Hitler, Adolf

b. 1889; d. 1945

German dictator, born at Braunau-am-Inn, Austria. His father was a minor customs officer in the Austrian service, who till late in life was surnamed Schicklgruber, and who married three times, Hitler being the only son of his third wife. Hitler's father died when he was 14, leaving no resources for his continued education. With his mother he went to Vienna hoping to become an architect, but had to earn his living as assistant to a house painter and by selling indifferent sketches. After a few years' miserable existence in Vienna, during which period he probably absorbed the anti-Semitic and Pan-Germanic views current among extreme nationalists at the time, advocated especially by Schönerer, he left in 1912 to settle in Munich. These years of penury were formative of both his philosophy of life and of his character.

When the First World War opened Hitler joined a Bavarian reserve regiment. He fought in the trenches, acted as dispatch rider, reached the rank of Gefreiter, or lance-corporal, was wounded in the Somme Battle, 1916, and gassed in 1918. After the war he convinced himself that Germany had been defeated through the treacherous and enfeebling influence of the Jews and the Marxist socialists. Back in Bavaria, while attending and later conducting courses designed to keep ex-servicemen away from Bolshevism, he came under the influence of Gottfried Feder, the intellectual father of the Nazi movement. He then became the seventh member of an insignificant political group in Munich, the 'German Workers' Party', and, equipped with a few definite ideas and a clear insight into the value of the art of propaganda, he soon distinguished himself by his almost hypnotic popular oratory.

Through his friends, Röhm, a staff officer at Munich, and von Epp, he maintained close contacts with the Reichswehr, which were to stand him in good stead. In 1921 he ousted Drexler, the founder, and himself became leader of the party, which now styled itself the 'National Socialist German Workers' Party', its programme being Hitler's nationalist and anti-Marxist creed. Differing from Röhm as to the function of the newly-created Sturmabteilung (SA) troops ('Brownshirts'), Hitler organised a special detachment to be his own political executive. This was the origin of the Schutzstaffel (SS) or 'Blackshirts' formally established in 1926 in imitation of Mussolini's organisation. In November 1923, thinking that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse, Hitler made his first attempt, in alliance with Röhm, Ludendorff, and Goering, to seize power, in the notorious putsch in Munich, the intention being to make Ludendorff dictator. Two days later he was arrested with others, including Ludendorff, and tried for treason. Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and incarcerated in the fortress of Landsberg. Here he worked on the final draft of Mein Kampf with the aid of his friend, Hess. Meanwhile his party disintegrated. Released under an amnesty in 1924, he set to work immediately to rebuild the party organisation, though for some time Strasser, creator of the Nazi party in northern Germany, was more influential than Hitler in the party ranks, whose strength in the Reichstag was only 12. Hitler, however, gradually recovered the ground he had lost since the abortive putsch. By 1930 he was the undisputed head of a considerable party. Funds were increasingly flowing in from the big industrialists, who saw in National Socialism their best safeguard against Communism.

'Nationalism' gradually superseded 'Socialism' in the party programme, though its language was still wildly revolutionary. When the world economic crisis came in 1930 Hitler's party exploited the disillusioned and discontented masses as well indeed as the more solid middle-class elements, who saw their standard of living threatened by the crisis; and in the next election, after Brüning had dissolved the recalcitrant Reichstag, Hitler's party won 107 seats. Shortly after this he stood against Hindenburg in the presidential election. Beaten in the second ballot, Hitler was nevertheless now a political power to be reckoned with. In a rapidly deteriorating political situation, Brüning felt compelled to govern by decree and, though liberal in outlook, his regime paved the way to dictatorship. But in May 1932 he fell, after securing the re-election of Hindenburg as president and dissolving Hitler's Brownshirts. But though Hitler regarded himself as heir to the chancellorship, he was now baulked by the covert resistance of the old right-wing regime, with its backing of industrialists and Junkers.

When von Papen became chancellor, Hitler remained aloof. Von Papen dissolved the Reichstag but the Nazi party doubled its strength and Hitler was now head of the biggest single party. Eventually Hitler and von Papen reached an agreement. Hitler renounced the socialist section of his programme, von Papen veered round, released the subsidies from the industrialists to Hitler's coffers, and induced Hindenburg to accept Hitler as chancellor. Thus in January 1933 began the period of the Third Reich. By the end of that year the one-man party had become the one-party state. In the elections it was only by the support of the other Right parties that the Nazis had won a majority vote. Terrorism and brutality, however, established Hitler in an unassailable position. Opponents disappeared by assassination or into concentration camps. When some of his followers, wearied of Socialist- and Jew-baiting, murmured against the dropping to the 'socialist' and radical elements of the party programme, Hitler stuck down any and all of the leaders, Nazis or reactionaries, likely to give trouble, the chief victims being Strasser, Röhm, and Schleicher and his wife. This was the 'purge' of 30 June 1934, in which a hundred National Socialists were murdered. All power now passed to the National Socialist executive, which, for all practical purposes, meant Hitler himself. Soon afterwards Hindenburg died and Hitler was declared his successor; but he abjured the title of Reichspräsident in favour of Fürher (German, leader) and Kanzler (German, chancellor).

