Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was a German ideologue and statesman. Founder and central figure of Nazism, he took power in Germany in 1933 and established a totalitarian, imperialist, anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic dictatorship known as the Third Reich.

Führer of the German Reich August 2, 1934 – April 30, 1945 (10 years, 8 months and 28 days)
Election	Transfer of the functions of Head of State following the death of Paul von Hindenburg Ratified by plebiscite on 19 August 1934
Chancellor	Himself
Predecessor	Paul von Hindenburg (President of the Reich)
Successor	Karl Dönitz (Reich President)
Reich Chancellor January 30, 1933 – April 30, 1945 (12 years and 3 months)
President	Paul von Hindenburg Himself
Government	Hitler
Predecessor	Kurt von Schleicher
Successor	Joseph Goebbels
Biography
Date of birth	April 20, 1889
Place of birth	Braunau am Inn, Archduchy of Upper Austria  (Austria-Hungary)
Date of death	April 30, 1945 (age 56)
Place of death	Berlin (Germany)
Nature of death	Suicide
Nationality	Austrian (1889-1925); Stateless (1925-1932); German (1932-1945).
Political party	NSDAP
Father	Alois Hitler
Mother	Klara Pölzl
Siblings	Alois Hitler (half-brother); Angela Hitler (half-sister); Ida Hitler (Sister); Paula Hitler (Sister).
Spouse	Eva Braun

Established in Vienna and Munich, he tried in vain to become an artist, self-taught since he failed at the School of Fine Arts. Although he tried to evade his military obligations, he participated in the First World War with the Bavarian troops. After the war, he returned to Munich where he led a rather wait-and-see life in these troubled times, before joining the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, the Nazi Party), created in 1920. He imposed himself by his talents as an orator at the head of the movement in 1921 and attempted in 1923 a coup d’état that failed. He used his short prison sentence to write the book Mein Kampf in which he exposed his racist and ultranationalist views.

In the 1920s, in a climate of political violence, he occupied with the Nazi Party an increasing place in German public life, running for president against Hindenburg and becoming chancellor on January 30, 1933, during the Great Depression. His regime very quickly set up the first concentration camps for the repression of political opponents (especially socialists, communists and trade unionists).

In August 1934, after a violent operation to physically eliminate opponents and rivals – known as the Night of the Long Knives – and the death of the old Marshal Hindenburg, President of the Reich, he was elected head of state. From then on, he bore the dual titles of “Führer” (guide) and “Chancellor of the Reich”, thus scuttling the Weimar Republic and ending the first parliamentary democracy in Germany. The policy he pursues is pan-Germanist, anti-Semitic, revanchist and belligerent. His regime adopted anti-Jewish legislation in 1935 and the Nazis took control of German society (workers, youth, media and cinema, military industry, science, etc.).

The expansionism of the regime led Germany into the invasion of Poland in 1939, generating the European aspect of the Second World War. Germany first experienced a period of military victories and occupied most of Europe, but it was then pushed back on all fronts, then invaded by the Allies: in the East by the Soviets, in the West by the Anglo-Americans and their allies, including forces from the countries occupied by Germany. At the end of a total war that has reached heights of destruction and barbarism, Hitler, holed up in Berlin in his bunker, commits suicide while the capital of the Reich in ruins is invested by Soviet troops.

The Third Reich, which Hitler said was supposed to last “a thousand years,” lasted only twelve years but caused the deaths of tens of millions of people and the destruction of much of Europe’s cities and infrastructure. The unprecedented scale of massacres such as the genocide of European Jews and Gypsies — committed by the Einsatzgruppen and then in the mass killing centers — the starving deaths of millions of Soviet civilians or the murder of disabled people, to which are added the countless abuses against the civilian population, the inhuman treatment of Soviet prisoners of war or the destruction and looting for which he is responsible,  as well as the radical racism singling out his doctrine and the barbarity of the abuse inflicted on his victims, earned Hitler a particularly negative judgment by historiography and collective memory. His person and name are considered symbols of absolute evil.

Origin of the name Hitler

According to Le Petit Robert of proper names, “Hitler” is a variant of “Hüttler”, from the German Hüttle meaning “small   hut” (may have referred to a man living near a hut; in Bavaria, meant a carpenter).

Hitler is named after his father Alois’ father-in-law, Johann Georg Hiedler (under a different spelling, but the pronunciation is very close). The latter married Hitler’s grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, after Alois’ birth, without it being known if he was the father. Alois was registered under his mother’s name, with the mention illegitimate son, and later adopted his father-in-law’s name, in the form Hitler.

Hitler was baptized Adolphus Hitler. In  the nineteenth century, Adolf is a common name in German-speaking and Scandinavian countries.

According to the data sheet drawn up by French intelligence in 1924, Hitler’s middle name would be Jakob (Jacques, in German), but this card contains various gross errors, including the date and place of Hitler’s birth, and nothing corroborates the thesis of a middle name.

Early years

Origins and childhood of Adolf Hitler

Sources dealing with Adolf Hitler’s early years are “extremely incomplete and subjective”. The archival collections, the witnesses and Hitler himself give very different interpretations of this period which extends from 1889 to 1919. Many historians have even looked into the possibility of Hitler’s Jewish origin, but mostly concluded that there were mere unfounded rumors.

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m. in Braunau  am Inn, a small town in Upper Austria near the Austro-German border; he was baptized two days later in the church of Braunau. He was the fourth child of Alois Hitler (1837–1903) and  Klara Pölzl (1860–1907). His parents, married since 6 January 1885, came from the poor rural region of Waldviertel bordering Bohemia.

In 1894, the Hitler family moved to Passau on the German side of the border. A year later, Alois retired and bought a small farm in Fischlham near Lambach to devote himself to beekeeping.

Adolf entered the village school on May 2, 1895. His schoolmaster, Karl Mittermaier, testifies: “I remember how his class affairs were always arranged in an exemplary order.”

In the summer of 1897, the patriarch decided to sell his farm and moved his family to Lambach. Adolf became a student at the village monastery where his results remained good. He became an altar boy. In November 1898, Alois acquired a house in the village of Leonding near the church and cemetery. According to witnesses of the time, Adolf was a child who loved the outdoors and played cowboys and Indians like many children his age. His sister Paula said: “When we played Indians, Adolf was always the chief. All his comrades had to obey his orders. They must have felt that his will was the strongest.”

Father-son relationships

At the age of 11, in September 1900, Adolf Hitler was enrolled by his father Alois at the Realschule in Linz, four kilometers northeast of Leonding. His academic results then collapsed. He eventually repeats himself, the conflict between Adolf and his father becomes inevitable. Indeed, the father wants his son to become a civil servant like him, while the young boy wants to become a painter.

“For the first time in my life, I took my place in the opposition. However obstinate my father was in carrying out the plans he had conceived, his son was no less determined to refuse an idea from which he expected nothing. I did not want to be a public servant. Neither speeches nor harsh representations could reduce this resistance. I will not be a civil servant, no, and still no! »

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.

On January 3, 1903, Alois Hitler died of a heart attack, a glass of wine in hand, in the Wiesinger brewery in Leonding. It was a real turning point in the life of the young Hitler. But scholars are divided on Hitler’s feelings about his father’s death.

The end of school

Klara, now widowed, becomes the de facto guardian of Adolf and Paula Hitler aged fourteen and seven respectively. She receives State assistance of 600 crowns and monthly half of her late husband’s pension (100 crowns) and 20 crowns per child attending school. Her son always carries his mother’s photograph with him. In the spring of 1903, Klara placed Adolf in boarding school in Linz so that he could succeed in his studies.

Leopold Pötsch, his history teacher, was a supporter of  Pan-Germanism,  but no document can attest to a nationalist militancy on the part of Adolf Hitler at that time. On the other hand, he was immersed in an Austrian society of pan-Germanist spirit. Here is the portrait of the schoolboy Hitler that his head teacher paints during the trial of the putsch in 1923:

“He was unquestionably gifted, albeit of a stubborn character. He had difficulty controlling himself, or at least was considered recalcitrant, authoritarian, always wanting to have the last word, irascible, and it was obviously difficult for him to bend to the framework of a school. Nor was he hardworking, because otherwise […] he should have achieved much better results. Hitler was not just a draftsman who had a nice bit of pencil, but he was also able, on occasion, to distinguish himself in scientific subjects […]. »

— Eduard Huemer, 1923.

At the beginning of the school year 1904, for some obscure reason, Hitler left the school in Linz for the establishment in Steyr forty-five kilometers away. His academic performance did not improve, and he did not finish his third grade. He pretends poor health, simulated or exaggerated, and ends up dropping out of school permanently. From these years 1904-1905, the only known authentic document is a portrait of Hitler made by his comrade Sturmlechner. There is “a skinny adolescent face with a down of mustache and a dreamy look”.

Routes in Vienna

In the summer of 1905, Klara Hitler sold the house in Leonding to settle with her family in a rented apartment in the center of Linz at Humboldtstrasse 31. Adolf receives some pocket money from his aunt Johanna, which he uses to go to the cinema and the theatre. In November 1905, he met an apprentice upholsterer: August Kubizek, passionate about music. According to his friend, although unemployed, Hitler behaved like a real “dandy”: thin mustache, black coat and hat and ivory-pommelled cane. He drank alcohol, smoked a lot and was a member of the Association of Friends of the Linz Museum.

In May 1906, his mother offered him a stay in Vienna where he attended two operas by Richard Wagner: Tristan and The Flying Dutchman. He contemplates the imperial capital that both fascinates and makes him uncomfortable: Emperor Franz Joseph represents in his eyes the symbol of the aging of the Empire. He finally returned to Linz at the beginning of June. His discussions with Kubizek made him want to become a composer; He convinced his mother to study music before quickly dropping out.

In January 1907, the family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch, examined Klara and diagnosed a tumor that was operated on. Physically diminished, Klara moved from her apartment to a home outside Linz in Urfahr. Adolf has his own room while Klara, Paula and Johanna, Hitler’s aunt, share the other two rooms. In the autumn, he finally decided to take the entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna; his mother reluctantly gave in. Hitler was refused; His work is deemed “insufficient”. He later mentions this event in Mein Kampf as follows: “I was so convinced of success that the announcement of my failure struck me like love at first sight in a clear sky.”

In October, Dr. Bloch solemnly declares to the Hitler family that Klara’s condition is irreversible: her last wish is to rest alongside her husband, Alois, in Leonding. She died on December 21, 1907, at the age of 47. August proposes to Hitler to spend the Christmas holidays with his family, but Hitler declines the invitation. According to Dr. Bloch’s testimony, “Klara Hitler was a simple, modest and kind-hearted woman. Tall, she had neatly braided brown hair and a long oval face with beautiful, expressive gray-blue eyes […]. I have never seen anyone as overcome with grief as Adolf Hitler. »

When he returned to Linz at the bedside of his dying mother, he had not dared to admit to her his failure at the School of Fine Arts. Nineteen years old, Adolf Hitler is now a young man measuring 1.72 m and weighing 68 kilos. Stubborn, he decided that he would be a painter or architect and retried the entrance exam in Vienna.

Apparently, at that time, Hitler was not really a fanatical nationalist as he claimed in Mein Kampf. Indeed, why join a cosmopolitan city like Vienna, with many nationalities, rather than directly join Germany? For him, Vienna represents a challenge, a gateway to social advancement. Hitler was captivated by the performances of Felix Weingartner and Gustav Mahler at the Opera. Since 1897, Vienna has been ruled by Karl Lueger (1844-1910), the founder of the Christian Social Party. The mayor is violently anti-Semitic and rallies a good part of the Catholic electorate.

The second failure at the Beaux-Arts

In the spring of 1908, August Kubizek joined Hitler in Vienna, where he rented a grand piano to perfect his scales. According to his testimony, Hitler regularly went without food in order to go several times to the theater or the Opera. He also claims that Hitler has little interest in girls except for a young bourgeois woman named Stefanie. Called up for military service, the musician returned to Linz in July. During the summer, Hitler severed ties with both Kubizek and the rest of his family residing in Spital.

In October 1908, the École des Beaux-Arts rejected 96 students, including Adolf Hitler, who “was not allowed to take the test”. Not because he is a bad draftsman but because he does not work enough, he is unable to submit to discipline. He moved in August 1909 to rue Felbert, then rue Sechshauser and finally rue Simon-Denk. For lack of money, he is put on the street.

The marginal

Vienna police records indicate that from February 8, 1910, Hitler was domiciled in a men’s home at 27 Meldermann Street. Thanks to Reinhold Hanisch, a young man five years his senior, whom he had met a few months earlier in a homeless shelter, Hitler earned some money by clearing snow or carrying the suitcases of crowded passengers from the Westbahnhof. It then feeds on a soup in the morning and a bread crouton in the evening.

According to Mein Kampf, he was a laborer and assistant mason but no document proves it. Some witnesses — including Hanisch — insist on Hitler’s idleness in refusing to work. Thanks to the fifty crowns sent by his aunt Johanna, he acquired the artist’s equipment: Hanisch took charge of selling Hitler’s paintings in postcard format. On May 4, 1911, Angela Raubal claimed Hitler’s pension from the Linz court in order to raise Paula with dignity, which he had to accept in spite of himself.

Antisemitism and Aryosophy.

After hitting rock bottom in the winter of 1909, the marginal Hitler still lives in 1912 from his paintings sold in the street. According to Jacob Altenberg, one of his Jewish art dealers, “he used to shave … he regularly made his hair and wore clothes that, although old and worn, were no less clean.” Hitler participated in the political debates that erupted in the home. Two subjects put him out of himself: the Social Democratic Party and the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. No witnesses report anti-Semitic remarks on his part. According to Mein Kampf, he became an anti-Semite when he arrived in Vienna:

“One day as I was walking through the old town, I suddenly met a character in a long caftan with curls of black hair. Is this also a Jew? That was my first thought. In Linz, they didn’t look that way. »

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925.

This sudden anti-Semitism is contradicted by various sources. Kubizek claims that his friend was already “fiercely anti-Semitic” when he arrived in Vienna, but many of the anecdotes he relates are clearly dubious. According to Reinhold Hanisch, an Austrian worker who knew him at the time, Hitler would have become anti-Semitic only “later”; this witness thus insists on the friendship between the future Führer and Joseph Neumann, a young Jew met at the Viennese men’s home on Meldermann Street.

However, Ian Kershaw doubts the veracity of Hanisch’s claims: according to the historian, Hitler was indeed anti-Semitic during his stay in Vienna, but this was a “personalized hatred” and internalized as long as he needed the Jews to live. It would seem, therefore, but without any real evidence, that his exacerbated anti-Semitism did not appear until the end of the war in 1918-1919, when he “rationalized his visceral hatred into a worldview”.

In addition to anti-Semitic pamphlets, Hitler most likely read Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’ magazine Ostara: according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “the hypothesis of Lanz’s ideological influence on Hitler can be accepted”; the latter would have “assimilated the essence of Lanz’s Aryosophy: the desire for an Aryan theocracy taking the form of a dictatorship by divine right of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans over the inferior races; the belief in a conspiracy, continued throughout history, of the latter against the heroic Germans, and the expectation of an apocalypse from which would come a millennium consecrating the world supremacy of the Aryans”.

Ian Kershaw, for his part, also thinks that the magazine was among Hitler’s common reading at this time but concludes more cautiously about the precise nature of Lanz’s influence on his beliefs. It is improbable, however, that Hitler then knew the aryosophist Guido von List  and, while he may have been attracted by the political aspects of List’s thought most similar to Lanz’s, he never showed any interest in his occultist theories.

Life in Munich

In the spring of 1913, Adolf Hitler cherished the hope of studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. For his twenty-four years, he awaits the collection of his paternal inheritance, of 819 crowns. Moreover, having failed to register in 1909 for military service, he now thinks that the Austrian administration has forgotten him and that he can cross the border quietly. On 24 May, dressed properly, carrying a suitcase and accompanied by a man, the clerk Rudolf Häusler, he left home for the station. In addition to being a city of art, Munich seems familiar to him because it is close to his native region. Once there, Häusler and Hitler rented a room at 34 Schleissheim. Häusler shows his Austrian papers, Hitler declares himself stateless.

In January 1914, Hitler was ordered to the Austrian consulate as soon as possible to report on his desertion. He explains that he went to the Vienna City Hall where he was registered, but that the summons never arrived. What’s more, it has few resources and is weakened by infection. The consul believed in his good faith and on February 5, Hitler was definitively adjourned before the Salzburg Military Commission. For a long time, Häusler’s presence at Hitler’s side in Munich will be erased, because he is one of the few witnesses to know the call to order of the Austrian army to Adolf Hitler who has still not done his military service. Hitler did not want to reveal this embarrassing episode. In reality, he had fled Austria refusing to bear arms for the Habsburgs.

As in Vienna, Hitler lived from his paintings. He likes to reproduce the town hall, streets, breweries, shops. He sells each painting for between five and twenty marks, or about a hundred marks per month. In Mein Kampf, Hitler states that he read and learned a lot about politics at this time, but no document proves this. Perhaps he frequents bars and breweries where he discusses politics.

Soldier in the First World War

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian student. On July 31, the general mobilization is proclaimed in Berlin. The King of Bavaria, Ludwig III, sent a telegram to Wilhelm II assuring him of his military support.

August 1914

On August 2, 1914, the day after the Kaiser’s declaration of war, thousands of Munich residents flocked to Odeonsplatz to applaud the King of Bavaria. A photograph immortalizes the event and Hitler is included. In Mein Kampf, he declares himself happy to go to war. Yet this is to forget that he tried to evade the Austrian army a few years earlier.

According to his military booklet, he did not report to the recruiting office until 5 August. He was definitively drafted on 16 August as a “volunteer” in the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Infantry  Regiment of the Bavarian Army. The departure of the 16th  Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment (List Regiment, named after its colonel, Julius von List), into which it had just been incorporated for the front, was set for 8 October 1914. The train reached the Belgian border on 22 October and arrived in Lille on 23 October.

Fighting

Private Hitler had his baptism of fire on 28 October 1914 near Ypres. On 1 November, his battalion was decimated: out of 3,600 men, only 611 remained operational. After only a few days on the front line, he was assigned as an estafette on 9 November. On the previous 3 November, he was appointed gefreiter, which does not correspond, as various historians propose to the rank of corporal but to that of first class, without prerogative of command over other soldiers.

To reward his courage (for bringing to safety, along with his teammate Anton Bachmann, the commander of the regiment, Philipp Engelhardt), Hitler was proposed by Adjutant Gutmann for the decoration of the  Iron Cross Second Class (and he received the first class in 1918). He has the position of estafette with the staff of his regiment: he goes to collect the orders of the officers to transmit them to the battalions. In times of relative calm, the estafette Hitler crisscrosses the countryside around Fournes to paint watercolors Renowned for his difficult character, he is nevertheless appreciated by his comrades. Proposing to him  to “sleep with French women” puts him out of himself, since it would be “contrary to German honor”. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t hang out with prostitutes.

Private Hitler isolates himself to think or read. The few known photographs from this period show a pale, mustached, skinny man often isolated from the group. His real companion is his dog Foxl and one day he is anxious not to find him: “The bastard who took it from me does not know what he did to me. ” Hitler is a true fanatical warrior, no brotherhood, no defeatism must be tolerated. He writes:

“Each of us has only one desire, that of fighting definitively with the gang, to arrive at the test of strength, whatever the cost, and that those of us who will have the chance to see our homeland again find it cleaner and purified of all foreign influence, than through the sacrifices and sufferings made every day by hundreds of thousands of us,  that through the river of blood that flows every day in our struggle against an international world of enemies, not only the external enemies of Germany be crushed, but the internal enemies are also broken. That would be more valuable to me than all the territorial gains. »

— Adolf Hitler, letter to Ernst Hepp, February 5, 1915.

Injury

On October 7, 1916, a shell exploded in the shelter of the estafettes: Hitler was wounded in the left thigh. He was treated at the Beelitz hospital near Berlin. After some time in the depot battalion, he asked to join his regiment; On March 7, 1917, he arrived at Vimy. At the end of September 1917, his regiment obtained two weeks’ leave, Hitler left for Berlin. On 13 October 1918, near Ypres, he was severely gassed. He was sent to the Pasewalk hospital  in Pomerania. At the trial in Munich in 1923, he explained:

“It was mustard gas poisoning, and for a whole period I was almost blind. Afterwards, my condition improved, but as far as my profession as an architect was concerned, I was no more than a complete cripple, and I never thought that I would one day be able to read a newspaper again. »

— Adolf Hitler, Munich Trial (1923)

Just as Germany was about to capitulate, the revolution spread to Berlin and the Kaiserliche Marine mutinied. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and takes refuge in the Netherlands. The socialist Philipp Scheidemann proclaims the Republic. Two days later, the new government signed the armistice of 1918.

Hitler’s stay in Pasewalk was a turning point in his life. He recounts in Mein Kampf that  , unable to read the newspapers, it was through a pastor who came to announce it to the convalescents that he learned on November 10 the news of the establishment of a republic in Germany. In tears, he fled, he said, to the dormitory: he then said he was  “struck by lightning”  and then seized with a “revelation”.

From his hospital bed, when he has regained the use of his eyes, Hitler is devastated by this announcement and becomes blind again. He claims in Mein Kampf to have  had a patriotic vision and to have at the time “decided to do politics”. A myth has been built on this “hysterical blindness” treated by the psychiatrist Edmund Forster, a specialist in war neuroses, who would have undertaken hypnotherapy  on Hitler following which paranoia, psychosis  would have been structured.  and the patriotic vision of the future Führer, elements unverifiable because Hitler’s medical report disappeared and Dr. Forster, monitored by the Gestapo, committed suicide in 1933.

Wait-and-see attitude

Hitler arrived in Munich on November 21, 1918. Without family, work and home, his concern is to stay in the army. On 3 December, he left for the Traunstein prison camp in southern Bavaria as a military guard. Then, the camp was suppressed, the soldier Hitler was sent back to his barracks on January 25, 1919, and arrived in Munich around February 12. In Munich, street fighting intensified, armed workers marched through the city and Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, was assassinated in the street by a nationalist student.

“Man of confidence” of his staff, Hitler was appointed in April to head the commission of inquiry of his regiment on the revolutionary events. But, as L. Richard points out, contrary to what he states in Mein Kampf, the armistice was not for him the political “revelation” of his life. He did not rush ahead of events but took advantage of his proximity to the officers. He made no particular political commitment (neither Freikorps nor Bavarian Civic Guard). The soldier Hitler of the time was not a dynamic militant, nor an anti-Semitic fanatic; He is a wait-and-see tackle.

All his life, Hitler adhered to the myth of the “stab in the back”, disseminated by the military caste, according to which Germany had not been defeated militarily, but betrayed from within by the Jews, the forces of the left, the Republicans. Until his last days, the future master of the Third Reich remained obsessed with the total destruction of the enemy within. He wanted to punish the  “November criminals”, erase November 1918 and never see a repeat of this traumatic event, at the origin of his involvement in politics.

A propaganda hero

The image of the heroic fighter of the Great War shaped by Hitler in Mein Kampf and then by Nazi propaganda in the late 1920s was the subject of an in-depth study in 2011 by historian Thomas Weber, based on the archives of the List regiment whose official history was published in 1932. In his book Hitler’s First War, he concludes that there is a large degree of mystification, particularly due to the hagiographic accounts of Hans Mend and Balthasar Brandmayer.

His regiment had a very poor military value (poorly trained, poorly equipped unit, composed mainly of unmotivated peasants,) and was not engaged in decisive combat. Hitler himself and the propaganda would later have embroidered on the image of the heroic estafette in the front line, but Hitler has a mission of regimental estafette carrying dispatches a few kilometers behind the front line and not of battalion or company estafette. Hitler would have been especially keen to maintain his assignment with the command of his regiment, which allowed him to keep himself as protected as possible from the dangers of the front line.

A contested founding experience

Thomas Weber also insists on the inconsistencies between what his study reveals from the sources available on the “List regiment” (including letters and maps sent by the soldier Hitler) and the image propagated by Hitler himself according to which the First World War was for him an ideologically and politically decisive event. Strongly opposing the earlier conclusions of Australian historian John Williams, he notes that “if this approach were correct, Hitler should be the main character in this regimental history of 1932 and not a fleeting figure in the background, confined to an almost insulting role of second knife” and concludes that at the end of the war,  “His landing in the ultra-nationalist and counter-revolutionary ranks seems to have been dictated by considerations of pure opportunism as much as by solid convictions.”

Political ascent

Upon his release from hospital in November 1918, Hitler returned to his regiment in Munich. He later wrote that the war had been “the most unforgettable and sublime time.”

The year 1919

Although Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he decided to get involved in politics as soon as the armistice of November 11, 1918, was announced, this was mainly a retrospective reconstruction. As Ian Kershaw notes, Hitler still refrained from enlisting in the early months of 1919, not thinking of joining the many Frankish corps—paramilitary units formed by far-right veterans to crush communist insurrections in Germany and then the young Weimar Republic itself. Under the short-lived Munich Council Republic, he remained discreet and passive, and probably outwardly pledged allegiance to the regime.

Since November 9, 1918, Bavaria has been in the hands of the Räterepublik or “Republic of Councils”, a revolutionary government proclaimed by the socialist Kurt Eisner and turning more and more to the left after the assassination of the latter in early 1919. Hitler’s own barracks are run by a council. Disgusted, Hitler left Munich for Traunstein.

However, in 1919, when power was hesitant between the communists of the KPD and the Social Democrats of the SPD, he was elected delegate of his barracks, first when power in Bavaria was in the hands of the SPD, then a second time as deputy delegate under the short-lived communist regime (April-May 1919), just before the capture of Munich by federal troops and the Free Corps. He did not seek to fight these regimes, without having joined any of these parties, and it is likely that the soldiers were aware of his nationalist political views.

Hitler theoretically remained in the army until March 31, 1920. In June 1919, while the repression of the revolution was raging in Bavaria, his superior, Captain Karl Mayr, charged him with making anti-communist propaganda  among his comrades. It was during his lectures among soldiers that Hitler discovered his talents as an orator and propagandist and that for the first time an audience spontaneously showed itself seduced by his charisma.

It is also from this period that Hitler’s first anti-Semitic writing is dated, a letter he addressed on September 16, 1919, to a certain Adolf Gemlich, on the initiative of his superior, Captain Karl Mayr. After a virulent anti-Semitic attack, in which he describes the action of the Jews as  “racial tuberculosis of peoples”, he opposes  “instinctive anti-Semitism”  and  “reasoned anti-Semitism”: “Instinctive anti-Semitism will be expressed in the last resort by pogroms.

Reasoned anti-Semitism, on the other hand, must lead to a methodical struggle on the legal level and to the elimination of the privileges of the Jew. Its ultimate goal must, however, be, in any case, their banishment.” For Ernst Nolte, this letter is also a testimony to Hitler’s incipient anti-Bolshevism and the association he makes between Jews and revolution: Hitler ends his letter with a remark that the Jews “are indeed the driving forces of the revolution”.

Hitler: a charismatic speaker of the Nazi Party (1919-1922)

At the beginning of September 1919, Captain Karl Mayr charged Corporal Hitler and Warrant Officer Alois Grillmeier with a propaganda mission within an ultra-nationalist political group, the DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Workers’ Party), founded in early 1919 by Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer. . On September 12, 1919, Hitler went to a party meeting with Adjutant Alois Grillmeier and six other former propaganda agents under Karl Mayr.

