Adolf Hitler - Führer of Nazi Germany Documentary

The man known to history as Adolf Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in the town of Braunau-am-Inn in Upper Austria. His father was Alois Hitler, an illegitimate child of Maria Schicklgruber. He was already in his early fifties when Adolf was born. A German nationalist, Alois was nevertheless a loyal patriot of the Empire of Austria-Hungary even after the German Empire was formed in 1871 under Prussian leadership and with Austria-Hungary excluded. He used his mother’s name Schicklgruber for much of his life before changing it legally, during which process the name of his stepfather, Hiedler,

was misspelled on the legal documentation and mistakenly rendered as Hitler. An ill-tempered and brutish man, Alois worked as a customs official, a semi-military profession in those days, and rose through numerous positions to become a senior customs inspector in Adolf’s earliest years. He had three different wives and nine children, of which Adolf was one of the youngest. Adolf’s mother was Klara Pölzl , an Austrian woman from a peasant family. She married Alois in 1885 when she was just 24 and he was 47. Klara was noted as a kind and pious woman, though as we will see

the Hitler family environment was not a good one. There is a theory that Hitler may have been of partly Jewish descent. His grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, had never married, but she did give birth to a child out of wedlock when she was in her early forties and nearing the end of her child-bearing years. The child in question was Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler. The question is, who was Alois’ father that had sired him with the unmarried Maria Anna? Many years later, in the early 1930s, a senior Nazi official, the future governor of the Nazi General Government

of Poland, Hans Frank, was charged with investigating this very issue. Though his official report contained nothing controversial, in private elsewhere he stated that he had come across evidence which pointed towards Alois’ father, Adolf’s grandfather, potentially being Leopold Frankenberger, a member of the Jewish Frankenberger family, in whose household Maria Anna worked for a time as a cook. Frank noted that the Frankenberger family had later paid for much of Alois’ upbringing in a manner which was suggestive that Leopold felt some responsibility for the child. Historians have tended to approach Frank’s claims with some scepticism, although a DNA

study produced in 2010 yet again suggested that Hitler may have had some Jewish heritage. These points aside, there is still no definitive evidence to suggest this and Hitler’s possible Jewish heritage remains a theory, though an interesting one. Adolf’s early life was not an easy one. His three older full siblings from Alois’ marriage to Klara, Gustav, Ida and Otto, all died in infancy in 1887 and 1888, Otto just days after he was born, while both Gustav and Ida died of diphtheria within a few weeks of each other in December 1887 and January 1888. This meant that

Adolf was Klara’s eldest surviving child. She doted on him and it has been speculated that some of Hitler’s narcissism in later years stemmed from his relationship with his adoring mother. The same certainly could not be said of his father. Alois Hitler was a tough, brutish man. A heavy drinker, he spent much of his time in local taverns. When he did return home there was no affection displayed towards his wife and young Adolf, or his other children. He regularly physically attacked Klara and his children and it was a tense and violent environment in which Adolf grew

up. There is also a growing consensus that Hitler developed monorchism in his youth, where his right testicle did not descend. It used to be believed that this was an urban myth based on a British military song that was sung during the Second World War, but a recent study in 2015 claimed based on a re-analysis of a medical examination Hitler was forced to undertake when he was imprisoned in Bavaria late in 1923 that it is in fact accurate. The Hitler household was also an itinerant one during Adolf’s youth. Alois continued to work as a senior customs

officer during the early 1890s. In 1892 he was transferred to the town of Passau and worked there for another two years before being reassigned again to Linz, one of the largest urban centres in Austria, although Klara had just given birth to another child, a boy named Edmund, and so she remained in Passau for a time with Adolf, Edmund and Alois Jnr. and Angela, two older children from Alois’ earlier marriage to Franziska Matzelsberger. Alois retired not long afterwards and used his savings and pension to purchase a farm some 50 kilometres from Linz. Though relatively distant from

the city, Hitler would develop an affinity for Linz. After Alois’ efforts at farming failed, the family moved back to Passau in the late 1890s. Here Adolf’s younger brother Edmund died in 1900, though by then he did have a new younger sister, Paula Hitler. Born in 1896, she was one of the few members of the Hitler family who would live a long life. Hitler performed poorly in a school in Linz that he was sent to attend, much to his father’s consternation, although Alois died in January 1903, bringing to an end his tempestuous relationship with Adolf and