Sure of his position in Germany, Hitler now began his long campaign to restore German power in Europe, heralding his advent to power by a series of increasingly grave breaches of treaty obligations and by flouting European opinion. The first need was to re-arm Germany, which was done secretly at first and then ever more flagrantly. But before launching his attack on the Versailles Treaty he awaited the plebiscite on the Saar in January 1935. The result, partly influenced by terrorism, was an overwhelming majority for retrocession to Germany. In March he denounced the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and introduced conscription for the Reichswehr. A year later he boldly risked marching his forces into the demilitarised Rhineland zone, at the same time denouncing the Treaty of Locarno, which he claimed had been abrogated by the Franco-Soviet Alliance. In July, when the Civil War in Spain broke out, Hitler seized the opportunity to test his army and air force on the side of Franco. The remilitarization of the Rhineland was followed by two years of the most active German military preparations coupled with an economic reorientation aiming at autarky.

Events abroad in 1936-37, such as the League of Nations's failure to check Mussolini's Abyssinian adventure, increased the nervous tension in Europe and went far to strengthen Hitler's position. Mussolini was drawn into the orbit of Hitler's machinations and intrigues, and their collaboration found expression, in 1937, in the Rome-Berlin axis. The end of 1937 saw Germany's course set for an expansionist foreign policy, which for two years won spectacular successes. Hitler acquired Austria by the simple process of manipulating an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations and then sending the German army across the frontier and forcibly incorporating Austria in the Reich. But the great test of this policy came in 1938 with the campaign for the liberation of the Sudetenland; for this was an attack on a sovereign state bound by treaty with the Western powers and by ethnic ties with Russia. Hitler had gauged to a nicety the underlying realities of the immediate political situation and realised that the governments in the West were not then prepared to fight. Then followed the humiliating pact of Munich and Hitler now seemed in the eyes of the average German, not only to be the preserver of peace, but a consummate statesman, outrivalling all his predecessors in extending the Reich frontiers. Within less than a year he had added ten million Germans to the Third Reich, broken the one formidable bastion to German expansion to the south-east, and made himself the most powerful dictator in Europe since Napoleon. In the talks with Neville Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg he had reiterated his stock phrase used after the rape of Austria - that he had no more territorial claims to make. Yet soon afterwards he was invading and overrunning, not merely the German-inhabited regions of Bohemia, but the whole of Czechoslovakia, and them himself went to Prague to proclaim yet another bloodless victory, while at the same time he announced his annexation of Memel in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Poland was Hitler's next victim. He was now claiming the retrocession of Danzig and demanding the Polish Corridor. In response to Poland's appeal, Britain and France guaranteed Polish independence. Hitler was shaken by this development, more particularly when the two Western powers began negotiations with Moscow. But rather than abandon his cherished designs on Danzig and the Corridor he preferred to swallow all that he had previously said in condemnation of the bolshevist regime and proposed the non-aggression pact with the USSR to which Stalin agreed on 23 August. With the removal of any probability of Soviet assistance to the Western powers the way was clear for Hitler's Blitzkrieg (German, lightning war) on Poland, and the Second World War broke out as a result (September 1939). After the immolation of Poland, Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on 6 October in a remarkable rhetorical outburst, made his 'last offer' to the Allies. But as a plea for peace it suffered from the now universal realisation that his word could in no circumstances be trusted. A month later he spoke at Munich in the Bürgerbräu beer cellar on the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, announcing that he had ordered Goering to prepare for a five-year war.

In his New Year address in 1940 he declared that he was fighting for a 'New Order' in Europe, and in March he met Mussolini on the Brenner, a prelude to the invasion of Norway and Denmark and the overrunning of the Low Countries and France. The spectacular events of spring and summer, 1940, culminating in the armistice with Pétain only confirmed the average German in his belief in Hitler's genius. In the spring on 1941 he attacked Yugoslavia and Greece and went to join his advancing armies there, while continuing to belabour Britain with his bombers and striking under water at its seaborne supplies. Hitler knew that only successful invasion could bring Britain to its knees. But both Hitler and his military experts now feared to make the effort, and as an alternative Hitler in 1941 planned to attack the British Empire at its Achilles heel in the East. This plan, however, depended for its success on the neutrality of the USSR and, not being sure of this, Hitler and his advisers decided to combine the attack on Egypt with an invasion of the USSR itself. This fatal decision revealed the essential weakness underlying all Hitler's Weltpolitik and it is possible that he took it against the opposition of other Nazi leaders and against the advice of many members of the German general staff. Thenceforward he strove to divide the USSR from the Western Allies by stressing Germany's anti-Bolshevik crusade.

