Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris
by Ian Kershaw
Norton. 845 pp. $35.00

Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis
by Ian Kershaw
Norton. 1,115 pp. $35.00

The idea of the great man in history has gone distinctly out of fashion. Ever since “social history” came into vogue, academics have had little but disdain for the idea that unique personal qualities enabled Frederick the Great to turn Prussia into a leading power or Napoleon to unify the European continent. In university history departments these days, high politics is viewed as a frivolous distraction at best, and, at worst, as patriarchal. What count are the behavioral patterns of large social forces and interests: economic, bureaucratic, ethnic, sexual, and so forth.

The historiography of Nazi Germany has been no exception to this trend. Dismissive of the notion that a single man could have led an entire nation into the abyss, “functionalist” historians like Hans Mommsen have minutely traced the bureaucratic machinations that account, in this view, for the progressive radicalization of the Third Reich and the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Hitler and his camarilla play walk-on parts. Given the dominance of this approach, it is hardly an accident that despite the flood of literature about Nazi Germany, so few scholarly biographies of Hitler have appeared, all of them decades ago.

Ian Kershaw’s massive two-volume work is thus something of an event. Kershaw, a historian at the University of Sheffield in England, has been an adherent of the social-history camp. In his previous books, he focused not on Hitler but on Hitler’s image and the way it was received by ordinary Germans. But, as he confesses here, he came to feel uneasy about effacing Hitler from the history of the Third Reich.

In writing a biography, Kershaw now seeks to redress the balance. But he has done so by bringing the tools of social history to bear on the career of the great dictator himself. What emerges, therefore, is a Hitler who is less the product of his own efforts than a creation of German society. By proceeding in this fashion, Kershaw hopes to demolish what he calls the “Fuehrer myth”—the legend, promoted assiduously by Hitler himself, that he waged a lonely struggle against his enemies and prevailed only through sheer force of will. Whether Kershaw succeeds is another question.

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In his first volume, which came out in this country last year, Kershaw carefully traces Hitler’s years as a drifter in the anti-Semitic cauldron of Vienna. He then examines his experiences in the German army in World War I, his career as a beer-hall agitator in Munich, and his intrigues with the national-conservative politicians who installed him in power in 1933. The volume ends with Hitler’s first great foreign-policy success—the occupation of the Rhineland—when he began to believe in his own infallibility.

It was this belief that, as Kershaw’s second volume relates, led Hitler to embark on ever-more reckless military adventures and finally to plunge into a dreaded two-front war against the West and the Soviet Union simultaneously. In tracing the course of that war, Kershaw also devotes considerable attention to the unfolding of the Final Solution, a subject scanted or ignored by previous Hitler biographers. He ends with Hitler, utterly oblivious to his place as the greatest criminal in history, ranting to his associates in his bunker about the Jewish peril before shooting himself.

In constructing this portrait, Kershaw has performed prodigies of research. He appears to have left no archive unvisited, and to have read everything by and about Hitler, including Joseph Goebbels’s newly discovered diaries. The result is certainly the most comprehensive biography to date. It is also, in tone, the most detached, not to say clinical. In an implicit repudiation of the kind of indignation summoned up by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Kershaw explains that his task is “not to engage in moral disquisitions on the problem of evil in a historical personality, but to try to explain the grip Hitler had on the society which eventually paid such a high price for its support.”

There is no disputing that Kershaw does a convincing job of dismantling some of the myths that have accreted to the Nazi leader over the years. One such myth is the notion, propagated by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf, that he was already a convinced anti-Semite during his years in Vienna before World War I. In fact, Kershaw shows, although he was certainly influenced by anti-Semites like Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, he had not yet formed the coherent view of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy that was later to dominate his thoughts. The “key ideological breakthrough,” in Kershaw’s judgment, came only in 1919, in the anti-Bolshevik “instruction courses” Hitler attended at Munich University at the behest of the army. Soon enough, he was himself indoctrinating troops against Bolshevism in lectures of such frenzied anti-Semitism that he was asked by his superiors to tone them down.

