Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

talent was one for stirring up the base emotions of the masses. If the answer to that question cannot be presumed in the first instance to lie in those attributes, such as they were, of Hitler’s personality, then it follows that the answer must be sought chiefly in German society – in the social and political motivations which went into the making of Hitler. To search out those motivations and to fuse them with Hitler’s personal contribution to the attainment andexpansion of his power to the point where he could determine the fate of millions is the aim of the study.
    If I have found one concept more than any other which has helped me find a way to bind together the otherwise contradictory approaches through biography and the writing of social history, it is Max Weber’s notion of ‘charismatic leadership’ – a notion which looks to explanations of this extraordinary form of political domination primarily in the perceivers of ‘charisma’, that is, in the society rather than, in the first instance, in the personality of the object of their adulation.
    An attempt to undertake a new biography of Hitler, bold though it may be, found further encouragement (as well, it must be admitted, as some discouragement or even dismay) through the massive outpouring of first-rate scholarly research on practically all aspects of the Third Reich since the major biographies of Fest – even more so of Bullock – were written. It is surprising, in retrospect, for instance, how little anti-Jewish policy and the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ figured in such earlier biographies. The difficulties of pinning down Hitler’s own, often shadowy, involvement in the ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ is, of course, among the reasons for this. But the major advances made in research on this area make it both necessary and possible now to redress the balance – something which Marlis Steinert’s most recent major biography had already begun to do.
    Not only the extent of the secondary literature, but the availability of primary sources on Hitler makes the time for a new biography opportune. The superb multi-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches and writings between the refoundation of the Nazi Party in 1925 and his appointment as Reich Chancellor in 1933 is one major addition to scholarship. This now makes it possible, in tandem with the equally excellent edition of his speeches and writings down to 1924, to survey the development of Hitler’s ideas, as he publicly expressed them, for the entire period before he took power. A second indispensable source which can now be used for the first time in full in a biography of Hitler is the diary of the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, only recently discovered in its entirety, surviving on glass plates (an early form of photocopy) in formerly inaccessible state archives in Moscow. For all the caution which must naturally be attached to Goebbels’s regularly reported remarks by Hitler in a text which the Propaganda Minister, intent on later publication, wrote for ultimate self-glorification and for securing his place in history high in the Nazi pantheon of heroes, the immediacy as well as the frequency of the comments makes them a vitally important source of insight into Hitler’s thinking and actions. One allegedsource, used for decades as an authentic guide to Hitler’s thoughts and plans, prominently deployed by both Bullock and Fest, has, however, fallen by the wayside. I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s
Hitler Speaks,
a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether. Other sources, too, particularly memoirs but even the ‘table-talk’ monologues of the last months (the so-called
‘Bunkergespräche’),
of which no original German text has ever been brought to light, have to be treated with due caution. The combination of Hitler’s innate secretiveness, the emptiness of his personal relations, his unbureau-cratic style, the extremes of adulation and hatred which he stirred up, and the apologetics as well as distortions built into post-war memoirs and gossipy anecdotes of those in his entourage, mean that, for all the surviving mountains of paper spewed out by the governmental apparatus of the Third Reich, the sources for reconstructing the life of the German Dictator are in many respects extraordinarily limited – far more so than in the case, say, of his main adversaries, Churchill and even