The world, it seems, had rather forget about Hitler. The subject suits nobody. We all have good reason to foreshorten him in one way and magnify him in another, to write him down as a unicellular worm or a complex monster, and so be done with him. His victims have a natural aversion to reducing their wrath to analysis. Western scholars are not at home with outré phenomena.

It is hard to say which is a greater impediment to the understanding of a historical figure: to regard him as ordinary and therefore self-evident, or as sui generis and therefore inexplicable. The historians stand on better ground, but they have a predilection for antecedents—Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Gobineau, Bismarck—and their search has not been strikingly fruitful. However you turn them, Frederick, Nietzsche, Bismarck, et al. were not proto-Nazis.

The generals and politicians who as eyewitnesses and associates had the best opportunity to gather and give evidence on Hitler have been more concerned to excuse themselves for ever having had that opportunity than to exploit it to round out the world’s understanding of him. Dozens of leading men in the professional, economic, and political life of Germany worked long and closely with Hitler; not a single one of them has produced a convincing portrait of him. If only they could have felt that in touching Hitler they did not touch Germany, or themselves!

German refugee scholars, as well as those who remained at home, have hesitated to tackle the most spectacular subject of their time. This is understandable but unfortunate. The result has been that the image of Hitler, in the democracies at any rate, remains a thing of patches: half-demagogue, half-doctrinaire; or half-militarist, half-monster; half-strategist, half-fanatic; half-nationalist, half-rootless condottiere; or half-bohemian, half-provincial.

The facets are varied, and most of them reflect a part of the truth. Taken together, however, they are incoherent. How often do we hear it said of Hitler: up to this point his aims and deeds are explicable, but beyond. . . ? The points vary with different observers, but for most of them there is an incomprehensible beyond.

The question arises, however, whether Hitler’s aims and his deeds did not exhibit sufficient consistency to suggest a pattern. Was there not method as well as madness in him? We cannot take refuge in the “extraordinary personality.” Personality is the style of the man. And the style of a man, like the style of a writer, is his way of arranging and expressing his content. It is, when we are in the presence of an authentic personality, a distinctive coherence between manner and content. Granted that a personality is unusual, many of the elements of his thought and action generally are representative of his time and place. And if they are, we may trace them to their source with a certain confidence.

It is true that with Hitler we are dealing with a congenital and professed liar. He behaved like a man with a “secret.” He did not share his intentions fully with his most intimate associates. He was no man to give anyone a weapon against himself. “Nobody,” he boasted, “can use a letter in my own hand against me.” Letters are the most self-revealing documents. But complete dissimulation is one of the most exigent of arts. There are few men who, if they keep on talking long enough, do not end by giving themselves away. Then there are deeds; if a man’s deeds fall into a pattern that matches that of his implicit intentions, the inner self and will of the rankest hypocrite are exposed to view.

Many are the words of Hitler that match his deeds with a startling appositeness.

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What, then, was Hitler? Was he Konrad Heiden’s “armed bohemian,” Hermann Rauschning’s nihilist, a typical nationalist and racist, a fanatic, or a self-taught petty bourgeois? Hitler himself would have us believe that he was a man with the soul of an artist, a man of “ideas,” who had chosen the life of action reluctantly and in obedience to an ineluctable destiny and task. How many times did he not “threaten” to abandon politics for art or architecture; how many times did he not say that had it not been for Germany’s need of him he would have become the great architect and city planner of his age!

Hitler led what is vulgarly regarded, by many insiders as well as outsiders, as a bohemian life. He reveled in interminable discussions and monologues on “interesting” subjects; he got to bed in the early hours of the morning and rose late; he was un-athletic and usually sluggish; he hated all regular work and all systematic, continuous, serious application. He needed constant distraction, and his amusements were banal: mostly movies, the same Wagnerian operas repeated indefinitely, sweet pastry, and petting.

Insofar as he contemned established notabilities—professional generals, respectable statesmen, aristocratic diplomats, and pedigreed bureaucrats—he was indeed a rebel. But he belonged to that familiar variety of rebel that craves to elbow those above him out of their places but not abolish the places themselves. In essence, he was a thoroughly absorbed, even possessed, politician. The finer bohemian values—freedom, spontaneity, individuality, and the renunciation of worldly advantage—meant nothing to him.

Hitler posed as a “thinker.” He was indeed a “thinker” of sorts, a curbstone or rather beer-hall “philosopher.” Was there a subject on which he did not have a decided and “original” or at least shocking opinion? The range was vast and would bespeak an encyclopedic mind were not the mind itself so shoddy. His opinionatedness reveals the self- and semi-educated man, who was content to pick up his information and views, which included startling bits of esoteric lore, from the popular press, the movies, and especially from conversation and argument with kindred spirits. He had the retentive memory of the man who feels that almost everything he knows is somehow his own private discovery.

Hitler has been most often classified socially with the petty bourgeoisie. The classification is justified in a mildly genetic sense. His father, Alois Hitler, was, true enough, a salaried customs guard, and he was living on a government pension when his son Adolf was growing up. Alois came of peasant stock on both sides, as did Adolf’s mother: Alois always retained a connection with the land, inheriting a parcel here, trying to buy a parcel there; and when he retired it was to live and work on a farm. The restricted outlook of both father and son, and their simultaneous envy of the superior classes and disdain for the inferior masses—for people who worked with their hands—strengthens the case for calling them petty bourgeois. But while Alois belonged, at any rate, to a definite class by virtue of his official post and of his place in the social scheme, Adolf belonged, strictly speaking, to no class. He refused to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a petty official or white-collar worker. He possessed neither the ambition nor the industry to achieve a conventional calling or position. He kept looking for “a good thing” which would not require regular or routine work. This was the main reason for his early failure in Vienna.