the other members of the family. As he entered his late teens Hitler left Linz in 1907 and headed for Vienna, the capital of the very large Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he developed a great interest in fine art. This was an era of immense vitality in European art as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were still impacting on artistic styles and new movements like Expressionism were also emerging. Hitler wanted to be part of this and applied on several occasions to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was rejected. This disappointment was compounded by the loss of his

doting mother from breast cancer on the 21st of December 1907. Nevertheless he continued to pursue his dreams of becoming a painter. These hopes were overly ambitious. Hitler’s watercolour paintings and other pieces from the late 1900s and into the early 1910s reveal a painter of very modest ability. He was able to paint a functional landscape scene and a decent representation of famous buildings around Vienna, but his paintings lacked any depth or emotional resonance. Unsurprisingly many critics who viewed his work at the time advised him to steer his career towards architecture and over time his paintings of

buildings, notably Die Karlskirche im Winter, painted in 1912, did show some technical improvement. By 1909 Hitler’s pursuit of his dream of becoming an artist had placed him in a dire economic position as he ran out of what small amount of money he had received following the death of his parents in 1903 and 1907. He soon began acquiring odd jobs as a labourer and also managed to sell some of his watercolour paintings, though these were not being sold to galleries but rather as functional pieces people bought to furnish their homes with generic scenes of Viennese life.

Eventually he ended up homeless for a time, effectively living for much of 1909 and 1910 as a tramp moving between homeless shelters in Vienna and boarding houses for men. This was a highly unusual period for a person who would rise to become a leader of a major European state one day and one of the most significant figures in modern history. There are very few other examples of someone being both a tramp at one point in their life and a head of state in another. Indeed such was the scale of the difficulties that Hitler experienced in

Vienna between 1907 and 1913 that many historians have speculated that his later hatred of non-German groups developed during this time, particularly his adoption of the virulent Anti-Semitism which was so prominent across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hitler moved to Munich in the Bavaria region of southern Germany in May 1913, a city in which both his future and that of Nazism would be forged. He was called up for conscription to the Austro-Hungarian army a few months later but was excused on medical grounds, a decision that he later claimed he was content with

as he now viewed Austria-Hungary as being un-German in its multi-ethnic nature. There is probably considerable truth to this being his reason for trying to avoid military service in Austria-Hungary, as when the First World War broke out in the final days of July 1914 and the first days of August, Hitler quickly enlisted with the Bavarian divisions of the German imperial army. Like so many other young German, French and British men of the time he was posted to the Western Front in the trenches of Flanders and north-eastern France. Over the next four years he served as both

a runner carrying messages between staff headquarters behind the front lines and sometimes on the front lines at engagements such as the First Battle of Ypres early on in the war and the Battle of Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917. He was wounded several times and received numerous commendations for bravery including both the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class and the Black Wound Badge. In the final stages of the war, as Germany was faced with the prospect of major invasions of its own territory by the British, French and Americans for the first time, Hitler was

temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on the 15th of October 1918. While recuperating in hospital he learned of the political, social and military unrest that was spreading across Germany, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II that followed and the German surrender and armistice on the 11th of November 1918. He would later claim that he was so traumatised to learn of the German capitulation and the betrayal of those who had fought for the cause of an imperial Germany that he temporarily went blind for a second time in hospital. While this claim remains dubious, a more widely

accepted theory in the early twenty-first century is that Hitler might have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his wartime experiences between 1914 and 1918. This was known euphemistically as ‘shell-shock’ at the time, but is a much better understood condition today. A great many soldiers of the First World War suffered from PTSD later. If Hitler was afflicted by it then it might well explain a lot of his more severe behaviour following the First World War. Once the war ended and he had sufficiently recovered from his own injuries, Hitler returned to Munich. It was

a period of intense political and social change in Germany. The German Revolution was underway, with socialist groups trying to seize control of Berlin, Munich and other cities in imitation of the Russian Revolution of 1917 that had seen the Bolshevik Communists seize power there, while other right-wing groups were also forming in Germany to resist the socialists, many of which were employed as Freikorps irregulars by the German government to try and re-establish some sense of law and order in the new German republic. Into this milieu Hitler returned to Bavaria and soon became immersed in the vibrant politics

