Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

PREFACE

    I had never thought, until a few years ago, that I would write a biography of Hitler. For one thing, a number of biographies of the Dictator which I rated highly already existed. I had read as a student, with endless fascination, Alan Bullock’s early masterpiece. And on its appearance in 1973 I immediately devoured Joachim Fest’s new biography, admiring as all did its stylistic brilliance. It was only with initial reluctance, and due sense of modesty in the light of the achievements of Bullock and Fest, that I allowed myself in 1989 to be persuaded to undertake the present work.
    Another reason for hesitation was that biography had never figured in my intellectual plans as something I might want to write. If anything, I was somewhat critically disposed towards the genre. From the early part of my scholarly career onwards, first as a medievalist, I had been much more drawn to social history than to a focus on high politics, let alone a focus on any individual. These tendencies were enhanced when I encountered the prevalent trends – strongly anti-biographical – in German historiography in the 1970s. When changing course at that time to undertake research on the Third Reich, it was the behaviour and attitudes of ordinary Germans in that extraordinary era that excited my attention, not Hitler and his entourage. My early works, arising from my involvement in the pioneering ‘Bavaria Project’ and profiting from the enormous stimulation offered by a brilliant mentor, Martin Broszat, pursued those interests by exploring popular opinion and political dissent under Nazi rule, and by examining Hitler’s image among the population. The latter work certainly exposed me to the historiographical debates raging in Germany in the 1970s about Hitler. But as a non-German, primarily interested in the reception of Hitler’s image and the reasons for his popularity rather than Hitler himself, in his actions and role, I remained essentially an outsider to the debates.
    This I felt to be less so after participating, as little more than a novice atthe scene, in an important conference at Cumberland Lodge near London in 1979, attended by most of the German ‘big guns’ writing on the Third Reich, and revealing in graphic and startling force the chasmic divisions of interpretation among leading historians on Hitler’s role in the Nazi system of rule. Experiencing the conference was a spur to immersing myself much further in the differing approaches in German historiography, prompting the publication of a survey in which my sympathies for the ‘structuralist’ approaches to Nazi rule, looking beyond and away from biographical preoccupation with the Nazi Dictator, were evident.
    There is no little irony, therefore, in my eventually arriving at the writing of a biography of Hitler in that I come to it, so to say, from the ‘wrong’ direction. However, the growing preoccupation with the structures of Nazi rule and with the gulf in the divides on Hitler’s own position within that system (if ‘system’ it can be called) pushed me inexorably to increased reflection on the man who was the indispensable fulcrum and inspiration of what took place, Hitler himself. It drove me, too, to considering whether the striking polarization of approaches could not be overcome and integrated by a biography of Hitler written by a ‘structuralist’ historian – coming to biography with a critical eye, looking instinctively, perhaps, in the first instance to downplay rather than to exaggerate the part played by the individual, however powerful, in complex historical processes.
    What follows is a work which reflects, through the medium of a biography of Hitler, such an attempt to bind together the personal with the impersonal elements in the shaping of some of the most vitally important passages in the whole of human history. What has continued in the writing of the book to interest me more than the strange character of the man who held Germany’s fate in his hands between 1933 and 1945 is the question of how Hitler was possible: not just how this initially most unlikely pretender to high state office could gain power; but how he was able to extend that power until it became absolute, until field marshals were prepared to obey without question the orders of a former corporal, until highly skilled ‘professionals’ and clever minds in all walks of life were ready to pay uncritical obeisance to an autodidact whose only indisputable