As in so many cases, the exalted but vague hankering after “art” covered a lack of will and self-discipline. He did have a gift, in his vocal organs—and a passion for using them. It was principally these organs, with their strangely steely and harsh commanding ring, that secured him his first regular job, as a propagandist and agitator for the German army in 1919. He was then thirty years old.

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It is clear that Hitler was not “standard.” We cannot infer his attitudes and ideas from his social position or ambitions, his way of living, or his image of himself. To get at his mentality, we must watch it unfolding in his decisions and deeds, in Mein Kampf, in his myriad speeches, and in informal and unguarded remarks. In his last years he unbuttoned himself to his intimate circle in interminable after-dinner causerie, which was duly recorded for posterity by secretaries and edited by associates in the Tischgespräche (Bonn, 1952).¹ As one winnows this vast mass—a sad chaffy and gritty mass—three features emerge.

For the most important of these it is difficult to find an apt expression. I shall call it literalness. Hitler was unable to grasp any meaning except in its literal sense. He lacked that capacity for perceiving nuance and shading which marks the cultivated man. He lacked the feeling for metaphor and the figurative without which only the most palpable phenomena can be perceived. Hitler’s mind was the opposite of the poetic. What was generalization or approximation to others was inflexible law to him. That politics and diplomacy are often fed by half-truths and untruths; that force plays a large role in domestic and international success; that peoples may be distinguished by differences of culture or skill, are considerations that are usually subjected to discount and modification in judging particular cases. Hitler’s mind translated them into the propositions that all politicians are, and ought to be, nothing but barefaced liars; that success in international affairs is based on nothing but force and cunning; and that, while a few peoples are creative, all others are not only inferior to them but hardly distinguishable from animals.

The literal quality of Hitler’s mind was revealed in his view of nature, of technology, and, above all, of evolution.

Nature was to him the supreme law. He conceived natural law with abecedarian simplicity. There is a passage in the Tischgespräche in which he holds forth on airplane construction and shipbuilding. Nature, he lays down, has anticipated everything, and it is therefore always best to follow her. But one must be sure to read her verbatim. In the process of walking, for example, nature has anticipated the wheel. If you ignore the rim and look at the spokes, you will see that rolling is only another way of walking! The fact that the circular principle is more important than the spoke—the first wheels had no spokes—eludes him. Again, the principle of the lighter-than-air craft is wrong. He would not trust himself in a Zeppelin. For nature has endowed no bird with a bladder for the purpose of flying, as she has fish for rising and descending in the water. The future belongs to the air, for birds are “one degree ahead of flying fish, which itself is higher than the ordinary fish.” [Speaking of fish, modern ships are built wrong. They are pointed fore, bulge aft, and propel themselves from the rear. They should be constructed like fish, rounded fore—in order to reduce the pressure (for the same reason, spades should be round, not pointed)—and should be driven by side “fins.” But the rudder seems to be all right, because fish have rudders.]

Hitler was a “scientist.” There is hardly a word that was oftener on his lips than Wissenschaft. Wissenschaft did not mean to him a special application of rational culture, the by-product of a free-ranging imagination coupled with a disciplined outlook on the world. “Science does not claim to know the essence of things.” “As for the why of these [natural] laws we shall never know anything about it. A thing is so, and our understanding cannot conceive of other schemes.” Yet his faith in “laws” was absolute. Science meant to him statistics, technology, and even a kind of magic. He would reel off, on the least provocation and to the dismay of his hearers, miles of statistics—statistics of population, of inhabitants per square mile, of ball bearings, of motor fuel consumption, of railroad mileage, and, of course, of military potentials, weapons, and logistics. “I’m mad on technique,” he exclaimed.

The machine was the contrivance of an ingenious deity whose logic was impenetrable and less interesting than its effects. He worshipped technology, much as certain primitive peasants worship the first tractor they see, as a powerful beast concealing an enormously clever and mysterious spirit somewhere within it. Hitler was persuaded that to establish astronomical laboratories in every sizable town would be the best means of putting an end to Christianity, the priesthood, and all “cerebral aberrations” of a religious kind. In order to predict the weather, “we need . . . men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature—whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars.” The weather prophet “might be a man who has never set foot outside his own village, but who understands the flight of midges and swallows, who can read the signs, who feels the wind, to whom the movements of the sky are familiar. . . . The good fellow would be excused from making written reports, and he would even be authorized to express himself in his own dialect. . . . It is known that in every region there are such beings, for whom the weather has no secrets.”

The obverse of this faith was the rejection of “intellectuals,” “thinkers,” and “theoreticians.” “I regard everything that comes from a theoretician as null and void,” he laid down in his latest, and most dogmatic and pompous, phase. Hence his preference for engineers, mechanics, inventors, and organizers. Hence his faith, to the end, in secret weapons, in a deus ex machina that would at the last moment bring his many enemies to their knees in a stunning triumph.