of his adopted city. He gravitated towards the German Workers’ Party, an outfit led by Anton Drexler that existed in Munich for not much more than a year between early 1919 and the spring of 1920. Hitler was working clandestinely as an army intelligencer charged with investigating the activities of parties such as the German Workers’ Party, but he was soon genuinely drawn to Drexler’s ideas, in particular his belief that Germany had been betrayed at the end of the war. There was a strange paradox in this period. While Hitler was primarily associated with the German Workers’ Party, he

also had ties during these years to the Bavarian Communist movement. For four weeks in April and early May 1919 the Bavarian Communists had succeeded in gaining control over much of Bavaria and had declared the creation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic, though their revolution was quickly suppressed. During this Hitler had clearly been involved with the Communists in some capacity, though the extent to which this was part of his work with the army or whether he was a supporter of the Communists remains a topic of considerable debate. For instance, Hitler attended the funeral of Kurt Eisner, a

prominent Jewish-German Communist in Bavaria in the spring of 1919 and wore a mourning band. Given Hitler’s later vitriolic hatred of the Bolshevik Communists of Russia and the view of fascism as being the far-right opposite of the far-left socialist policies of interwar Europe, it seems completely out of character that he would have engaged in such activities in 1919. Yet it is not as strange as it might first appear. Many fascists across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s flirted with Communism before drifting towards fascism. Moreover, both movements placed an emphasis on the idea of the members of

a society working together as a cohesive whole, and on labour movements. Indeed, the Nazi Party’s official name, when translated into English, was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Thus, the paradox of Hitler flirting with Communism before moving towards the far-right is not as unusual as it might seem. The far-right and the far-left in interwar Europe had some aspects in common, despite their differing ideologies. After he more firmly began to adhere to the German Workers’ Party of Drexler rather than the Bavarian Communists, Hitler’s political ideology began to become more firmly established. Influenced by Drexler and Dietrich

Eckart, another founding member of the Workers’ Party, he began to adhere to an ultra-nationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist and patriotic political ideology, one which had roots in the pre-war Völkisch German nationalist folk tradition. This looked back to the medieval period to when the German people had expanded eastwards into Poland, the Baltic States and other regions, Christianizing the Pagan people found here. In time this would cohere into the Nazi idea that Germany should acquire vast lebensraum or ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe where a new German Reich or empire would be built. He also developed a virulent opposition to

the Treaty of Versailles. So too was Hitler largely responsible during this period for the adoption of the swastika as the party emblem, one which was associated with Aryanism and the Völkisch movement long before the First World War. It was also in 1919 and 1920 that Hitler’s existing Anti-Semitism became much more extreme, with many individuals like himself in Germany in the post-war years beginning to associate the Jewish people with German defeat in the war. As early as September 1919 he was writing to some of his new political associates in Munich in apocalyptic terms about the complete

removal of the Jewish people from German society. In order to appeal to individuals who might have been briefly inclined to support the Bavarian Communist movement in 1919, in the spring of 1920 the name of the German Workers’ Party was changed to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The acronym for this in German is where the term ‘Nazi’ comes from. The black swastika on a red background now fully emerged as the emblem of the party. From its inception, Hitler, who was now discharged from the army around the same time and committed himself fully to the Nazi

movement thereafter, was one of its central figures. In the anarchic political environment of Munich in the early 1920s he emerged as a noted speaker at political rallies, his energetic performances drawing large crowds, sometimes more out of curiosity than any major desire to join the Nazis. In the summer of 1921 he exploited a controversy over a proposed merger with the German Socialist Party, based out of the city of Nuremburg, as a means to outflank his former mentor, Drexler, and become the new leader of the Nazis. The two years that followed between 1921 and 1923 were important

in growing the Nazi movement, though its popularity did not extend much beyond Munich and the wider Bavaria region, while this was also a period when key members of the later Nazi government such as Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Hess first join the Nazi Party. The first occasion on which Hitler and the Nazis came to notoriety beyond their immediate sphere of political fringe groups in Munich and Bavaria was in the early winter of 1923. By then the crisis of the German Revolution and the hyperinflation that had ravaged the German economy after the war

were finally beginning to abate as new currencies, the rentenmark and the reichsmark, were introduced. Hitler decided the time was ripe to try and seize power in a military coup before the government fully stabilised the situation. On the night of the 8th of November 1923 he and approximately 600 members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA seized control of one of the largest beer halls in Munich and declared their intention to take control of the city and then the wider government of Bavaria. Their attempted coup was a pathetic one. Hitler delayed into the early hours of the

