Hitler

authority’ is, in Weber’s conceptualization, inherently unstable. Continued failure or misfortune willbring its downfall; and it is under threat of becoming ‘routinized’ into a systematic form of government.
    Applying this concept of ‘charismatic authority’ seemed to me to offer a useful way of tackling both of the central questions I had posed. To my mind, the concept helps in evaluating the relationship between Hitler and the mass following that shaped his rise – though in conditions never, of course, imagined by Max Weber, and where the image of ‘heroic’ leadership attached to Hitler, exploiting pre-existing pseudo-religious expectations of national salvation, was in good measure a manufactured propaganda product. And I also found it invaluable in examining the way Hitler’s highly personalized rule eroded systematic government and administration and was incompatible with it. Of course, by the middle of the war, Hitler’s popularity was in steep decline and any ‘charismatic’ hold over government and society was now waning sharply. By this time, however, Germany had been wedded for a decade or so to Hitler’s ‘charismatic’ domination. Those who owed their own positions of power to Hitler’s supreme ‘Führer authority’ still upheld it, whether from conviction or necessity. They had risen with Hitler. Now they were condemned to fall with him. He had left them no way out. Hitler’s authority within the regime started to crumble only as Germany faced imminent and total defeat. And as long as he lived, he posed an insuperable barrier to the only way the war he had brought about could be ended: his country’s capitulation.
    I linked ‘charismatic authority’ to another concept as a way of showing how Hitler’s highly personalized form of rule functioned. This, as referred to in the text and operating as a kind of leitmotiv throughout the biography, was the notion of ‘working towards the Führer’, which I tried to use to show how Hitler’s presumed aims served to prompt, activate or legitimate initiatives at different levels of the regime, driving on, consciously or unwittingly, the destructive dynamic of Nazi rule. I did not mean, with this notion, to suggest that people at all times asked themselves what Hitler wanted then tried to put it into practice. Some, of course, especially among the party faithful, did more or less just that. But many others – say in boycotting a Jewish shop to protect a rival business, or denouncing a neighbour to the police on account of some personal grievance – were not asking themselves what the Führer’s intentions might be, or operating from ideological motivation. They were, nevertheless, in minor ways, helping to sustain and promoteideological goals represented by Hitler and thereby indirectly promoting the process of radicalization by which those goals – in this case, ‘racial cleansing’ of German society – gradually came more sharply into view as realizable short-term aims rather than distant objectives.
    The approach I chose meant the two volumes were necessarily long. But even beyond the text itself there was much to be added. I was keen to provide full reference to the extensive documentary sources – both archival and printed primary sources, and the wealth of secondary literature I had used – first, so that other researchers could follow these up and re-examine them if need be, and second to remove distortions in some accounts or dispose of myths which had attached themselves to Hitler. At times, the notes became in themselves minor excursions on points of detail which could not be expanded in the text, or offered additional commentary upon it. I provided lengthy notes in
Hubris
, for example, elaborating on points of interpretation in historiography, and on differing views of Hitler’s psychology; and in
Nemesis
on the authenticity of the text of the final ‘table talk’ monologues of early 1945 and on the complex (and sometimes conflicting) evidence about the circumstances of Hitler’s death and Soviet discovery of his remains. All of this meant that the two finished volumes became massive in size, totalling over 1,450 pages of text and almost 450 pages of notes and bibliography. Of course, not all readers are able to devote sufficient time and energy to a work of such length. And, naturally, not all readers are interested in the scholarly apparatus.
    After much consideration, I decided, therefore, to produce this