As I have noted in this space in the past, World War II ended the year I was born, and I grew up Jewish in Harrisburg, Pa. with a continual awareness of the Holocaust. Discovering Provincetown enabled me to live my life in a spiritual home where I feel welcome and safe. But the fearful consciousness of that history has never entirely gone away.
I thought I knew everything I needed to know about Adolf Hitler. But I will never be done with that character, the tragic events associated with him, and the millions of deaths he caused. I have been reading the doorstop of a book — 624 pages — entitled Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans, published last year by Penguin Press. The first hundred or so pages deal with Hitler himself. This is what I have learned (all quotations are from Evans):
After a fairly unimpressive early life, Hitler rose to prominence due to his undeniable ability as an orator: “He had the good fortune to enter politics at a time when public speaking, live and before vast crowds, enjoyed its greatest potency.” The context of his success is important, too. It was a time of great economic turmoil; the 1929 stock market crash, the Depression, and high tariffs plunged Germany into a crisis “when desperate people turned to the Nazis for desperate remedies.”
Hitler had “a talent for rabble-rousing.” He appealed more to emotions than to intellect and “reduced the complexities of politics to a series of simple formulae. Everything was a matter of good or evil, right or wrong, everything was absolute, all solutions final.”
He consistently dealt in hyperbole: everything was the greatest this or that; he went into tirades of contempt for his opponents, often crudely expressed. This approach was extremely successful. “What brought Hitler to supreme power … was a combination of murderous political violence … and a propaganda offensive that violated every standard of truthfulness and decency.”
Once in power, Hitler abolished the presidency and everyone had to swear allegiance to him — not the constitution. He replaced his foreign minister and any other cabinet officials and generals thought to be less than absolutely loyal with more pliant subordinates. He “appointed individuals from outside the political class often in a quite arbitrary manner, simply because they made an impression on him or had done him a favor.” Because of Hitler’s “irregular work habits,” these people often had to guess at how to implement his policies, a situation called “working towards the Fuhrer,” and to be safe they usually went to extremes, in a “self-perpetuating radicalism.”
In 1942, Hitler “secured a declaration of the Reichstag that his word was law and he was entitled to dismiss judges if they showed any independence in their rulings.” Eventually, to qualify for a civil service job, an applicant had to be a member of the Nazi party.
Hitler rejected the Treaty of Versailles; he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations.
Long before he attained power, Hitler saw himself as Germany’s future leader by virtue of “fate” and “providence”; later, when he escaped a bomb plot, he claimed that “providence” had come to his aid. “Constant adulation further corrupted Hitler’s already narcissistic mentality.” To bring Germany to victory, he stated that “his person alone was in a position to do this.” He said: “I must, in all modesty, name my own person irreplaceable.…”
Hitler’s main motivations were anti-Semitism and expansionism (securing more “living space”). He constantly referred to “the Jew” and insisted that all Germany’s problems were due to these people (a race and not a religion) in government, the press, the banks, and the arts. Although they constituted less than one percent of the population, they were “the internal enemy,” and early on he promised that the fight against them would “never fail because of formal bureaucracy and its inadequacy,” because the Nazis would prevail. Later, he declared that the Slavs were “subhumans” and should be replaced by the Aryan Germans.
Some said Hitler had no inner life at all.
Any resemblance of these observations to persons currently in the news is purely intentional.
