It was different to the place in the history he’d once imagined. He’d said, in March 1939 as what remained of Czechoslovakia was occupied by German troops, ‘I’ll go down in history as the greatest German’. If he’d won the war, that would have been the case. Even in the early 1950s, a quarter of Germans still had a good opinion of him. We can now see plainly the destructive will that was a key to Hitler’s character. But that scarcely explains his mass appeal in the 1930s. For that, we have to acknowledge a creative, visionary side to Hitler, however repellent it is to us. That was what the first spin-doctor, Joseph Goebbels, exploited in building up the public image of the great Leader. In a society gripped by panaoia of national decline and decadence, Hitler offered a breathtaking vision of Germany’s future grandeur and glory, of regeneration, resurgence, and redemption. Millions were enthralled by the vision.

The vision was underpinned by the aesthetics of power. These were new, and spectacular. Albert Speer was one of those swept away by the grandiose perspectives, by the monumentalisation of history. Hitler, the would-be artist and architect, was mesmerised by building plans. His extraordinary fantasies could now be put into practice. They reflected an amazing gigantomania. Plans for the new capital, Germania, included an assembly hall sixteen times bigger than the interior of St.Peter’s, Rome, to hold up to 180,000 people. The dome would soar to 726 feet. Money was no object. What mattered, so Hitler told Speer, was building for eternity. His buildings were to be a lasting monument to Germany’s glory. They should be there for future generations like the pyramids of Egypt stood as testament to the greatness of the pharoahs.

In many other spheres, too, Hitler released immense, pent-up energies. He made the unimaginable seem possible. Engineers were thrilled at the prospect of creating huge trains to run on wide-gauge tracks, so-called ‘travelling hotels’ that would carry German holidaymakers to the Crimea. Doctors relished the chance to experiment not just on animals, but on humans. This was, of course, the reality behind the fantastic vision. It meant a seismic break with the Judaeo-Christian-humanitarian values that had been the basis of European civilisation. Hitler rejected the ‘softness’ of Christianity, as well as the hold of its churches over the people. He evoked the grandeur, but also the cruelties of the classical world, linked to the heroic values embodied in Germanic myth. It was a world-view that glorified strength, conquest, dominance at the expense of the weak, the feeble, the disinherited. It was the crudest possible doctrine of survival of the fittest, with the weak seen as justifiably going to the wall. It amounted to a complete upturning of Christian-humanist tradition.

Those seen as a racial or genetic threat were to be wiped out by one means or another. Gassing methods were first tried out on the mentally sick. Target groups for the racial engineering widened as time went on. Gypsies, homosexuals, antisocials, habitual criminals, and many others social groups were included. But a special place in the pantheon of racial enemies was held by the Jews – Hitler’s own perceived arch-enemies. The murder of the Jews, we can now see clearly, was intrinsic to Hitler’s utopian vision. It is the prime example of something never previously encountered in history: the meticulously planned, state-directed, attempt to wipe out an entire people, and by modern, industrialised methods of killing. Goebbels described Hitler as the Final Solution’s ‘unswerving champion and spokesman’. He was right. But the Holocaust would only have marked a beginning. The General Plan for the East, first formulated by SS planners in 1941, envisaged no fewer than 31 million Untermenschen, mainly Slavs, being deported from Germany’s new colonial territories over the subsequent 25 years. Few were envisaged as surviving the Siberian wastes for too long. Such a vision of inhumanity defies the imagination. But it was only too imaginable at the time. This was because Hitler’s own boundless fantasy about the future German Reich breached all the moral and legal constraints that had shaped European civilisation, and opened the floodgates to murderous initiatives of every conceivable kind. Using the phrase of a Nazi functionary in 1934, I called the preemptive initiatives ‘working towards the Führer’, and made the concept the interpretative cornerstone of my biography of Hitler.

The more you look at Hitler, the more the point strikes home. He alone was capable of such a monstrous vision. He alone was prepared at all stages to think the unthinkable, unhesitatingly to take the most radical options, to burn all bridges behind him. But in presiding over such breathtakingly terrible inhumanity, all he need to do for much of the time was provide ‘guidelines for action’, and authorise the initiatives of others. His fantasies could only be converted into reality because of the type of power he held. We can best call it, following the great German sociologist, Max Weber, ‘charismatic authority’.That is, Hitler’s power rested in the first instance on personal loyalty, not governmental function - on a belief in his historic mission, his heroic qualities, his incomparable achievements. There was a quasi-religious strand to this belief. It was most fervently held in the inner circle of Hitler’s devotees. But in various forms, if diluted, it stretched into wide sections of the German population. Strong reserves of it still remained long after the war had turned sour for Germany. Before that, at his zenith, Hitler embodied distant, visionary goals that by their very utopian nature had the capacity to touch upon the more limited interests of most Germans. That’s why so many were prepared, often for non-ideological reasons, to do all they could to ‘work towards the Führer’.

We can now locate Hitler’s place in history from another perspective. His end can be seen to have been epochal. That is, it encapsulated a turning-point in European – and world – history. It brought to an end one epoch, and ushered in another. Naturally, we shouldn’t personalise this. Nor should we imagine a change overnight, a sudden and once-and-for-all break with continuities. I haven’t the time here to explore this fully. But I think the old argument remains valid: Hitler’s rule had unwittingly brought about a revolution of destruction. And with that, Germany – and also Europe – began the crossing to a new era.