morning of the 9th and by the time wider Nazi units were being called to act in different locations several Bavarian officials who had been allowed to escape the previous night at the beer hall had alerted authorities and the city police and security forces were in place to stop the march of the Nazis through central Munich the following morning. After a limited exchange of fire, the Nazi leaders essentially ran off. Years later the attempted Beer Hall Putsch in Munich would take on a legendary status amongst the Nazis, but what was primarily striking about it was how

disorganised and ill-conceived an effort it had been. Hitler had fled from Munich in the aftermath of the Putsch. He was quickly arrested and on the 24th of February 1924 he was placed on trial. It would last five weeks. Hitler ultimately lost the legal battle and was found guilty of high treason in fomenting an attempted coup d’état, but he emerged successful from the trial in so far as it garnered quite a lot of regional and even national press attention for him to promote his views about German politics and society. He was given a sentence of five

years, which it was intended he would serve at Landsberg Prison, however Hitler would ultimately serve less than one year even with time served during his trial taken into account. Moreover, his months at Landsberg Prison in 1924 were formative in his political outlook. It was here that he determined that the Nazis would henceforth seek to use the parliamentary process to destroy the Weimar Republic from within. He also composed much of his sprawling political testament here, Mein Kampf, meaning My Struggle. It is easy to dismiss Hitler's political tome today as simply a statement of his racial views.

That certainly was a major factor in it, but there were a great many other sections to what ultimately became a long book, ones describing the use of new Nazi and German paramilitary units to govern the continent and notions surrounding the acquisition of lebensraum or ‘living space’ in the east to build a vast new Germanic empire in Europe. Hitler and much of his ideas in Mein Kampf were a by-product of his belief in racial hierarchies, a tendency in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which categorised different racial or ethnic groups not through the

religious lens that they had been viewed in centuries gone by, but instead through allegedly scientific arguments. This involved everything from scientists collecting skulls and measuring them to allegedly demonstrate that some racial groups had bigger brains than others to repurposing the theories of Charles Darwin to argue that not only had human beings evolved through natural selection, but that some racial groups such as the Germans, British and other people of Europe had evolved beyond other human groups in places like the Americas, Africa and parts of Asia. At its most extreme, adherents of this view on the different

races of the world and eugenics argued that there was a legitimate argument for furthering the more advanced races over the allegedly less advanced ones through political and social movements. In all of this Hitler would continue to be influenced, even after the composition of Mein Kampf by the writings of Hans F. K. Gunther, a German writer who published numerous works in the 1920s in which he outlined a hierarchy of the different racial groups of Europe, arguing for the Germanic or Nordic people being at the top of this racial pyramid and others such as the Jewish and

Slavic people being at the bottom of it. Gunther was a major influence on Hitler. This being said, it would be incorrect to view Hitler’s ideological outlook as being entirely the product of the politics and culture of Germany in the 1920s. Many of the ideas that the first Nationalist Socialists and other radical groups in Bavaria and elsewhere in the years between 1918 and 1923 were trading in, had deep roots in German culture and political discourse throughout the German Empire. As early as the 1870s and 1880s notions about the supposedly problematic elements of Jewish culture within Europe

were rife within German public discourse as were the ideas put forward about national revitalisation. The difference was that in the 1890s or 1900s these views were professed in relation to a newly reunited Germany taking its place amongst the Great Powers, often through carving out its own colonial empire, whereas in the 1920s a more sinister turn emerged when this desire for great power status turned into a feeling of exceptional bitterness at the manner in which the German people had been humiliated at the end of the First World War. It was in the mid-1900s that the German

state first oversaw a genocide, this one against the Herero and Namaqua people of German South West Africa in what is now Namibia. Ultimately a far-right German nationalist in 1909, if transported to a Nazi party rally in the mid-1920s, would have found a lot of what he saw and heard there to be quite familiar to him. Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison on Christmas Eve 1924 after serving less than a year in jail for launching a military coup against the government, unsuccessful though it might have been. He immediately began rebuilding the Nazi Party and by mid-February