The latter was also expected at this meeting, as evidenced by a note on the attendance list. At the end of this meeting, Hitler took the floor unexpectedly to castigate the proposal of a speaker, favorable to a secession of Bavaria. Noticed by Drexler, he joined the DAP, probably also on the orders of his superiors. Hitler’s application for membership in the German Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei), another far-right party, was rejected that same year. Its membership number, 555, reflects the tradition in fringe political parties of starting membership lists at number 501. However, the first numbers were not assigned in the order of arrival of the members but, around the end of 1919 beginning of 1920, following the alphabetical order of the members of the moment. It was not until membership card 714 (January 25, 1920) that the numbers followed chronological order.

The only thing we know for sure is that Hitler was among the first two hundred or so members who joined the party before the end of 1919. In February 1920, as the DAP’s chief speaker, he transformed  the party into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), to align the party with similar parties in Austria or the Sudetenland.

His charisma and speaking skills make him a popular figure at public meetings of brewery extremists. His favorite themes—anti-Semitism, anti-Bolshevism, nationalism—found a receptive audience. Indeed, he uses simple language, uses powerful formulas and makes extensive use of the possibilities of his voice. Mobilizing more and more supporters seduced by his speeches, as much by his ideas as by his gestures, he made himself indispensable to the movement to the point of demanding its presidency, which the initial leading group abandoned to him in April 1921 after an ultimatum on his part. Because of its talents as a political agitator, the party quickly gained popularity, while remaining very much in the minority.

Hitler equipped his movement with a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, chose the swastika flag as its emblem, adopted a 25-point program (in 1920) and endowed it with an aggressive militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA). He also changed his style of dress, constantly dressed in black or military uniform, and it was also at this time that he cut his mustache into a toothbrush that became, with his lock on his forehead, the most famous of his physical characteristics.

Initially, Hitler presented himself as a mere “drum” charged with paving the way for a future savior of Germany, still unknown. But the cult spontaneously appeared around his charismatic personality in the ranks of the SA and militants soon convinced him that he himself was this providential savior. From 1921-1922, the intimate conviction that he was designated by fate to regenerate and purify defeated Germany never left him.  His narcissism and megalomania only increased, as did his absolute predominance within the Nazi movement.

This is what differentiates him  from Mussolini, initially a simple primus inter pares of a fascist collective leadership, or from Stalin, who does not himself believe in his own cult, manufactured late. On the contrary, the cult of the Führer is quickly organized, with the structuring of the party around the Führerprinzip in line: everything revolves around the Führer, who creates a bond of dependence, in the feudal sense of the term, between his followers and him; Hitler’s response to those who greet him is in reality an acceptance of the latter’s tribute.

Inspired by the reading of psychologist Gustave Le Bon, Hitler developed violent but effective propaganda.

“Hitler’s central idea is simple: when addressing the masses, there is no need to argue, it is enough to seduce and strike. Passionate speeches, the refusal of any discussion, the repetition of a few themes to satiety constitute the essence of his propaganda arsenal, such as the use of theatrical effects, garish posters, an outrageous expressionism, symbolic gestures, the first of which is the use of force. Thus, when the SA brutalizes their political opponents, it is not under the effect of unleashed passions, but in application of the permanent directives given to them.”

In his life, Hitler never accepted rational or contradictory debate and spoke only to established audiences.

In January 1922, Hitler was sentenced to three months in prison (two of which were suspended) for “disturbing public order”. He served this sentence in Stadelheim prison in Munich between June and July 1922. He was even threatened with expulsion from Bavaria.

Failed Munich Putsch (9 November 1923)

A fervent admirer of Mussolini (whose bust would adorn his office for a long time), Hitler dreamed of having his “march on Rome” that would bring him to power by force. In November 1923, when the economy had collapsed with the occupation of the Ruhr, the  hyperinflation ridden Papiermark was worthless, and   separatist or communist enterprises were shaking parts of Germany, Hitler believed the time had come to take control of Bavaria before marching on Berlin and ousting the elected government. On 8 and 9 November 1923, he led with General Erich Ludendorff  the abortive coup d’état in Munich known as the Brewery Putsch. The plot, botched, is easily routed and, during a clash of his troops with the police in front of the Feldherrnhalle, Hitler is himself wounded while sixteen of his supporters, later promoted  “martyrs” of Nazism, are killed.

The NSDAP was immediately banned. On the run, Hitler was arrested on 11 November, charged with conspiracy against the state and incarcerated in Landsberg am Lech prison. From that moment on, he will resolve to turn tactically to the only legal way to achieve his ends. But in the immediate future, he knows how to exploit his trial by using the bar as a platform: the media coverage of his trial allows him to put himself in the spotlight and to make himself known throughout the rest of Germany.

The magistrates, reflecting the attitude of the traditional elites with little attachment to the Weimar Republic, were quite lenient towards it. On 1 April 1924, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the fortress of Landsberg am Lech for “high treason”, which caused a scandal even among conservatives. Detained in a fortress, like criminals who acted for noble reasons, he served his sentence in a large cell in which he could receive visits, and especially where he had set up a real study, in which he read a lot and dictated to his relatives the first drafts of Mein Kampf. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released after nine months.

Final constitution of an ideology (1923-1924)

His detention in Landsberg prison was considered by Hitler as “his university at the expense of the state”, which allowed him to read works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Karl Marx and the memoirs of Otto von Bismarcket generals and statesmen. It gave him the opportunity to dictate to his secretary Rudolf Hess his book Mein Kampf, an autobiographical narrative  and  political manifesto  , destined to become the manifesto of the Nazi movement. Hitler unvarnished the formidable ideology that he had completed to build up since 1919 (Weltanschauung), from which he would no longer vary and which he would seek to put into practice.

In addition to his hatred of democracy, France “mortal enemy of the German people,” socialism and “Judeo-Bolshevism,” his doctrine rests on his intimate pseudo-scientific conviction of a Darwinian struggle between different fundamentally unequal “races.” At the top of a strict pyramid would be the German race or “race of Lords”, sometimes described as the “Nordic race” and sometimes as the “Aryan race” and whose most eminent representatives would be the tall blonds with blue eyes.

This superior race must be “purified” of all foreign elements, “non-Germans,” Jews, homosexuals, or sick, and must dominate the world by brute force. To the traditional pan-Germanism aimed at grouping all ethnic Germans in the same state, Hitler added the conquest of an indefinite Lebensraum, to be wrested especially in the East from the Slavic “subhumans”. Finally, Hitler constantly speaks of “eradication” or “annihilating” the Jews, compared to vermin, maggots, or lice, which are not only a radically inferior race to him, but also radically dangerous.

Hitler mainly borrowed his ultra-racist vision from H. S. Chamberlain, his cult of the superman from Nietzsche, his obsession with decadence from Oswald Spengler and, finally, the concepts of Nordic race and living space from Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s ideologue. He also draws on the “conservative revolution” led by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book The Third Reich he read.

According to the fact sheet established by French intelligence in 1924, Hitler is registered as a journalist and is described as “German Mussolini” with these notes: “Would only be the instrument of higher powers: is not a fool but very skilful demagogue. Would have Ludendorf behind him. Organizes fascist-style Sturmtruppen. Sentenced to five years in a fortress with the possibility of suspension after six months of detention. ».

After thirteen months of detention (nine of them since his conviction) and despite the determined opposition of prosecutor Ludwig Stenglein in Munich, he was released early on 20 December 1924.

Reorganization of the party (1925–1928)

On his release from prison on December 20, 1924, Hitler found a party torn between different centrifugal tendencies.

Under threat of expulsion to Austria, a threat quickly destroyed by the refusal of the Austrian government to take him in, he was banned from staying  in Prussia and from speaking in many other Länder. Having become stateless on  30 April 1925 and banned from speaking in public until 5 March 1927, he rebuilt the NSDAP on a new basis and regained a certain popularity.

Indeed, he exploits his aura of putschist to make the NSDAP an instrument in his hand. During this period, he disciplined the Sturmabteilung (SA), forbidding them any link with other far-right paramilitary formations, and encouraging the creation of  the Schutzstaffel (SS), a small elite troop, entrusted in 1925 to Heinrich Himmler, “the faithful Heinrich” in whom he placed all his confidence and who devoted the Führer a fanatical admiration. This sidelining of the undisciplined SA aroused the opposition of Röhm, who withdrew for a time from the NSDAP; then, he undermined the influence  of Ludendorff, his great rival, by pushing him to stand in the presidential election of 1925.

Finally, Hitler launched the profound transformation of the NSDAP, removing Gregor Strasser, threatening because of his organizational skills and his influence in the north of the Reich, where Hitler had sent him to implant the party in depth; Strasser, supported among others  by Goebbels, tried to set up an NSDAP not directly linked to Hitler, himself described as “petty-bourgeois”; this party refounded by Strasser’s group would be more focused on a program of socializing tendency and the struggle against  the Western plutocracy,  including by means of an alliance with the USSR, than on a direct link between a party leader and militants. To regain control of Strasser and his supporters, Hitler organized a meeting of cadres in Bamberg, Franconia, Julius Streicher’s stronghold, on February 14, 1926.

This gathering ended in Hitler’s victory over Strasser, despite the latter’s continued support from many supports. This defeat led to Goebbels’ rallying to Hitler during that year, despite the future propaganda minister’s proximity to Strasser’s ideas. Ultimately, Strasser was swept away by the lack of tangible results in his strategy of real conquest of a working-class electorate, and by a strategic reorientation of the party’s propaganda, henceforth directed towards the rural environment. But the tactic of reaching the whole of society, through the creation of specific organizations, which Strasser initiated, is systematically taken up after his defeat; indeed, elements of a new National Socialist society and state, capable of replacing state power on the same level, are gradually being put in place, focused on loyalty to the Führer; the first members of each of these structures were close to Hitler and remained so practically until the end of the regime.

The Weimar rally of July 1926 was the occasion for the staging of this success: according to the party’s statutes, Hitler was confirmed as leader of the NSDAP; but above all, by a ceremonial centered on the person of the Führer, the gathering provides the occasion for the taking of oaths of submission and allegiance to the person of Hitler, Führer of the NSDAP.

The party’s early successes in rural areas, in Saxony, Mecklenburg, Baden, validated its political approach and strengthened Hitler’s popularity within the party. The beginnings of the cult of personality began to develop: the Heil Hitler salute became obligatory, even in the absence of the Führer; the Nuremberg rallies in 1927 and 1929 took a new direction, henceforth focused on the enthusiasm generated by Hitler’s speech. Similarly, the party’s Youth League, existing since 1922, became in 1926 the Hitler Youth, quickly supervised, from 1928, by a thurifer, Baldur von Schirach.

The principles put forward to reorganize the party are all focused on the ability of cadres to conquer and then keep their place, thus defining a nebula, the NSDAP, constantly in unstable balance, with frequent changes at the different local levels of the party, Hitler then limiting himself to arbitrating between the different local leaders who emerge from these struggles; moreover, during these confrontations, each cadre can claim the will of the Führer, remaining deliberately vague.

In 1929, to better campaign against the Young Plan on war reparations due to France, submitted to referendum, the press boss and nationalist leader Alfred Hugenberg allied himself with Hitler, whose oratorical skills he needed, and financed the propaganda campaign that allowed the Führer of the Nazis to become known throughout Germany.

Having sidelined, rallied to him, or circumvented the main supporters of a national socialism, Hitler, whose personal lifestyle continues to gentrify, also strives to make himself respectable and reassuring in the eyes of the traditional elites. To rally them and make people forget his image as a plebeian and revolutionary agitator, he decided, for example, during the referendum of June 1926, in favor of compensation for the reigning princes overthrown in 1918. The Ruhr magnate, Fritz Thyssen, gave him his public support.

The SA, the brutal militia of the party that distinguished itself in aggression and street fighting, posed more problems for Hitler by its rather broad plebeian recruitment and by its often uncertain discipline. The rank and file of the SA advocated a “second revolution” and was exasperated by the compromises that the Nazi party had to make in its conquest of power. Their Berlin sections, commanded by Walter Stennes, even went so far as to ransack the premises of the Nazi Party several times between 1930 and 1931. In 1930, faced with this serious mutiny on their part, Hitler recalled from Bolivia his former accomplice in the 1923 putsch, Ernst Röhm, whom he himself had sidelined in 1925: the latter took over their leadership and partially restored order in their ranks.

“Resistible Ascension” (1929-1932)

As Bertolt Brecht suggests by the title of his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a bitter anti-Nazi satire, Adolf Hitler’s march to power was neither linear nor irresistible. However, it was favoured after 1929 by a context of exceptional crisis, and by the weaknesses, errors or discredit of its opponents and political competitors.

Germany had only a weak democratic tradition behind it in 1918. Born of a defeat and a revolution, the Weimar Republic had taken root badly, especially since servants and nostalgics of the Kaiser remained very numerous in the army, the administration, the economy and the population. The Catholic Zentrum, a member of the founding coalition of the Republic, embarked on an authoritarian drift from the end of the 1920s, while communists, nationalists of the DNVP and Nazis continued to refuse the regime and to fight it. Finally, the traditional cult of great leaders and the widespread expectation of a providential savior predisposed a large part of its population to rely on Hitler.

A very recent and fragile nation-state, crossed by multiple geographical, religious, political and social cleavages, Germany also entered a new phase of political instability from 1929. After the death of Gustav Stresemann, architect with Aristide Briand of Franco-German rapprochement, the fall of Chancellor Hermann Müller in 1930 was that of the last parliamentary government. It was replaced by the conservative and authoritarian government of Heinrich Brüning of the Zentrum.

A convinced monarchist, the very popular Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, elected President of the Republic in 1925, stopped playing the game of democracy in 1930. He began to govern by decree, appointing cabinets to his orders increasingly devoid of any majority in Parliament, using and abusing his right to dissolve the Reichstag — used no less than four times from 1930 to 1933. The Weimar institutions were thus emptied of their substance long before Hitler dealt them the final blow.

The catastrophic consequences of the 1929 crisis on the German economy, which was highly dependent on capital repatriated to the United States immediately after the Wall Street crash, soon brought the NSDAP a lightning and unexpected success. In the elections of September 14, 1930, with 6.5 million voters, 18.3% of the vote and 107 seats, the Nazi Party became the second largest party in the Reichstag. Brüning’s severe and anachronistic deflation only aggravated the economic crisis and plunged many worried Germans into Hitler’s arms. By constituting with the latter, the “Harzburg Front” in October 1931, directed against the government and the Republic, Hugenberg and the other forces of the nationalist right unwittingly played into the hands of Hitler, whose power (electoral and parliamentary) now made him a leading figure on the political scene.

President Hindenburg’s seven-year term ended on 5 May 1932, and the right-wing and the Zentrum, in order to avoid new elections, proposed tacitly renewing the presidential term. The agreement of the Nazis being necessary, Hitler demanded the resignation of Chancellor Brüning and new parliamentary elections. Hindenburg refused, and on February 22, 1932, Joseph Goebbels announced Adolf Hitler’s candidacy for the presidency of the Republic. On February 26, Hitler was conveniently appointed Regierungsrat, a state official, which automatically granted him German citizenship.

His election campaign is unprecedented in terms of propaganda. In particular, the then unprecedented and spectacular use of the plane in his electoral movements allowed Goebbels to put up posters: “The Führer flies over Germany”.

Hitler obtained 30.1% of the vote in the first round on March 13, 1932, and 36.8% in the second round in April, or 13.4 million votes that went to him, doubling the score of the legislative elections of 1930. Supported in desperation by the Socialists, Hindenburg was re-elected at the age of 82. But in the regional elections that followed the presidential election the NSDAP strengthened its positions and came out ahead everywhere, except in its native Bavaria. In the parliamentary elections of 31 July 1932, it confirmed its position as Germany’s leading party, with 37.3% of the vote, and became the leading parliamentary group. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man since 1923, became President of the Reichstag. Born of a small group, Hitler’s cult has become in less than two years a mass phenomenon capable of affecting more than a third of Germans.

Hitler succeeded in uniting a very diverse electorate. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the unemployed who put their hope in him (it was among them that Hitler scored lowest), but the middle classes, who feared being the next victims of the crisis. While the female electorate voted very little for the extreme right in the 1920s, Führer’s well-known popularity with women combined with the structural rapprochement between the female and male votes to ensure additional reinforcements of votes after 1930.

Protestants voted for him more than Catholics, but much of the latter’s vote was set by the Zentrum. The countryside, tested by the crisis and subjected in Prussia to the harsh almost feudal exploitation of the Junkers, used the vote against Hitler for protest purposes. The workers voted less Nazi than the average, even if a significant part was attempted. As for civil servants, students or doctors, their high level of education did not prevent them from being over-represented in supporting the doctrinaire of Mein Kampf.

Allied with the nationalist right, benefiting from the discredit of the Zentrum and the obligation for the SPD to support the unpopular Franz von Papen “to avoid the worst”, Hitler also multiplies hypocritical statements in which he poses as a democrat and a moderate, while flattering the traditional elites and even the Churches with a more traditionalist discourse than before.

The communists of the KPD, who reduce Hitler to a mere puppet of big capital, do him a favor by fighting above all the socialists, in the name of the “class against class” line dictated by the Stalinist Comintern, and by refusing any joint action with them against the NSDAP. The KPD went so far as to cooperate with the Nazis during the transport strike in Berlin in 1932. At the end of 1932, the economic and social situation deteriorated further (more than 6 million unemployed at the end of the year). The unrest and political insecurity are at their height, the brawls with the involvement of Hitlerite SA are permanent. The very reactionary government of Von Papen is unable to gather more than 10% of the deputies and voters.

Engaged in a personal tug-of-war with Hitler, President Hindenburg still refused to appoint him chancellor: the old Prussian marshal, former head of the German army during the Great War, displayed his personal contempt for the man he described as a “little bohemian corporal” and whom he claimed had “just the stature to make a postmaster general”. All attempts at conciliation failed. At the end of 1932, the Nazi movement went through a difficult phase. Its financial crisis is becoming acute.

Activists and voters are tired of the lack of perspectives, Hitler’s variable geometry speeches and the internal contradictions of the Nazi program. Many SA people talk about immediately starting a suicidal uprising that Hitler does not want at any price, and Gregor Strasser threatens to split with the support of Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. Finally, the parliamentary elections of November 1932 saw a decline in the popularity of the NSDAP, which lost 2 million votes and 34 seats. This is the moment when Léon Blum, in France, writes in Le Populaire that  the road to power is definitively closed for Hitler and that any hope of accessing it is over for him. Yet these setbacks do not diminish his resolve.

Accession of Adolf Hitler to absolute power

On January 30, 1933, around noon, Adolf Hitler achieved his goal: he was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic after a month of intrigues at the top organized by former Chancellor Franz von Papen, and thanks to the support of the right and the involvement of the German National People’s Party (DNVP). That same evening, thousands of SA marched triumphantly on Unter den Linden Avenue under the gaze of the new Chancellor, marking the takeover of Berlin and the launch of the hunt for opponents. The daily Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ), close to the conservative right, wrote on January 31, 1933: “In any case, it is a bold and bold decision, and no politician conscious of his responsibilities will be inclined to applaud.” The Catholic daily Regensburger Anzeiger warned against “a leap into darkness”.

Destruction of democracy (1933-1934)

Contrary to popular belief, Hitler was never “elected” chancellor by the Germans, at least not directly. He was nevertheless appointed Chancellor by the President in accordance with the Weimar Constitution and chosen as leader of the party that won the parliamentary elections of November 1932, although Ian Kershaw recalls that “Hitler’s appointment to the chancellery could probably have been avoided” until the last moment.

The negotiations with the president, which in fact proved indispensable to his appointment, lead some to consider that he was  “hoisted to power” by a handful of industrialists and right-wingers.  And despite his enormous electoral weight, an absolute majority of voters never voted for him, since even in March 1933, after two months of terror and propaganda, his party obtained only 43.9% of the vote. However, he achieved his goal pursued since the end of 1923: to come to power legally. And there is no doubt that the rallying of the mass of Germans to the new chancellor was done very quickly, and less by force than by adhesion to his person.

When Hitler’s first government was formed, Alfred Hugenberg’s DNVP hoped to be, together with von Papen’s Zentrum, able to control the new chancellor—although the DNVP accounted for only 8 percent of the vote, while the Nazis had 33.1 percent. In fact, Hitler’s first government included, in addition to the Chancellor himself, only two Nazis: Göring, responsible in particular for Prussia, and Wilhelm Frick, in the Ministry of the Interior.

But Hitler quickly outflanked his partners and immediately set in motion the bringing of Germany to heel. On 1 February, he obtained from Hindenburg the dissolution of the Reichstag. On 3 February, he secured the support of the army. During the election campaign, Von Papen, Thyssen and Schacht obtained from industrial and financial circles, hitherto rather reserved towards Hitler, that they replenished the NSDAP coffers and financed his campaign. The SA and SS, militias of the Nazi Party, were given powers as auxiliary police officers. Many deaths mark the meetings of the opposition parties, notably the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD). Opponents are already being brutalized, arrested, tortured and even murdered.

The enigmatic Reichstag fire on February 27 served as Hitler’s pretext to suspend all civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution and radicalize the elimination of his political opponents, including communist KPD deputies, who had been illegally arrested. The NSDAP won the elections of 5 March 1933 with 17 million votes, or 43.9% of the vote. In the days that followed, in all the German Länder, the Nazis seized by force the local levers of power.

On March 20, during a grandiose propaganda ceremony at the tomb of Frederick II of  Prussia in Potsdam, where he appeared in full costume alongside Hindenburg, Hitler proclaimed the advent of the Third Reich, to which he would later promise a duration of “a thousand years”. On March 23, thanks to the votes of the Zentrum, to which the Chancellor promised in exchange the signing of a concordat with the Vatican, and despite the opposition of the SPD alone (the KPD deputies being arrested), the Reichstag voted the law of full powers which granted Hitler special powers for four years. He could now write laws on his own, and they could depart from the Weimar Constitution, which Hitler did not even bother to formally abolish.

This is a decisive step in the hardening of the regime. Without even waiting for the law to be passed, the Nazis opened the first permanent concentration camp on March 20 in Dachau, under the leadership of Himmler. The latter laid in southern Germany, just like Göring in Prussia, the foundations of the formidable Nazi political police, the Gestapo.

On 2 May, twenty-four hours after agreeing to march in front of the Chancellor, the unions were dissolved and their property seized. On May 10, the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels presided over a night of auto-da-fe in Berlin where Nazi students burned pell-mell in public thousands of “bad books” by Jewish, pacifist, Marxist or psychoanalyst authors such as Marx, Freud or Kant. Thousands of opponents, scientists and intellectuals fled Germany like Albert Einstein. On 14 July, the NSDAP became the sole party. Hitler also quickly ended local freedoms. The autonomy of the Länder was definitively abolished on 30 January 1934: a year after his accession to the chancellery, Hitler became the head of the first centralized state in Germany’s history.

In all, between 1933 and 1939, between 150,000 and 200,000 people were interned, and between 7,000 and 9,000 were killed by state violence. Hundreds of thousands more had to flee Germany.

The Nazis condemned “degenerate art” and “Jewish science,” and destroyed or dispersed many works of the artistic avant-garde. The program to “purify” the German breed is also implemented very early. A law of April 7, 1933, allowed Hitler to immediately dismiss hundreds of Jewish civil servants and academics, while the SA at the same time launched a brutal campaign to boycott Jewish shops.

Hitler also personally imposed in the summer of 1933 a law providing for the forced sterilization of the sick and disabled: it was applied to more than 350,000 people. Particularly hating the mixing of populations (described as a “racial shame”), the German leader ordered to sterilize in particular, in 1937, the 400 children born in the 1920s  to German women and black soldiers of the French occupation troops. Persecution of homosexuals also begins, bars and gathering places for homosexuals are closed. Homosexuals were brutalized and tortured, and some were sent to Dachau. Some are offered “voluntary emasculation”.

In November 1933, the new dictator supported his policy when 95% of voters approved the withdrawal from the League of Nations and the single list of the NSDAP in the Reichstag received 92% of the votes.

Röhm’s SA demanded that the National Socialist “revolution” take a more anti-capitalist turn, and dreamed in particular of taking control of the army, which would dangerously compromise the alliance forged between the chancellor and the traditional conservative elites (presidency, military, business circles). Forged documents forged by Heydrich also persuaded Hitler that Röhm was plotting against him.

On the evening of June 29, 1934, and the following three days, during the Night of the Long Knives, with the benevolent support of the army and President Hindenburg, Hitler had about two hundred of his supporters and former political enemies assassinated. Among them, Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, but also Dr. Erich Klausener, leader of Catholic Action, or his predecessor in the chancellery, Schleicher, as well as Kahr, who had blocked his way during the putsch of 1923. Unable to believe that he was eliminated by Hitler, Röhm refused to commit suicide and shouted Heil Hitler!  before being shot dead in his cell by Theodor Eicke and Michel Lippert.

On July 2, old Hindenburg congratulated Hitler, whom he increasingly appreciated, for his firmness in this matter. His death on 2 August severed the last living link with the Weimar Republic. Under the Weimar Constitution, the Chancellor temporarily exercises the powers of the deceased President. On the same day, the Reichstag passed a law merging the two offices into one: Hitler became “Führer und Reichskanzler”. The plebiscite of August 19 (89.93% in favor) completes the giving the Führer absolute power.

Absence of competition

After the regaining control of the movement, and until the last days of the conflict, Hitler, supported by his relatives, enjoyed, first within the party, then quickly within the state, a de facto monopoly of political power.

First of all, none of the National Socialist officials, with the exception of Röhm, who was quickly eliminated, pursued a policy of seizing power, and it was only in the last week of the Battle of Berlin that their appetites were sharpened, when it was clear to his potential successors that Hitler would commit suicide in his bunker. Supported by the Führerprinzip within the party, and on the concentration of power within the state, Hitler and his relatives gradually emptied the collegiate decision-making bodies of their ability to exercise any authority over the political functioning of the party and the state: thus, when Arthur Dinter proposed, for the first time in 1927,  the establishment of a collegial body — the party senate — and then a second time after 1933  — the creation of an elected collegiate body — Hitler and his relatives hastened to postpone the project.

Cult of the Führer

Surrounded by an intense cult of personality, which celebrates him as the messianic savior of Germany, Hitler demands an oath of loyalty to himself. This is lent in particular by the military, which will make future conspiracies within the army very difficult, many officers deeply reluctant, in conscience, to violate their oath.

This cult was gradually established even before the Brewery Putsch, when Hitler, both orator and theoretician of National Socialism, in opposition to the circle of the first Nazis, composed of reiters (Röhm), theoreticians (Rosenberg), organizers (Strasser) and demagogues (Streicher). ), begins to have more and more important audiences: his sense of formulas, his memory of details impress both his relatives and his audiences.

Thus, is set up what Kershaw calls a charismatic community centered on one man, Hitler, whose presence neutralizes rivalries between disciples. His followers compete for the place of intimate with the great man: Göring,  “paladin of the Führer”; Frank,  “literally fascinated”; Goebbels saw him as “a genius”;  Schirach is  “delighted by his first contacts”…

The totalitarian ambition of the regime and the primacy of the Führer are symbolized by the regime’s new motto: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one empire, one leader”), in which Hitler’s title idolatrous takes God’s place in the old motto of the Second Reich:  “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Gott” (“One people,  an empire, a god”).