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How Hitler read the law of nature was shown strikingly in his view of evolution. In the hands of other Darwinians, the translation of evolution from the biological to the social realm always implied some qualification or attenuation of meaning. The struggle of human beings or classes, the rivalry of ideas or institutions, and the clash of nations bore a largely figurative resemblance to the “struggle for existence.” For Hitler, however, the resemblance was literal.

His argument for exterminating “abnormal” individuals was that “animals who live in a social state have their outlaws. They reject them.” He had seen a movie of wild horses in Tibet. They were running after their lead horse. (Incidentally, Hitler picked up much of his “science” and even politics from the screen. As an “artist,” he felt there was a superior virtue in visual information. Having once seen the film The Grapes of Wrath, he concluded that most Americans were rootless and nomadic.) “Every community of living creatures,” he commented, “which wishes to prevail behaves like the wild horses. When there is no bellwether, the community dissolves, it is even atomized, and everything is at an end. That is why monkeys, for example, trample to death outsiders, as alien to the community. And what is true of monkeys must be even truer of men.”

He regarded the Jewish question in the same light. To justify killing Jews he asked, “Whose fault is it when a cat kills a mouse?” He could not account to himself why the Jews had survived over the centuries unless he could bring himself to believe that they possessed superior powers of physical endurance. He proceeded to do so. He never had any trouble believing whatever was necessary for his logic or his purposes. He asserted repeatedly in his Tischgespräche that the Jews could withstand any climate: “Der Jude ist der klimafesteste Mensch der Erde.” It followed that it was particularly difficult to destroy them. Siberia might kill others, but it would only harden them. But that meant merely that one must make a greater effort! No conclusion stumped him. Nor did any conclusion, however extraordinary, suggest to him that he might have another look at his premise or make doubly sure of his “facts.” (This quality of drastic logic is but feebly conveyed by the term “literalness.”)

The premise, then, of Hitler’s racial politics was a simple equation of the human with the animal kingdom. Mankind was divided into races as sharply distinguished from each other as the various animal species. The races were arranged in a similar hierarchy. Each race had a special characteristic or bent. To cross them was to go counter to nature and instinct. The discussion of “Volk und Rasse” in Mein Kampf opens with arguments from the animal kingdom. The human races, like so many different species, have distinguished themselves by the rawest evolutionary struggle, a war of competition, destruction, and suppression in which the strongest and most brutal survived and dominated. Physical strife was still the law of human intercourse.

The solution of international problems was conceived in the terms of animal husbandry. The eugenics of the race and the family was the eugenics of the barnyard and stall. It is of more than passing significance that Hitler’s principal coadjutors in racial matters were trained agronomists and animal breeders by profession. Heinrich Himmler had been a chicken farmer and Walther Darré had raised rabbits. They had been the party’s original agrarian experts, and as rulers they brought to bear the methods of animal breeding upon the problems of imperial control and aristocratic leadership. This was for them, as for Hitler, the last word in “science.” Their conclusions are familiar to all. The colored races were to be subjugated and segregated to prevent the “contamination” of the white race. Within that race, the non-Nordics and particularly the Slavs were to be similarly segregated. As their number was too high to permit of easy domination, they must be decimated. The Jews, and other “races” such as the Gypsies, were ruinous to the blood of Aryans and must be exterminated.

Since the higher races were already corrupted, they must be purified. The unfit or the half-breeds must be carefully weeded out in order to create a natural aristocracy. The unfit were those who were physically weak, mentally ill, or endowed with sensitivity. They were to be done to death or at least sterilized. The aristocracy was to be recruited, blood-wise, from the “purer” groups, which, in general, meant the peasantry. Hitler and his agronomists felt that the urban population, and the upper classes with it, had run down biologically, and that the peasants were the last reserve of healthy blood. “Just as we have again produced the old Hanover type of horse from sires and dams who had little of the old purity left,” wrote Darré, “so we shall again, in the course of generations, breed the pure type of the Nordic German by means of recessive breeding. . . . We shall in the first instance make use of the peasantry. . . .”

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The new aristocracy would distinguish itself from the mass of Germans as fiercer beasts distinguish themselves from domesticated animals. “A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after,” Hitler informed Rauschning. “There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.”

It becomes clear why he eventually made, indeed why he had inevitably to make the statement that Germans have held so much against him: “In this too I am steel-hard [eiskalt]: If the German people is not ready to stake everything for its survival, all right, then let it perish [verschwinden]. . . . If I should go under, let the German nation also go under, for it has not proved worthy me.”

It is difficult to imagine Napoleon or Frederick II making a remark of this sort. Yet such utterances did not spring from megalomania alone. Megalomania grew on Hitler—this statement was made long after his accession to power and during the war—but the implicit distorted evolutionary thinking was with him always. When the Allied armies invaded Germany, Hitler gave the order to destroy the factories, utilities, power plants, bridges, and rails in their path. To those who protested that this would do more harm to his country in the future than to the enemy in the present, he replied, eiskalt: “If the war should be lost, then the nation, too, will be lost. That would be the nation’s unalterable fate. There is no need to continue to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better ourselves to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation [the Russians!]. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case only inferior persons, since the best have fallen.”