1925 had succeeded in convincing the Bavarian authorities to lift the ban on the party. Thus, just over 15 months after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was a free man and the Nazis were back in action in Bavaria. It was a new Germany though by the spring of 1925. The hyperinflation and the political, economic and social chaos that had characterised German politics and society from 1918 to 1923 had finally come to an end and the country had instead entered into a period of pronounced economic growth. In this environment Hitler and his allies now committed to trying

to secure power in Germany at the ballot box rather than at the end of a gun. In fact, Hitler had only managed to secure the acquiescence of Heinrich Held, the head of the Bavarian regional government, for the party to be reformed once he promised that they would engage in democratic politics going forward. That is exactly what the Nazis initially did and the period from 1925 to 1929 was one of rebuilding the party and trying to expand it to become a national political entity. It is important to remember that Hitler was not always the all-powerful Führer

that he became in 1934 after he combined the offices of Chancellor and President of Germany and once he dispensed of the threat posed by Ernst Röhm and the SA that same year. He also had rivals for power in the 1920s, none more so than the Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto. In another development which points towards the unusual ways fascism and socialism could overlap in interwar Europe, the Strassers represented a more left-wing element within the Nazi Party from 1925. They built up their support within the more northerly branches of the party, while Hitler’s main support base

was in Munich and southern Bavaria. Eventually Hitler would manage to outflank them, principally at the Bamberg Conference in Upper Franconia on the 14th of February 1926 at which he won over a large cohort of the party to his agenda, though the Strassers would remain a perceived threat for several more years. In any event, the Nazis failed to make any major electoral breakthrough, whether on Hitler’s watch or under the Strassers. In the 1928 Reichstag elections just 810,000 people voted for them throughout Germany, meaning the party’s number of representatives in the national parliament fell to 12 from

the 14 that had been elected in 1925 when they ran under the moniker of the National Socialist Freedom Movement while the Nazi Party itself was still banned. After he secured his grip on the leadership, Hitler effectively began running the Nazi Party like a mob boss. The Nazis were primarily based out of Munich, though with branches in other cities to the north, much like the Italian American Mafia expanded westwards from New York and Chicago in the interwar period. While they were engaged in parliamentary democracy in their new iteration from 1925 onwards, they were still steeped in

illicit activity, their paramilitary wings like the SA and SS using violence and intimidation to further the party’s interests, while the proceeds of crime were often used to fund the party machinery. Individuals met with Hitler in various locations around Munich and were handed out orders on how to promote the Nazi mission. There were few of the democratic inner workings one would expect of a normal political party with votes on key matters and appointments. Instead Hitler dispensed patronage like a mafia don, while members of crews were put in place to run Nazi operations in various districts, towns

and cities. This methodology would continue long after Hitler’s ascent to power and eminent historians of the Third Reich have noted the manner in which the Nazis in power operated as a series of interpersonal relationships between Hitler and leading ministers and officials. This was not a cabinet-style form of governance, but rather a pyramid, with Hitler at the top, followed by a lower layer of sub-bosses and then a broader layer of enforcers and henchmen. Soon a fourth layer would be added in the shape of the German people in much the same way as entire communities can become

the subjects of criminal organisations where they become extremely powerful. There was often scandal thrown into the mix within Nazi circles in Munich in the late 1920s and into the early 1930s. Some members engaged in activities which were deemed to be sexually or socially deviant by the standards of the time. Indeed the Nazis seemed to continuously attract eccentrics and social outcasts during the 1920s and social gatherings of party members were often peculiar affairs. Hitler was not above attracting scandal himself. In 1925, his 17-year old half-niece, Geli Raubal, a daughter of Hitler’s half-sister Angela, moved with her

mother to Bavaria, Angela’s husband having died many years earlier. There they were in regular contact with Adolf and eventually Angela became a housekeeper to her half-brother and she and Geli moved into his home. From late 1927 onwards Hitler became more and more controlling of his half-niece’s movements, often restricting her from leaving his apartment. It was soon rumoured that Hitler and Geli were involved in a sexual relationship of some kind, although historians have been unable to disentangle to what extent this is true or whether it was largely the by-product of a campaign by the Strassers and

others to discredit Hitler. Whatever the exact nature of it, there is no doubt that the relationship was an inappropriate one between half-uncle and half-niece and was probably sexual to some extent. Some individuals who were in Munich in the early 1930s even later claimed that Geli may have fallen pregnant with Hitler’s child in 1931. We will never know the truth of this. Geli was found dead in Hitler’s apartment in Munich on the 18th of September 1931 after apparently shooting herself. Hitler had left the city to visit Nuremburg earlier that evening after arguing with Geli. After her