Part of Hitler’s success was that he had been the intersection point of important strands of German political culture. There were important counter-strands, embracing socialism, liberalism, personal freedom, and democracy. But these had been defeated by 1933. Those that had triumphed, and helped produce Hitler, included a sense of cultural and racial superiority, nationality based upon ethnicity, the right to a ‘place in the sun’ befitting a great power, deep resentments at national weakness and humiliation, and a feeling that Germany was the last bulwark of western civilisation against ‘asiatic’ Bolshevism. In each case, Hitler built on these cultural values, distorted them into their most extreme, radical form, then broke their hegemony in Germany’s total defeat and occupation. The old continuities that had helped create Hitler, had made Germany a problem for Europe, and a key element in Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War, were shattered by defeat and destruction. There was, of course, no ‘Stunde null’, no ‘zero hour’ when everything stopped, then started again in a totally different key. But within a decade of the war ending, a new Europe was emerging from the ruins left by Hitler. Much brutality, bloodshed, suffering, and repression were still to be encountered on the way. But Hitler’s revolution of destruction provided a starting-point for new structures and new values to evolve. It gave Europe – Germany most of all – the chance of a new beginning.

Hitler’s direct political legacy, the Cold War, was wound up between 1989 and 1991. It might have been thought that our preoccupation with Hitler would then fade. Instead, it’s grown. Never since the war has there been so much about Hitler as recently. It seems at times near-obsessive.The danger of this is over-personalising the catastrophic impact of the Third Reich.

Historians themselves have long since left behind extreme Hitler-centric interpretations that reduced the Third Reich to little beyond the expression of the dictator’s will. At the same time, the counter-interpretation of Hitler as somehow a ‘weak dictator’, hesitant, indecisive, preoccupied largely with his own prestige and upholding his image, always lacked credibility. So in my own biography, I tried to adopt a new approach, one that could incorporate wider social and political forces while still doing justice to Hitler’s unique, personal role. In my interpretation, Hitler’s importance isn’t diminished one jot. He’s still the indispensable driving-force. But it’s not at all the picture of a madman overriding the wishes of others. Hitler was a political fanatic wielding immense state power, not a madman. Unfortunately, until it was too late, large numbers of sane and rational people, among them non-Nazis in Germany’s power elite (for example, in the army leadership, the state bureaucracy, or industry), thought what he was doing was good. They endorsed and applauded his decisions. Much of the public gave their acclamation. In the mid-1930s, Hitler was the most popular head of state in Europe. one leading German historian once said: ‘It’s unbearable to think that the will of a madman plunged Germany into the war’. That sort of apologia is no longer tenable.

But it is probably not too far from a still prevalent popular view. In contrast to the shifts in historical understanding, popular images of Hitler have remained remarkably unchanged across the decades. The carpet-biting madman showering out dictats to a totalitarian society completely in his grip, single-handedly taking Germany down the road to perdition comes close to summing it up.

The obsession with Hitler amounts at times less to a justifiable search for explanation of Europe’s great catastrophe than to a macabre fascination with Hitler’s bizarre personality, rapidly descending into trivialisation and distorting historical interpretation through over-personalisation of complex events. The fascination can sometimes take weird forms. In letters I’ve received I’ve been asked: did Hitler drink Tokay wine on his wedding night? Or, repeatedly – regurgitating the old legend – did he visit Liverpool in 1912? Naturally, I said I couldn’t see him on the terraces at Anfield shouting ‘come on you Reds’. I also had a letter insisting on the basis of ear-measurements that Hitler was really Prince John, the prematurely deceased son of George V. The fascination with Hitler is kept alive through incessant media attention. Documentaries and films are legion. Bernd Eichinger’s recent film, personalising Germany’s ‘downfall’ through the drama in the bunker, was watched by over five million Germans. It was seen as sensational in Germany for treating Hitler as a human being. What a sensation: Hitler was human. And all the time we’d thought he was a monster from Mars. But what a specimen of humanity. He pats the Goebbels children on the head, strokes Blondi - his dog, not Eva Braun - and gives chocolates to his secretary - then in the next breath gives out orders that condemn thousands to death. Still, peering into this strange individual’s inner world evidently retains its fascination, even after all these years. And Hitler is a taboo figure like no other. British newpaper editors dressing up as Hitler at office parties cause scandal, but sustain the attention. The antics of a royal prince in Nazi uniform do the same. Hitler has entered popular culture. No other dictator, not even Stalin, attracts the same attention. Hitler has become the very icon of evil. But that just enhances the fascination. The minutiae of his personal life, his medical condition, his women- or men-friends: all evoke endless (and mainly fruitless) interest and speculation. It was once thought that any book on Hitler’s sex-life would be among the shortest volumes ever written. But a recent study purporting to ‘out’ Hitler as a homosexual has undermined that assumption. Another investigates the equally tenuous evidence that Hitler had contracted syphilis from a prostitute in Vienna in 1909 or 1910. The implication of such approaches, taken to logical absurdity, is plain. In the one case a Munich rent-boy, in the other a Viennese prostitute was to blame for all the ills of the world that Hitler caused.

Of course, in some ways it can help historical understanding to focus an an iconic individual. But it can also lead to serious distortion, to an over-readiness to magnify the role of the individual in history at the expense of more complex causes of significant historical developments. The tendency is extreme in the case of Hitler. This is in part because of the extremes of the personality cult constructed by German propaganda during Hitler’s lifetime, attributing all ‘achievements’ to his personal ‘genius’. The opposite distortion is to attribute all the evil of Nazism to Hitler. In some ways, it seems as if the impression created by the personality cult has persisted – but in reverse. Where Hitler was once seen as a superman, he is now a super-demon. Where once he was a beloved leader, he is now the iconic hate-figure. Where once he was a genius, now he’s a madman.

These images preclude deeper understanding of how Nazism could grip a society. At their worst, they trivialise the past and distort the present, reinforcing crude anti-German stereotypes and even skewing attitudes towards Europe through their caricaturing of Hitler and Nazism.

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Content last updated: 25/04/2005

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