This is what General Heinz Guderian reports. But whether the words are accurate, whether they were spoken in anger, whether they are put together in such a way as to exculpate Guderian himself and others like him, this is not the place to decide. Their substance, however, is consistent with Hitler’s view of other nations and civilizations. It flowed quite simply, and “unalterably,” as he would have said, from his view of the law of nature. Defeat would be the ineluctable verdict of nature on the inferiority of the Germans. They would have been judged as unfit to prevail. Hitler condemned whole races to death with the utmost equanimity; why not the Germans to economic inferiority? He was not committed to the human race! Was that what he meant with his remark: “Plainly I belong by nature to another species”? To anyone else, that Germany had “lost” the war might mean that she had forfeited her claim to international leadership and material greatness. To Hitler it meant quite simply that she had forfeited her right to anything more than a nominal, physical existence. Henceforth she should not have railways and bridges and factories; her inhabitants would be lucky to be allowed to scratch the soil, raise cattle, and scrounge for wild fruit. It was Hitler, and not his enemies, who seriously believed that Germany not only should become “pastoralized,” but deserved to be. That is what failure means in Darwin’s, or rather Hitler’s, jungle.

Hitler did not grasp the doctrine of evolution; rather, it grasped him.

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Hitler’s chief psychological trait was an obsession with cunning. He read the history of civilization as a triumph of craft. The advances and inventions that raised man above the animals boiled down to a string of “tricks and ruses” by which the highest races circumvented and exploited nature, the animal world, and the inferior races. Further progress rested similarly upon the strategic enslavement of men. International success began and ended with wile. Hermann Rauschning suggested to Hitler that two could play at that game. “Trickery invited counter-trickery: ‘Maybe,’ replied Hitler, ‘but anyhow I get there first.’;” Hitler’s opponents were all foxes, but he would outfox them. If the Marxists have discovered the means of enticing the masses, he has discovered their discovery and will beat them at their own game. If the British have built an empire by the crafty exercise of violence, Hitler, alone of all their rivals, has penetrated their mystery and will turn their own methods against them. The Jews have used the theory of the “chosen people,” and have drawn strength from their very dispersion. He would do the same: he would raise the Germans to be an elect people and use the ethnic Germans in all parts of the world to second his aims. The simulation of “socialism” on a larger scale; the duplication of a more compact and extensive British empire; the facsimile of the “Elders of Zion” in an even cleverer form—that is the “New Order.” Hitler was the “hick” who outsmarted the city “slickers.” His “idea” was a composite counterfeit of the “secrets” of his enemies and rivals.

If the psychology was crafty and the mentality literal, the content was splashed with predilections and images stemming from the village and the small town. Bucolic pictures spring spontaneously to Hitler’s mind. When he wished to say that community was not based on natural instincts and that only force created society, he was reminded that when, in his native haunts, the farm boys and servants met at the local inn they always got to quarreling and fighting with knives. They were welded into a “society only when the gendarmes came on the scene.” To justify sexual intercourse and childbearing out of wedlock, he recalled that in his rural Austria no peasant would marry a woman who had not already proved fertile and capable of giving birth to healthy children.

Through Hitler’s speeches and writings there runs a strong undercurrent of antagonism to urban and cosmopolitan civilization. He was for some years a derelict in the great city of Vienna; he never became a confident citizen of it. He always extolled the countrified Munichs and Linzes, the Weimars and Bayreuths above the Viennas and Berlins. Even in his days of power, he preferred his country retreats to the German capital. In former centuries, he remarked, the towns were centers of culture and art, but the modern city was merely an accidental place of temporary settlement.

His speeches abound with diatribes against cities: “The bigger a town is the more it is tempted to play the role of metropolis . . . and try to grab everything for itself.” The city was to him the seat of “decadent bohemianism,” “the personification of incest,” the focus of the infection of syphilis. (Hitler was obsessed with the unappetizing aspects of sex.) The city was the breeding ground of the plagues of modern society, particularly of the miseries of the proletariat. “In the country there was no social question, as the master and the servant did the same work, and, above all, they ate out of the same dish.” A nation, he shouted, can exist without cities, but not without peasants. The cities themselves are replenished with country blood. The peasant “may be primitive but he is healthy.” He is a sound heathen, while the bohemian only pretends to heathenism.

Behind his attack on Marxism there lurked this animus against urban-centered civilization. In the Communist Manifesto, as elsewhere in his writings, Karl Marx expressed a deep contempt for peasant life. He rejected it as isolating, primitive, and brutalizing. To erase the distinctions between rural and urban life, or rather to immolate the village in urbanism, was one of the principal objects of his program. In this aim he expressed, in rather extreme fashion, a traditional attitude that reached back to antiquity through the Renaissance.

Hitler voiced the defiant retort of the peasant: “Just as liberalism and Marxism denied the peasant, so did the National Socialist Revolution consciously confess him as the surest support of the present and the only guarantee of the future. . . . So long as a nation can rely upon a powerful peasantry, it will constantly derive new strength from this class. Believe me, the resurgence which we have just lived through would not have been possible if part of the people in the countryside had not always been in favor of our movement. It would have been impossible in the cities alone to conquer those starting points which have given us the sanction of legality in our actions.”

Whenever Hitler compares them, the city-dweller comes off worse than the small-townsman and usually much worse than the peasant. The city-dweller is unstable and vain. He is likely to “hurl” himself “frantically upon everything new.” The peasantry is happily immune to the ideological aberrations of city folk. It is “the solid backbone of the nation, for husbandry is the most chancy occupation on earth. What, think you, would happen if the work of a city worker or an official depended on chance? Work on the land is a schooling which teaches energy, self-confidence, and a readiness to make swift decisions; the town-dweller, on the contrary, must have everything exactly mapped out for him, and does all he can to eliminate the slightest chance of any risk. . . .”