death Hitler became profoundly depressed and later allegedly claimed that she was the only woman he ever loved. What was especially controversial about the entire episode between Hitler and his niece was that it occurred at a critical juncture for the Nazi leader and his party’s ascent to power. The Nazis were a joke in the eyes of most Germans throughout the 1920s, a potentially dangerous one, given their efforts to overthrow the regional Bavarian government in Munich back in 1923, but certainly not an organisation that many people believed could ever realistically claim control over Germany. Their electoral showing

after Hitler was released from Landsberg at the end of 1924 reflected this. They had obtained just over 2.6% of the national vote in the 1928 Reichstag elections and the percentage would have been much slimmer had it not been for a solid base amongst disaffected men in Bavaria. Thus, the sudden and rapid rise in popularity of the party following the Wall Street Crash of late 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it caught many people by surprise. It should not be attributed to any great strategy on Hitler’s part. The Nazis, with their message of bitterness, resentment

and anger, had simply been out of vogue during the prosperous years between 1925 and 1929. Now, in the early 1930s, they captured the Zeitgeist of a changed Germany experiencing a fresh crisis. In the federal elections of September 1930, nearly six and a half million Germans voted for them, more than any other party except the Social Democratic Party. Hitler was an important component of the Nazi Party’s success in the early 1930s. Though it may seem peculiar to us with the benefit of hindsight and the passage of nearly a century, the strange performance by Hitler at political

rallies in which he delivered raging speeches almost in a reverie were enormously popular in the crisis years of the Great Depression. Many people who joined the Nazi movement during these years and who went on to occupy senior positions within the Third Reich spoke after the Second World War of the personal magnetism of Hitler and he developed an almost messianic following. Yet it was not this alone which led to the Nazi’s growing success. It was the bitterness of the German people combined with an immensely effective propaganda and marketing campaign overseen by figures like Joseph Goebbels, the

Nazi propaganda Tsar. As energetic as Hitler’s campaigning and leadership was in 1931 and 1932 it could not bring him to the top of the state. Despite their enormous popularity, in a fractured political landscape, the best result that the Nazis ever came out of a Reichstag election with, was in July 1932. On that occasion they won over 37% of the vote, with nearly two out of every five Germans who voted indicating their support for the peculiar Austrian and his bunch of strange adherents from Bavaria. This made them the largest party in the Reichstag by quite some

margin, but with none of the other parties willing to countenance offering them sufficient support to form a working coalition government, Hitler was left on the side-lines proclaiming his utter unwillingness to enter government unless he was made Chancellor of Germany. It was only in January 1933, after emergency meetings between the heads of the centrist parties and the leaders of big business in Germany, that an agreement was reached whereby a coalition government would be formed with Hitler as chancellor. They thought they could contain him. How wrong they were. Within months the Nazis had brushed aside all political

opposition and in 1934 after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler won election as President too and dually united the positions of Chancellor and President, proclaiming himself to be Führer , ‘Leader’, of a new Germany. The Weimar Republic was dead. Hitler’s ascent to power was not without its missteps. In Mein Kampf years earlier, he had written at length about the need for a paramilitary force known as storm-troopers and their employment to foment the coming Nazi revolution. Now in 1933 he found himself having attained to the highest position in Germany, yet he faced a threat

to his power within Nazism from Ernst Röhm , the head of the Stormtroopers or Sturmabteilung Nazi paramilitary organisation, better known simply as the SA. By the end of 1933 the SA had more than three million members and continued to grow, with some speculating that the much smaller Reichswehr, the very small national army that the Weimar Republic had been allowed to retain under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, would soon be absorbed into the SA and that Röhm would become head of the German armed forces and a threat to Hitler in the process. And Röhm

displayed all the characteristics of a person who felt he was a rival to Hitler. Hitler and his closest allies acted on the 30th of June 1934, launching a series of attacks across Germany which lasted into the 1st and 2nd of July. The key goals were the elimination of Rohm and the other heads of the SA, but the Night of the Long Knives, as it became known, was also a means for Hitler to settle scores with all manner of perceived enemies and rivals. These included the murder of Gregor Strasser and several officials involved in foiling the