The Führerprinzip becomes the new principle of authority not only at the top of the state, but also, by delegation, at every level. For example, the law officially proclaims the boss as the Führer of his enterprise, as the husband is the Führer of his family, or the Gauleiter Führer of the party in his region.

Hitler maintained his own cult through his radio interventions: each time, the whole country had to suspend its activity and the inhabitants listened religiously in the streets or at work to his speech broadcast over the airwaves and loudspeakers. At each congress held in Nuremberg during the “high masses” of the NSDAP, he benefited from a clever staging orchestrated by his confidant, the architect and technocrat Albert Speer: his oratorical talent electrified the audience, before the assembled masses burst into applause and frenzied shouts to cheer the genius of their leader.

Conversely, the slightest criticism, the slightest reservation about the Führer puts their author in danger. During the crossing of the desert, the years 1924-1930, the Strasser brothers are marginalized and then eliminated because of their insensitivity to the person of Hitler. Of the thousands of death sentences handed down by  Judge Roland Freisler’s People’s Court, many of those sent to the guillotine after travesties of justice were sent for contemptuous or skeptical words against the dictator.

The Nazi salute became mandatory for all Germans. Anyone who tries, out of passive resistance, not to do the Heil Hitler!  de rigueur is immediately singled out and spotted.

In the spring of 1938, the Führer further accentuated his predominance and that of his relatives in the regime. He eliminated Generals Von Fritsch and Von Blomberg, and subdued the Wehrmacht by placing at its head the servile Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, known to be blindly devoted to him. In Foreign Affairs, he replaced the conservative Konstantin von Neurath with the Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop, while Göring, who asserted himself more than ever as the unofficial No. 2 of the regime, took charge of the autarkic economy by ousting Dr.  Hjalmar Schacht.

The German population was framed from birth to death, subjected to intense propaganda orchestrated by his faithful Joseph Goebbels, for whom he created the first Ministry of Propaganda in history. The leisure activities of the workers are organized — and monitored — by the Kraft durch Freude of Dr. Robert Ley, who is also head of the single trade union, the DAF. The youth was inevitably subjected to intense indoctrination within the Hitlerjugend, which bore the name of the Führer, and which became on December 1,  1936 the only authorized youth organization.

Nazi System: Interpretations and Debates

The German historical school of “intentionalists” insists on the primacy of Hitler in the functioning of the regime. The extreme form of personal power and the cult of personality around the Führer would not be understandable without his “charismatic power.” This important notion is borrowed from the sociologist Max Weber: Hitler considers himself since 1920 as invested in a providential mission, and above all, he is sincerely considered as the providential man by his supporters, then by the mass of Germans under the Third Reich.

While the cult of Stalin was belatedly and artificially imposed on the Bolshevik party by a victorious apparatchik, but lacking the talent of tribune or a leading role in the October Revolution, the cult of Hitler has existed since the origins of Nazism, and has paramount importance there. Membership in the Nazi Party means, above all, absolute allegiance to its Führer, and no one occupies a place in the Party and the State except to the extent that he is closer to Hitler’s very person. Hitler personally took care to reinforce his image as an inaccessible, solitary and superior leader, by refraining from any personal friendship, and by forbidding anyone to talk to him or call him by his first name — even his mistress Eva Braun had to address him by saying Mein Führer.

On the other hand, for the intentionalists, without the frighteningly coherent character of the ideology (the Weltanschauung) that animates Hitler, the Nazi regime would not have embarked on the path of war and mass extermination, nor in the denial of all the elementary legal and administrative rules that govern modern and civilized states.

For example, without his charismatic power of an unprecedented kind, Hitler could not have authorized the mass euthanasia of more than 150,000 mentally handicapped Germans by a few simple words scribbled on Chancellery letterhead (Operation T4, September 3, 1939). Similarly, Hitler could not have triggered the “Final Solution” without ever leaving a single written order. No executor of the genocide of the Jews ever asked to see a written order: a simple order from the Führer (Führerbefehl) was sufficient to silence any question and led to the almost religious and blind obedience of the executioners.

The rival school of “functionalists”, led by the German historian Martin Broszat (1926-1989), has however qualified the idea of the omnipotence of the Führer. As it has demonstrated, the Third Reich has never decided between the primacy of the single party and that of the state, hence endless rivalries of power and competence between the dual hierarchies of the NSDAP and the Reich government. Above all, the Nazi state appears as a singular tangle of competing powers with comparable legitimacy. This is the principle of “polycracy”.

However, between these rival groups, Hitler rarely decides, and decides little. Very unbureaucratic, having inherited from his bohemian youth in Vienna a total lack of taste for the work followed, working in a very irregular way (except in the conduct of military operations), the Führer appears as a “weak dictator” or a “lazy dictator” according to Martin Broszat. He actually leaves each of the rivals free to claim him, and he only expects all to walk in the direction of his will.

Therefore, demonstrated the British biographer Ian Kershaw, whose work synthesizes the achievements of intentionalist and functionalist schools, each individual, each clan, each bureaucracy, each group outbids, and tries to be the first to realize the projects set in their broad outlines by Adolf Hitler. This is how anti-Semitic persecution will spiral and gradually move from simple persecution to massacre and then to industrial genocide. The Third Reich structurally obeys the law of “cumulative radicalization”, and the Hitler system can thus in no way stabilize.

This “charismatic power” of Hitler also explains why many Germans spontaneously went to meet the Führer. Thus, in 1933, student organizations carried out auto-da-fe themselves, while parties and unions rallied to the chancellor and scuttled themselves after excluding Jews and opponents of Nazism. Germany largely gives itself to the Führer in whom it recognizes its dreams and ambitions, more than the latter seizes it.

According to Kershaw, the Führer is, therefore, the man who makes possible the long-cherished plans at the “base”: without any need for him to give precise orders, his mere presence in power authorizes, for example, the many anti-Semites in Germany to trigger boycotts and pogroms, or Nazi doctors, such as Josef Mengele, to carry out the atrocious pseudo-medical experiments and mass euthanasia operations whose idea existed before 1933.

This also explains, again according to Ian Kershaw and most functionalists, the tendency of the Hitler regime to “self-destruction”. The Third Reich, a return to “feudal anarchy”, is indeed breaking down into a chaotic multitude of rival fiefdoms. Hitler cannot and will not put any order on it, because stabilizing the regime according to formal and fixed rules would make the perpetual reference to the Führer less important. Thus, in 1943, when the existence of the Reich was in danger after the Battle of Stalingrad, all the leading apparatuses of the Third Reich argued for months over whether to ban horse racing – without deciding.

The regime thus substitutes for modern rational institutions the feudal bond of personal allegiance, man to man, with the Führer. However, no Nazi leader has Hitler’s charisma. The cult of the latter has existed since the origins of Nazism and is consubstantial with the movement and then the regime. Each derives its legitimacy only from its degree of proximity to the Führer. As a result, in the absence of any successor (“In all modesty, I am irreplaceable,” Hitler’s words to his generals reported by Hannah Arendt), Hitler’s dictatorship has no future and cannot survive it (according to Kershaw). The end of the Third Reich and that of its dictator have practically merged.

German public opinion

The support of the Germans for his policy (and even more so for him) was important, especially at the beginning.

The “other Germany”, “a Germany against Hitler”, certainly existed, but these very expressions underline after the fact its hopelessly minority and isolated character. Any opposition was quickly reduced by exile, prison or internment in camps. Democrats, socialists and communists paid the heaviest price by the thousands, as did all those who refused war, the Nazi salute or any sign of allegiance to the idolatry surrounding the Führer. The mass denunciation has raged and plunged the country into an atmosphere of fear, where no one can open up without risk to his neighbor, indoctrinated children going so far as to denounce their parents.

Few people in the name of their humanist, Marxist, liberal, Christian or patriotic principles, or simply out of humanity and conscience, will dare to doubt the Führer, defy him by abstaining from the Nazi salute, by transgressing the many prohibitions of Nazi society, or by helping the persecuted – a fortiori by entering into active resistance. Out of contempt, the very nationalist writer Ernst Jünger called Hitler Kniebolo in his war diary.

The communist Bertolt Brecht will stage him as the gangster Arturo Ui. Democrat Thomas Mann denounced him on American radio, while acknowledging that “this man is a calamity, okay, but that’s no reason not to find his case interesting.” For the Christian students of the White Rose, returned from their initial illusions, he represented the Antichrist.  Bishop Lichtenberg, who died deported for praying in Berlin for the Jews, told the Gestapo: “I have only one Führer: Jesus Christ.”

Despite its ban and the violent repression that fell on its members, the KPD managed to maintain a clandestine organization structured around the “Red Orchestra”, which distributed leaflets and pamphlets and infiltrated the heights of the German state apparatus.  The other Marxist currents were also active in the underground anti-Nazi resistance (this was the case of the future Chancellor Willy Brandt), in connection with their leaderships in exile for the most important parties (SPD, SAP, KPD-O).

The terror and repression carried out by the Gestapo limited the impact of German resistance to Nazism. The anti-Semitism and racism of Nazism echoed widespread prejudices, but except for a small minority, they were not the sole motivation for voting for Hitler or supporting his dictatorship—nor did they have much deterrent effect. The Führer’s broad popularity before the war stemmed mainly from the brutal restoration of law and order, his anti-communism, his opposition to the “Diktat” of Versailles, the diplomatic and economic successes achieved (including the significant reduction in unemployment) and his policy of rearmament.

These successes should not, however, mask the social and political conditions in which economic improvements were achieved, nor the painful situations of food shortages, the imposition of ersatz poor quality to replace imports condemned by autarky, and the lack of foreign exchange from 1935. In particular, the purchasing power of workers declined between 1933 and 1939. The women were forcibly returned to the home. The rural exodus has accelerated. Nazi laws encouraging the concentration of business and trade led to 400,000 closures of small businesses before the war. The social categories that had pinned their hopes on Hitler are therefore far from always satisfied.

Moreover, many Germans took up in favor of Hitler the ancestral distinction between the good monarch and his bad servants. While the “monks”, the privileged of the Party-State, are generally despised and hated for their abuses and frequent corruption, Hitler is spontaneously considered free from these defects and as a recourse against them. Many Germans spontaneously believe that the Führer is left in ignorance of the “excesses” of his men or his regime. Within a few years, Hitler had in fact identified with the nation, channeling for the benefit of himself the very patriotic feeling of citizens reserved towards Nazism.

The aspect of  “civil religion” assumed by Nazism also appealed to many Germans, and the messianic cult organized around Hitler united the population around him. Many minds were also fascinated by Nazi irrationalism,  with its neo-romantic cult of the night, blood, nature, its taste for uniforms and parades, its rituals and spectacular ceremonies resurrecting a medieval or pagan universe, and by the effective appeal to mythical heroes of the national past (Arminius,  Barbarossa,   Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II of Prussia, Andreas Hofer,  Otto von Bismarck…), mobilized retrospectively as precursors of the providential Führer.

Yet the victims of much harassment, the churches as institutions made little attempt to oppose Hitler. He has always been careful not to implement the projects for the eradication of Christianity nourished by his right-hand man Martin Bormann or the ideologue of the party Alfred Rosenberg. He played on anti-communism, anti-feminism and the reactionary aspects of his program to appeal to religious electorates. The signing of the concordat with the Vatican in June 1933 was a personal triumph, which tied the hands of the episcopate and strengthened its international stature.

Defending themselves from “playing politics,” bishops, parish priests and pastors opposed each other only on material or confessional points and ended their sermons by praying “for the fatherland and for the Führer.” Pope Pius XI’s encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (1937), distributed in the greatest secrecy to German Catholic parishes to be read there on March 21, 1937, protested against the failures of the German state to comply with the 1933 concordat, and denounced with rare virulence the ideological excesses of the Nazi regime such as the deification of race and the cult of personality of the head of state.

It urges priests and laity to resist the dissolution of Catholic structures and the stranglehold of official education on children’s morals, without, however, condemning the political regime in place. In short, the Catholic Church, a minority among the German Christian churches, chose an attitude of composition with the Nazi regime. A small number of Catholics, however, chose to resist the regime, for example by saving even Jews not married to Catholics.

Contrary to legend, Hitler was neither the candidate nor the instrument of business circles until 1933. But big business quickly rallied to him, and benefited greatly from the restoration of the economy and then the plundering of Europe, often going so far as to compromise themselves in the exploitation of the concentration camp workforce (IG Farben in Auschwitz, Siemens in Ravensbrück). While all conservative elements (military, aristocrats, churchmen) provided tribute to the (weak) German resistance, the employers remained remarkably little present. One of the few exceptions is paradoxically that of his very old supporter Fritz Thyssen, who broke with Hitler and fled the Reich in 1939, before being handed over to him the following year by the French state and interned.

The historian Götz Aly insists that the material benefits of the Aryanization and plunder of Europe, more than ideology, made many Germans indebted and complicit to their Führer. The hundreds of trains of property stolen from murdered Jews were not lost to everyone, nor were the thousands of vacant homes they were forced to abandon.

Economic and social policy

Hitler rejects capitalism and Marxism in the same contempt. His racist nationalism is the essential element. It is strongly marked on the right, including in the alliances forged. A fundamental objective for him is the reconstitution of a “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft), united by a common race and culture, free from democratic divisions and class struggle, as well as from Jews and racially impure elements, and where the individual finally has no value and exists only according to his membership of the community. After the civil divisions of the 1920s, some Germans wanted only to share this vision.

Having already distanced himself from the socializing part of the Nazi program in the late 1920s, Hitler finished refusing the idea of a social revolution after the purge of Röhm and the liquidation of the SA. Not very gifted in economics himself, the Führer very quickly opted for brutal pragmatism against the crisis, removing from the government the old Nazi economic theorist Gottfried Feder in favor of the sympathizer and brilliant specialist more classical Hjalmar Schacht, former director of the Reichsbank.

In a few years, the economy was rebuilt, among other things, thanks to public jobs created by the state (motorways already planned under the Weimar Republic, Siegfried line, major spectacular works by the Nazi engineer Fritz Todt, housing also in the continuity of the Weimar work, etc.). Rearmament did not occur until later (accelerated by the Four-Year Plan from 1936), after reviving the economy, helped by a situation of global recovery.

In May 1933, the dissolved trade unions gave way to the German Labour Front (DAF), a Nazi corporatist organization led by Robert Ley. The DAF prohibits strikes and allows bosses to demand more from employees, while guaranteeing them job security and social security. Officially voluntary, membership of the DAF is in fact compulsory for all Germans wishing to work in industry and commerce. Several sub-organizations depended on the DAF, including the Kraft durch Freude responsible for supervising workers’ leisure activities or beautifying their canteens and workplaces.

Between 1934 and 1937, Schacht’s mission was to support the intense rearmament effort. To achieve this objective, it sets up financial arrangements that are sometimes ingenious (such as the good MEFO), sometimes hazardous, widening the State deficit. In addition, the policy of major works develops a Keynesian policy of public investment. According to William L. Shirer, Hitler also cut all wages by 5%, freeing up resources to revive the economy, which seemed to confirm the interventionist nature of his directives.

Unemployment fell sharply from six million unemployed in 1932 to 200,000 in 1938] In 1939, industrial production was just above its 1929 level. However, Schacht considers that investments in the military industry threaten the German economy in the long term and wishes to change this policy. Faced with Hitler’s refusal, which considered rearmament a top priority, Schacht left his post in early 1939 in favor of Göring. Only the headlong rush into expansion, war and plunder probably enabled Hitler to avoid a serious final financial and economic crisis.

Hitler’s diplomacy

Third Reich diplomacy is essentially conceived and directed by Hitler himself. His successive foreign ministers, (Konstantin von Neurath and Joachim von Ribbentrop), relayed his directives without showing any personal initiative. Hitler’s diplomacy, through its interplay of alliances, audacity, threats and deception, is an essential cog in the strategic goals pursued by the Führer. His thunderous speeches in the Reichstag or at the Nazi congresses of Nuremberg chant the diplomatic crises he provoked successively; They alternate with his hypocritically reassuring interviews with newspapers or foreign representatives.

Completely equating his personal destiny with that of Germany, and identifying the biological course of his life with the destiny of the Reich, Hitler is obsessed with the possibility of premature aging, and so he wants to be able to start his war before his 50th birthday. The dictator’s view of himself, therefore, has a direct role in accelerating the events by which he leads Europe to the Second World War.

Opposition to the Treaty of Versailles

On October 14, 1933, Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and the Geneva Conference on Disarmament, while delivering pacifist speeches. On 13 January 1935, the Saar overwhelmingly (90.8% of ‘Yes’) voted in favor of joining Germany.

Moreover, in March 16, 1935, Hitler announced the reinstatement of compulsory military service and decided to increase the strength of the Wehrmacht (the new name of the German armed forces) from 100,000 to 500,000 men, by creating 36 additional divisions. This is the first flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In June of the same year, London and Berlin signed a naval agreement, which allowed the Reich to become a maritime power. Hitler then launched a massive rearmament program, including recreating naval (Kriegsmarine) and air (Luftwaffe) forces.

The 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen were a great showcase for propaganda, especially to make people forget his policy of fait accompli and to put the United Kingdom and France against the wall in what Hitler planned to do. In January 1936, Bertrand de Jouvenel, a young journalist at the Winter Games, took the initiative of contacting Otto Abetz, the Reich’s itinerant representative, to ask him for an interview with Hitler.

Abetz sees this as a good communication opportunity to thwart the ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact by a vote in the Chamber of Deputies to take place on February 27. The day before publication, the owner of Paris-Soir, Jean Prouvost, banned the publication of the article, which was requested by the president of the council Albert Sarraut. Finally, the article was published the day after the vote in the newspaper Paris-Midi on February 28.

The Germans’ goal was to delay the publication so that they could then say that Hitler’s good intentions had been hidden from the French and thus adopt countermeasures.

What Hitler says in his interview in Paris-Midi is calibrated for the French public and representative of his manipulative talents. He thus expresses his “sympathy” for France and exposes his peaceful wishes: “The chance is given to you. If you do not understand it, think about your responsibility to your children! You have before you a Germany whose nine-tenths have full confidence in their leader, and this leader says to you: “Let us be friends!”

The reactions to this interview are all convergent across Europe, from London to Rome via Berlin. All commentators welcome Hitler’s words of peace and everyone sees them as the beginning of a rapprochement between four.

On 7 March 1936, Hitler reneged on his words of peace by remilitarizing the Rhineland, once again violating the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Accords. This is a bluff typical of his personal method. Hitler instructed his troops to withdraw in case of retaliation from the French army. However, although the German army at that time was much weaker than its opponents, neither the French nor the British saw fit to oppose remilitarization. The success was resounding for Hitler.

Complacency abroad

The fascination exerted by Hitler at the time went far beyond the borders of Germany. For many sympathizers of fascism, it embodies the “new order” that will replace “decadent” bourgeois and democratic societies. Some intellectuals made the pilgrimage to the Nuremberg Congress, such as the future collaborationist Robert Brasillach. The journalist Fernand de Brinon, the first Frenchman to interview the new chancellor in 1933, will be a militant close to Nazism, and the representative of the Vichy regime in the northern zone in occupied Paris. On 13 June 1933, the Fascist Prime Minister of Hungary, Gyula Gömbös, is the first foreign head of government to pay an official visit to the new German Chancellor.

Many conservatives throughout Europe persisted for years in seeing Hitler as nothing more than a bulwark against Bolshevism or the restorer of order and economy in Germany. The radical specificity and novelty of his thought and regime are not perceived; he is seen as a classical German nationalist, little more than a new Bismarck. We also often want to believe that the author of Mein Kampf has calmed down with the exercise of responsibilities. In the spring of 1936, Hitler spectacularly received at his second home in Berchtesgaden the old British statesman David Lloyd George, one of the victors of 1918, who was full of praise for the Führer and the successes of his regime. Moreover, in 1937, he was also visited by the Duke of Windsor (the former King of England Edward VIII).

In the summer of 1936, Hitler inaugurated the Berlin Olympics. It is the occasion of a thinly veiled display of Nazi propaganda, as well as grandiose receptions intended to seduce the representatives of foreign establishments present on the spot, especially the British. The Greek Spyrídon Loúis, winner of the marathon at the first Games in 1896, presented him with an olive branch from the wood of Olympia.

France has given up boycotting the Games and its Olympic delegation marches before Hitler with its arm outstretched (the Olympic salute resembling the Nazi salute). On the other hand, the American delegation refused any ambiguous gesture during its appearance before the dictator. Later, during the trials, Hitler left the official gallery, but this gesture would not have been intended, contrary to popular belief, to avoid having to shake hands with the black American champion Jesse Owens,  but to avoid having to congratulate all the winners, a decision that includes Owens without specifically targeting him.

On January 2, 1939, Hitler was voted “Man of the Year 1938” by Time Magazine.

Alliances

In July 1936, Hitler supported General Franco’s nationalist insurgents during the Spanish Civil War. He sent transport planes to enable colonial troops from Spanish Morocco to cross the Strait of Gibraltar during the crucial first days of the insurrection. Like Mussolini, he then sent military equipment as well as an expeditionary force, the Condor Legion, which tested new war techniques, including aerial bombardments on civilian populations, during the destruction of Guernica in 1937.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which fought on two different sides in the Great War, were initially hostile following their disagreement over the Anschluss. In June 1934 in Venice, during their first meeting, Mussolini looked down on Hitler, dressed in civilian clothes and uncomfortable in front of the one who had long served as his inspiration. The Italian dictator prevented the annexation of Austria in July by sending troops to the Brenner Pass after the assassination of authoritarian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by the Austrian Nazis. But after Italy left the League of Nations, following its aggression against Ethiopia, and with their joint intervention in Spain, the two dictators grew closer and concluded an alliance, a relationship described by Benito Mussolini as the Rome-Berlin Axis, founded in October 1936.

In November 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a treaty of mutual assistance against the USSR, which Italy joined in 1937. That same year Hitler met at Nuremberg with Prince Yasuhito Chichibu, younger brother of Emperor Hirohito, in order to strengthen ties between the two states. In September 1940, the signing of the Tripartite Pact between the Third Reich, Italy and the Empire of Japan formalized cooperation between the Axis powers to establish a “new order”. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States, without any benefit for Germany, since underestimating a country he did not know, he brought into the race against the Reich the immense economic potential of America, out of reach.

In May 1939, Germany and Italy signed a treaty of unconditional military alliance, the Pact of Steel: Italy undertook to help Germany even if it was not attacked.

Anschluss

In order to achieve the Anschluss, the annexation (in literal translation) of Austria to the Third Reich, prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler relied on the local Nazi organization. It is trying to destabilize Austrian power, notably through terrorist acts. A coup d’état failed in June 1934, despite the assassination of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Italy had advanced its troops into the Alps to counter German expansionist tendencies, and the Austrian Nazis were severely repressed by a fascist-style Austrian regime.

By early 1938, Germany was in a stronger position and had allied itself with Italy. Hitler then exerted pressure on Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, urging him, during a meeting in Berchtesgaden in February, to bring Nazis into his government, including Arthur Seyss-Inquart at the Ministry of the Interior. Faced with the growing threat of the Nazis, Schuschnigg announced in March the organization of a referendum to confirm Austria’s independence.

Hitler then issued an ultimatum demanding the complete handover of power to the Austrian Nazis. On 12 March 1938, Seyss-Inquart was appointed Chancellor, and the Wehrmacht entered Austria. Hitler himself entered the country through the border town of Braunau am Inn, which was also his hometown, and then arrived in Vienna where he was triumphantly cheered by a delirious crowd. The next day, he proclaimed the official annexation of Austria to the Reich, which was approved by referendum (99% yes) the following month. Greater Germany (German: “Grossdeutschland”) was thus formed, with the union of the two states with German-speaking populations. Few Austrians opposed the end of independence, like the exiled Archduke Otto of Habsburg.

In annexed Austria, terror immediately fell on the Jews and on the enemies of the regime. A concentration camp was opened at Mauthausen near Linz, which quickly gained the reputation of being one of the most terrible in the Nazi system. Hitler’s homeland, which boasted after the war of having been the “first victim of Nazism” and refused for a long time any compensation to the victims of the regime, was in fact distinguished above all by its strong contribution to the crimes of the Third Reich.

The British historian Paul Johnson points out that Austrians are over-represented in the higher authorities of the regime (besides Hitler himself, we can mention Adolf Eichmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Arthur Seyss-Inquart) and that they participated in proportion much more in the Holocaust than Germans. A third of the killers of the Einsatzgruppen were  Austrians, as were four of the six commanders of the main Nazi extermination centers and nearly 40% of the camp guards. Out of 5,090 war criminals registered by Yugoslavia in 1945, 2,499  were Austrians.

Sudetenland crisis and the Munich Agreement

Pursuing his pan-Germanist goals, Hitler then threatened Czechoslovakia. The regions of Bohemia and Moravia along the borders of Grossdeutschland, called Sudetenland, are predominantly populated by the German minority. As with Austria, Hitler asserted his demands based on the agitations of the local Nazi organization, led by Konrad Henlein. The Führer invokes the “right of peoples” to demand from Prague the annexation of the Sudetenland to the Reich.

Although allied with France (and the Soviet Union), Czechoslovakia could not count on its support. Paris absolutely wants to avoid military conflict, prompted by the British refusal to participate in a possible intervention. The memory of the Great War also influenced this attitude: if the Germans had developed the desire for revenge, the French maintained a resolutely pacifist general atmosphere.

On 29 September 1938, in accordance with a proposal made by Mussolini the previous day, Adolf Hitler, the French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain and the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini, meeting in the Bavarian capital, sign the Munich Agreements. France and the United Kingdom agreed that Germany should annex the Sudetenland to avoid war. In exchange, Hitler, manipulative, assures that the territorial claims of the Third Reich will stop there. The next day, Czechoslovakia, which had begun to mobilize, was forced to bow. At the same time, the Third Reich allowed Poland and Hungary to seize the city of Teschen and southern Czechoslovakia respectively.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who mastered the policy of “appeasement” with the Reich, famously said: “Hitler is a gentleman.” But while French and British public opinion was enthusiastic, Winston Churchill commented: “Between dishonor and war, you have chosen dishonor. And you’re going to have war.” In fact, Hitler broke his promise just a few months later.

In March 1939, the Slovak Republic, encouraged by Berlin, proclaimed its independence; its leader, Jozef Tiso places his country under the German orbit. Hitler, during a dramatic meeting in Berlin with Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha (replacing resigning President Edvard Beneš), threatened to bomb Prague if Bohemia and Moravia were not incorporated into the Reich. On 15 March, Hácha relented and the German army entered Prague without a fight the next day. Bohemia and Moravia became the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, led by Konstantin von Neurath from November 1939, then from 1941 to his execution by the Czech resistance in May 1942, by the SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed “the butcher of Prague”.

By taking over Bohemia and Moravia, the Reich seized at the same time an important steel industry and in particular the Škoda factories, which made it possible to build tanks. By annexing Slavic populations and no longer Germans, Hitler threw off the mask: what he was pursuing was no longer classical pan-Germanism but, as he openly admitted to his generals on May 23, 1939, the conquest of unlimited living space.

