interpretation that dwells too much on Hitler himself risks falling into ‘Hitlerism’ and begins to read like an apologia,” he points out, and yet “any comprehensive examination of the historical circumstances and conditions runs the opposite danger of losing sight of Hitler as an agent and presenting him as a mere puppet of external forces.”
The portrait of Hitler that we find in Longerich’s biography does not omit the oddities and ironies of his strange life, and it reminds us, for example, that Hitler was awarded an Iron Cross for his combat service in World War I on the recommendation of a Jewish officer named Guttman, and that Hitler nonetheless slandered Guttman as a “coward” after he had risen from the lowly rank of corporal to the self-invented rank of Fuhrer. And Longerich explores Hitler’s exceedingly strange and sometimes tragic relationships with women, two of whom died by suicide. “Just as he had no interest in friendships, so he was indifferent to love affairs,” the author concludes. “Germany was his ‘bride.’ ”
Longerich’s research allowed him to reveal, among other things, how many copies of “Mein Kampf” were sold, how much money he made and how much he spent for car insurance. More illuminating, however, is Longerich’s explanation of how Hitler managed to win and keep the nearly universal allegiance of the German population. During the early years of Nazi agitation, his speeches were “warmly received by the majority of the audiences, being met with enthusiastic outburst and huge applause.” The reaction to his speeches, Longerich insists, “was based on this dialogue with the public.” His rise to power within the Nazi party was the result of his power to stir the masses: “We want to pour hatred, burning hatred, into the souls of millions of our national comrades.” And he consolidated his power in every address and public appearance, which were “pre-planned from the first moment to the last and increasingly took on the form of a ritual.”
From an early point in his political career, Hitler surrounded himself with “a group of dubious characters,” Longerich writes, and he continued to rely on his devoted inner circle for the rest of his life. Unlike Mussolini, who was eventually removed from power by a vote of the Grand Council of the Fascist Party, Hitler encouraged competition among the rival branches of the party, the government and the armed forces while “assign[ing] tasks to confidants on an ad hoc basis.” As a result, no real threat to Hitler’s authority emerged within the Nazi party, and Hitler was able to call on “a mixed bunch of political operators, willing helpers and patient listeners” to execute his most bloodthirsty orders, including the industrial-scale mass murder that he called the Final Solution and we call the Holocaust.
Hitler believed that he was a genius, but Longerich’s account of his decline and fall confirm that he was wrong. Hitler fancied himself to be smarter than his generals, but it was Hitler’s erratic and overly ambitious military decisions that condemned Germany to defeat. By 1944, suffering from the undiagnosed onset of Parkinson’s and no longer able to speak in public, Hitler was unable to acknowledge the inevitable collapse of Nazi Germany that was evident to everyone else. Hitler was still capable of enforcing what Longerich calls “his unbending insistence on ‘holding on, whatever the cost’ (which included the deliberate tactic of prolonging his regime by extending the mass murder of the Jews).”
Hitler’s promised a “Thousand-Year Reich,” but he died by his own hand after only 12 years. Not only the Jewish people but all of Europe had suffered from Hitler’s (and Germany’s) crimes against humanity. Perhaps the single most important conclusion that Longerich reaches is that “[i]t is beyond question that no single individual was responsible for this catastrophic outcome.” Blaming Hitler is too simple and spares too many of the perpetrators.
“Millions of committed Nazis had worked tirelessly for this regime; a huge army of willing helpers and opportunistic fellow travelers had given it unquestioning support; the elites had been only too glad to put their specialist knowledge and expertise at its disposal; officers and soldiers had carried out their military tasks obediently and with great commitment; the great majority of the German population had followed their ‘Fuhrer’ devotedly and without protest,” Longerich concludes.
Exactly here we find why yet another book about Hitler is necessary. Longerich has not forgotten the German version of Amalek, and neither should we.
Jonathan Kirsch, attorney and author, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.
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