Munich Putsch a decade earlier. It was all a sign of how ruthless the Führer could be after acquiring power. When Hitler secured power in 1933 and 1934 he did so with the goal of quickly revitalising Germany’s economic, social, political and military fortunes, all with the goal of initiating a new European war that would overturn much of the rest of the First World War and make Germany the dominant power on the continent. This is often depicted as a war of revenge against Britain and France, but it was more complex than this. Certainly Hitler wanted to reverse

the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, but his primary purpose in instigating a new war was ideological, aiming to acquire vast new territories to the east of Germany, where the new German Third Reich would primarily be an empire stretching from the River Rhine to the Ural Mountains. Yet, given the diplomatic alignment of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, he was in little doubt that this would probably necessitate a conflict with Britain and France and that it would be best to neutralise France on Germany’s western border to the greatest extent possible. With all

this in mind, Hitler began taking steps immediately to bolster the German armed forces and from 1935 onwards Germany was openly rearming in breach of the Treaty of Versailles. One of the first major moves of the new regime was to begin acting on the Anti-Jewish views Hitler had put forward in Mein Kampf years earlier and which he continued to articulate in his speeches and political rhetoric thereafter. On the 1st of April 1933, just over a week after the passage of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler and the Nazis to rule by decree, a national boycott of

Jewish businesses was decreed, while in mid-May Nazi book burnings targeted works by Jewish authors in particular. In 1935 Hitler did briefly criticise random attacks by the SA and other Nazi paramilitary groups against individual German Jews, but this was not borne out of any sympathy, rather a desire to ensure that the state’s Anti-Semitism was co-ordinated. Thus, at a special meeting of the German Reichstag at Nuremburg in September of that year Hitler instructed several Nazi government ministers and officials to begin drawing up the Nuremburg Laws, a series of pieces of legislation which effectively moved to make second-class

citizens out of Germany’s Jews, forbidding marriage and intercourse between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, as well as targeting Jewish businesses and banning Jewish people from employing Germans of a certain age and gender. The Nuremburg Laws were only imposed in a piecemeal fashion for a time, but once the Summer Olympics had been held in Berlin in 1936 Hitler ordered them to be stringently imposed. The Kristallnacht or ‘Night of the Broken Glass’, in which thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked, and hundreds of Jews were arrested, with many being killed, followed on the night of

the 9th of November 1938 as the Nazi drift towards the Holocaust gathered pace. We might ask what daily habits the Führer kept once he came to power? While he was a workaholic, he was one of a different kind to many modern workaholics. For instance, he often did not rise until 10am or 11am, or depending on his schedule sometimes close to midday. Conversely he would work long into the night, with some who knew his habits in Berlin and the Wolf’s Lair in later years attesting to the fact that he regularly stayed up until 3am or 4am

working. An animal lover, he kept numerous dogs over the years, of which his German Shepherds, Blonda and Blondi, were the most well-known. This extended to adhering to a largely vegetarian diet long before this was in anyway common in European societies, something which he adopted in the mid-1930s, although he occasionally did eat meat and fish. Having smoked heavily in his younger years, often as many as 40 cigarettes a day, he quit and even offered gold watches to any of his associates who were also able to break the habit. He also quit drinking alcohol for the most

part in the mid-1930s, though again would still imbibe small amounts on very rare occasions. The general sense we get is of an individual who as he entered his mid-forties became concerned with being healthier, although things like the cessation of smoking and adopting a vegetarian diet were hardly commonplace pieces of health advice offered by doctors in the 1930s. His one major vice remained a sweet tooth, with Hitler often eating many cream pastries in a day, sometimes while watching his favourite films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. Of course many people have

tried to understand the psychology of Hitler and why he behaved in the way he did. A wide range of theories have emerged, beginning during the Second World War when the Führer was still alive. These have ranged from suggesting that Hitler was bipolar, had psychotic tendencies or was schizophrenic to the previously noted idea that he was suffering from a prolonged form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder induced by his experiences during his childhood and the First World War. More obscure hypotheses include that he may have had an abnormal brain structure or that he had multiple psychological conditions which

led to his peculiar personal development. Unfortunately reaching a firm conclusion on this issue has been hampered by the fact that Hitler’s body would be burned and very few of his remains survived beyond the end of the Second World War, meaning that an autopsy which might inform how his physical health impacted on his psychological well-being could not be carried out. In the absence of concrete evidence of any kind the most plausible explanation is that Hitler exhibited symptoms of histrionic personality disorder, paranoia bordering on schizophrenia, narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder, perhaps with PTSD. As we

will see, these issues were exacerbated in his later years by an increased intake of multiple narcotics that made his already erratic behaviour worse. There have been other theories to explain how Hitler’s psychology functioned and how he reached such a position of power within Germany. One of the leading historians of the Third Reich and biographers of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, has argued that Hitler actually had a very limited personality and life. He had very few interests beyond politics and the acquisition of power and was effectively a void or vacuum as an individual. His personality reflected this. Instead,