The German campaigns in the Balkans and the Mediterranean were brilliant in conception and execution, but British intervention in Greece and British resistance in Crete and Libya delayed Hitler's timetable, and, as the summer of 1941 wore on it was becoming obvious that German optimism had outrun itself. For some time Hitler was silent, but on 4 October at a meeting of the Winter Help Campaign, he announced a 'gigantic operation' which would bring about the defeat of the USSR. On 21 December, following the failure of the Reichswehr before Moscow, Hitler announced the dismissal of the commander-in-chief, Brauchitsch, and his own assumption of direct control of all military operations. Against further disaster he staked the legend of his own intuitive talent - a decision no doubt hastened by the entry of the USA into the war and the fact that four-fifths of the world was now ranged against Germany.

Hitler's New Year message for 1942 showed a marked decline in buoyancy. The German armies were still a powerful force, and, with the Allies still far from their total war-effort, Hitler could hope for further success in the field, and in fact in the earlier half of 1942, the German armies in the USSR reached the Volga at Stalingrad while Rommel in North Africa was threatening Cairo and Alexandria. Yet before the autumn was past Rommel had been routed at El Alamein and the Russians had destroyed Paulus's 6th Army before Stalingrad. From then onwards Hitler spoke less of Germany victory than on the inability of the Allies to defeat Germany, and new crises soon faced him. In July 1943 his fellow dictator, Mussolini, fell from power and Italy capitulated to the Allies. Two months later, in Munich, at a party gathering, he seemed to regain something of his old confidence. He assured his audience that however long the war might last Germany would never capitulate.

After the German armies had been driven out of Russia in a series of counter-offensives, and after the Anglo-American landing in Normandy, where it soon became clear that the Western Allies would not, as Hitler had promised, be 'driven into the sea', the German 'opposition', led by certain generals of the Reichswehr, supported by industrialists, liberals, and even elements of the Left, attempted a coup d'etat. The signal was to be the assassination of Hitler, but the bomb which was placed in his headquarters by a staff officer named von Stauffenberg failed in its purpose. When the immediate danger was past, the Fürher instituted his last and most savage 'purge', thousands of men and women being executed not because they were implicated, but because they might conceivably have led another rising. At the same time Himmler took command of the army inside Germany so as to tighten the Nazi grip on it. As the Allies pressed into Germany from all sides Hitler succumbed to the pressure of great events. Obscurity shrouds his final hours. It seems probable, however, that he and his wife, Eva Braun (whom he apparently married on 29 April 1945), died in the air-raid shelter under the ruined chancellery in Berlin on 30 April 1945 - presumably by committing suicide. It is generally considered that their bodies were subsequently burned in the courtyard.

Hitler achieved the triumph of the Nazi party in Germany by a mixture of deceit and violence, and used the same devices to destroy other nations. From the time he became master of Germany he made lies, cruelty, and terror his principal means to accomplish his purpose; and he became in the eyes of virtually the whole world an incarnation of absolute evil. The neurotic who made himself leader of the German race inflamed it with his ambitions, corrupted its spirit, and finally brought upon it terrible human and material devastation. He found in the divided and tortured state of mind of the German people after the First World War the symbol and expression of his own morbid emotions and inferiority complex. From an intuitive understanding of the German mind and psychology he elaborated a theory and practice of propaganda, which, because it worked on people with obsessions similar to his own, achieved startling success; and later, with Goebbels, he developed it into a new and fearful instrument of tyranny. His resourcefulness was extraordinary, and in the art of suiting policy to necessity he had no equal. His lack of mental stability is now acknowledged; but the remarkable feature of his career is the way in which he was able to lead a whole nation that had, in the past, produced much of the best in Europe's philosophy and culture on a cause which was from the outset patently amoral, and which from 1943 onwards was clearly leading to disaster. He possessed a hypnotic quality which was best expressed in his oratory: his speeches contained little original matter, but the method of delivery quite obviously reduced his audiences to a state of delirium; and the most dispassionate foreign observers have admitted his effectiveness in this respect.

© JM Dent/Historybookshop.com

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