Hitler

excellence
. He owns no ties outside his own “ego” … He is in the privileged position of one who loves nothing and no one but himself … So he can dare all to preserve or magnify his power … which alone stands between him and speedy death.’ The thirst for personalized power of such magnitude embraced an insatiable appetite for territorial conquest amounting to an almighty gamble – against extremely heavy odds – for a monopoly of power on the European continent and, later, world power. The relentless quest for ever greater expansion of power could contemplate no diminution, no confinement, no restriction. It was, moreover, dependent upon the continuance of what were taken to be ‘great achievements’. Lacking any capacity for limitation, the progressive megalomania inevitablycontained the seeds of self-destruction for the regime Hitler led. The match with his own inbuilt suicidal tendencies was perfect.
    All-consuming though power was for Hitler, it was not a matter of power for its own sake, devoid of content or meaning. Hitler was not just a propagandist, a manipulator, a mobilizer. He was all those. But he was also an ideologue of unshakeable convictions – the most radical of the radicals as exponent of an internally coherent (however repellent to us) ‘world-view’, acquiring its thrust and potency from its combination of a very few basic ideas – integrated by the notion of human history as the history of racial struggle. His ‘world-view’ gave him a rounded explanation of the ills of Germany and of the world, and how to remedy them. He held to his ‘world-view’ unwaveringly from the early 1920s down to his death in the bunker. It amounted to a utopian vision of national redemption, not a set of middle-range policies. But it was not only capable of incorporating within it all the different strands of Nazi philosophy; combined with Hitler’s rhetorical skills, it also meant that he soon became practically unchallengeable on any point of party doctrine.
    Hitler’s ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into the shaping of events need, then, to be accorded the most serious attention. But they explain far from everything. What Hitler did not do, did not instigate, but which was nevertheless set in train by the initiatives of others is as vital as the actions of the Dictator himself in understanding the fateful ‘cumulative radicalization’ of the regime.
    An approach which looks to the expectations and motivations of German society (in all its complexity) more than to Hitler’s personality in explaining the Dictator’s immense impact offers the potential to explore the expansion of his power through the internal dynamics of the regime he headed and the forces he unleashed. The approach is encapsulated in the maxim enunciated by a Nazi functionary in 1934 – providing in a sense a leitmotiv for the work as a whole – that it was the duty of each person in the Third Reich ‘to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish’ without awaiting instruction from above. This maxim, put into practice, was one of the driving-forces of the Third Reich, translating Hitler’s loosely framed ideological goals into reality through initiatives focused on working towards the fulfilment of the Dictator’s visionary aims. Hitler’s authority was, of course, decisive. But the initiatives which he sanctioned derived more often than not from others.
    Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world. Understanding this demands reconciling the apparently irreconcilable: the personalized method of biography and the contrasting approaches to the history of society (including the structures of political domination). Hitler’s impact can only be grasped through the era which created him (and was destroyed by him). An interpretation must not only take full account of Hitler’s ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into the shaping of events; it must at the same time locate these within the social forces and political structures which permitted, shaped, and promoted the growth of a system that came increasingly to hinge on personalized, absolute power – with the disastrous effects that flowed from it.
    The Nazi assault on the roots of