His personal predilections were clear. “By God! how right the peasant is to put his trust solely in the earth! What’s the use of talking about scenic beauty, when the earth is oozing with wealth!” He explained the spirit in which he made war as “that of a peasant whose property is attacked and who leaps to arms to defend his patrimony.” His strategy is prehensile. He praised a soldier who asked him to hold on to the Atlantic Wall: “. . . it shows that a man hates to abandon a place on which he has worked so hard.” Instances abound of his refusal to give up Russian territory once gained, regardless of military necessities.

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This preference for the rural was reflected in Hitler’s view of the state and the empire. The basis of his state was essentially territorial. The best guarantee of its defense, and the best basis for its own attacks, were to be found in physical amplitude. Much land held the promise of stability through the growth of a large peasantry. “A solid stock of small and medium peasants was at all times the best protection against social ills as we have them today. This is also the only solution that allows a nation to find its daily bread in the inner circle of its domestic economy. Industry and trade step back from their unwholesome leading positions into the general frame of a national economy of balanced demand and supply.”

While the farther ambitions of the “Thousand Year Reich” were industrial and colonial in character, the core of that empire was to be agrarian. Greater Germany would extend over Central Europe, the Balkans, and most of European Russia, if not all of it. This vast region would become the reservoir of food, oil, industrial resources, peasant b9/19/2007lood for the new “aristocracy,” manpower, and trained military forces for the control of Western Europe, as well as of overseas colonies. The empire would be organized by a division of functions. Germany proper would monopolize industrial, hence military production. The rest would become a semi-feudal preserve. The indigenous population, principally Slavs, would be decapitated: their articulate classes, professional men, and the propertied and middle classes, indeed their whole urban population, would be put out of the way—by methods that have become too familiar to bear recounting. Only the villagers would remain. They were peasants, hence “healthier” than townsfolk, but peasants of a lesser race, and hence of inferior blood. Indeed the whole racial theory of Hitler may be reduced to a hierarchy of peasant bloodstreams. The Slavs would be reduced, in numbers, in fecundity, and in possibility of resistance, to a safe and convenient level. They would become the permanent slaves—or, if you will, serfs, without, however, the rights of medieval serfs—of large-scale farmers recruited from the surplus population of Germany.

The Slavs must be taught just enough German to make it impossible for them to pretend that they cannot follow the commands of their masters, but not a word more, or they will give themselves airs. None of Tolstoy’s clever Lavrushkas for Hitler. Education was not for the Slavs or for any other subject people. Particularly must they not be taught the history of their countries; it might remind them of better and prouder days, and suggest that things might be different again. Let the slaves, however, have all the music they want; the radio would play all day; especially dance and light music; the “people” love to listen to music. “For cheerful music promotes joy in work. And it would be a desirable thing generally, as we learned from our experiences under the Weimar Republic, that the people should dance a lot.”

Above the layer of well-endowed German farmers, a smaller layer, an agrarian and military elite, would live in superior biologic purity—tall and blue-eyed blond mating only with, though not necessarily marrying, blue-eyed and tall blond—and in military Omnipotence, its homes half-palace, half-castle. This was a streamlined version of the old Teutonic Knights who had lived in fortified settlements among the Slavs of Prussia and the Baltic regions. The modern knights would be supplied with the most effective instruments of destruction. They would speed in armored splendor over a vast network of “Roman” Autobahnen reaching to the utmost corners of their realm. Revolts would be unthinkable.

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Land- and peasant-mindedness, cunning, and literalness—these were the attributes of Hitler’s mind. They do not add up to a complete portrait. To finish it one would have to describe Hitler’s sinuous opportunism when out of power and his intransigence when in power, his brutality and tenacity, his insight into political psychology and propaganda, his oratorical energies, and his quality of obsession and hypnosis. Nor do the traits that we have sketched go far to explain the rise of Nazism, however much they may explain of its denouement. They do not account fully for Hitler’s policy during his first years in office, when his power was hedged by severe domestic and international limits.

Hitler’s freedom of action expanded as his hold on power stiffened. His personal intervention, notably in foreign and military affairs, became increasingly significant and at last all-determining. His mind and purpose grew in fulfillment. That is why the late Hitler was so much like the early Hitler, and why the Tischgespräche are so redolent of his early images, impressions, and ambitions. The enduring pattern of his mind stamped itself increasingly upon the course of events, particularly during the war. And if we keep that pattern in view, we may at last penetrate some of the more paradoxical and “incomprehensible” features of his policy: the exterminations, the failure to arrange a compromise either with the East or with the West; the contortions, and at the same time the essential rigidity and obstinacy, of his diplomacy and his strategy.

Hitler’s literal reading of evolutionary law, combined with his brutality, account for the immolation of whole peoples and the criminal “experiments” with individuals. The extermination of the Jews and other groups cannot be put down merely to political opportunism or to the search for seven goats. The exterminations were began in 1942, when the Jews had exhausted their role as scapegoats, and they gathered in intensity and volume as the fortunes of the war turned against Germany. Hitler was determined to snatch a “racial” victory from the jaws of military defeat, feeling, quite correctly, that he could commit under the cover of war mass murders that would be difficult, if not impossible, in peace. War was, to him, the great racial revolution. It exalted the strong, and devoured the weak.