German-Soviet Pact and Polish Aggression

After Austria and Czechoslovakia, comes Poland. Wedged between two hostile nations, Józef Piłsudski’s Poland signed a non-aggression treaty with the Reich in January 1934, thinking it was protecting itself against the Soviet Union. The influence of France, Poland’s traditional ally, in Central Europe thus diminished considerably, a trend that was later confirmed with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the disintegration of the Little Entente (Prague, Bucharest, Belgrade), an alliance placed under the patronage of Paris.

In the spring of 1939, Hitler claimed the annexation of the Free City of Danzig.

In March, Germany annexed the Lithuanian possession of the city of Memel. Then, Hitler directly claimed the Danzig corridor, Polish territory lost by Germany with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. This region gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea and separated East Prussia from the rest of the Reich.

On 23 August 1939, the day after Hitler’s speech in Obersalzberg, Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, Foreign Ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union, sign a non-aggression pact. This pact is a new setback for French diplomacy. In May 1935, Pierre Laval’s government had signed a treaty of mutual assistance with the USSR, which had the effect of cooling France’s relations with Poland, but also with the Tories in power in London. With the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, France could no longer count on the USSR to threaten an expansionist Germany. In addition, Poland is caught in a pincer movement. Germany and the USSR agreed to divide the countries between them: Western Poland for the first, Eastern Poland (Polesia, Volhynia, Eastern Galicia) and the Baltic States for the second.

On August 30, 1939, Hitler issued an ultimatum for the return of the Danzig corridor. Poland refuses. This time, France and the United Kingdom are determined to support the attacked country. This is the beginning of the Second World War.

During the war

Once France was defeated in 1940, Hitler satellised the countries of Central Europe: Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. Hitler obtained the accession of Hungary and Bulgaria, former losers of the First World War, by offering them respectively half of Transylvania and Dobrudja, ceded by Romania, where the pro-Hitler general Ion Antonescu took power in September 1940. From June 1941, Hitler dragged Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania into the war against the USSR, as well as Finland, which saw it as an opportunity to right the wrongs of the Russo-Finnish war.

However, Hitler failed to bring Francoist Spain into the war. Counting on the recognition of the Caudillo who had won the Spanish Civil War, he met him in Hendaye on October 23, 1940. Hitler hoped for Franco’s permission to conquer Gibraltar and cut off English communication routes in the Mediterranean. Cautious, the Spanish dictator knows that England cannot be invaded or defeated before 1941, and that the game remains open.

The quid pro quos demanded by Franco (notably territorial compensation in French North Africa), whose country was otherwise ruined and dependent on American deliveries, were unachievable for Hitler, who wished to spare the Vichy regime somewhat to bring it on the path of collaboration. Furious from the interview to the point of describing Franco as a “Jesuit pig”, Hitler nevertheless later benefited from the sending to the USSR  of the Spanish “volunteers” of the Azul division, which participated until 1943 in all the fighting (and all the exactions) of the Wehrmacht, and the Caudillo always supplied him with strategic minerals of primary importance.

The day after the Hendaye meeting, on October 24, Hitler stopped at Montoire where French state collaboration was formalized during an interview with Pétain. The symbolic handshake between the old marshal and the Chancellor of the Reich stunned French public opinion.

In November 1941, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, met Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, wishing to persuade them to support the Arab nationalist cause. He obtained from Hitler the promise “that once the war against Russia and England is won, Germany can concentrate on the objective of destroying the Jewish element remaining in the Arab sphere under British protection.” Amin al-Husseini relayed Nazi propaganda in Palestine and the Arab world and participated in the recruitment of Muslim fighters, materialized by the creation of the Waffen-SS divisions Handschar, Kama and Skanderberg, mainly made up of Muslims from the Balkans.

This Nazi support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem contradicted the anti-Semitic policy of the 1930s, which resulted in the emigration of a large part of German Jews to Palestine. As for the Grand Mufti, his strategy is guided by the principle that the enemy of his enemies (in this case the English and the Jews) must be his ally. From Hitler’s point of view, it was essentially a question of shaking the positions of the British Empire in the Middle East in the face of the advance of the Afrikakorps and of allowing the recruitment of auxiliaries, especially to fight against the partisans, while the hemorrhage of the German army became problematic.

Hitler in Paris

According to a legend maintained by the notebooks of the prefect of police of Paris, Roger Langeron, on June 18, 1940, Hitler visited Paris for the first time. He reviewed the troops of the Wehrmacht detachments marching past Generals Brauchitsch and Bock. In the evening, he returned to Munich to meet Benito Mussolini and examine Philippe Pétain’s request for a cessation of hostilities. This visit exists only in the notebooks published by Langeron, and is not taken up by historians. Maurice Schumann calls it a legend.

On June 23, he visited the French capital (a second time according to the prefect Langeron, a first otherwise), always briefly and discreetly (three vehicles) in the company of Arno Breker and Albert Speer, mainly to be inspired by its urban planning (he had given the order to spare the city during military operations). At six o’clock in the morning, coming from the aerodrome of Le Bourget, he went down the rue La Fayette, entered the Opera Garnier, which he visited meticulously.

He took the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the rue Royale, arrived at the Concorde, then at the Arc de Triomphe. The procession descends the Avenue Foch, then reaches the Palais de Chaillot. Hitler poses for photographers on the Trocadero esplanade, with his back turned to the Eiffel Tower. They then go to the Military School, then to the Invalides and he meditates for a long time in front of the tomb of Napoleon I (it is also at the Invalides that he will transfer the ashes of the son of Napoleon I, the Aiglon).

Then, he goes back to the Luxembourg Gardens, which he visits, but does not wish to visit the Pantheon. Finally, he walks down the boulevard Saint-Michel, his two bodyguards at a distance.  Place Saint-Michel, he goes back by car. They then arrived at the Ile de la Cité, where he admired the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame, then the right bank (  the Châtelet, the town hall, the Place des Vosges, the Halles, the Louvre, the Place Vendôme). They then go up to the Opera, Pigalle, the Sacré-Cœur, before leaving at 8:15 am. An overview of the city completes his visit. He never returned to Paris again.

Triumph in Berlin

On July 6, 1940, Hitler returned to Berlin to celebrate Germany’s crushing victory over France: he was received in triumph between the central station and the chancellery where he reviewed some divisions returned from the front. This was his last military parade and the last time he received a standing ovation.

World War II

Hitler had “brilliant” intuitions during the first phase of the Second World War. The Wehrmacht would later say that it had applied Blitzkrieg (blitzkrieg, involving a massive and concentrated use of bombers and tanks), which allowed it to occupy successively Poland (September 1939), Denmark (April 1940), Norway (April-May 1940), the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium (May 1940), France (May-June 1940), Yugoslavia (April 1941) and Greece (April-May 1941). In the case of France, the disobedience of the German generals is the first cause of the lightning victory which is more or less the subject of a post-war reconstruction and brings the consecration of the notion of blitzkrieg, not so precisely envisaged in 1940.

The rapid defeat of France in June 1940 was a real triumph for Hitler, who was cheered by a massive crowd on his return to Berlin in July. However, this eternal dice player put everything at stake by attacking the USSR on June 22, 1941, a decision that ultimately proved fatal.

The war radicalized his regime and made him take on its deadliest features. Just as the attack on Poland gave the signal for the massacre of the mentally handicapped or mass repression against the Slavic peoples, it was in the planned war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg) against the Soviet populations that the “Final Solution” was elaborated. All of occupied Europe was subjected to terror and plunder, to varying degrees depending on Hitler’s fate of each “race” and country.

Success and conquest of a large part of Europe (1939-1940)

His utter disregard for international law made Hitler’s task easier, as did his complete lack of scruples and the timid passivity or naivety of many of his victims. Thus, six of these countries (Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Yugoslavia) are neutral states, attacked by surprise, without even the formality of a declaration of war. Hitler often expressed to his relatives his feeling that the diplomatic or non-aggression treaties he signed on behalf of Germany were, for him, only worthless papers, only intended to numb the opposing mistrust. At the Nuremberg trials, the Third Reich was accused of violating 34 international treaties.

Similarly, Hitler did not hesitate to resort to methods of terror to make the enemy bend. He ordered the destruction by air of the center of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940, or the bombing of Belgrade (6-9 April 1941), in retaliation for an anti-Hitler putsch by Serbian officers hostile to Axis membership. The Wehrmacht also distinguished itself during its advance by a number of war crimes, such as the massacre of 1500 to 3,000 black soldiers of the colonial troops in France, the first victims in this country of Hitler’s racism.

Self-taught in military matters, Hitler judged that the generals of the old school dominating the Wehrmacht, often from the Prussian aristocracy (generally despised by the Nazis who considered themselves revolutionaries), were too cautious and overwhelmed by the conceptions of modern warfare (Blitzkrieg and psychological warfare). The successes are above all those of talented young generals such as Heinz Guderian or Erwin Rommel, who know how to show audacity, initiative, and have a more innovative conception of war than their opponents.

However, Hitler showed some skill and strategic audacity. He was thus convinced that neither France nor Great Britain would intervene while Poland was being invaded, avoiding Germany fighting on two fronts, which was effectively the phoney war scenario. He was also largely at the origin of the so-called “von Manstein” plan, which made it possible, by invading Belgium and the Netherlands, to trap the Franco-British forces projected too far forward and to take them from behind by a breakthrough in the bald Ardennes, to isolate the best of the enemy troops cornered at Dunkirk in May-June 1940.

However, on 24 May, Hitler, fearing that a too rapid advance would provide the enemy with the opportunity for an improbable second victory of the Marne, made the mistake of ordering his troops to stop in front of the port, from which 300,000 British soldiers were embarking, an order later described as the “miracle of Dunkirk”. On June 17, 1940, after the request for the armistice, Wilhelm Keitel called Hitler “the greatest general of all time” (Größter Feldherr Aller Zeiten). Later, after the Battle of Stalingrad, his colleagues used the acronym Gröfaz to ridicule Hitler. On June 22, in the clearing of Rethondes, during the Franco-German Armistice who he symbolically demanded the signature in the same clearing and the same wagon as in 1918, Hitler exults in front of the cameras of German news.

Before the invasion of Russia, a year later, Hitler’s Germany dominated Europe, adding in the spring of 1941 Yugoslavia and Greece to its empire, invaded to help Mussolini, jealous of Hitler’s successes but himself quickly entangled in the Balkans. With its military successes and the disappearance of French influence in Central Europe, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania (whose oil fields were a continuous obsession for Hitler during the war) and Bulgaria, by joining the Tripartite Pact, fell into Germany’s orbit, providing it with bases for future actions.

Between June 1940 and June 1941, Nazi Germany’s only adversary remained the United Kingdom, supported by the Commonwealth. Hitler was rather inclined to cordial relations with the British, considered racially close to the Germans. He hoped that the British government would eventually negotiate peace and agree to settle for its colonial and maritime empire without further intervention in Europe. Hitler counted on the action of the Luftwaffe, then the attacks of submarines against the convoys of goods (Battle of the Atlantic), to make the United Kingdom bend.

But on this point, the determination of Winston Churchill, who came to power on 10 May 1940, contrasts with the procrastination of his predecessors. Refusing any peace of compromise, galvanizing the British population, he thwarted the Führer’s plans. From September 15, 1940, the Battle of Britain (July 10 to October 31, 1940) is virtually lost for Germany, the heroism of the pilots of the Royal Air Force having defeated the rants of Göring, master of the Luftwaffe, whose semi-disgrace with the Führer begins. The air battle ended like a military pat,  but it was a political and strategic defeat for Hitler, who failed, for the first time, to impose his will on a country.

Furious, Hitler postponed Operation Seelöwe on September 12  — his plan to land in England, improvised too late in the summer of 1940, and unfeasible as long as the United Kingdom still had its naval and air fleet. He then unleashed bombings intended to terrorize the British civilian population:  the Blitzfell every day across the Channel, in particular in Coventry, razed by the German air force on November 26, 1940, or on the old City of London, burned in particular in the nights of December 1940 and that of May 10 to 11, 1941. But the British popular determination remains intact.

In 1942, in retaliation for the first major British raids on German cities, Hitler again ordered the destruction of British cities of art by air one by one (the “Baedeker raids”, named after a famous tourist guide), just as he unleashed V1 and V2 missiles on England in 1944, without more success.

In addition, excessive submarine warfare brought the United Kingdom closer to the United States, which was concerned about freedom of trade and navigation. Hitler began to see war with America, the “home of Jewish capitalism” in his eyes, as inevitable. In the spring of 1940, Germany found itself in a critical war situation and had a choice to make: attack Britain or reach an agreement with it. However, Halifax did not seem ready to negotiate and announced it publicly in a radio speech. Following England’s decision to continue the war, Hitler was faced with two options: “inflict a military defeat on Britain or force it to recognize German supremacy on the continent by crushing the Soviet Union in a quick defeat.”

 Hitler then planned to attack the Soviet Union in order to maintain his position of strength by eliminating Britain’s main possible great ally. Moreover, the destruction of Russia would allow Germany to expand its territory and thus strengthen its power. Hitler’s will was not only territorial, but also ideological, Russia being a sign of Jewish domination. “In other words, living space in Russia would be synonymous with the destruction of Jewish power.” However, the decision to attack the Soviet Union the following spring was not as obvious as expected due to disagreements within the leadership of the armed forces.

Indeed, opinions differ, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Werner Brauchitsch and the Chief of the General Staff of the Army, Colonel-General Halder, declared that it was preferable to maintain good relations with Russia. They thus focused their military efforts on the possibility of attacking British positions in the Mediterranean. In response, Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German Navy, decided to implement a Mediterranean strategy with the aim of replacing British power. This strategy failed mainly because of the small size of the German fleet, especially if the war became global with the entry of the United States.

Despite the lack of support, Hitler remained on his position of attacking the Soviet Union but decided before that to implement the “peripheral strategy” of targeting British possessions in Gibraltar and the Middle East, in particular for fear of America’s entry into the war on England’s side. This strategy was aimed at getting Britain out of the war[unclear] so that it could later focus solely on the Soviet Union. The capture of Gibraltar was also seriously considered by Hitler, which allowed him to force Britain to leave the Mediterranean so that the Axis would be fully in his possession.

The domination of the Mediterranean was indeed of great importance in the continuation of the war but this strategy did not work, partly because of Spain’s refusal to enter the war. The capture of Gibraltar was still feasible but would entail too high a military and political cost. In January 1941, Hitler encountered unfavorable political conditions. Indeed, unable to satisfy Spain, France and Italy at the same time, he found himself without allies and decided not to attack Great Britain head-on. None of the plans presented at the end of the summer and autumn will be implemented, as they are considered too risky in view of Germany’s situation. Hitler, therefore, made the decision to renounce this attack to turn to the assault on the USSR, from which he thought he emerged victorious.

The outbreak of the Second World War inaugurated a process of decapitalization of Berlin, the capital of the Reich: Hitler’s desire to be as close as possible to military operations, accompanied by his general staff, was the cause. But this state of affairs is qualified by the decree of August 30, 1939, which sets up a Reich Ministerial Defence Council, organized around Göring and conceived as a collegial decision-making body, which was not the case thereafter, leaving in fact the decision-making authority to the administrative officials of the Reich.

After the death of Rudolf Hess, the place he occupied was gradually occupied by Martin Bormann, who relied on a hypothetical will of the Führer. During the conflict, it became increasingly difficult for ministers to gain direct access to the Chancellor. Indeed, as the conflict progressed, with a Führer increasingly distant from the daily management of the state, the channels of access to the chancellor became scarcer: the numerous chancelleries created in peacetime in 1933-1934 had to reckon with the Führer’s team of aides-de-camp, who controlled Hitler’s schedule. Ultimately, these chancelleries, moreover in a fierce struggle against each other, form an effective screen between the Chancellor of the Reich and some of his ministers, a screen of which Bormann makes a very effective instrument of personal power.

Surprised both by the declaration of war by Great Britain and France, as well as by the speed of the Polish defeat, Hitler nevertheless defended the idea, against his staff, that there would be no major Allied offensive on the Western Front; the facts having proved him right, he proposed a rapid transfer of the units engaged against Poland to the west with a view to a rapid offensive.  both against France, but also against the Netherlands and Belgium, to seize the Belgian and Dutch ports, despite the reservations of its officers, reservations reactivating the conservative networks involved in the conspiracy of 1938.

Moreover, infuriated by the events of autumn and winter (explosion of a bomb during a public appearance of Hitler on November 8, 1939, capture by the Allies of officers with plans for the planned offensive, postponement due to unfavorable weather conditions), Hitler listened on the advice of one of his aides-de-camp and despite the reservations of Franz Halder and his staff,  to the plan drawn up jointly by Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian, because he met with these officers the operational translation of his idea of crossing the Meuse by surprise.

Similarly, he was sensitive, after receiving information from a former Norwegian minister, leader of a nationalist party then of mediocre importance, Quisling, to the conceptions developed by Grand Admiral Raeder, who advocated, inspired by a kriegspiel played in the 1920s, the invasion of Scandinavia. ; this one, carried out partially (Sweden was not attacked, unlike Denmark and Norway) and against the principles of naval warfare, which pleased Hitler, proved to be a great success, despite significant naval losses.

Not content with participating in the drawing up of the plans for the offensive planned for the spring of 1940, Hitler was also involved in the psychological warfare waged against the Allies: he coordinated the harassment of French defensive posts, he drew up, with the services of the Ministry of Propaganda, the leaflets dropped on the Allied positions and ordered the regular broadcasting of broadcasts.  prepared by German radio, for French positions: Hitler is thus at the origin of the idea, broadcast to French soldiers, that the German attack does not take place solely for the purpose of seeking a political solution to the conflict, which contributes to the weakening of the morale of the French troops and reinforces the resentment of the latter against the British expeditionary force.

Mistakes and First Failures (1941)

Hitler also and above all proved to be a messy and unpredictable commander-in-chief, disdainful of the opinion of his general staff. He can count on the great servility of the latter, and in the first place of the head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, high command of the armed forces), Wilhelm Keitel. In Hitler’s work, a frequent lack of realism is often coupled with strategic oddities. Moreover, the Führer is oblivious to many of the problems of the front. Since Adolf Hitler resents bad news and anything that does not fit his plans, his subordinates are reluctant to pass on certain information to him.

From the first months of the offensive in the East, after the euphoria of the first successes, Hitler was cautious, in private, about the chances of rapid success in the war against the Soviet Union: thus, in August 1941, before Guderian and other generals, he evoked the failure of the first phase of the campaign, then, during a visit of Mussolini to Rastenburg,  At the end of the month, he takes responsibility for the situation. In the conferences that followed, he was supportive, against Guderian, Halder and Brauchitsch, who also highlighted the strategic nature of the capture of Moscow, a railway junction between the two sides of the front of the conquest of Ukraine and its resources. If the conquest of Ukraine is a great military success, it is nevertheless a defeat against time, which is bound to fail when the capture of Moscow becomes the priority.

His first grave mistake was to open a second front, invading the huge Soviet Union without having finished the war against the United Kingdom. Always convinced that he had a monumental task that he would struggle to accomplish in a single lifetime, he wanted to attack the USSR, the main reservoir of “living space” and the main doctrinal enemy, in a short time. From December 1940, he planned a war of terrorist extermination in the East: it was not only a question of destroying Bolshevism, but beyond, as already in enslaved Poland, of destroying the State, of reducing the civilian populations to the state of slaves and subhumans, of emptying by massacres and deportations the conquered territories of their Jews and their Gypsies,  in order to make way for German settlers.

According to Peter Padfield, on May 10, 1941, Hitler sent Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s “designated successor,” to Britain with a detailed peace treaty, under which the Germans would withdraw from Western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality on the impending attack on the USSR.

At the launch of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler, considering that the Red Army would collapse rapidly, planned to reach an Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line before the end of the year. He forbade his troops to carry winter equipment.

He divided his army into three groups: Army Group North (GAN) with the Leningrad objective, Army Group Centre (GAC) with the Moscow objective, and Army Group South (ASG) with Ukraine objective. To this device are added the Finnish allies in the North, Hungarian, Romanian and Italian in the South, the latter being considered unreliable by Hitler and his staff.

In August 1941, Hitler gave priority to the conquest of Ukraine, a primary economic objective with its grain lands and mines, by the GAS, but also a strategic objective, because a very large part of the Red Army was concentrated around Kiev: to march directly on Moscow before having destroyed these reserves, as many German generals would like.  would dangerously expose the flank of the Wehrmacht in Hitler’s eyes. In doing so, the Führer forced the GAC to stop, even though it had reached 300 kilometers from Moscow. The offensive on this sector resumed in October, but this setback involved a formidable adversary: the Russian winter.

Hitler neglected this factor as much as he underestimated, out of hatred of Slavs and communism, the quality and combativeness of Soviet “subhumans”. His racism also made him formally forbid the invading army to seek allies among local nationalists and enemies of the Stalinist regime.

On the contrary, the unleashing of cruelty against civilians and the implementation of premeditated mass crimes very quickly alienated Hitler the Soviet population, thrown into the arms of Stalin who knew how to proclaim the sacred union. The arrival of fresh troops from Siberia made it possible to clear Moscow and to push back Germans ill-prepared for the harsh weather conditions. The Wehrmacht then lost 700,000 men (killed, wounded, prisoners), a quarter of its strength on this front.

On December 19, 1941, as the retreat threatened to turn into an uncontrollable debacle like the one that had made the Great Napoleonic Army disappear in 1812, Hitler took direct command of the Wehrmacht on the Russian front, ousting General von Brauchitsch as well as Guderian, von Bock and von Rundstedt. It categorically forbids any retreat, any retreat, even strategic, going so far as to condemn to death officers and generals who carry out it by disobeying him. The Führer’s draconian orders succeeded in stabilizing the front some 150 km from Moscow, at the cost of terrible suffering for the soldiers.

Now the blitzkrieg has had its day and Hitler has lost all hope of a short war. Moreover, it was at the same time that he declared war on the United States, on December 11, 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, of which his Japanese allies had not even warned him, and without any benefit for the Reich, since the Japanese Empire did not declare war on the USSR. The Führer has therefore thoughtlessly brought into the race the greatest economic potential in the world, beyond the reach of his Panzers and bombers.

Hitler was now the absolute master of the army and operations (even Stalin left his generals under the reins after 1942, while Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle took little more than political decisions). If the frustrating failure before Moscow further radicalizes his murderous projects (his decision to exterminate all the Jews of Europe is taken at the time of the slowdown of the advance in Russia), Hitler still has formidable armed forces and remains for the moment the all-powerful master of conquered Europe, from the gates of Moscow to the Atlantic.

Exploitation and Terror on Europe

The “New Order” promised by Nazi propaganda never meant for Hitler anything but absolute domination and systematic exploitation of his “living space” by the “race of Lords.”

Everywhere local economies are therefore placed under guardianship, for the exclusive benefit of the Third Reich and its war effort. Exorbitant financial tributes were demanded from the vanquished, raw materials drained from Germany as well as agricultural and industrial products (not to mention works of art, entire trains of which were rounded up by Göringet Rosenberg). The plundering of occupied Europe was all the more radical because Hitler was absolutely keen to maintain a high standard of living for the German population even in the midst of the war, in order to prevent a repetition of the revolt of November 1918.

On 21 March 1942, to alleviate the labor shortage caused by the massive mobilization of the Germans on the Eastern Front, Hitler appointed Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel plenipotentiary for the recruitment of workers. Placed under the direct authority of the Führer alone, Sauckel managed, by dint of manhunts and massive roundups in the East, and by using more intimidation and coercive measures in the West (conscription of labor and STO), to bring in two years more than 8 million forced laborers on the territory of the Greater Reich. Among them, Polish and Soviet workers (Ostarbeiter) were subjected to brutal and extremely discriminatory treatment, leaving them barely the bare necessities to subsist.

Meanwhile, on February 8, 1942, Hitler commissioned his favorite confidant and architect, the young technocrat Albert Speer, to reorganize the Reich’s war economy. At the beginning of 1942, the German economy was not entirely devoted to war production. By centralizing the management of war production in his ministry, the newly appointed Minister of Armaments quickly achieved results that enabled the German economy to support the war effort. But it took a long time to overcome Hitler’s reluctance to proclaim the total war desired by Goebbels, the Führer not wanting to impose sacrifices on the Germans likely to damage his image and push them to revolt.

Himmler, for his part, exploited to the death the forced labor force of the concentration camps, whose mortality rate literally exploded from the beginning of 1942. On December 9, 1941, Hitler personally issued the Nacht und Nebel decree, co-signed by Keitel, which planned to literally wipe out the deported resistance fighters “in the night and fog” (an expression borrowed by the Führer from a Wagner opera). Within the Nazi concentration camp system, it is, therefore, prisoners from all over Europe classified as “NN” who will experience the worst treatment and the highest mortality rate.

Nazi domination largely reintroduced in Europe practices that had disappeared since the eighteenth century: torture, hostage-taking, reduction of populations to slavery, destruction of entire villages became commonplace practices that signed Hitler’s brief hegemony.

To this can be added the forced enlistment into the German troops of the Alsatian-Moselle or Polish Malgré-Nous d’Ivoire, whose annexed territories are subjected to intense forced Germanization, or the kidnapping for the same purpose of Germanization of hundreds of thousands of European children with “Aryan” features, entrusted to the Lebensborn supervised by Martin Bormann, secretary to the Führer.

Hitler personally set the rate of 100 hostages to be shot per German soldier killed. Strictly applied in the East, claiming victims by the tens of thousands, these massive reprisals against civilians are more moderate in the West, where Hitler’s racism does not despise the populations as much, and where the highest level of development and organization of societies must be taken into account. Nevertheless, they are applied.

Also, after a series of attacks inaugurated by the shooting of Colonel Fabien against a German officer in the middle of Paris, Hitler personally ordered the execution of a number of hostages, who were shot in particular at the camp of Châteaubriant. In March 1944, when the Italian Resistance killed 35 German soldiers in occupied Rome, Hitler demanded that one hundred hostages be shot for each killed: Marshal Kesselring reduced the unrealistic rate to ten to one, and 355 Italians still perished at the Ardeatine Pits. On June 10, 1942, following the execution of his faithful Heydrich by the Czech resistance, Hitler ordered the total destruction of the village of Lidice.

From setbacks to debacle (1942-1944)

As the conflict evolved, the growing role in the day-to-day management of the war affected Hitler in various ways, physically and psychologically. In addition, it intervenes in the military, technical and industrial fields, marking with its paw choices, some of which prove disastrous. At the same time, the process of decapitalization of Berlin, initiated at the outbreak of the conflict, intensified as the Führer and Chancellor’s campaign headquarters moved.

Thus, the physical condition of the commander-in-chief, suffering from a misdiagnosed disease, declines rapidly. Guderian, in February 1943, and Hossbach, summoned on July 19, 1944,  to Rastenburg to be entrusted with the command of the 4th Army, discover a prematurely aged man, tired by his repeated insomnia, suffering from a tremor in his left arm, with a pale complexion and vague eyes. In addition to his general fatigue, he is poorly treated by his doctor, Dr.  Theodor Morell. Because of his insomnia, he adopts over the course of the conflict a totally shifted rhythm of life: breakfast is taken in the late morning, and lunch in the early evening, and tea is served to his guests and close collaborators late in the evening.