Kershaw also shows, contrary to another myth, that Hitler did not singlehandedly build a mass movement from scratch in Bavaria. That region’s farrago of nationalist groups actually provided an ideal environment for his movement, as well as a variety of sponsors to supply him with respectability and, even more important, cash. Not only was he dependent on others, his own efforts were often fumbling. “During this period, Hitler was seldom, if ever, master of his own destiny,” Kershaw writes. “The key decisions—to take over the party leadership in 1921, to engage in the putsch adventure in 1923—were not carefully conceived actions, but desperate forward moves to save face.”

Kershaw also argues that, contrary to his own carefully crafted legend, Hitler did not come to power in 1933 through a “triumph of the will.” Even though a sizable part of the German populace proved responsive to Hitler’s bellicose rhetoric, this by itself would not have sufficed. He still needed to be “levered” into office by members of the German elite like the feckless former chancellor Franz von Papen, who believed that the responsibility of exercising power would “tame” the Austrian corporal. In Kershaw’s view, without supporters and quasi-supporters in high places, “Hitler would never—even as head of a huge movement, and with over 13 million supporters in the country—have been able to come to power.” Hitler’s dictatorship, concludes Kershaw, “was made as much by others as by himself.”

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This last point forms, indeed, the leitmotif of Kershaw’s second volume. Aiming to reduce the Hitler myth to rubble, Kershaw contends not only that Hitler constantly vacillated and tried to put off decisions during the war years, but that it was his subordinates who formulated and advanced many of the regime’s policies. Indeed, Kershaw adduces instances in which these subordinates, lacking clear guidance from Hitler, embarked upon radical initiatives in anticipation of what they deemed to be his wishes. The Nazi phrase for this was “working toward the Fuehrer.”

But this line of argument can be pushed too far. To take the single most important issue, Kershaw seems to suggest that in pursuing the extermination of European Jewry, Hitler was irresolute and had to be urged on by Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Goebbels. Around the middle of September 1941, Kershaw writes, “Hitler had bowed to the pressure to deport the German and Czech Jews to the East” (emphasis added). And “within a few days of the decision to deport the Reich Jews,” he continues a bit later, “Goebbels was back at Fuehrer headquarters, seizing the opportunity to press once more for the removal of the Jews from Berlin.”

Is that, however, the way things happened? Obviously, in carrying out a vast and complex project like the Final Solution, Hitler had to rely on subordinates. Nor, as is well known, did he leave a trail of written commands for later historians to point to. But the fact remains that it was his deep and longstanding hatred of the Jews, and his gift for telegraphing that hatred to his subordinates and the German masses alike, that made him the central agent of the Holocaust and not simply (as Kershaw acknowledges at one point) its “chief inspiration.”¹ In carrying out the most terrible crime in history, Hitler was hardly “bowing” to pressure from below.

This brings us to the deeper problem of Kershaw’s approach. In conceiving of Hitler’s power as “a social product”—a product that was itself the “creation of social expectations and motivations vested in Hitler by his followers”—Kershaw not only fails to bring Hitler’s personality to life but never satisfactorily comes to grips with his fundamental motivations and demonic qualities. Indeed, Kershaw regards talk of Hitler’s uniquely evil character as mostly humbug, an (unintended) artifact of Nazi propaganda that portrayed the Fuehrer as superhuman.

Unfortunately, the idea of power as a “social product” is itself distressingly vague—nothing more than opaque speculation about the mindset of the German people that fails to explain what most needs to be explained. Again and again in the course of his career, Hitler reached key decisions that brought him success against opposition both from within and from without his ranks. In 1933, he insisted on settling for nothing less than the chancellorship even when he had already been offered other cabinet positions. In the early years of his dictatorship, he overrode the objections of his generals in securing a string of diplomatic and military triumphs. And during the course of World War II it was he, most fatefully, who translated radical anti-Semitism into genocidal deeds. To relegate Hitler to a creature of the hopes placed in him by the German people is wildly to underestimate both him and the evil that he wrought (or that, in Kershaw’s cautious formulation, is “associated with the name of one man”). Though he had his helpers, Hitler did lead an entire nation into the abyss. In that sense, if in that sense alone, he can be called a great man.

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¹ This acknowledgment is itself something of a concession for Kershaw. In his book, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (1985),
edition earlier this year, Kershaw wrote that “Hitler himself took relatively little part in the overt formulation of . . . [the Nazi party’s anti-Semitic] policy, either during the 1930’s or even the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ itself.”

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