Hitler

physically in ruins, but morally shattered. That still needs explaining. The combination of a leadership committed to an ideological mission of national regeneration and racial purification; a society with sufficient belief in its Leader to work towards the goals he appeared to strivefor; and a skilled bureaucratic administration capable of planning and implementing policy, however inhumane, and keen to do so, offers a starting-point. How and why this society could be galvanized by Hitler requires, even so, detailed examination.
    It would be convenient to look no further, for the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s calamity, than the person of Adolf Hitler himself, ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945, whose philosophies of breathtaking inhumanity had been publicly advertised almost eight years before he became Reich Chancellor. But, for all Hitler’s prime moral responsibility for what took place under his authoritarian regime, a personalized explanation would be a gross short-circuiting of the truth. Hitler could be said to provide a classic illustration of Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘men do make their own history … but … under given and imposed conditions’. How far ‘given and imposed conditions’, impersonal developments beyond the control of any individual, however powerful, shaped Germany’s destiny; how much can be put down to contingency, even historical accident; what can be attributed to the actions and motivations of the extraordinary man ruling Germany at the time: all need investigation. All form part of the following inquiry. Simple answers are not possible.
    Since he first entered the limelight in the 1920s, Hitler has been viewed in many different and varied fashions, often directly contrasting with each other. He has been seen, for example, as no more than ‘an opportunist entirely without principle’, ‘barren of all ideas save one – the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which he had identified himself’, preoccupied solely with ‘domination, dressed up as the doctrine of race’, and consisting of nothing but ‘vindictive destructiveness’. In complete contrast, he has been portrayed as fanatically driving on a pre-planned and pre-ordained ideological programme. There have been attempts to see him as a type of political con-man, hypnotizing and bewitching the German people, leading them astray and into disaster, or to ‘demonize’ him – turning him into a mystical, inexplicable figure of Germany’s destiny. No less a figure than Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, then Armaments Minister, for much of the Third Reich as close to the Dictator as anyone, described him soon after the end of the war as a ‘demonic figure’, ‘one of those inexplicable historical phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind’, whose ‘person determined the fate of the nation’. Such a view runs therisk of mystifying what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945, reducing the cause of Germany’s and Europe’s catastrophe to the arbitrary whim of a demonic personality. The genesis of the calamity finds no explanation outside the actions of an extraordinary individual. Complex developments become no more than an expression of Hitler’s will.
    An absolutely contrary view – tenable only so long as it was part of a state ideology and consequently evaporating as soon as the Soviet bloc which had sustained it collapsed – rejected out of hand any significant role of personality, relegating Hitler to no more than the status of an agent of capitalism, a cypher for the interests of big business and its leaders who controlled him and pulled the strings of their marionette.
    Some accounts of Hitler have scarcely recognized any problem at all of understanding, or have promptly ruled one out. Ridiculing Hitler has been one approach. Describing him simply as a ‘lunatic’ or ‘raving maniac’ obviates the need for an explanation – though it of course leaves open the key question: why a complex society would be prepared to follow someone who was mentally deranged, a ‘pathological’ case, into the abyss.
    Far more sophisticated approaches have clashed on the extent to which Hitler was actually ‘master in the Third Reich’, or could even be described as ‘in some respects a weak dictator’. Did he in fact exercise total, unrestricted, and sole power? Or did his regime rest on a hydra-like ‘polycracy’ of power-structures, with Hitler, on account of