The Soviet resistance transforming the conflict into a war of attrition, Hitler now assigns to each of the operations on the Eastern Front a strategic dimension of conquest of strategic places of production: the industrial basin of the Donetz, the oil of the Caucasus.

From the launch of Operation Fall Blau, Hitler quarreled incessantly with his chief of staff, Halder, supported by Alfred Jodl. At the root of these quarrels, Halder and Hitler had two approaches to the 1942 campaign: Halder, as a soldier, developed an approach that betrayed the obsessive preference of German officers for tactical matters; Hitler placed himself in a general strategic project: he wanted to give the Reich the means of a long war against the Anglo-Saxons. However, Hitler, obsessed with the conquest of living space, did not necessarily draw from his strategic conceptions the conclusions that flow from his strategic analyses.

Quickly, he became aware of the military impasse generated by his choices and began to lose interest in the military situation on the ground. Hitler thus became increasingly suspicious of his generals, dismissed List and Halder during the month of September, replaced Halder with Zeitzler, inexperienced, while giving in the directives enacted, not only instructions impossible to keep, but also a luxury of details. He thus swept away Zeitzler’s objections to the difficulties of supplying armies engaged more than 2,000 km from their bases, insisted on the symbolic character of the capture of Stalingrad,  which he conceived as the starting point of the offensive of the following summer (he could not then renounce it, under penalty of losing his prestige and permanently skinning the myth of invincibility of the Führer).

But the defeat forced him to implement a defensive strategy, strongly inspired by his experience at the front during the Great War, causing losses probably greater than they should have been if another defense system had been adopted.

Moreover, Hitler frequently loses control of his nerves in the presence of his main officers, even if he never rolled on the ground, as the legend claims: Halder, Zeitzler, Guderian,  for example: the latter, after his return to grace, regularly opposes Hitler during very violent scenes; moreover, he isolates himself within the teams that surround him at the General Staff,  no longer eats meals with key collaborators and no longer attends briefings regularly.

Despite his setbacks, Hitler continued to exert a strong influence on his generals, among other things through his ability to analyze in political terms a number of events with military implications, analyses that the military was not able to formulate. It is this political analysis that constitutes the basis of the admiration of many soldiers, even in the most critical moments, and despite the fact that, until an advanced date of April 1945, Hitler continued to perpetually order his troops, on whatever front, not to retreat, despite the balance of power largely in favor of his opponents,  or combat conditions on the ground.

By 1944, it had become impossible for German officers to question Hitler’s analyses, including reasoned arguments; this impossibility created the conditions for a divorce between Hitler, bent on his orders not to give an inch of ground, and the General Staffs, whose recommendations were generally ignored by the latter: thus developed in the military command organs of the Reich the feeling of Hitler’s inability not only to lead the Reich,  if not towards victory, at least towards the end of the conflict, but also to define strategic objectives in the conduct of the war. This defiance of part of the command against Hitler, an open secret according to a conspirator of the plot of July 20, 1944, Günther Smend, during his confession, creates the conditions for the preparation and execution of a military putsch against Hitler and the Nazi leadership.

Moreover, the more the conflict progresses towards its end, the more the orders given are unachievable on the ground, which he never sees on the spot: the last military instructions for the disengagement of Berlin by four skeletal armies or armies endowed with means out of proportion to the stated objective constitute the latest chronological example of this trend.

The first defeats obsessed him, Stalingrad first. In Stalingrad invested by Axis troops, operations became for months a symbolic issue, the theater of a direct duel between him and Joseph Stalin. From Vinnytsia, from where he personally supervised the operations, he opposed throughout the autumn any withdrawal from the city, already partially invested, against the advice of his generals. It strictly forbids doing anything other than resisting on the spot.

After a fierce urban battle, the Sixth Army, surrounded in the city, surrendered. The day before, Friedrich Paulus, his general, was elevated to the ultimate rank of Generalfeldmarschall: no German marshal having ever capitulated, this promotion is, in reality, an invitation to heroic suicide to serve propaganda. The failure of Stalingrad, beyond tactical and strategic errors, is a consequence of the centralization of military powers, around Halder first, then around Hitler, Hitler that his generals no longer contradict, despite his poor estimates of the balance of power, his inadequate orders and his disarray in the face of a situation that escapes him more and more. Similarly, the obstinate refusal to evacuate Tunisia led to the captivity of 250,000 Axis soldiers in May 1943.

Very reserved about the Kursk offensive – his last on the Eastern Front, and the largest tank battle in history – Hitler made no difficulty in stopping it, on July 13, 1943, when, to his flagrant failure, was added the Allied landing in Italy: he was forced to withdraw from the Eastern Front units immediately sent to other European theaters of operations; thus,   the landing in Sicily forced him to clear the Russian front and precipitated the overthrow of Benito Mussolini.

From this period, Italy is the poor relation of the European fronts, on the basis of an analysis of the war in terms of capital space; in this perspective, the end of 1943 saw a strengthening of Western Europe, to the detriment of the Eastern Front, which led to tensions with the commanding generals in this theater of operations: he decided on a strategy and was concerned with the least of the tactical repercussions of these decisions on the ground, despite the requests of Kluge and Manstein. He spent most of the second half of 1943 in Rastenburg, which was increasingly isolated.

During the summer offensive in South Russia in 1942, Hitler repeated the mistake of the previous year by splitting an army group in two, thus making it more vulnerable. Group A is heading towards the Caucasus and its oil fields, Group B is heading towards Stalingrad.

Skeptical about the Allied exchanges decrypted by the German services (Operation Fortitude) in the period preceding the Normandy landings, Hitler however delayed the sending of Panzerdivisionen to reject the landed forces, thinking that Operation Overlord was a diversion and that the real landing should take place north of the  Seine (the rumor that attributes the loss of the battle to Jodl’s refusal to wake Hitler must be considered a legend). He did not change his mind until the end of the Battle of Normandy.

In August 1944, he ordered Marshal von Kluge to carry out a counter-attack at Mortain to cut the breakthrough of the American troops at Avranches, in such conditions that the offensive was doomed to failure as soon as it was prepared. In addition, the launch of the Soviet offensive on 22 June 1944 provoked a new crisis between Hitler and his generals: indeed, as a supporter of static defense, he ordered the creation of 29 strongholds and the creation of a pole of resistance in Courland, points of support for the reconquest; in this context, he made many changes within the general staffs,  Changes multiplied by the repression of the attack of July 20.

Similarly, in the industrial field, if Hitler attends many presentations of military equipment, he is nevertheless responsible for disastrous choices for the conduct of the war. If he gives carte blanche (or almost)  to Albert Speer, he must reckon with Sauckel, competent for everything related to the workforce, and with the administration for which he is responsible, but which is headed on a daily basis by Karl Otto Saur.

Moreover, Hitler’s certain competence in the field of armaments was limited by his lack of overall vision. Thus, he multiplies the errors of choice, for example by favoring heavy tanks with little maneuverability, such as the Tiger, unlike the Soviets who choose the T-34, more maneuverable; similarly, his hesitations on the production of jet aircraft prove damaging: the Me 262, first armed as a fighter plane, was equipped for bombing in the summer of 1944, at Hitler’s request, then, again at his request, was converted into a fighter plane in March 1945.

If it has become obvious to all, even among his servants, that defeat is inevitable and that Hitler is leading Germany to catastrophe, no cessation of fighting is possible as long as he remains alive. However, in Germany itself, Hitler exercised heavy repression after surviving the attack of July 20, 1944.

Plots of July 20, 1944

Hitler’s absolute power continued to grow stronger during the war. Thus, in April 1942, during a ceremony in the Reichstag, he was officially given the right of life and death over every German citizen. As Göring’s star faded and his designated successor, Rudolf Hess, mysteriously fled to Scotland in May 1941, his private secretary Martin Bormann increasingly asserted himself as an éminence grise, filtering out access to Hitler, managing his property, and playing an active role in implementing Nazi projects in Europe.

His victories in 1939-1941 reinforced the population’s belief in his infallibility, and made impossible the task of those who would have wanted to overthrow him. Even some future resistance fighters such as Pastor Martin Niemöller, the student martyrs of the White Rose in Munich or the Count of Stauffenberg, hero of the attack of July 20, 1944, were initially seduced by the charismatic person of the Führer and his successes.

However, if the at least passive support of the masses remains practically acquired until the end, since the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, individuals or isolated groups have understood that only the death of Hitler can still avoid a total disaster for Germany.

Adolf Hitler’s unusual “devil’s luck” narrowly escaped several assassination attempts. But it is also necessary to reckon with the difficulty of reaching him, since he hides in his Prussian HQ after 1941, his inability to keep to regular and predictable times, the crowd or the SS guard who surround him, and his precautions taken — his war movements are secret, the bottom of his cap is armored,  He wears a bulletproof vest and his food is tasted beforehand by his doctor —.

In November 1938 in Munich, the Swiss Catholic Maurice Bavaud tried to shoot him, he will be guillotined. On November 8, 1939, during the annual commemoration of his failed putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller brewery, Hitler escaped an attack orchestrated by Johann Georg Elser. The bomb exploded twenty minutes after the departure of Hitler who had had to cut short his speech because of bad weather conditions forcing him to take the train rather than the plane.

As the outcome of the war became clearer in the direction of defeat, several officers plotted with civilians to eliminate Hitler. Although the Allies had expressed the choice of unconditional surrender at the Anfa Conference in January 1943, the conspirators hoped to overthrow the regime in order to negotiate a political settlement of the conflict.

Among them, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (secret service), Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and General Ludwig Beck. The latter, after the defeat of Stalingrad, set in motion the plot under the name of Operation Flash, but the bomb placed on March 13, 1943, in Hitler’s plane, returning from a visit to the Eastern Front, did not explode. Another attempt a few days later, on March 21, where Colonel von Gersdorff had to blow himself up in the presence of Hitler during a visit to an exhibition at the Zeughaus in Berlin also failed.

On July 20, 1944, at 12:42 p.m., at the Wolfsschanze, his headquarters in East Prussia, Hitler was wounded in an attack executed by Colonel von Stauffenberg during an attempted coup d’état by officers, former officers and civilians resistant, which was harshly repressed. Compromised, Marshals von Kluge and Rommel, and other general officers, were driven to suicide, while Admiral Canaris was sent to a concentration camp where he was hanged, alongside Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in April 1945, when the Allies approached their place of detention.

In all, more than 5,000 people were arrested and murdered in the ensuing crackdown. By virtue of a totalitarian conception of collective responsibility, and referring to the ancient customs of vengeance of the Germanic peoples (Sippenhaft), Hitler sent the families of the conspirators to concentration camps. The conspirators, mistreated and ridiculed, are dragged before Roland Freisler’s Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), which showers them with insults and humiliations during parodies of justice that do not save even the elementary appearances of the law, before sending them to their deaths. Many perished hanging from butcher’s fangs on the very day of their sentencing in Berlin’s Plotzensee prison. Hitler had the executions filmed so that he could view them in his private room, although it seems that the films were never screened in the end.

On the very day of the attack, Hitler received Mussolini by performing all the duties imposed by protocol and in an Olympian calm, serving tea himself and serving as his guide for the visit of the site of the explosion. The reaction of the population to the announcement of the attack is multifaceted: the party organizes support meetings, whose success is uneven throughout Germany, but the population, generally cautious, await the continuation of events.

In dire straits

Hitler’s orders to his troops became less and less possible to carry out, given the overwhelming superiority of the Red Army and the Allies. Meetings between Hitler and his Chief of Staff Heinz Guderian, appointed in July 1944, became increasingly stormy and he was finally dismissed on 28 March 1945.

Hitler motivates his relatives by invoking “miracle weapons”, such as the V1 and V2, the first missiles or the first Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters, supposed to turn the situation around, or a reversal of alliance in extremis.

In fact, since the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the Allies have been unambiguously demanding unconditional surrender, denazification of Germany and punishment of war criminals. As for the “new weapons”, they would have been quite insufficient, and Hitler himself wasted his last chances by displaying for a long time his contempt for the “Jewish sciences” including nuclear physics (one of the causes of the delay in research on the atomic bomb), or by demanding, against the advice of all experts, to build jet planes as bombers – in order to be able to resume the destruction of English cities – and not as fighters, which could have tipped the air war.

In the last months of the conflict, Hitler, whose health was rapidly declining (due to Parkinson’s disease), no longer appeared in public, spoke little on the radio, and remained mostly in Berlin. Even the Gauleiter, mostly members of the party since the 1920s, were struck by Hitler’s physical decrepitude: on February 24, 1945, Hitler addressed them for the last time, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the party program, and Karl Wahl, Gauleiter of Swabia, was marked by Hitler’s fall; after a speech deemed disappointing by the participants in this meeting,  Hitler launches into a monologue that makes him regain his verve and his spirit.

It was Joseph Goebbels, the head of propaganda, who was also Berlin’s defense commissioner and  head of the Volkssturm, who made up for this shortcoming and took it upon himself to exhort the troops and the crowds. The link between the Germans and the Führer is loosening. Hitler never visited a bombed city or a civilian hospital, he never saw any of the refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army by the millions from  January 1945, he no longer went to the bedside of wounded soldiers, and since the end of 1941, he has stopped eating meals with his officers or soldiers. His slide out of reality is accentuated.

Following the Soviet winter offensive in January 1945, Hitler lost interest in the fate of the Germans living in the regions threatened by the Soviet push and ordered both the evacuation of the civilian population, of everything that could be evacuated, as well as the systematic destruction of what could not be sent west. He experienced fits of fury at each announcement of the collapse of the defense lines in the East: thus, the abandonment of Warsaw by Harpe, despite strict orders, led to his replacement by Ferdinand Schörner in a fit of fury, like the replacement of Rheinardt by Rendulic, competent, but powerless in the face of the means deployed by the Soviets.

Other generals, such as Friedrich Hossbach, were simply dismissed for not being able to achieve the objectives assigned to them (in his case, the reconquest of Warsaw). With Joseph Goebbels, he presented through the press the confrontation as a modern version of the Punic Wars, a war of European civilization against a barbarian invasion, which would be won through a supreme effort by the nation and its leaders. In the same vein,  the Völkischer Beobachter explains to its readers the nature of the ongoing conflict by insisting on the weight of Mongolian units within the Red Army.

Moreover, faced with the systematic refusal of each request for withdrawal of their units, more and more officers concealed certain troop movements from Hitler: thus, on January 17, 1945, in the dramatic context of the Soviet winter offensive, General Burgdorf, Hitler’s aide-de-camp for the Wehrmacht, was suspected by certain commanding generals on the Eastern Front to hide from Hitler the gravity of the German military situation in Poland.

Similarly, from 20 January, the order to retreat having finally been given, General Rheinhardt, in charge of the defense of East Prussia, did not inform Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, of the German retreat and the abandonment of positions directly threatened by the Red Army in the Lötzen region, despite the strict orders of Hitler and his nearest staff. These late retirement authorizations contribute to amplify the ongoing disaster and make each downturn even more problematic. Similarly, Keitel and Jodl did not inform Hitler of the vanity of the efforts to constitute the 12th Army, nor of all the maneuvers ordered to the units that made up this army to clear the city of Berlin, nor of the failure of Felix Steiner’s attempt to clear Berlin from the north.

At the beginning of April 1945, he continued to oppose, surrounded by his close advisers, any maneuver to shorten the Oder front, and dismissed all the objections presented to him by Gotthard Heinrici, commander of the army responsible for defending Berlin, insisting on the role that the commander must play: to instill faith and confidence in the units under his command,  while building up reserves of inexperienced soldiers, drawn from the SS, Luftwaffe and Navy.

Moreover, convinced that the German people did not deserve to survive him since he had not shown himself to be the strongest, Hitler ordered on March 19, 1945, a scorched-earth policy of unprecedented magnitude, including the destruction of industries, military installations, stores and means of transport and communication, but also thermal and electrical stations.  sewage treatment plants, and everything that is essential for the basic survival of its fellow citizens.

This order will not be respected. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and Reich architect, claimed before the Nuremberg Tribunal that he had taken the necessary measures to ensure that Hitler’s directives were not carried out by the Gauleiters. This order is in fact the culmination of instructions given since 1943: from February 14, 1943, he ordered the destruction of everything that could be useful to the enemy, as well as the forced evacuation of the population, in the territories abandoned by the retreating German troops, an order taken up in October 1943 during the evacuation of the Kuban bridgehead. On October 16, 1944, when the territory of the Reich was directly threatened, Hitler ordered to transform every house in every village into a fortress, destined to be defended until it collapsed.

On March, enraged by the failure of the offensive in Hungary, he ordered the Leibstandarte to remove the armband in his name, worn by the men of this division.

In April 1945, the Reich was desperate: the Rhine had been crossed by the West on 23 March, cities were crushed by daily bombings, refugees fled in droves from the East, the Soviets approached Vienna and Berlin. In the streets of the cities, the SS still hang in public those who speak of ceasing a hopeless fight. On the corpses of civilians hanging from lampposts, placards read, for example: “I hang here because I doubted my Führer”, or “I hang here because I am a traitor”. The last images of Hitler filmed, in the middle of the battle of Berlin, show him decorating his last defenders: children and pre-adolescents.

Last ten days

On April 20, the top Nazi leaders came one last time to greet their master hastily on his birthday, before all fleeing hastily away from Berlin, attacked by the Red Army. On the same day, Hitler visited the exhibition displaying the latest models of weapons, organized in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery and ordered that equipment, stored in railway cars, be unloaded and given to the fighting units.

Holed up in the depths of his Führerbunker, Hitler refuses to leave for Bavaria and chooses to stay in Berlin to better stage his death. During increasingly stormy daily sessions, while outside the biggest battle of the war raged, he continued to order impossible maneuvers to liberate the capital quickly encircled, including Felix Steiner, commander of a Panzer corps and Walther Wenck, commander of the 12th Army. On April 22, understanding the vanity of these attempts, he entered into one of his most terrible rages, before collapsing, finally acknowledging for the first time that  “the war is lost” (Der Krieg ist verloren). The decision to stay permanently in Berlin and commit suicide was made in the following days.

On the 23rd, Albert Speer returned by plane to Berlin beset to bid farewell to Hitler. He confesses to him having sabotaged the scorched earth policy, without the dictator reacting, and leaves having obtained only a soft handshake from his idol.

The last internal crises of the regime took place on the evening of the 25th, Hermann Göring, still nominally heir to Hitler, sent him, on the basis of what had been reported to him of the crisis of despair of April 22, a telegram from Bavaria (where he was) asking him if he could take the leadership of the Reich in accordance with the provisions of 1941. Persuaded by Bormann to mistakenly see it as an ultimatum and a coup de force by the Reichsmarschall, Hitler, furious, dismissed Göring and had him placed under SS surveillance at the Berghof.

His fury redoubled on the 27th when the Allied radio informed him that his faithful Himmler had tried without his knowledge to negotiate with the West. However, some recent research speculates that Himmler negotiated with the Allies on Hitler’s own orders. He had Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, SS General Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer, shot in the gardens of the chancellery. According to Kershaw, Fegelein’s death would actually be a substitute for  Himmler’s fate if Himmler had fallen into his power. In reality, like Göring, Himmler was informed of the April 22 bout of despair, and like Göring, he deduced that he had a free hand for his negotiations with the Western allies. This calculation led to his immediate exclusion from the NSDAP and his arrest, his repatriation to Berlin, a prelude to his death sentence.

On April 28, in a fit of rage, he dismissed General Heinrici, who had just refused to carry out an impossible order given by Keitel and Jodl.

On the night of April 29, after being married to Eva Braun by Walter Wagner, Hitler dictates to his secretary Traudl Junge a private will and then a political will, an exercise in self-justification in which he denies his responsibility for the outbreak of war. Curiously, the text does not say a word about Bolshevism, at the very moment when the Soviets seized Berlin. On the other hand, Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsession still appears intact. He recalled the exclusion of Himmler and Göring from the NSDAP, dismissed Speer, Ribbentrop and Keitel, rewarded the partisans of the fierce struggle such as Goebbels, Bormann, Giesler, Hanke, Saur and Schörner, appointing the former to the Chancellery, the others to ministerial posts and Schörner commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, and then entrusted the presidency of the Reich to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz.

On April 30, around 3:30 p.m., while the Red Army was less than 300 meters from the bunker and preparing to invest the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the company of Eva Braun: he killed himself by a bullet in the temple or neck; His pistol was then found at his feet. Researchers found no trace of powder on his teeth, implying that he did not kill himself by shooting himself in the mouth.

A frequent claim is that he bit a cyanide capsule just before or almost at the same time as shooting himself in the temple: Ian Kershaw claims that it is impossible to shoot right after biting such a poison and that Hitler’s body did not give off the bitter almond smell characteristic of prussic acid and found on that of Eva Braun. Nevertheless, bluish deposits on Hitler’s dental prosthesis, presumably related to a chemical reaction between cyanide and prosthesis, may suggest that the dictator actually bit into a capsule. Many other theories circulate, sometimes involving a third party who fired the bullet, but they are considered fanciful.

In order not to see his corpse taken as a trophy by the enemy (Mussolini was shot on April 28, 1945, by the Italian partisans and his body hanged by his feet in front of the crowd in Milan), Hitler gave the order to cremate it. This was immediately done by his driver Erich Kempka and his aide-de-camp Otto Günsche, who burned the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in a bomb crater near the bunker. The rain of Soviet shells ploughing Berlin almost certainly destroyed the bulk of both bodies.

Refusing to outlive his master despite his orders and considering that there is no life imaginable in a world without National Socialism, Goebbels commits suicide the next day with his wife Magda, after the latter poisoned their six children.

That same May 1 at 10:26 p.m., the radio, on the orders of Karl Dönitz, broadcasts the following communiqué: “The Führer’s HQ announces that this afternoon our Führer Adolf Hitler has fallen to his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting until his last breath against Bolshevism.” On May 2, after signing the capitulation of Berlin, General Weidling restored the truth to the microphone and accused Adolf Hitler of having abandoned soldiers and civilians “in plan” (im Stich). In the ruined cities or on the roads, the mass of Germans initially concerned with survival will remain rather indifferent to the end of Hitler.

On May 4, the 2nd DB of General Leclerc symbolically seized the Berghof, the residence of the Führer in Berchtesgaden. On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally. At the same time, the opening of the concentration camps definitively revealed the extent of Hitler’s death work. “Hitler’s war was over. The moral trauma, which was Hitler’s work, was just beginning” — Ian Kershaw.

Discovery of Hitler’s body and rumors of a leak

Many rumors circulated about the possibility that Hitler survived the end of the war. The FBI conducted investigations in this direction until 1956 on more or less serious leads. But as soon as Berlin fell, the Soviet secret service unit tasked with finding Hitler, SMERSH, believed it had recovered a large part of the body.

On May 2, 1945, warned of Hitler’s suicide, SMERSH sealed off the garden of the Chancellery and the Führerbunker. The remaining personnel was arrested and interrogated, Stalin being briefed by an NKVD general by means of a direct coded line.

On 5 May, Ivan Churakov of the 79th Infantry Corps, to which SMERSH was attached, discovered Hitler’s body near that of Eva Braun, in a shell crater in the garden of the Chancellery. In accordance with the Führer’s wishes, their remains have been burned and are unrecognizable. On May 11, the concordant testimonies of Hitler’s assistant dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his technician, confirm the identity of the body. Hitler’s upper teeth feature a  recent bridge. At first, Stalin imposed silence on the discovery, even going so far as to reprimand Zhukov for failing to find Hitler, while Pravda described the rumors of the discovery as a “fascist provocation”.

The Soviets launched other rumors, claiming in particular that Hitler was hiding in Bavaria, an area under the control of the American army, implicitly accusing the latter of complicity with the Nazis. In June 1946, the last witnesses of the Führerbunker, detained by the NKVD, were brought to the scene of the suicide. In the garden of the chancellery, they indicate the place where they burned and buried the bodies of the Hitler couple.

The location corresponds to the exhumation carried out by SMERSH a year earlier. Further excavations were undertaken and four skull fragments were uncovered. The largest is pierced by a bullet. The autopsy carried out at the end of 1945 on the male body discovered in the same place is partly confirmed: the doctors note the absence of a piece of the skull, the one that should have allowed to conclude that Hitler committed suicide by firearm.

Adolf Hitler’s remains were buried in complete secrecy, along with those of Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their six children, General Hans Krebs and Hitler’s two dogs, in a grave near Rathenow in Brandenburg.

In 1970, the KGB had to return its premises in Brandenburg to the East German government. Fearing that the existence of Hitler’s tomb would be revealed and that the site would then become a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, KGB chief Yuri Andropov gave permission for the destruction of the dictator’s remains and nine other remains.  On 4 April 1970, a KGB team cremated the ten bodies and secretly scattered the ashes in the Elbe, in the immediate vicinity of Rathenow. But Hitler’s skull and teeth, preserved in the Moscow archives, escaped cremation. We learn about it only after the dissolution of the USSR (1991). On April 26, 2000, the upper part of the skull attributed to the dictator became one of the curiosities of the exhibition organized by the Federal Service of Russian Archives, marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of the end of the war.

In 2009, at the request of the History television channel, which made a documentary entitled Hitler’s Escape dealing with the hypothesis of the dictator’s escape, the American Nick Bellantoni discovered that the skull attributed to Hitler was actually that of a young woman. DNA tests carried out in the United States on the samples brought back by the archaeologist confirm his claims. According to Nick Bellantoni, the skull would not be that of Eva Braun either. The testimonies claim that she committed suicide with cyanide and not with a firearm. This twist of theater revived theories claiming that Hitler was able to survive the fall of the Reich.

The historian Antony Beevor regrets these polemics, which he considers sensationalist, recalling that the dentition, with its characteristic bridge, was formally recognized in May 1945 by Käthe Heusermann, assistant to Hitler’s dentist, and his technician Fritz Echtmann, arrested by the Russians. But Hitler’s dental archives having been destroyed on the orders of Martin Bormann in 1944, so before the Russian investigations, Heusermann’s testimony is based only on his memory, as pointed out by the British journalist Gerrard Williams, who recalls that there is then no forensic expertise attesting that it is indeed Hitler’s teeth.

These theses of the Führer’s flight remain not very credible, clashing with the (sometimes contradictory) testimonies of the last hours, which conclude that the Nazi dictator has died. In 2009, Rochus Misch, Hitler’s former bodyguard, who was with Günther Schwägermann, one of the last two survivors of the bunker, claimed to have seen the lifeless bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.

In 2018, a study by French researchers (including Philippe Charlier) on one of the fragments of the skull held in Moscow confirmed that these fragments belonged to Hitler, and that he died in 1945.

Reactions of the Germans to the announcement of his suicide

By the autumn of 1944, Hitler had lost the confidence of a majority of Germans. The proclamations of loyalty to his person met with little echo or were strongly criticized, as evidenced by the reactions of the population of Stuttgart, reported by the SD, to an article by Goebbels published in the newspaper Das Reich at the end of December 1944: Hitler’s genius was then questioned by the population and he was deemed responsible for the conflict. However, the discredit surrounding Hitler was not unanimous: refugees, many in Germany and Berlin, said that Hitler was eager to bring them home, and young people sincerely complained about Hitler, perceived as having wished the best for the Reich. But even in the Berchtesgaden district, near the Berghof, Hitler was considered a misfortune for the Reich from February 1945.