It has often been argued that he could have made good his conquest of Western Russia by coming to terms with the Ukrainians. This was certainly common sense, but his territorial plans and his hopes for a refreshed German peasantry and nobility made a compromise impossible, since they required the decimation and abasement of the Slavs. The nationality policy of the Third Reich in Russia was not a “mistake” of judgment or tactics; it followed “unalterably” from Hitler’s purpose and methods.

Finally, his reliance on cunning explains how he deceived, and eventually antagonized, the great powers. On his theory that diplomacy was mere deception, he could not believe that the British would enter the war in 1939 or that, having entered it, they would fight seriously. If they did, the war would spread to two fronts, and the two-front war was the principal score on which he attacked, and mocked endlessly, the former imperial regime of Germany. The British called his bluff instead of countering it with another, as they were expected to do.

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Such were the consequences of Hitler’s outlook. What was its inspiration and source, where its local habitation?

Was it Germany? Certainly Hitlerism (found a powerful echo in German traditions, institutions, and movements. Hitler’s literalness met its more sophisticated foster brothers in German pedantry, narrow specialization, and blinkered expertise. Led by the primitivist doctrinaire, technologists and “scientists” who could not detect, with their finest instruments, the difference between vivisection and murder, between experiment and crime, produced the most dreadful holocaust in history. Hitler’s chicanery appealed to a people that for two generations had worshipped a Bismarck. Diplomatic deception fertilized the old military machine and the professional General Staff and drove them to achieve remarkable if inconclusive victories. Hitler’s insistence on territorial power struck a sensitive chord in the heart of the Junkers. His bent for the natural, the rustic, and the pagan reinforced the romantic youth ideologies and movements that abounded in Germany: the hikers, the solstice-celebrants, the Nordic and nudist enthusiasts, the sex orgiasts. Without these passions, without the Prussian instruments, without the invertebracy of the ubiquitous German expert, Hitlerism could not have got very far. Germany, and not Hitler, is responsible for the success of Hitlerism.

Yet there is a great difference between Hitlerism and Prussianism. The combination of Junkerdom, militarism, and efficiency which was Prussianism, was ambivalent. Prussianism was Janus-faced. It tried to make the best of two worlds, the old world of Eastern territorial power, aristocracy, and privilege, and the Western world of science, industry, and maritime empire. The Prussian tradition was Protestant and Hitler was a pagan who thought Roman Catholic methods and institutions superior to those of Protestantism. Prussian conservatism appealed to Germanic, as opposed to Roman, traditions, and, like some Western conservatisms, was based on admiration of the medieval. But Hitler, as the years passed, harked back more and more to classical models, particularly that of Roman imperialism, and tended more and more to consider the early Germans, as the Romans themselves did, unkempt and brawling barbarians. And the whole Christian Era, until the rise of despots after his own heart, like Frederick II, he regarded as the most degraded in human experience: “an era of ‘bloodlust, ignominy, lies.’” Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, and their ilk were all native Germans, and topped Hitler in their special departments. Goering was a more unscrupulous opportunist, Goebbels a more determined “nihilist” and “permanent revolutionist,” and Himmler a more efficient organizer and spectator of millioned crime. Yet can we imagine any of them providing the rationale and the driving force of their movement? They were mere Nazis; the Austrian corporal was the supreme Hitlerist.

It is interesting to notice that Hitlerism made a stronger appeal in Southern Germany, particularly in Bavaria and eventually across the border in Austria, than in the more industrial and Prussian areas to the west and the north. But Hitler’s rise to supreme power owed little to the force of his ideas. He presented them in such an exaggerated and contradictory fashion that they were largely discounted. The more they were understood, the more incredible they seemed. His rise was due, at first, to the miseries and confusions of the economic depression. That he won power was due more directly, and above all, to the political irresponsibility, moral dullness, and intellectual bankruptcy of German conservatism, of the traditional German ruling class.

It must never be forgotten that Hitler did not seize power. It was presented to him by the military Hindenburgs, the aristocratic von Papens, the arch-monarchical Hugenbergs, and the industrial and monopolistic von Thyssens. From the mid-19th century onward, German conservatives (as the Japanese conservatives later) snatched at the tools and political forms of the West but were careful to reject its culture and political principles. By fighting liberalism without cease, they deprived themselves of a barometer and a good sense which from the first would have warned them of the real danger and evil of Hitlerism. (It is worth noticing that the conservative conspirators who plotted the assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, appealed to Christianity for spiritual sanction of their “act of treason” in a final effort to avoid commitment to liberal principles.)

In the end, the armor of the conservatives turned out to be mere brass. They looked upon the union with Hitler, whom they made Chancellor in a cabinet conservative in its majority, as a clever marriage of convenience in which they would naturally play the dominant male. They became instead the passive bride upon whom Hitler fathered the monster we know. To this day, most German conservatives have refused, in defiance of the facts, to acknowledge the offspring. Yet it is as much theirs as it is Hitler’s—indeed more so, since it was they who owned and made the bed upon which they coupled with the Devil.

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But if the character and actions of German conservatism account for the triumph and potency of Hitlerism, they do not account for all its policies and conclusions. Hitler was not a product of the industrial world over which the German conservatives presided. His literal mentality, his emphasis on peasant blood and crafty imitation, and his excessive concern with territorial expansion place him closer in spirit to the village and the small town than to the industrial cosmopolis.

