Read this as part of CBR15Bingo: Europe. Adolf Hitler’s entire life story takes place in Europe and he, more than any one person, instigated a world war that began in Europe. Many times, Europe is considered a fancy, civilized place and I think we need to own how historically, western Europe has given the world a horrifying amount of barbarism between colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Holocaust.
While far from an expert on Nazi Germany, I perhaps know more about it than the typical wikipedia diver or podcast listener. My senior seminar was on Church and the Holocaust and I was able to stomach works such as Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I don’t blame anyone for not spending much time with either; they make for brutal reading, delivering blow-after-blow to the human spirit.
But aside from the basics, I really don’t know much about Adolf Hitler.
I’m not looking to get into a deep discussion on worldviews; we all have our own and this is a book review, not a philosophy class. But I’m a big believer that it’s tough to separate a person from their context. At the end of the day, we all make our own decisions and must be accountable for them. But Adolf Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism or despotism or even fascism. So what exactly did he experience that made him the man he became?
I don’t have time or energy to read a plethora of books on Adolf Hitler so I did some research and almost all of it came back to Ian Kershaw’s two-parter. And yeah, while I don’t have anything to compare it to, this gave me what I needed.
Kershaw goes into the specifics of what made the man from his young days in Austria under the abusive thumb of his father to his vagabond days in Vienna, which seemed to birth in him a deep sense of insecurity and gave him his first real glimpses of antisemitism and how political power is used. From there, we go to the first war, to the Munich beer halls and the long road to power in Berlin, culminating with Germany being re-armored and the Nazis taking over every facet of Deutschland’s government.
Along the way, Kershaw sheds as much historical light as possible on the incidents and teachings that made Hitler what he was. And as his power grew, what the Nazis were under him. It’s a dense book but it’s eminently readable.
Like Shirer’s famous work, I was aggravated once more at reading all of the off ramps that were passed along the way to power: the conservative fear of communism that allowed Hitler to get off the hook for his failed putsch, the inability of the Left to coalesce under a united party that could keep the Nazis out of power, the unwillingness of folks to take the beer hall demagogue seriously, the lack of adults in the room to tell him no (especially once Hindenburg died). The man was terrible but you can’t ignore the unlikely set of postwar circumstances, baked in nationalism, and fervent antisemitism that made him possible.
It would be easy to call Hitler a monster, an animal, another dismissive term. But the man was all too human, which is perhaps what we are afraid to admit. His appeals to the reptile brain worked; he didn’t singlehandedly start the largest war in human history. Learning about Hitler’s life and motivations reminded me of the many times other ruffians in history were given second chances, made excuses for, and generally treated more as a nuisance than a serious political entity. And yet, as the damning quotes of Hitler’s enemies were flung at Hindenburg and Papen the day they agreed to make him Chancellor, the generations do indeed curse the name but only after millions died before them.