In this context, the announcement of the Führer’s suicide on May 1, 1945, did not provoke great reactions in the Reich, whose cities were razed to the ground by bombing, and which was plagued by deadly fighting that did not slow down the invaders. For the majority of the population, busy trying to survive, as for the soldiers engaged in a final fight that they know is lost in advance, Hitler’s suicide leads only to indifference and apathy; nevertheless, the fate of the Germans in May 1945 led some to express their rejection of the character. Among the soldiers, some, a minority, pay him a quick tribute, while the others remain indifferent to the news.

Among the leaders of the Reich, civilian or military, feelings are divided: in his agenda of May 3, Schörner, commander of Army Group Centre, deployed in Bohemia and fanatical Nazi, describes Hitler as a martyr of the fight against Bolshevism, while Georg-Hans Reinhardt, former commander of the same army group, seemed to expect this outcome for a few weeks. His successor as president, Karl Dönitz, is carefully awaiting confirmation of the dictator’s death before starting surrender negotiations. But  Dönitz was not the only Nazi leader whose death opened up prospects: Himmler, stripped of his powers by Hitler in a fit of rage at the end of April, imagined himself in favor of the new power, but was quickly dismissed by Dönitz.

Hitler’s suicide, presented to the population as a heroic end, preferable to surrender, led to a wave of suicides in the Reich both among the regime’s leaders and among ordinary citizens: in particular, eight Gauleiters, seven supreme chiefs of the police and SS, seventy-eight generals and admirals committed suicide at the beginning of May. The most spectacular suicide is that of Magda and Joseph Goebbels, for whom life no longer has any meaning, and who do not hesitate to drag their six children into death.

Cult of personality

A cleverly organized staging

From 1921, the staging of the NSDAP left a certain place for the Führer, the guide of the party and the people. Organized around the idea that the Führer was the great leader called upon to carry out the realization of the German destiny, the NSDAP quickly became Hitler’s party. Indeed, at the meetings, everything revolves around Hitler, who is expected, then arouses not only enthusiasm, but also hysteria of crowds heated white by long waits for the savior. As soon as the election of 5 March 1933 ended, the Ministry of Propaganda was entrusted to Joseph Goebbels, who had been in charge of propaganda within the Nazi Party since 1929.

From the first days, the Ministry of Propaganda structured its action around the construction of the myth of the Führer, making Hitler the strong man to raise Germany. Thus, suggesting that all of Hitler’s actions were guided by the will to do whatever was good for his people, Goebbels develops the idea that the counterpart of this action is absolute obedience to the Führer and his proxies. From July 1933, the person of the Führer became omnipresent in the state apparatus, in schools, in everyday life: compulsory in the party since 1926, the Hitler salute was imposed on civil servants and teachers in July 1933.

From 1933, however, the task of organizations claiming to be Hitler’s became less obvious: initially organized with a view to conquering power, the party must henceforth “serve the Führer” and be totally submissive to him.

One of the concerns of Hitler, who arrived at the chancellery at the head of a political movement claiming a form of socialism, was to present himself, and to be represented as coming from the working class: as he himself hammered in 1933 during a speech at the Siemens factory, as recalled in a propaganda pamphlet published in 1935,  Hitler, the People’s Chancellor, the worker in the service of the Reich was a “construction worker, artist and student”.

Formally, he approached the German people: he addressed a crowd who had come to listen to him using the familiar plural form of the Ihr, he affected personal poverty and modesty: he had neither a bank account nor shares, he sat to the right of his driver, his duties as chancellor forced him to evolve in grandiose frameworks,  like the new Reich Chancellery, he apologized when he received the workers of the construction crews of the building, while specifying that he lived modestly in private.

War propaganda

From the outbreak of the world war in 1939, Hitler was a subject of choice for propaganda. Presented as the conqueror successor of Bismarck or the Teutonic Knights by Goebbels’ propaganda, he was the subject of multiple attacks by Allied propaganda, from the Phoney War by the French and the British, then by all his opponents throughout the conflict.

German propaganda

The propaganda, animated by Goebbels, must take into account the desire for rarity of Hitler’s appearances over the course of the conflict. Indeed, if the Anschluss, the Sudetenland were the occasion of the appearances of Hitler in Germany, this propaganda must, from 1941, deal with Hitler’s reluctance to show himself in public and his entrenchment within his staff and his circle of intimates. The dictator uses various vectors to express himself to all or part of the population: newspapers, proclamations, agendas, radio. During the conflict, he wrote little in the press, rather used by Goebbels, addressed the Germans through the radio and his soldiers through the agendas.

Throughout the conflict, however, Hitler continued to address the German population on the occasion of the milestone anniversaries of National Socialism: January 30, the anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor, November 9, the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, and on certain occasions, either usual, such as December 31, or on the occasion of important events,  as after the Allied landing near Naples on September 9, 1943, or July 20, 1944.

However, propaganda gradually exploited the figure of the Führer outside Germany. Thus, in France, the first mention of Hitler’s name dates from 1941.

Moreover, from 1942, the period of the first recruitment difficulties within the Wehrmacht, the figure of Hitler, a defender of Europe threatened by the Bolsheviks and the Jews, began to be put forward.

From 1944 onwards, Goebbels’ propaganda had to confront the German population’s mistrust of Hitler. Indeed, the editorials of the Minister of Propaganda in the newspaper Das Reich, as well as the Führer’s New Year’s speech arouse more and more skepticism among the population: the reactions of the population of Stuttgart to Goebbels’ article of December 31, 1944, known from a report of the SS intelligence service, are more than bad.  the report highlighting the feeling that Hitler was, in the eyes of the population, one of the main culprits of the conflict.

Allied propaganda

From the declaration of war, the Allies developed different approaches to propaganda against the Führer, the main leader of the Third Reich. Allied propaganda ridiculed Hitler a lot, caricaturing his usual poses, portraying him as a manipulative figure. In 1944, he was also presented as a monster.

Thus Pierre Dac ridiculed Hitler abundantly, at first in the Marrow Bone, mocking in particular the celebrations of the Führer’s birthday in an exchange of telegrams with Mussolini, then in London from October 1943, for free France, for example by highlighting Hitler’s disastrous military choices in a small practical culinary recipe,  The Intuitive Soufflé, in the manner of Father Adolf, taken from Berchtesgaden’s Strategic Kitchen Manual, in songs featuring well-known rhymes in France before the war. Hungary’s about-face and the Rastenburg bombing also provided the chansonnier with the opportunity to ridicule Hitler’s supporters: increasingly doubtful leaders of satellite states, rebuked by Hitler who still believed in final victory.

After the end of the war (after Hitler’s suicide), when, as a war reporter, Pierre Dac went to Germany and Austria occupied by the Allies in May and July 1945, he ridiculed the propensity of some Germans, members of Eva Braun’s family for example, not to dwell on the links they had maintained with Hitler.

Historical and artistic conceptions

Hitler is interested in ancient civilizations that left ruins in abundance: in his eyes, ancient monumental art forms guarantee their designers a kind of eternity. Thus, architecture was probably Hitler’s greatest passion. If he wanted to be an artist, he had no sensitivity to the artistic currents that were contemporary to him. In Vienna as in Munich, active centers of modern art, he was not interested in the avant-gardes, reserving his admiration for the neo-classical monuments of the nineteenth century.

Complex relationship with history

Hitler quickly became interested in history. Having attended school in the 1890s and 1900s, he drew from it a heroic vision, inspired by the learning of the life and gesture of “great men” and a strong interest in antiquity. During his Viennese years, according to those who knew him, he became passionate about antiquity, reading dozens of books on the subject, as well as translations of Greek and Roman authors. Chancellor, he defined on March 23, 1933, in a speech to the Reichstag (which only developed conceptions set out in Mein Kampf) the main orientations of what should be the history programs in the schools of the Reich, quickly translated by Frick into circulars of application: History must offer students a Pantheon of Great Men and their actions.

Conception of History

In Hitler’s eyes, the history of humanity, beyond events, is above all the history of the struggle of races. Several presuppositions preside over the reasoning that leads to this conclusion: first, there are human races, a widely accepted belief at the beginning of the twentieth century, then these races have constantly fought for the control of a territory and for their survival, finally, in this struggle, the most insidious weapon that can use one race against another is the mixing of blood. Thus, in Hitler’s eyes, racial purity constituted the best bulwark against the influence of Asia, that is to say, of the Asian peoples, an influence which he considered harmful, and of which Judeo-Bolshevism constituted the last avatar and, in his eyes, the most dangerous.

For Hitler, a gigantomachy opposes the Indo-Germanic Aryan race to the Jew, to the Mediterranean in general, to the eternal East.

Universal History According to Hitler

According to Hitler, all civilization comes from the North, the cradle of origin of the Aryans. Thus, on many occasions, he develops the idea that the Greeks and Egyptians come from the North: indeed, he contests the thesis of the backwardness of the Germans and justifies their backwardness of development, compared to Athens and Rome, by the harshness of the Nordic climate; he thus locates  the Lebensraum of the  Germans of the Great Invasions, not to the east, but to the south. Leaning on Tacitus, he describes in pejorative terms the Germania of the origins.

Thus, Hitler tends to find the Germanomania of Himmler and the SS ridiculous and does not hesitate to let his guests know: he thus takes up the most humiliating prejudices against the Germans, magnified by Himmler. Indeed, Hitler appreciates Greek and Roman antiquity more than anything: in his eyes, it was the Romans who made Germany what it became: Arminius is certainly celebrated, but Hitler recalls his passage in the Roman legions, which makes him a cultural intermediary between Rome and Germania.

This fascination for the Roman Empire is as much fascination for power as a fascination for the material signs of this power: Rome thus not only conquered an empire, but also left many clues and traces of its imperial influence, traces allowed above all by the development of the state, authorized only by the presence of Aryans among those who set up and organize this state.

But Rome also provided a model for Hitler, that of military expansion, first by the organization of stewardship, as he recalled on April 25, 1942, before his guests, then by the constant concern of the Roman generals both for the choice of armaments and to know the state of mind of their troops, to be able,  like Caesar, to use it for the benefit of their enterprises; From Roman military history, Hitler mainly retained a philosophy of the use of force: when it proves necessary, its use must be total, to strike as effectively as possible the resistance capacities of the adversary.

Not content with finding a model in military expansion, Hitler also saw it as a model for managing the territories conquered by a Germanic fighting elite: in his eyes, it was because the Roman racial core was homogeneous that the Romans were able to conquer, first Lazio, then, allies, within the framework of a union maintained by force.  with racially neighboring peoples, Italy, and finally, the Mediterranean. Hitler also linked the durability of the Roman Empire, and its culture, to its roads, the former building the latter, the latter structuring the former. As early as the 1930s, an analogy was made by the builders of the Nazi highways between the Roman roads and the Reich highways, a prelude to the territorial rise of the thousand-year-old Reich.

Hitler defined the role of these roads, within the framework of the conquest and preservation of the Reich, within the framework of their military use. But Rome is also a model because the Roman Empire had, according to him, a universal vocation, unrealizable, that had not, even at the peak of the highest power, reached the Third Reich: model, the  Roman Empire, with a unifying vocation must have its counterpart, the conquering Reich, racially unified. This Roman imperial project, defined as impossible to realize, was in Hitler’s eyes a way of anchoring his own project in reality, giving it credibility.

But the Roman attraction also operates in the relations maintained by Hitler with contemporary Italy, fascists. Thus, compared to Mussolini, who professed at the beginning of the Third Reich a sovereign contempt for Hitler’s racism, Hitler developed an inferiority complex, when he compared the past of Roman Italy and that of ancient Germania: he, therefore, tried to favor the annexation of the Romans and Greeks to his conception of the Indo-Germanic race.  to glorify a supposed common kinship between Rome and Germany.

Art according to Hitler

From these historical conceptions flow very precisely defined artistic considerations.

Very marked tastes

As soon as he came to power, he dispersed the artistic and cultural avant-gardes, burned many works of the avant-gardes and forced thousands of artists into exile. Those who remain are often forbidden to paint or write, and are placed under police surveillance. In 1937, Hitler circulated an exhibition of “degenerate art” throughout Germany aimed at mocking what he called “Jewish and cosmopolitan doodles.” He encouraged a “Nazi art” in accordance with the aesthetic and ideological canons of power through the works of his favorite sculptor Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl in cinema, or Albert Speer, his only personal confidant, in architecture. Often part of monumental propaganda, such as the stadium for the Berlin Olympics (1936), these works in a very neo-classical style also often develop the exaltation of “healthy”, virile and “Aryan” bodies.

Architect’s dreams

One of Hitler’s obsessions was the complete transformation of Berlin. As soon as he came to power, he worked on urban plans with his architect Albert Speer. It was thus planned a series of great monumental works of excessive ambition, of neo-classical inspiration, with a view to realizing the “new Berlin” or Welthauptstadt Germania. The war thwarted these projects, and only the new chancellery, inaugurated in 1939, was completed. The dome of the new Reichstag Palace would have been 13 times larger than that of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the triumphal avenue twice as wide as the Champs-Élysées and the triumphal arch could have contained in its opening the Parisian triumphal arch (40 m high). Speer’s biographer, Joachim Fest, discerns through these megalomaniac projects an “architecture of death”.

Hitler demanded the use of the finest materials for the buildings he ordered, suggesting that his architects override the reservations of Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk. Wanting to bequeath buildings (and their ruins, on the model of Roman ruins) more than thinking them for contemporary use, Hitler, despite the reservations of his entourage, is enthusiastic about Speer’s theory on the value of ruins, a theory inspired by the sight of the ruins of a tram depot dynamited to make the Zeppelinfeld of Nuremberg.

This theory is taken up on many occasions by Hitler in his speeches at sessions of the party congress, or in the architectural instructions he gives for the design of the plans of the buildings whose realization he commissions: thus, from 1924, in Mein Kampf, without Speer’s architectural design being precisely theorized,  it evokes with bitterness the possible ruins of Berlin in the 1920s. The architecture promoted by Hitler was designed, not according to its daily use, but to its destruction, as he himself said during the laying of the foundation stone of the Krongresshalle in Nuremberg:

“If ever our movement were to remain silent, then this testimony would still speak after millennia. In the middle of a sacred wood of ancient oaks, men will admire with sacred terror this first giant of the buildings of the Third Reich.

Thus, on the model of the ruins of Rome, he wants the Reich he is building to leave behind material clues of its past greatness.

In the midst of the war, Hitler rejoiced that the ravages of Allied bombing facilitated his grandiose post-war projects for the radical reconstruction of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Linz.

On 9 February 1945, architect Hermann Giesler delivered a model of Linz to his bunker, showing the city’s reconstruction projects. This model is then the subject of a mandatory passage of all visitors to the Bunker, until its destruction, in April.

Hitler and music

When he came to power, he especially promoted the music of Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner, his favorites, in Nazi ceremonies. In 1943, on a visit to Linz, he liked to evoke before his interlocutors, Gauleiters and certain ministers, including Speer, his memories during his discovery of Wagner’s works at the city’s opera.

Historical legacy

A ruthless and dehumanized figure, totalitarian dictator, racist and eugenicist, Adolf Hitler was above all the main responsible for by far the largest, most destructive and most traumatic conflict that humanity has ever known, causing nearly forty million deaths in Europe, including twenty-six million Soviets. About eleven million people were directly murdered on his orders, because of the systematic criminal practices of his regime and armed forces, or in the application of his premeditated exterminating plans. Among them are three-quarters of the Jews of occupied Europe. “Never in history has such material and moral ruin been associated with the name of one man,” observes historian Ian Kershaw.

Hitler’s image was definitively associated with these crimes, in particular, when the death camps were discovered in April-May 1945, with their heaps of emaciated corpses, their skeletal and haggard survivors, their pseudo-medical experiments and their gas chambers lined with the infamous crematoriums. This macabre revelation has finished settling the previous debates between opponents and supporters of the character and his regime. The rediscovery of the Holocaust, since the 1970s, has refocused attention on the specificity of the Judeocide it inspired, while confirming the intrinsically criminal nature of its action and system.

Balance sheet

The human toll is unprecedented. In three years of occupation, Nazi terror killed nearly a quarter of Belarus’ inhabitants. Poland under Hitler lost nearly 20% of its total population (including 97% of its Jewish community, until then the largest in the world). The USSR, Greece and Yugoslavia lost between 10 and 15% of their citizens. In the West, Hitler’s terror and exploitation were less than trying but trying. Between 1940 and 1944, France governed by the Vichy regime was proportionally the most plundered country in Europe, 30,000 inhabitants were shot on the spot, tens of thousands deported to concentration camps, a quarter of the Jewish population exterminated, not to mention the 400,000 soldiers who fell in battle, nor the two million soldiers held captive indefinitely in the Reich or more than  600,000 French STO forced to work in German factories.

The Germans were not the last to have paid dearly for the excessive ambitions of their Führer, to whom they nevertheless generally continued to obey to the end. More than four million soldiers died on the frontlines, leaving even more widows and orphans, and condemning a generation to suffer the lasting imbalance of the sex ratio and the life of single-parent families. Thus, two-thirds of German males born in 1918 did not see the outcome of the war. Almost all major and medium-sized German cities are in ruins, and 500,000 civilians have been killed by the bombs. Hundreds of thousands of German women of all ages were exposed to rape by the Red Army in 1945.

Germany itself, which Hitler had claimed to be the reason for his political struggle and existence, disappeared as a state at the end of the Nazi adventure. It only regained its independence in 1949 (without full sovereignty at first) and its unity only in 1990. Berlin, one of the cities that had voted the least for Hitler and that the Führer had never liked, will nevertheless suffer a division of 40 years, materialized after 1961 by the famous Berlin Wall.

In retaliation for the massive abuses of the Third Reich, more than 8 million Germans who had been present for centuries were expelled in 1945 from the Sudetenland, the Balkans and all of Central and Eastern Europe. Not to mention the deportation to Siberia, in 1941, of the Volga Germans seen by Stalin as a potential fifth column of Hitler. The current territory of Germany is less than a quarter of that of the Reich of 1914.

Hitler’s trauma also led to Germany’s definitive elimination as a military power, its armed forces remaining strictly limited, and banned from operations outside its borders until at least the 1990s. On the diplomatic level, the post-war division closed the doors of the UN to the GDR and the FRG (“economic giant and political dwarf”) until 1973. On the other hand, on the economic level, his faithful Albert Speer was able to renew the machines and bury the factories: Germany’s industrial potential is largely intact after the war, which made it possible to wonder if Hitler was not the unspeakable father of the post-war German economic miracle.

Hitler’s looting, bombing, retaliation and scorched earth immediately aggravated the unprecedented material toll of the war. Thousands of towns, towns and villages were destroyed by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS throughout Europe. Minsk was destroyed by Hitler at 80%, Warsaw at 90%. The USSR has at least 25 million homeless people and Germany 20 million. 30 million refugees and  “displaced persons” roamed the roads of Europe in May 1945, mostly in Germany.

The fight against “Bolshevism”, which Hitler had made a foundation of his mission and one of his most promising propaganda themes, ended in a total fiasco. It was by repelling Hitler’s aggression that the Red Army pushed all the way to Berlin and that the USSR was able to impose its domination on half of Europe for more than 40 years. Having become the main victor over his former ally Hitler, Stalin also derives from his victory over the latter immense prestige among his population and throughout the world.

In the occupied countries, by engaging in collaboration with Hitler, usually without obtaining any counterpart from the Führer, many European officials caused their countries serious civil divisions and compromises that will come back to haunt national memories for a long time. Traumatic hard fighting pitted Hitler’s enemies and allies against each other in occupied France, in war-torn Italy or, on a much worse scale, in the Ustasha-ruled Independent State of Croatia. In Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia, the resistance fighters to the master of the Third Reich could not even get along among themselves and fought violently: the Greek civil war of 1944-1949,  for example, is also a legacy of Hitler.

Despoiled and exterminated, the Jews of Europe saw the most brilliant and prosperous centers of their culture disappear forever, with the eradication without return of the strong communities of Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Vilnius or Warsaw. Three-quarters of Yiddish speakers perished. In Eastern Europe, the few survivors of the camps are often insulted or even murdered on their return, especially by those who have taken their property in their absence. It is not uncommon to hear Poles or Czechoslovaks complain aloud that “Hitler has not finished the job”.

Memory and moral trauma

The main absentee from the Nuremberg trials, and despite Göring’s slogan “Not a word against Hitler”, the Führer saw most of his subordinates posthumously blame him for their criminal acts. Most claimed to have merely obeyed his orders, and to have ignored most of the reality of his regime of terror and genocide.

Post-war denazification did not prevent many of Hitler’s accomplices from never being disturbed, or from making prosperous political, economic or administrative careers, in the FRG as in the GDR. Others have taken refuge, via exfiltration channels, in Latin America or the Arab world, continuing to maintain the nostalgic cult of the Führer, and often continuing to spread anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, while reusing the police methods of the Third Reich for the benefit of local dictatorships. Others were employed by the American secret services, such as Klaus Barbie. Virtually no former Nazi official ever repented or expressed the slightest regret for following and serving Hitler.

The only notable partial exception is that of Albert Speer, the dictator’s former confidant and minister, but his guilt complex, exposed in his memoirs of the Third Reich, is mixed with a lingering fascination with Hitler, which testifies that the character’s charisma still had effect well beyond his death and the discovery of his crimes.

Hitler broke the continuity of German history. He questioned even the permanence and the very meaning of civilization. One of the most cultured and developed peoples in the world has indeed proved capable of producing a Hitler, and of following him to the end without much resistance, including in undertakings of barbarism at this unique hour in history.

Since then, German and European consciousness has not ceased to question the responsibilities of the German past in the advent of Hitler, that of the guilt of the Germans who lived under the Führer (Schuldfrage), but also the moral responsibility that falls as a legacy to the generations who did not know him. In the words of Tony Judt, “asking each new generation of Germans to live forever in Hitler’s shadow, demanding that they take responsibility for the memory of Germany’s unique guilt and making it the yardstick of their national identity was the least we could demand… But it was expecting too much.”

In 1952, 25% of Germans surveyed admitted to having a good opinion of Hitler and 37% thought it would be good to have no Jews left on their territory. After, in 1955, 48% still believed that Hitler, without the war, would remain one of the greatest statesmen their country had ever known. In 1967, 32% still supported this view, especially among the elderly. Even from the 1980s, the resurgence of ultra-minority but very violent neo-Nazi phenomena could also have caused concern. These groups are recognizable among other things by their practice of the Nazi salute or when they loudly celebrate the anniversary of the birth and death of the Führer.

The renewal of generations, the weakening from the 1960s of public and private taboos preventing talk of a traumatic and compromising Hitlerzeit (or Hitlerdiktatur), the rediscovery of the singularity of the genocide of the Jews from the 1970s, the fight against negationism, have subsequently made it possible to eradicate much of the latent sympathies or nostalgia for Hitler and his regime in Germany and Austria.

Hitler also periodically came back to haunt the collective memories of other countries. Especially from the 1960s and 1970s, we rediscover everywhere that one of the greatest criminals in history has benefited even at home from essential support, relays, informers – or simply indifference, passivity and complacency more or less heavy with human and moral consequences. France did not recognize until 1995 the responsibility of the Petainist state in the deportations of Jews. Even neutral states such as Switzerland or the Vatican have seen the ambiguities of their attitude towards Nazi Germany bitterly questioned.

Even in the West, the war against Hitler was never conceived as a war to save the Jews. The racist and exterminating specificity of his action had rarely been perceived by contemporaries. In the post-war period, public authorities and public opinion were more concerned with celebrating the resistance fighters and soldiers who had fought the dictator (perceived primarily as the foreign aggressor and oppressor of the nation) than his victims, who were often silenced. It was only after the Eichmann trial in 1961 and with the rediscovery of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the 1970s that the Western world understood the genocide of the Jews as Führer’s main crime.

Paradoxically, the author of Mein Kampf was undoubtedly the unwitting gravedigger of the old European anti-Semitism: widely spread before the war as one opinion among others, anti-Semitism has, after him, definitively become a taboo devoid of any right of citizenship in the West, as well as a crime punishable by law.

Throughout the West, a vast educational effort through schools, the media, literary and cultural productions, the testimonies of survivors, has made it possible to familiarize the general public with the extent of the misdeeds of the Third Reich. Thus, the name of Hitler spontaneously and durably evokes among the masses the very idea of the absolute criminal. In 1989, to mark the centenary of his birth, a Monument Against War and Fascism was erected in front of his birthplace.

Anti-Semitism

According to Hitler, the Jews are a race of “parasites” or “vermin” from which Germany and the world must be ridden. Faced with this fantastic and protean enemy, the “universal poisoner of all peoples”, the incarnation of absolute evil and a mortal threat to the German people, Hitler, Führer with an unshakeable will, sees himself, and is seen by his compatriots as the most effective of the ramparts, practically until the end of the war.

Foundations

This conviction developed during his youth, spent in the very strongly anti-Semitic Vienna of the first decade of the twentieth century, marked by the rise of the Christian social movement around Karl Lueger and the pan-Germanist movement, grouped in Austria around Georg Schönerer. He blames the Jews for the events of November 9, 1918, and thus for the defeat and the German revolution, as well as for what he sees as the cultural, physical and social decadence of the so-called Aryan civilization.

During this period, the proliferation of pamphlets and other nationalist texts provided a valuable sounding board for the idea that Jews were responsible for the events of 1917 in Russia and 1918-1919 in Germany, in a context of civil war and revolutionary unrest brutally repressed by the alliance of circumstance of certain social democrats and the extreme right: all this propaganda insists on the strong presence of Jews among the revolutionary cadres; these sheets, also emphasizing the systematic practice of executions, instilled the idea that revolutionaries were either manipulated by Jews or aspired to entrench Jewish domination, based on terror, in Europe.

This domination would materialize in unlimited exploitation of humanity for the benefit of the Jews, for whom work would be a punishment: incapable of work, the Jew could only exploit the work of others.

At the root of anti-Semitism is the idea that race is everything, that it is useless to want to fight against the deep nature of the people, of the race to which one belongs: for Hitler, the Jews are therefore taken in their totality, the blood defining the race and all the characters that flow from it.

Formation and evolution

During his Austrian period, Hitler developed, strongly influenced by the published writings he seemed to devour, especially in the Austrian capital, a virulent anti-Semitism that was reinforced by the announcement of the defeat of 1918. Indeed, this defeat reinforced not only the anti-Semitic tendencies of the German extreme right, but also  Hitler’s anti-Semitism, in the Bavarian context of the Republic of Councils: a significant part of the members of the Central Council being of Jewish origin, this revolutionary experience confirmed Hitler in his political choices and his virulent anti-Semitism, barely encouraged by the frequent reading of the far-right leaflets that circulate among the troops barracked in Munich.

In the autumn of 1919, still a member of the army’s propaganda section, he joined a small group, the DAP, which was indistinguishable from the other far-right political parties that abounded in Bavaria: anti-Semitic and pan-Germanist, this party developed a program focused on the annulment of the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles; initiated into economics by Gottfried Feder, its anti-Semitism is then very strongly tinged with anti-capitalism.