Hitler’s descent and upbringing, his tradition and environment, suggest the principal source of his motives and ideas. It is well to keep in mind that he was eighteen years old when he left his native rural region of Upper Austria for the larger scene of Vienna. He was already a grown, not to say a finished, man—as Rudolf Olden properly insists—and not the wide-eyed romantic boy of Nazi hagiology. Psychologists and novelists assure us that eighteen years is a respectable age for the formation of character. Hitler was distinctly not one of those people, rare in all events, who “grow” with their work, with their responsibilities, or with their years. He was, rather, mulish and self-absorbed, in the end as in the beginning. He lived and went to school in a succession of villages and small towns. In the secondary grades he was a failure. How he must have hated his teachers! No group is covered with so much contempt in the Tischgespräche as teachers and professors. Even “thinkers” and “intellectuals” are treated with less venom. The professor, Hitler said, “is a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment.” One of his early teachers had criticized his German and said he would never write a decent letter; how right he turned out to be! “Dieser Stümper, dieser kleine Knirps,” Hitler hissed back at him, forty years later, from his bunker in the Eastern front, pausing in his conquest of the world.

Hitler quit school at the age of sixteen and lazed around, debating what to do with himself and coming to little conclusion. He daydreamed about an artistic or architectural career. Later, in Vienna, he was unable to enter a professional school for lack of preparation. He boasted that he refused to learn from books. In Mein Kampf he explained that one should pick out of one’s reading only facts and arguments that are useful in the pursuit of one’s ambitions or confirm ideas one already has. He not only failed to make his way in the Austrian capital but, what was more significant, he failed to assimilate the ways of thinking, the nuances and attenuations, of the city.

Hitler’s forebears were small farmers, touched on the paternal side with a tendency to vagrancy, restlessness, and to side-excursions into milling and cobbling. His father was the first of the line to rise above petty peasantry. On both sides, again, Adolf Hitler was a Waldviertler. The Waldviertel was notorious as a particularly isolated and backward Austrian district situated on the frontier of rural Bavaria. One of the borderlands where German met Slav, it was tangential to the mainstream of modem communications and intercourse, a provincial backwash. The forests of the Waldviertel were thick, its arable land scanty.

Hitler’s remark that the beauty of forested mountains was an invention of “professors” came from the land-hungry heart of the Waldviertler. He recalled in the Tischgespräche that the life of the peasants in his native region and contiguous districts of Southern Germany was “a real hell on earth . . . the whole of my homeland was strewn with boulders.” No wonder the fertile Ukraine beckoned so tantalizingly.

The hamlets, villages, and smallish towns of the Waldviertel were steeped in prejudice and superstition, ridden by witchcraft and, like many a retarded peasant area, inbred. Hitler’s own family history was a typical illustration of inbreeding and incest. His paternal grandmother was a country girl who gave birth to a son, Alois, out of wedlock. Alois bore her maiden name of Schicklgruber and was brought up in the home of a married fellow villager who may have been his real father. However, his mother subsequently married the brother of this villager, Georg Hitler. When Alois was nearly forty years old, and his mother long dead, Georg Hitler swore that he was Alois’s father. It seems that Alois would come into a small inheritance if his name were Hitler. Thus it came about that Schicklgruber became Hitler. There is no adequate explanation, except the obvious one that someone else was the father, why this “subsequent legitimation” was not made at the time of the marriage, as church and rural tradition commanded.

Alois himself had an illegitimate child and another was born only three months after his second marriage. His third wife was a niece, Klara, twenty years his junior, whom he had raised in the household of his first marriage as a sort of stepdaughter. It is surmised that their relations had been of a more intimate character, however. Klara’s third child, born in 1889, was Adolf Hitler.

The story has a fitting climax. When Adolf was thirty-seven years old, living rather comfortably as a Nazi leader in Munich, he invited Angela, his half-sister, to keep house for him. She brought along her daughter, Geli, who was then seventeen. The rest might have been foretold. Uncle promptly fell in love with niece. But Hitler was not the marrying kind. He made Geli’s life so miserable that five years later she killed herself. Adolf and Geli had repeated, with exactness, the pattern of the family, particularly the story of Alois and Klara. There is no reason to think that this pattern was anything but ordinary in the villages of the Waldviertel, and of those of Austria and Bavaria generally.

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Such was the native habitat of Hitler. It was a rural one in which the small town faded easily into the village. Small towns deep in rural areas are urban by a courteous convention; they are often merely large villages and market places for peasants. Their inhabitants were fresh from the soil, and bound to village life by family relationships and a passion for land-owning. Nor is an intimate connection with the countryside restricted to isolated small towns. There are cities, like Linz, and even great capitals, like Vienna, which recruit much of their population, including domestic and other labor, directly from the countryside. Such cities have a busy turnover, with the result that many a townsman retains contact with the native hearth and heath. The distinction between rural and urban becomes blurred. It was blurred in the case of Hitler. In externals, he was a distinctly urban phenomenon. His greatest triumphs were achieved in the ambiance of industrial and metropolitan life. Yet his early, persistent, and permanent outlook was nurtured in a world largely rural. This, the world of Bavaria and Austria, rather than of Western or Northern Germany, stretched east and west beyond the confines of German-speaking countries into the backwoods of Eastern and Southeastern Europe: a world of oppressed peasants and reactionary landlords, sprinkled with towns whose inhabitants were often of different tongues and faiths from those of the enveloping countryside.