However, the frequentation of Baltic Germans, Alfred Rosenberg in particular and the Bavarian Dietrich Eckart oriented this anti-Semitism on other paths: first, he kept the idea of the Jewish character of Russian Bolshevism, of the international Jewish conspiracy, very strongly influenced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the second, the fight against the soulless Jews, opposed to the realization of true socialism in Germany, made possible by a genuine German revolution, which would lead to the departure of the Jews from Germany.

Under the influence of Rosenberg, he accentuated his reflection on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: for Hitler, capitalism and Bolshevism would be the two facets of the desire of the Jews to impose on the world an ideology that only Germany could oppose by taking the lead in a merciless racial struggle. This struggle is in reality, according to Hitler, the fight between idealism, defended by Germany, and materialism, the means that the Jews have found to defend their domination.

Embodied by Bolshevik Russia, this materialist conception of existence, which must be fought with the greatest firmness, was at the basis of the reorientation of Germany’s foreign policy objectives regenerated by National Socialism: until 1922, the main demands were to annul all the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, from 1922.  Hitler, spurred on by his then evolving anti-Semitism, wanted a reorientation of German foreign policy, henceforth directed towards the constitution of a continental empire constituted at the expense of Bolshevik Russia.

Thus, the conquest of vast lands at the expense of the Slavs is the goal resulting from the synthesis between anti-Semitism and Hitler’s anti-Marxism. At the basis of this reorientation of expansionist objectives is a double influence: first, the influence of Baltic Germans, around Rosenberg, who is beginning to play a significant role in the formation of the ideological corpus of Nazism, and second, a reflection on the German colonial experience and the consequences of its existence on the Reich’s relations with Great Britain.

This reorientation led to reformulations of Hitler’s anti-Semitism: the Jew, archetype of the negation of Germanness, became the Judeo-Bolshevik, incarnation of the Jew, racial archetype of the corrupting parasite and dissolving pure races, “vampire” thriving on rubble and misery, as in Bolshevik Russia. To face this threat, a merciless race war must be waged against the Jew (and his allies) by the Germans, previously strengthened and regenerated by a systematic search for the purity of the race.

Dietrich Eckart, who died at Christmas 1923 in the Bavarian Alps, also played a key role in the development of Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideas. In his book, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Hitler and Me (in reality, a  text written by Eckart alone, but which develops ideas close to those of Hitler at the time), he develops the idea of an association between the revolution in Russia, on the one hand, and a phantasmagorical Jewish project of world domination that has its roots in the oldest history:  the Jew is thus perceived as an incarnation of evil, in search of total domination of the world, a prelude to its destruction.

Faced with this deadly project, it is necessary not only to reveal its mysteries, but also to oppose it with the utmost energy. Total victory for the German people is then the only way of redemption for the peoples who wish to break their chains, this total victory supposing the disappearance of the Jew of Europe. This eschatological outcome of the struggle presupposes an extraordinary adversary, an absolute negation of humanity, which the Aryan race must face not only for the domination of the world, but also for the preservation of civilization: “there will be no more men on the surface of the earth”, he confides to Eckart.

The formulation of this objective is to be compared with Hitler’s descriptions of the Jews in Mein Kampf: a teeming and threatening sub-humanity, which, like bacilli and microbes, creeps everywhere, causing, in the peoples, it infects, the unconsciousness of its presence, which makes it even more threatening. In all these cases, Hitler develops multiple adaptations, in the context of the rise of microbial research, of the wandering, ghostly, corpse, corrupting and above all eternal Jew.

Events

Throughout his political career, Hitler multiplied his anti-Semitic positions, whether in front of his relatives, in his public speeches, before his foreign guests, or before members of the German state apparatus.

Anti-Semitic tendencies

The defeat of 1918 reinforced the anti-Semitic tendencies of many army officers, and following them, many non-commissioned officers and soldiers. An officer in charge of propaganda, he was, in the summer of 1919, in charge of the re-education of German prisoners repatriated to Bavaria. On this occasion, he sent a letter to one of his superiors, at the latter’s request, on the “Jewish problem”: in this reply, the oldest testimony of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, he equated the Jew with a race, which it was necessary to fight. This fight involves the withdrawal of civil rights and the banishment of the Reich. Moreover, in anti-capitalist rhetoric, he makes Jews greedy, attracted by “shining gold.”

Thus, in 1919, for Hitler, the Jews were responsible both for the defeat (he also developed the idea that it would have been necessary to exterminate 15,000 Jews judiciously chosen to win the war), for the revolution (even if this report is surprisingly silent on the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy”: it was indeed at this time that he began to bring Marxism and the Jewish project of world domination closer together) and for the conditions in which the Reich went through the conflict.  (He also demanded the death penalty by hanging for Jewish war profiteers.)

Soon after, these themes were taken up by Hitler, the DAP’s chief speaker, at meetings held in the breweries of Munich, which the press began to report on in view of the hysteria they unleashed. During this period, under the influence of Gottfried Feder,  he also developed the idea of a specifically German socialism, in which the Jew played the role of absolute foil: indeed, as a speculator by essence, the Jew used finance capital to achieve world domination, as opposed to the Germans, who relied on industrial capital, which created wealth.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism

If Hitler’s thought had long been both anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic – although the latter trait was more marked than the former – at the beginning of 1920 the two currents of thought gradually merged in him under the influence of Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Alfred Rosenberg, “in the catalytic image of Bolshevik Russia”. From mid-1922, a more radical anti-Marxism appeared in his speeches, claiming that the goal of the NSDAP was the “extirpation” and “annihilation” of the  Marxist worldview, even making, in its 1923 positions, Marxism “the only and mortal enemy”  of the Nazi Party. It appears that this shift is probably opportunistic, anti-Marxism being more electorally promising than anti-Judaism, notably to seduce Bavaria.

Thus, Mein Kampf is, beyond its virulent anti-Semitism, an equally anti-Marxist work in which Hitler describes Marxism as a “Jewish doctrine” and a  “global scourge” for the eradication of which he calls, despite the fact that, as Ian Kershaw points out, if Hitler claims to have read Marx in Vienna in 1913 and in his prison in Landsberg,  “there is no indication that he ever attacked the theoretical writings of Marxism”;  “His reading had only a purely instrumental end . . . He found what he was looking for.” Nevertheless, when journalists pointed out to him that his discourse had shifted towards a stronger anti-Marxism, Hitler explained that he had hitherto been too lenient on this subject. But he adds that the writing of Mein Kampf made him realize how  the “Jewish question”  was, beyond the German people, a “world scourge.”

Political life of the Reich

From his membership of the DAP, Hitler formulated the themes he exploited until the end of his life. Thus, in a speech delivered in August 1920, he took up the themes dear to biology, to develop a biological approach to the resolution of the Jewish question: the Jew, microbe vector and responsible for racial tuberculosis, must be fought among the people; Immunization against these germs will be done through the exile or relegation of these germ carriers to concentration camps.

After his release, Hitler multiplied anti-Semitic attacks, despite his caution that characterized his positions on issues relating to international politics during this period; indeed, during the period 1925-1932, he designates to the condemnation of his audience the Jews as responsible for all the evils that strike Germany, this designation always being made according to extremely elaborate oratorical procedures, even unprecedented.

In parallel with the highlighting of this obsession, Hitler knew not to put this subject forward when necessary: throughout the period 1925-1933, he alternated cold calculation and poorly contained fury, mixed with ideological fanaticism when it came to anti-Semitism. On 28 February 1926, before the members of a nationalist and conservative circle in Hamburg, or in his 1932 speech to industrialists meeting in Düsseldorf, the Jewish question was barely mentioned, with rare exceptions, in a speech on 25 June 1931, particularly in the period between the elections of September 1930 and on January 30, 1933, especially in the presence of representatives of the foreign press, which then believed him to be assagiated.

But this absence (or quasi-absence) alternated with moments of rare violence: during the summer of 1932, for example, while talks for the formation of a Schleicher-Hitler government were well underway, the assassination by the SA of a communist militant from Upper Silesia not only called these talks into question, but the verdict sentencing the guilty to death triggered in Hitler an unmeasured anti-Semitic rage.  reported by his relatives.

Hitler’s rise to power

From 1933 onwards, the NSDAP was able to implement, at least on this point, part of its program; The utopia explained during the previous period can then be gradually implemented. However, at all stages of the implementation of this program, between 1933 and 1945, Hitler remained publicly in the background, hardly interfering during their practical implementation, content himself with issuing threats for propaganda purposes throughout the period of exercise of power.

When, in power, he had the means to carry out the “prophecies” that he had multiplied over the 1920s, Hitler found himself in a way hostage to them, because the party was waiting for them to be fulfilled; some thurifers, grouped in particular around Himmler, then proposed to realize the utopia during the lifetime of his prophet,  while even the latter envisaged the realization of his project over several generations.

However, in the period 1933-1936, Hitler remained relatively measured on the Jewish question: he was indeed sensitive to the arguments developed by some of his ministers.  Schacht, for example, in a memorandum of 3 May 1935, emphasizes the consequences for exports of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1935, orchestrated by Streicher and Goebbels. But this measure is compensated both by his tendency not to question certain public expressions of anti-Semitism and by the use, by the party cadres, of the famous will of the Führer; in September 1935, at Hitler’s request, the Reichstag promulgated a new legal framework for the Jews of the Reich, transforming them into subjects of the Reich, laws that it assumed before international opinion by invoking the Bolshevik peril.

Thus, not wishing to return to state anti-Semitism, Hitler, supported by Hess, mitigated its scope, by legalizing a status for Jews, limiting the impact of the disorderly rampages of NSDAP militants, for example, during the many exchanges about anti-Semitic placards in the streets during the 1936 Olympic Games. : after many exchanges, Hitler decides in favor of a moderate line: the disappearance of the most extreme signs and their replacement by formulas such as: “Jews are undesirable here”.

But these measures of moderation are counterbalanced by the use, by a certain number of Nazi officials, of the famous will of the Führer, which is in reality based on the main political lines laid down by Hitler during more or less formal interviews with his relatives and members of the NSDAP: these, within the framework of the National Socialist polycracy are in reality in constant competition and are obliged,  if they want to keep their post, to constantly anticipate Hitler’s wishes, hence a constant one-upmanship, including in anti-Semitic demonstrations, which Hitler, without endorsing them at first, validates a posteriori, by a law or a decree.

Aware of the need for an agreement with the conservatives with whom the Nazis shared power, Hitler was obliged to give alternately pledges in all areas to conservatives on the one hand and to party members on the other. The decapitation of the SA having given pledges to the army, the laws of 1935 are in reality also pledges given to the rank and file of the party: promulgated by the Reichstag during its 1935 session in Nuremberg (at the same time as the party congress), these laws fix the relations that can henceforth exist between the Jews of the Reich,  Reduced to the rank of subjects, and German citizens.

Thus a legal framework is defined for the Jews of the Reich (which has the consequence of directing the Nazi anti-Semitic enthusiasm towards a specific goal), by Hitler’s choice of one of the versions of the bill drafted by Nazi officials of the Ministry of the Interior, modifying in pencil the quality of the persons falling under this law:  while the drafters had left out the Jews of mixed couples, Hitler, while the extremists were pushing for an extension of the law, included the Mischlinge, from mixed marriages, among those who fell under the scheme; by this choice, he presented everyone with a fait accompli, cutting short any criticism and technical objection on the part of the drafters of the text.

Hardening of anti-Semitic policy

The year 1936 marked a turning point in the internal evolution of the Nazi regime, with the rise of Göring and Himmler to key positions in the German state apparatus. It was also from this moment that the anti-Semitic policy pursued in the Reich shifted towards more harshness and violence. Hitler, from 1936, radicalized his public positions on the question of the Jews.

Linked to Bolshevism, the Jews constituted the supreme threat to the German people, as Hitler made clear at the party congresses of 1936 and 1937: the Jew was not only the enemy of the German people but also of humanity as a whole, which it was necessary to annihilate or risk being annihilated in his place. Taking up the themes of the beginnings of Nazism, Hitler thus participated in the spread in the Reich of a new anti-Semitic climate, more brutal than during the previous period.

Despite the truce of the Olympic Games, Hitler, on February 12, 1936, at the funeral of Wilhelm Gustloff, representative of the NSDAP in Switzerland, assassinated by a Jewish student, gives the trend of the following attacks, calling for the total suppression of the “Jewish plague”, then, during the preparation of the congress of 1936, leaves the reins on the spot to Goebbels and Rosenberg in order to allow them to multiply anti-Semitic attacks in the Reich.

Hitler’s interventions in 1937, and not only at the party congress, reinforced this tendency. At the NSDAP congress, his speech took up the themes of the 1923 dialogue with Eckart: the Jewish author of revolution, must be fought in the context of a conflict for the defense of civilization. Thus, he indicates the true scope of the fight that is being prepared, namely the defense of civilization, while recalling that the Bolshevik party is composed of 80% Jews, which allows him to illustrate the theme of Judeo-Bolshevism.

But he also had to deal with the party’s base, which was more vindictive than he was, and which pushed for extremist measures, particularly with regard to the marking of shops owned by Jews: for fear of being overwhelmed, he not only allowed German merchants to mark their shops, but also calmed his troops by reaffirming his desire to annihilate the Jews of Europe.

In the spring of 1938, Hitler himself gave further impetus to anti-Jewish legislation by ordering his Reich Chancellery office to investigate mixed couples and ascendants of state officials, as the Civil Service Law was increasingly severely enforced during this period.

Kristallnacht did not provide Hitler with the opportunity to return to the fate of the Jews, having left the initiative of the operations to Goebbels, who, for the occasion, supplanted Himmler in this affair, with the blessing of the Führer. Hitler merely ran the case behind the scenes, without mentioning it at any time, even in front of party members he trusted. But the criticisms made by Himmler and Göring about Goebbels’ organization of the pogrom pushed Hitler to have a more rational approach to the Jewish question in the Reich: after a few months of prevarication, between prohibitions, ghettos and insignia, Hitler finally decided in favor of additional prohibitions in the summer of 1939, and under the influence of Göring.  in favour not only of the confiscation of property, but also of compensation for the Mischlinge, because of possible reactions among the population.

After Kristallnacht, Hitler evoked many times before foreign representatives, Polish, South African, Czech Republic, the fate he would like to see reserved for the Jews: exile in an extra-European colony (Madagascar was once envisaged) and elimination, which he evokes in ambiguous terms; but Hitler, informed by a memorandum of the Ministry of War of January 25, 1939,  Based on the belief that the United States is a state “manipulated by world Jewry,” seems to be redirecting its diatribes against capitalism, another vector of world domination. This reorientation was also noticeable throughout the National Socialist press, such as the Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper.

In his annual address to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler set out to the deputies his vision of the dangers facing the German people; for him, the “world Jewish enemy”, defeated in the Reich, would constitute a threat from abroad: it was indeed from the neighboring countries of the Reich that “International Jewry” was preparing its revenge against the German people, in the form of a war of extermination.

This threat would take the form of a conspiracy, the Jewish plot, which only the Reich and fascist Italy would have been able to uncover and denounce. During this speech, he insisted, “becoming a prophet”, on the retaliatory measures that the Reich would have to take against “Jewry” in the event of conflict, inevitably provoked by the policy pursued by the great powers, which he considered lackeys of the Jews when they opposed the Reich and its pretensions. On two other occasions, in two speeches read on February 15, 1942, and February 24, 1943, to the NSDAP cadres, Hitler repeated the themes he had developed in his speech of January 30, 1939.

Despite some reservations, based in particular on the idea that the existence of Jews was a problem of global proportions, Hitler showed interest in plans to emigrate Jews out of Europe; he therefore regularly inquired about the negotiations within the Evian Commission, convened for the preparation of this emigration: only 200,000 Jews, the oldest, would be allowed to remain in the Reich, while the rest of the Jewish population of the Reich would be resettled in a colony of a European state.

Antisemitism during the conflict

During the world conflict, Hitler confided his hatred of Jews to all his visitors, heads of state, prime ministers or ministers, plenipotentiaries, collaborators, military or civilian officials close or not, state or party officials, foreigners and Germans: all these confidences do not deal with Jews, but with the Jew, a sprawling and powerful enemy, a “foreign body” in Europe.  against which a “fight to the death” is engaged.

Throughout the Phoney War period, between September 1939 and May 1940, and beyond, until the end of 1940, Hitler was little public about his anti-Semitism, hoping for an arrangement with the Allies, even though the events of September 1939 provided Hitler with the opportunity to return to the question of the Jews in his four proclamations of September 3, 1939.  to the German people, the armed forces and the National Socialist Party.

The invasion of Poland and the British declaration of war in September 1939 provided Hitler with an opportunity to denounce the “Judeo-democratic” enemy who had so well manipulated the British engaged in a contiguous war against the Reich. In the same vein, his New Year’s address to the nation on January 1,  1940, recalls his vision of the conflict that has just started: a link exists between the conflict and a Jewish plan to exterminate the Germans, which explains, in his eyes, the systematic rejection by the Allies of his offers of negotiations.

The defeat of France reactive in Hitler, as in his relatives, the hypothetical evacuation of the Jews of Europe to Madagascar, which he shared with many leaders of countries allied with the Reich. But in the summer of 1940, in the face of British resistance, this project was abandoned.

From the autumn of 1940, the preparation for the war in the East occupied Hitler’s thoughts: he wished to resume the struggle against Judeo-Bolshevism, put aside for a time, a struggle to put an end to the “role of Jewry in Europe”. Following the outbreak of the invasion, in front of his relatives, general officers, Hitler mentions the action of Robert Koch, in his research against tuberculosis, to compare himself to him: indeed, he declares before this audience to have discovered the bacillus of racial tuberculosis, then, putting himself aside, gives instructions to Goebbels, who came to Rastenburg on July 8, 1941,  to lead an exacerbated campaign against Judeo-Bolshevism, responsible for the fate of Russia, according to him reduced to its last entrenchments (this ideological line will not vary again until the end of the conflict).

Following the defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler instructed the Ministry of Propaganda to put forward more than ever reinforced anti-Semitic propaganda, supported by a very strong substrate, which, according to Goebbels, it was a question of heating up to white throughout occupied Europe. In his interviews with Goebbels in the spring of 1943, he also developed the idea that the Jewish people had, not a plan, but a goal, world domination, which they were content to carry out instinctively; Hitler would therefore be the gravedigger of this plan, and, according to his listener, would therefore realize, for the benefit of the Germanic people, the objective pursued by the Jews.

From 1944, until the last bombings of the war, the Jews were, in Hitler’s eyes, in a confidence to Walter Hewel on January 19, 1944, the instigators of the bombings that hit Germany, its allies and the regions it occupied; this responsibility of the Jews constitutes in the last year of the conflict, an argument often used before its visitors.

In his rare public interventions in 1945, Hitler showed consistency, and while seeing fronts and alliances crumble one after another, continued to expose in aggressive and threatening rhetoric an anti-Semitism long free from all constraints: thus, the New Year’s radio address, the speeches of January 30 and February 24,  commemorating the seizure of power in 1933 and the proclamation of the party program respectively provide an opportunity to further address the role of the Jews in the fate of the Reich.

Taking refuge in February 1945  in the underground bunker of the chancellery in Berlin, he continued to issue letters and opinions on the Jewish question: on April 12, when he learned of the death of Roosevelt, scarecrow of the Jews in America, according to a word from 1941, he saw this event as a turning point in the conflict.  analysis that he shared with the soldiers of the Eastern Front, in his agenda (the last) of April 16, 1945.

Similarly, on April 21, 1945, in a telegram thanking Mussolini’s birthday wishes, he denounced the Jews as the true heart of the coalition that was about to prevail over a bloodless Wehrmacht. In his wills (private and political) dictated to his secretaries on April 29, 1945, the day before his death, while he became aware that everything, alliances, army, loyalties, collapsed around him, he continued to blame the Jews for all the misfortunes that had befallen the German people since 1914: the capitulation of 1918, the war and the debacle,  which he attends in his bunker, directly threatened by the Red Army; he also instilled the idea that in 1939 he had proposed an agreement with the Allies, refused by the Jews around French and British officials.

Racial Doctrines and crimes against humanity

Among the authors who most influenced Hitler in particular and the Nazi regime in general in terms of racial doctrines was the American Madison Grant, whose ideas had a great influence on his racial policy, and then the German Hans Günther. Their works were included by Hitler in the list of works recommended to the Nazis.

Hitler had presented his racial and anti-Semitic theses in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written in 1924, during his incarceration in the fortress of Landsberg, after his failed putsch in Munich. If its success was modest at first, it was printed in more than ten million copies and translated into sixteen languages until 1945; it is the reference of the Nazi orthodoxy of the Third Reich.

There is nothing in his known biography to suggest that the individual Hitler never killed or tortured anyone with his hands. He never visited a single one of his concentration camps, nor witnessed any of the bombings or mass shootings ordered by him or his subordinates. But every executioner, first and foremost his faithful Himmler, knew that by putting into practice the logical consequences of Nazi doctrine, he was loyally fulfilling the Führer’s directives.

Racist theories of Hitler

In this book, Hitler exposes his racist theories, involving inequality and hierarchy of races, and his particular dislike of Slavs, Gypsies, and especially Jews. Presented as inferior races, they are referred to as Untermenschen (“subhumans”).

According to Hitler, the Jews are a race of “parasites” or “vermin” from which Germany must be ridden. He blames them for the events of November 9, 1918, and thus for the German defeat and revolution, as well as for what he sees as the cultural, physical and social decadence of the so-called Aryan civilization.  Mein Kampf recycles the Jewish conspiracy theory already developed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler fed his anti-Semitism and racial theories by referring to ideologies in vogue in his time.

In Vienna, during his youth, the Jews, well integrated into the elite, were often accused of the decomposition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The hatred of Jews was exacerbated by the defeat in World War I. As for his ideas on human races, Hitler derived them essentially from Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“Genesis of the Nineteenth Century”,  1899) by the German-speaking British Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose theses themselves took up those of the racialist’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853). French Gobineau. Hitler was also inspired by the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer as advocated by the  “German Monist League” founded by Ernst Haeckel.

Hitler also took up in Mein Kampf the old pan-Germanist doctrines aimed at regrouping the dispersed German populations in a single state, but he added, notably under the influence of the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, the demand for a “living space” (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe. According to these doctrines, German territories were to be expanded indefinitely, especially in Central Europe and Ukraine, territories already coveted by the German ruling strata at the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The German territories of the time were, still according to this doctrine, considered too narrow in view of the material needs of their populations and in an uncomfortable strategic position between hostile powers to the west and east. Finally, Hitler targeted two fundamental adversaries: the Communists and France, considered degenerating because it was led by Jews and creating a multi-ethnic colonial empire, and against whom Germany had to take revenge for the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.

Adolf Hitler is obsessed with the idea of purity of a so-called Aryan race, the “superior race” of which the Germans are supposed to be the worthy representatives, in the same way as the other Nordic peoples (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish). In order to scientifically establish this notion of the Aryan race, pseudo-anthropological research is undertaken and university courses are given. For this purpose, Himmler established a scientific institute, the Ahnenerbe. In reality, the Aryans were a group of nomadic peoples living in Central Asia in the third millennium BC and without any links with the Germans. The fact remains that the notion of “Aryan” becomes with Hitler a set of phantasmagorical values that Nazi scientists tried to justify with so-called objective data.

The “Aryan race” is assimilated to the aesthetic canons of Germanic man: tall, blond and athletic, as represented by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.

Euthanasia

Nazi racial doctrines also involved “improving German blood.” Massive sterilizations, applied with the help of doctors, were thus undertaken in 1934, involving nearly 400,000 “asocial” and hereditary patients. In addition, 5,000 children with Down syndrome, hydrocephalus or motor disabilities have disappeared.

With the war, a vast program of euthanasia of the mentally ill was launched under the code name “Aktion T4“, under the direct responsibility of the Reich Chancellery and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. In September 1939, Hitler ensured total impunity for doctors selecting those sent to their deaths, thus freeing up places in hospitals for the war-wounded. As with Jews, victims are gassed in fake shower rooms. Despite the secrecy surrounding these operations, euthanasia was publicly condemned by the Bishop of Münster in August 1941. It officially ceased, but actually continued in the concentration camps. About 200,000 schizophrenics, epileptics, seniles, paralytics were executed. In addition, Nazi forces systematically shot mentally handicapped people found in hospitals in Poland and the invaded Soviet Union. Many euthanasia specialists were then reassigned to the mass gassing of Jews: Aktion T4 will therefore have both prepared and chronologically preceded the Final Solution.

Persecution of Jews

In Nazi Germany, Jews were excluded from the community of the German people (Volksgemeinschaft). On April 1,  1933, Jewish doctors, lawyers and merchants were the subject of a vast boycott campaign, implemented in particular by the SA. These militias created by Hitler had already perpetrated, as early as the early 1920s, acts of violence against Jews. On April 7, two months after Hitler came to power, the law “for the re-establishment of a professional civil service” excluded Jews from all government employment (except veterans and those who had been in service for more than ten years).

On September 15, 1935, Hitler, formalizing and radicalizing state anti-Semitism, proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, including the laws “for the protection of German blood and honor” and “on the citizenship of the Reich.” These forbade Jews access to public service jobs and university positions, enlistment in the army, or the practice of liberal professions. They can no longer have a driver’s license. Jews are stripped of their German citizenship. Mixed marriages or sexual relations between Jews and Germans are also prohibited. The goal is complete segregation between the German people and the Jews, which also applies to schools, housing and public transport. In 1937, an “Aryanization law” aimed to dispossess Jews of the businesses they owned.

Heavily hit by these discriminatory measures, German Jews emigrated in droves: about 400,000 departures in 1933-1939, including Austrians (out of about 660,000), to the Americas, Palestine or Western Europe. In general, these emigrants were not well received, and sometimes interned as nationals of an enemy country, or turned back by various countries in Europe and America.

On the night of November 9 to 10, 1938, Joseph Goebbels organized, with the Chancellor’s approval, a vast pogrom: Kristallnacht, using as a pretext the assassination of a Reich diplomat in Paris by a German Jew. Goebbels seems to be using this event to regain Adolf Hitler’s favor, which he partially lost when his affair with an actress nearly led his couple to a public divorce. During that night, hundreds of Jewish shops were ransacked and most of Germany’s synagogues burned. The death toll was 91 and nearly 30,000 Jews were interned in concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen). Following these events, the Jewish community, held responsible for the violence, was ordered to pay a fine of one billion marks: the property of the Jews was massively plundered.

The German population, enlisted by the propaganda of Hitler, Goebbels or Streicher, was convinced of the existence of a “Jewish question”. This conditioning favors the participation of many of them in the extermination of the Jews.

Holocaust

On April 2, 1945, in his bunker, Hitler dictated in his political testament: “… one will be eternally grateful to National Socialism for the fact that I have eliminated the Jews of Germany and Central Europe.” The allusion to the physical extermination of the Jews in Mein Kampf is still the subject of debate among historians.

For some of them, this project has not been explicitly described in this book, while other part believes that the anti-Semitism expressed in it is not only alarming, but is based on significant Ausrottung terminology. The project of total extermination of the Jews may have germinated in the minds of Hitler and his minions early on, but it does not seem that he established a precise plan or methodology for taking action before the war. There is no indication that the Nazi leadership initially planned that the first anti-Semitic measures were to lead to a homicidal and a fortiori genocidal conclusion.

However, in the words of U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials, “the determination to destroy the Jews was a force that at every moment cemented the elements of the (Nazi) conspiracy.” In fact, Adolf Hitler’s statements on the Jews show that, from the beginning, he nurtured the project of physical destruction of the Jews and that the war was an opportunity for him to announce this destruction, then to comment on its implementation.

On November 12, 1938, after Kristallnacht, Göring convened a major conference at the Air Ministry with the aim of standardizing anti-Jewish measures. A Foreign Ministry official noted Göring’s summary: “If, in the near future, the German Reich finds itself engaged in a conflict with foreign powers, it goes without saying that we in Germany will think in the first place of settling accounts with the Jews.”

Hitler similarly radicalized his anti-Semitic rhetoric. On January 30, 1939, in a resounding speech in the Reichstag, Hitler “prophesied” that in the event of war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” To this decisive “prophecy” he or Goebbels will make many allusions in private during the war: its fulfillment once the war has begun will be one of the priority concerns.

Hitler, however, did not need to invest much personally in the destruction of the Jews, delegated to Himmler, who contented himself with making regular reports to him. While various secret Nazi documents planning the extermination often allude to the “Führer’s order,” no handwritten notes from him on the “Final Solution” have ever been found and probably never existed. This is a sign that his absolute power has allowed him to unleash one of the greatest crimes in history without even the need for a written order.

The Nazi leaders had long considered, among other “solutions” such as the creation of relegation zones, the expulsion of the entire German Jewish community without exterminating it, but no concrete phase of realization was initiated. In particular, projects for the settlement of Jews in Africa (Plan Madagascar) were envisaged. The outbreak of war radicalized anti-Semitic persecution within the Third Reich. The prolongation of the war against the United Kingdom no longer makes it possible to envisage these deportations, just as the idea of a displacement of European Jews to Siberia – which would have already been enough in itself to cause a hecatomb in their midst – is abandoned.

The occupation of Poland in September 1939 brought more than 3,000,000 Jews under German control. They were quickly herded into ghettos in the main Polish cities, where they were robbed and starved, and reduced to unimaginable misery. The attack on the Soviet Union, starting on June 22, 1941, placed the conquest of Lebensraum on the same level as the eradication of “Judeo-Bolshevism”. SS units, the Einsatzgruppen, often assisted by Wehrmacht and police units, sometimes aided by local residents and collaborators, summarily shot one and a half to nearly two million Jews, including women, babies, children and the elderly, on the Eastern Front.

On September 18, 1941, a secret circular from Himmler announced that the Führer had decided to deport all Jews from occupied Europe to the East, and that forced emigration was no longer on the agenda. This is the first step towards genocide on the scale of the entire continent. At the end of 1941, the first “gas vans” were used in the east, while the extermination centers of Chelmno and Belzec were already built and began their work of mass murder.

The exact date of Hitler’s decision has never been precisely defined since he never formally wrote an order, but he did elaborate it during the autumn of 1941. In September 1941 crucial personal conversations were held between Hitler and Himmler, Himmler and Ribbentrop, Ribbentrop and Hitler. They discussed the future of the Jews in Europe while considering the entry of the United States into the war. The immediate and premeditated radicalization of Nazi violence with the invasion of the Soviet Union, the slowdown and subsequent failure of operations in the USSR, the soon-to-be-realized prospect of entry into the war against the United States, undoubtedly precipitated Hitler’s decision to fulfill his “prophecy” of 1939.

On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, 15 leaders of the Third Reich, under the chairmanship of RSHA leader Reinhard Heydrich, endorse the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ (Endlösung der Judenfrage). The total extermination of the Jews in Europe will assume a bureaucratic, industrial and systematic character that will make it unparalleled at this time in human history. Hitler was not there in person, but the measures taken respected his general objectives. In the summer of 1942, Himmler declared: “The occupied sectors become judenfrei. The chief put this very heavy order on my shoulders.”

At the top of the state, immediately after Hitler, it was Himmler, Heydrich and Göring who took the most important part in the administrative implementation of the Final Solution. On the ground, the extermination of the Jews was often the result of local initiatives, sometimes going ahead of the expectations and decisions of the Führer.

They were notably the work of SS officers and fanatical Gauleiters eager to please the Führer at all costs by liquidating as soon as possible the undesirable elements in their fiefdoms. The Gauleiters Albert Forster in Danzig, Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau or Erich Koch in Ukraine competed particularly in cruelty and brutality, the first two competing among themselves to be each the first to keep their verbal promise to Hitler to fully Germanize their territory within ten years. Two of Hitler’s close associates, Hans Frank, Governor General  of Poland, and Alfred Rosenberg, Minister of the Eastern Territories, also took an active part in the “destruction of the Jews of Europe.”

Many “ordinary Germans” were hardly less compromised than the SS in the massacres on the Eastern Front. More than one reserve policeman, more than one young soldier or one officer had integrated the Nazi discourse, not to mention Hitler’s generals. Thousands gave vent to their violence and sadism as soon as they were allowed and encouraged to humiliate and kill in the name of the Führer. Throughout Europe, countless “office criminals,” such as bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, carried out the designs of their Führer or collaborating governments without any particular qualms.

In the extermination centers, as recalled in the memoirs of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Jews, it was unthinkable for anyone, from the simple SS guard to the camp chief, to disobey the order of the Führer (Führersbefehl), or to question for a moment the correctness of his orders.  A fortiori, it was out of the question to have any moral scruples. None of Hitler’s “willing executioners” (Daniel Goldhagen) were ever forced to participate in the Final Solution: a soldier or SS man whose nerves were cracking was persuaded to continue, or he easily obtained his transfer.

No one within his system discouraged Adolf Hitler from proceeding with the “Final Solution.” In 1943, the wife of his former minister Konstantin von Neurath, shocked by what she had seen of the Jewish camp of Westerbork in occupied Holland, exceptionally dared to open up to the Führer: the latter rebuked her that Germany had lost enough soldiers to make him have to worry about the lives of the Jews, and banished her in future from the circle of his guests.

On the whole, the Allied leaders and opinions, or part of the European Resistance, did not realize the specific gravity of the fate of the Jews, and instead kept silent about their fate, as did Pope Pius XII, which probably indirectly helped Hitler. Just as the non-resistance of a large part of the starving, disoriented and ignorant Jews of the fate he reserved for them, facilitated the realization of his criminal project. In April-May 1943, on the other hand, the Warsaw ghetto uprising plunged Hitler into prolonged anger, but his furious and repeated orders did not prevent a handful of Jewish fighters from thwarting the SS reconquest for several weeks.

After the summer of 1941, Himmler retained the process of mass execution by the gas chambers tested at Auschwitz. In total, nearly 1,700,000 Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, were gassed in Sobibór, Treblinka, Bełżec, Chełmno and Majdanek. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp alone, 1,000,000 Jews perished.

Three-quarters of the Jews of occupied Europe — 5 to 6 million human beings, including 1.5 million children, all of whom had committed only the crime of being born Jewish and posed no threat or imaginary — thus perished in an enterprise of unprecedented nature. Of the 189,000 Jews who lived in Vienna before Hitler, a thousand survived in 1945, as did only a handful of the Jews who remained in Germany in 1940. The Netherlands lost 80 percent of its Jews, Poland and the Baltic countries more than 95 percent. In just two or three years, the extermination has made entire families disappear. In a large part of Europe, it is in fact a whole culture, a whole universe that Adolf Hitler had assassinated without return.

Extermination of the Gypsies

Hitler did not say a word about the Gypsies in Mein Kampf and in any case, he does not harbor the hateful obsession he shows for the Jews. Nevertheless, his regime persecuted and internalized the 34,000 Gypsies of the  Reich from the 1930s, and deprived them of their German citizenship, but less on racial grounds (the Gypsies came from the same regions as the supposed cradle of the  “Aryan” race) than as “antisocials”. This did not prevent the Nazis from also attacking those who were perfectly integrated into German society, in which many were sedentary workers, or veterans of 14-18, holders of decorations. The “Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy Peril” was the instrument of this repression. The Sinti tribe, although supposed not to have  “bastardized”, was not spared, as were the half-bloods partly born of non-Gypsies “Aryan”.

The extermination of about a third of European Gypsies, whom they call Porajmos,  was less systematic and general than the genocide of the Jews. Nevertheless, it has caused the almost complete disappearance of some communities.

No Gypsies were deported from France, where there were thousands available in the internment camps of the Vichy regime. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the Nazis waited until 1944 to deport several hundred gypsies to Auschwitz — which was enough to decimate their community without return. Terror and deportations were stronger in the East, where many were shot on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht or their local collaborators (the Croatian Ustashi were responsible for liquidating 99% of the country’s 28,700 Gypsies).

But if he gave on December 16, 1942, the general order for the deportation of European Gypsies to Auschwitz, Himmler lost interest almost immediately, and Hitler does not seem to have paid any particular attention to the question. In the special section reserved for them at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gypsy families were not separated, nor exposed to regular selections for the gas chamber nor subjected to forced labor, some were even released in exchange for their forced sterilization. But the SS doctor at their camp, Josef Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death,” performed pseudo-medical experiments on a number of Gypsy children, including twins.

After hesitating for a long time, then having several thousand able-bodied men set apart for concentration camp forced labor, Himmler finally ordered the camp commander, Rudolf Höss, to exterminate what remained of the “family camp”. From 1 to 3 August 1944, thousands of Gypsies, men, women, children and old men, were taken to the gas chamber in dramatic scenes.

The estimate of the number of Gypsies who were victims of the Nazis remains the subject of controversy. For German and Austrian Gypsies, the figure of people sent to concentration camps, deported to the East and gassed, fluctuates between 15,000 and 20,000 out of a population of 29,000 Gypsies in 1942; as for the number of European Gypsies murdered by the Nazis, it has been successively estimated at 219 000 victims in relation to a total population of 1 000 000, 196 000 deaths out of 831 000 people, or even half a million victims, the latter estimate not being supported by a source or a breakdown by country. The acknowledgment of their tragedy was belated, and in the immediate future, it did little to change the prejudices and public practices prevailing against them.

 Slavic “subhumans”

The extension of the German Lebensraum was inevitably to be carried out at the expense of the Slavic populations pushed eastwards. For Hitler, Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine should be treated as colonies. In this regard, Hitler is said to have said, according to Hermann Rauschning, in 1934: “Thus is imposed on us the duty to depopulate, as we have the duty to methodically cultivate the increase of the German population. You will ask me what “depopulation” means, and if I intend to suppress entire nations? Well, yes, that’s about it. Nature is cruel, so we have the right to be too.”

The non-Germanic populations were expelled from the territories annexed by the Third Reich after 1939, and directed to the General Government of Poland, an entity totally vassalized and placed by Hitler under the yoke of Hans Frank, the jurist of the Nazi party. As early as October 1939, the RSHA programmed the “physical liquidation of all Polish elements who had held any responsibility in Poland (or) who could lead a Polish resistance”.

This includes priests, teachers, doctors, officers, civil servants and important traders, large landowners, writers, journalists, and in general, anyone with higher education. SS commandos are in charge of this task. This extremely harsh treatment caused the death of nearly 2,200,000 Poles, including 50,000 members of the elites. As a result, 30% of Polish higher education professors perished, and thousands of clergymen, aristocrats and officers. Including the 3,000,000 Polish Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were exterminated, 15 to 20 percent of the Polish civilian population disappeared.

The Nazis also closed theatres, newspapers, seminaries, secondary, technical and higher education. From August 1 to October 2, 1944, with Hitler’s agreement, Himmler orchestrated the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, with the aim of the total destruction of the capital, the most active center of the Polish resistance. With the passive complicity of the Red Army who, stopped by the Germans at the gates of the city, did not parachute any aid to the insurgents, the Nazis destroyed the city to 90%, and emptied it of its last civilians after causing the death of about 200,000 people.

With the aggression of the USSR, Hitler premeditated a war of annihilation against the Soviet populations, experts assembled by Göring having predicted in particular that “our projects should result in the death of about 10 million people”. The aim is to plunder all the country’s resources, dismantle the entire economy, raze the cities, and reduce the populations to slavery and starvation (Hungerplan). The repression against the Slavs thus took an even more massive turn, although some populations, notably Baltic and Ukrainian nationalists, were initially willing to collaborate against the Stalinist regime.

The treatment of Soviet prisoners captured by the Germans was particularly inhumane: 3,700,000 of them out of 5,500,000 died of starvation, exhaustion or disease, sometimes after being tortured or tortured; thousands more were taken to concentration camps in the Reich to be shot in mass shootings. Political commissars were systematically shot in the name of the “decree of the commissars” (Kommissarbefehl) signed by Keitel even before the invasion. Millions of women and men, sometimes children and adolescents, were rounded up in dramatic manhunts to be transferred to the Reich as slave labor.

The actions of the partisans were the occasion for ruthless reprisals against the civilian population, both in the USSR and in Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia. About 11,500,000 Soviet civilians died during World War II.

In the autumn of 1944, after the failure of the first Soviet offensive in East Prussia, viewing images of small Prussian towns taken from the Soviets brought back by military police units, he went into a black fury and likened the soldiers of the Red Army, the Slavs and the Soviet populations, not to men but to animals.  thus, defining war as a conflict for the defense of European humanity, threatened by the Asian steppes; in this perspective, he ordered that these images be widely disseminated to incite hatred against the Slavs.

Hitler’s personal obsession with reducing these peoples to the status of subhuman deprived the Wehrmacht of many potential aids among the populations subjected to the Soviet yoke. It also had a direct deadly role, as when Hitler forbade storming the city of Leningrad, which he deliberately subjected to a deadly blockade responsible, in a thousand days of siege, for more than 700,000 civilian deaths. In his eyes, the city that had seen the birth of the revolution of 1917 had to be starved and then razed to the ground.

But it is difficult to speculate on the consequences of a “more moderate attitude, acceptable to the majority of the population, Russian or allogenous. The fact is that such a policy was ruled out because the Nazis would no longer have been Nazis, and World War II would not have taken place.” Similarly, Hitler endorsed pseudo-medical experiments aimed at developing a program of mass sterilization of Slavic women, perpetrated on thousands of human guinea pigs from Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. And the first victims of gassing at Zyklon B in Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners.

Persecution of homosexuals

Hitler seems to have been essentially pragmatic in this area: he tolerated homosexuality within the Nazi Party for a time, but knew how to use popular homophobia when he could take advantage of it, especially during the Night of the Long Knives and the elimination of Ernst Röhm, as well as during the Blomberg-Fritsch affair. He did not develop a specific doctrine in this regard, unlike Himmler.

Between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were deported to concentration camps between 1933 and 1945, out of about 50,000 prosecuted under paragraph 175 criminalizing sexual acts between two men (female homosexuality was not criminalized). Representing less than 1 percent of the camps’ troops, they are most often assigned to the hardest work commandos and, compared to other groups, experience particularly high mortality.

Religious views

Hitler was raised by a very religious Catholic mother and was fascinated in his childhood by religious ceremonies and the pomp of the Catholic Church. Although as a child he was baptized and confirmed at the age of fifteen, he stopped going to Mass after leaving home for good.

In 1914, when he joined a Bavarian regiment, he officially declared himself Gottgläubig, which can be translated as “deist without affiliation to a recognized church”. Later, developing his own vision of the world, he distanced himself even further from Christianity and became very hostile to it, holding it for a Hebrew religion whose precepts of charity and love of neighbor seemed to him contrary to the will to power and the warlike virtues he wished to instill in the German people.

Hitler perceived  Christianity as an unnatural and deadly religion: “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its extreme logic, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.” He hated his Jewish origin: “The hardest blow that ever struck humanity was the advent of Christianity. Bolshevism is an illegitimate child of Christianity. Both are inventions of the Jews. It was through Christianity that deliberate lying about religion was introduced into the world. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature when it claims to bring freedom to men, when in reality it wants to make them only slaves. In the ancient world, relations between men and gods were based on instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance.”

Moreover, Hitler did not share Himmler’s views on paganism. The head of the SS thus celebrated the cult of the Germans and vilified Charlemagne because of the persecutions committed against the Saxons, a people whose Christianization represented a real “original sin” in his eyes. Conversely, the Führer considers the Carolingian emperor as the “historical unifier” of the Western Roman Empire restored and cemented by medieval Christianity. Far from being in favor of the recreation of a Wotanic cult, Hitler congratulated himself on living in an era “free of all mysticism”.

In his own words: “It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the cult of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity took hold. Only those who are ready to die. At that time the ancient world was divided between philosophical systems and idol worship. But it is not desirable for the whole of humanity to be dumb down — and the only way to get rid of Christianity is to let it die little by little.” However, Hitler allowed Himmler and the SS to replace the Christian references of German society with references to a pre-Christian “Teutonic world,” supposedly the exemplary nucleus of a mythical racial Germanic identity.

His attacks on Christianity, notably those reported by Martin Bormann in his table remarks, were inspired more by materialism with scientific pretensions than by references to pagan mysticism. Hitler also stated in Table Talks: “But there is no question of National Socialism ever singing religion by establishing a form of worship. Its only ambition must be to scientifically construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a tribute to reason.”

Hitler admired Islam and regretted that the Germans had not become Muslims; He viewed Islam with sympathy, a religion he perceived as fanatical and warlike. Hitler said: “If Charles Martel had been defeated at Poitiers, the face of the world would have changed. Since the world was already doomed to Judaic influence (and its product, Christianity, is such a bland thing!) it would have been much better than triumphant Mohammedanism. This religion rewards heroism, it promises warriors the joys of the seventh heaven… Animated by such a spirit, the Germans would have conquered the world. It was Christianity that prevented them from doing so.” He also said: “I understand that one can be enthusiastic about the paradise of Muhammad, but the bland paradise of Christians!” .

Hitler also admired the Japanese religion devoted to the state: “We are unfortunate enough not to have the right religion. Why don’t we have the religion of the Japanese, for whom sacrificing oneself to one’s homeland is the supreme good? The Muslim religion would also be much more appropriate than this Christianity, with its softening tolerance.” He saw in this spiritual tradition  one of the causes of Japan’s  strength: “This [Japanese] philosophy, which is one of the main reasons for their success, could only be maintained as a principle of the people’s existence because they remained protected against the poison of Christianity.”

However, to spare German opinion, he never made an act of apostasy and continued to pay his church taxes, and he claimed to want to wait until the end of the war to settle their account with the Christian churches, which led him to restrain some anti-Christian and mystical ardor of the head of the SS. In his speeches, Hitler contented himself with vague references to an abstract god unattached to Christianity, effectively advocating a deistic position.

Despite harassment and surveillance, he has always had the ability to spare the German churches globally, avoiding an open conflict dangerous for the adhesion of the populations to his person. Neither he nor his followers were ever excommunicated, and Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), cautiously avoided mentioning Hitler’s name.

Personal life of Adolf Hitler and personality

Lifestyle

Hitler lived, especially during the war, as a recluse and time lag, leading in his various HQs a dreary, monotonous and essentially nocturnal life, which he imposed boredom on everyone around him.

Before hiding there after 1941, notably at the Wolfsschanze (at the  “Wolf’s Lair”) near Rastenburg in East Prussia after the launch of the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was still officially domiciled in Munich (he would sulk Berlin all his life) and even more, he liked to satisfy his romantic taste for the mountains at the Berghof. , his residence in the Bavarian Alps, in Obersalzberg, a district of Berchtesgaden (residence overlooked a few kilometers by the Eagle’s Nest where he rarely goes). Near the Berghof, some of his main courtiers and intimates also live.

According to some sources, Hitler did not drink or smoke (tobacco was strictly forbidden in his presence), ate vegetarian, at least since 1932 or the late 1930s. However, as was customary among Wehrmacht soldiers to increase their combat capabilities  – especially pilots – Hitler was probably a user of methamphetamine (then marketed in Germany under the name Pervitin). The book by German writer Norman Ohler Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich, published in September 2015 and dealing with the use of “drugs in the Third Reich”, provides information on, among other things, Hitler’s addiction and its repercussions on his state of health and psychopathology.

Sexuality

Hitler’s sentimental and especially sexual life, although indistinguishable and above all without known significance on his historical role, has been the subject of much speculation of all kinds since at least 1945, in a literature of varying quality to sources that are controversial to say the least. These speculations take multiple and sometimes contradictory forms: a hypothetical homosexuality dating back to the years of youth in Vienna or those of the First World War, a troubled and interested taste for rich mature women in the 1920s, incestuous relations with his young niece Geli Raubal, possible undinist practices, or coprophiles, a supposed impotence,  or even the number of his testicles.

The only sure fact is that, presenting himself to his people as mystically married to Germany, to justify and instrumentalize his celibacy, Hitler hid from the Germans the existence of Eva Braun until their common death, often neglecting her and forbidding her to appear in public or even to come to Berlin, and confining her as much as possible to Bavaria. For Ian Kershaw, by choosing women much younger than him (twenty-three years younger in the case of Eva Braun) and by keeping the distance (his future wife for a day was to call him only “mein Führer“), Hitler ensured that he could keep intact his narcissistic and selfish domination over them.

A charismatic egoist

Solitary and friendless, Hitler was incapable from his youth of any real sense of compassion or affection for anyone, reserving his few bouts of tenderness for his dog Blondi, a German shepherd. His unapologetic selfishness, his conviction of being infallible and his thirst for domination were reflected daily in the refusal of any criticism and in his endless monologues, eternally rehashing the same themes for hours, and exhausting his entourage until very late at night.

This did not prevent him from reigning over his entourage and the masses by his charisma and his undeniable power of seduction, and from inspiring blind devotions going as far as fanaticism. The famous terrible anger that he could sting, especially against his generals, was actually not very frequent, and occurred especially when the situation was out of his control.

Nor should the famous images of the orator Hitler shouting with frenzied gestures give a simplistic idea of his propaganda talents. In reality, before arriving at those famous climaxes that electrified the audience, Hitler knew how to vary the tones, build his progression and dose his flow, which only gradually accelerated.

A ‘lazy dictator’

Being essentially self-taught, his hasty education always left something to be desired. His libraries in Munich, Berlin, and Berchtesgaden contained more than sixteen thousand volumes, few of which were genuinely scientific or philosophical. He persecuted Freud (also decimating his family) and grossly distorted Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts in order to better fit his readings with his personal ideology. He did not know any foreign languages, his official interpreter Paul-Otto Schmidt being responsible for translating the outside press or accompanying him to all international meetings.

Employees were to offer him glasses all over the Reich Chancellery, so that Hitler would quickly have a pair available.

Quick to exalt and recruit the sport, he never did the slightest exercise of physical culture. Unable to force himself to regular and continuous work since his bohemian youth in Vienna, the “lazy dictator” (according to Martin Broszat) had no fixed working hours, often neglected to convene or preside over the council of ministers, was sometimes long impossible to find even by his secretaries, and most often only skimmed over files and reports. Unlike the very bureaucratic Stalin, Hitler hated paperwork, and wrote only one memoir, the one on the Four Year Plan (1936), which he had only two or three people read including Göring and the head of the army, Marshal von Blomberg. His instructions were often purely verbal or written in terms broad enough to give his subordinates enough leeway.

The Hitler health

His health continued to deteriorate in the last years of the war. Depressed and insomniac, aging, hunched over and trembling (probably suffering from Parkinson’s disease, whose symptoms, legs and especially left arm agitated with rapid tremors, appear in August 1941 according to Dr. Ellen Gibbels), stuffed with drugs by his doctor Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler was mostly absorbed in military operations and haunted in his sleep,  by his own admission, by the position of each of the units destroyed on the Eastern Front.

It was well before taking action that he evoked suicide in front of his loved ones as the easy solution that would put an end to his troubles in an instant. He was already ready to act after two political failures in 1923 and 1932. On April 22, 1945, when the Russians surrounded Berlin, he informed his entourage that he had decided to kill himself.

According to several researchers, he suffered from various diseases: irritable bowel syndrome, skin lesions, heart rhythm disorder, coronary sclerosis, syphilis, Parkinson’s disease and tinnitus, among others. In a 1943 report by Walter Charles Langer of  Harvard University for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he was described as a psychopath. In his book on Hitler, historian Robert G. L. Waite argues that he suffered from a borderline personality disorder.

Cinephilia

Passionate about cinema, he regularly watched movies (sometimes three in the same evening), forced his guests after an official dinner to watch a film and could even cancel meetings for this. He has seen Fritz Lang’s Siegfried at least two dozen times,  whom he had even considered appointing to head the German film industry, despite his Jewish origins. While these films were officially boycotted by Nazi Germany from 1935, he enjoyed watching American cartoons like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Mickey Mouse.

Cultures and media

Psychological analysis

Founder of a totalitarian, doctrinaire racist and anti-Semitic state, responsible for the European part of the Second World War that caused between forty and sixty million deaths, and inspiration for the genocide of the Jews and crimes against humanity unprecedented or equivalent to this day in human history, the character of Hitler crystallized such animosity that he became in the eyes of Westerners the archetypal figure of the criminal,  if not the very figure of “absolute evil”. Interpretations of his behavior therefore necessarily have a considerable stake, and it is therefore necessary to consider them with a great deal of hindsight.

The psychoanalyst Walter Charles Langer was appointed by the OSS in 1943 to analyze the Hitler case, his report was published. The psychiatrist Douglas Kelley,  known for his analyses of the personalities tried at the Nuremberg trials,  also studied Hitler’s personality by putting the latter’s gastric disorders, probably of psychological origin, as one of the keys to explaining his “anxiety neurosis” and his delusional hypochondria (1943). Psychologist Alice Miller analyzes the links between his “repressive” upbringing and the rest of his biography and offers the explanation that Hitler’s violent behavior would have its origin in his childhood traumas.

His mother had married a man 23 years older than her, whom she called  “Uncle Alois”; her three children died within a few years around Adolf’s birth, causing him to be overprotected. He was reportedly regularly beaten and ridiculed by his father; After an attempt to run away, he was almost beaten to death. Adolf hated his father throughout his life and it was reported that he had nightmares about him at the end of his life. All these explanations are controversial because they do not succeed any more than those of philosophers (Hannah Arendt in particular) to account for what could have constituted such a personality.

When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Hitler had his father’s village, Döllersheim, and several surrounding villages transformed into training grounds for the Wehrmacht, leading to the evacuation of the population. As part of the army exercises, the houses in the village were later destroyed. The village was home to the tomb of his paternal grandmother. The reasons that led Hitler to this choice are not historically established.

In film

The figure of Adolf Hitler was brought to the screen both by himself in German feature films created under Nazism, then by many actors first in anti-Nazi propaganda films and then after the war, in historical and memorial films, even comedies or science fiction works.

Decorations

Military decorations

• Iron Cross (1st and 2nd class)
• Badge of the Wounded (Germany) (black)

References (sources)

Tests on skull fragment cast doubt on Adolf Hitler suicide story, The Guardian, 2009; Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens and the Olympics Myth of 1936, History News Network; Article Adolf Hitler, Wikipedia; « Une goûteuse de Hitler se confie à la presse britannique », Le Monde, 2013; Hugo-Pierre Gausserand, « Un historien allemand révèle que Hitler était fou de cinéma », Le figaro, 2015.