For centuries the agrarian frontiers of Central and Eastern Europe had been under the pressure of the superior culture, the wealthier economy, and the more potent armaments of the West. In the 19th century the influence of liberalism began to penetrate the urban middle classes, and then to trickle further down. The resistance of rural society stiffened, and often took the form of xenophobia. Both landlords and peasants felt it. The Jews were an urban people and had good reason to embrace liberal and democratic ideals. Anti-Semitism became a favorite expression of anti-Westernism in Central and Eastern Europe.

Hitler grew up in an atmosphere of incipient rebellion against the West. Did Hitlerism express, in however exaggerated and distorted form, this rebellion? Hitler himself was thoroughly aware that he was exploiting, among other things, the division between East and West—a division that began, he wrote, “nearly 120 years ago at the moment when the Jew was granted citizen rights in the European states” and the process of industrialization started. “Then Europe stood at the parting of the ways. Europe began to divide into two halves, into Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe.” He traced the division to the higher susceptibility of the Western peoples to liberal ideas, which in turn was due to their racial and political corruption.

Hitler regarded the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe as healthier racially and spiritually, just as he regarded their traditional regimes as sounder politically, since they were based on a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, army, and bureaucracy. When he thought of agriculture, it was in the expansive forms of the East. Intensive farming repelled him. He must have the open spaces, like the Russians of his fancy. Farmers “are apt to lose the broad view, which, after all, is the most important. The man who possesses the vast spaces must show himself to be the master of the others, even if he restricts his activities to the colonization of his own country.”

Examine the list of the men Hitler admired. Mussolini excluded, for obvious reasons, no Western statesman appealed to his imagination. The Churchills and the Roosevelts are madmen and fools; even the Pétains, Lavals, and Francos are unimpressive. There are a few compliments for Lloyd George, and if cunning was the criterion, Hitler did not hit wrong. But the East teems with outstanding personalities. Kings Ferdinand and Boris of Bulgaria are admirable; “under the rod of the old fox, son Boris himself became a young fox who was able to work his way out of the complicated tangle of Balkan affairs.” And what a “preeminently sly old fox” was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem: “his quite exceptional wisdom puts him almost on equal terms with the Japanese.” Kemal Ataturk was so able it was impossible to believe that he could have been anything but an Aryan. To Rasputin, the shifty and hypnotic Siberian peasant monk, Hitler attributed “a power that could have contributed to the Slavic element a healthy life-affirmation.”

But the greatest praise was reserved for another Russian. In Joseph Stalin, Hitler felt he had found a kindred spirit, a rival worthy of his wand. “The cunning Caucasian” commanded his “unconditional respect.” He was “in his own way . . . a hell of a fellow! He knows his models, Ghengiz Khan and the others, very well. . . .” Stalin was “one of the most extraordinary figures in world history.” Hitler gave several reasons for his admiration, but one was particularly illuminating: “Stalin pretends to have been the herald of the Bolshevik Revolution. In actual fact, he identifies himself with the Russia of the Czars, and he has merely resurrected the tradition of Pan-Slavism. For him Bolshevism is only a means, a disguise designed to trick the Germanic and Latin peoples.”

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Have we strayed onto a strange path? Was there a double Hitler? Does Hitler appear, under one guise, as the hunter of the German frontier—the Ostmark—looking eastward to the conquest and displacement of the Slavic aborigines, and bearing the banner of German imperialism; but, turned around, does he appear instead as the leader of an Eastern rebellion against the urban and civilizing forces of the West? Did Hitler reinforce the Drang nach Osten with a Zug von Osten?

If Hitler gave a special touch to German imperialism, he also gave a special touch to Eastern reaction. That reaction had usually taken more conventional forms. In the Poland of Pilsudski it was military; in the Austria of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg it was clerical; in the Hungary of Horthy it was aristocratic; in Rumania it was monarchical; and in all these countries dictatorial regimes had found a strong basis in landlordism. The Russia of Stalin and Khrushchev professes Marxism, but a Marxism purged both physically and morally of its Western elements of liberalism and democracy. These regimes could never combine for an onslaught against Western philosophy in toto. It was not they that adopted Hitlerism. Hitlerism was adopted by a country that possessed the military and industrial means to attempt to weld the Eastern world together and lead it against the West.

Hitler thus played a double role. He promised to satisfy the aspirations of German imperialism and militarism, and so obtained control over the German army and economy. He gave expression to the hatred for Western ideas which had nourished reaction in Eastern Europe for generations, and so foisted German dominion upon it. The resentment and ambition that delivered Eastern Europe and Germany into Hitler’s hands at the same time blinded them to the real price he proposed eventually to exact of them. Germany craved that leading role in Western society and civilization which states like Great Britain and France had held in the past. Instead, she got a kind of Oriental barbarism that even Oriental despots had long abandoned. The difference between what Germany herself desired and what she tried to foist upon the world through Hitler is the reason for the lingering confusion in the German mind over the meaning of the Nazi experience. Much of the nature of the German catastrophe is explained by its incoherence.

The price Hitler meant to exact of Eastern Europe was, of course, higher than that he demanded of Germany. Eastern Europe he would use as a hammer to beat Western Europe into submission—and then melt down the hammer. He would destroy the best part of the peoples of Eastern Europe and make primitive slaves of the rest. In the end, Hitler deceived his allies—and his own people—much more than he did his enemies.

It was as if, after the First World War, German imperialism and Eastern reaction had shouted their wrath and resentment into a vast abyss. A single echo answered them—Adolf Hitler.

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