Kershaw argues, Hitler was able to reach such a position of power because of social and political undercurrents that had been present in German society for decades and which Hitler became the fulcrum for the expression of in the 1930s. Even when he attained power he took a decidedly hands-off approach to many aspects of government. However, his manipulation of his underlings and his creation of a competitive environment in which ministers and officials all competed against one another to curry favour with the Führer combined to ensure that Hitler’s wishes were being executed across Germany and then Europe without

the dictator ever having to become personally involved. This, after a phrase by a Prussian civil servant, Werner Willikens, has become known as the ‘Working Towards the Führer’ theory, the idea that Nazism functioned in a way in which all individuals sought to achieve the designs of Hitler, sometimes almost unconsciously. Despite his many ailments, Hitler was contradictorily said to have been rather mild-mannered and amiable when in company he liked in the period between his assent to power in 1933 and the zenith of the Third Reich in 1941. This was also the period in which he formed the

most important relationship of his entire life, one which would end in a very brief marriage, though as with everything with Hitler it was not without considerable turmoil. In October 1929, right around the time the Wall Street Crash was preparing the ground for the Nazis to rise in popularity, Hitler met 17-year old Eva Braun who was working at the time in the office of Heinrich Hoffmann, a photographer employed by the Nazi Party. In the years that followed they continued to cross paths and Braun became intent on winning Hitler’s affections, such that in August 1932 she attempted

to kill herself in a peculiar effort to demonstrate her fidelity to the Nazi leader. It worked and thereafter their relationship became more and more serious. A second attempt to kill herself in 1935 led to Braun becoming a permanent fixture of Hitler’s household and from 1936 onwards she might be described as his partner, as he ended other fleeting courtships he had engaged in during the 1930s. However, they would not marry until April 1945 and their relationship remained extremely private, with Hitler instead cultivating an aura of a leader who remained a bachelor, wedded to Germany rather than

to any woman. Upon assuming control of Germany in 1933, Hitler’s plan had been to gradually strengthen Germany’s economic and military position with a view to launching his war of revenge against the European powers in 1941 or 1942, the belief being that Britain, France and others would begin to rearm as well once they saw what Germany was doing. The British and French did do so and it is something of a myth that Prime Ministers in London and Paris like Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Léon Blum simply did not respond to the growing threat posed by the

Nazis. Still, they did not rearm at anything near the same speed as Germany. Hence, by 1937 Hitler was aware that the start date of the intended war could be moved forward. Matters accelerated thereafter. In the first weeks of 1938 a number of developments at home in Germany presented an opportunity to remove the War Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the German Heer or armed forces, Werner von Fritsch, from their positions and replace them with more biddable generals, iron-cladding Hitler’s control over the armed forces. Then in mid-March the Anschluss or union with Austria to

form a Greater Germany was completed through diplomatic pressure. By the summer Hitler’s rhetoric about annexing the Sudetenland, a region of north-western Czechoslovakia where German-speaking people pre-dominated, was escalating. On the 12th of September 1938 Hitler gave a speech at a Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg during which he denounced the Czech government, employing a line of attack which argued that Czechoslovakia was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state in which Germans, Hungarians and others were being denied their rights, much like minorities had been under the Austro-Hungarian Empire Hitler had been born in. He used this as a pretext for ordering

border incursions from Germany in the days that ensued and even made paranoid claims that France was trying to turn Czechoslovakia into a base of operations from which it could launch bombing raids against Berlin. In response, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, requested a meeting with Hitler, an initiative which culminated in the famous meeting in Munich at the end of September where after deliberating with Hitler, the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, and the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, Chamberlain emerged claiming that there would be a peaceful resolution of the dispute. Hitler and the Nazis were granted

the ethnically German Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, in return for promises that the Führer would make no further territorial claims. Maybe they had little choice? What is often overlooked when historians rush to blame Chamberlain for allegedly capitulating at Munich, is that Hitler had already ordered sizeable military incursions and artillery bombardments of Czech territory in the second half of September 1938 and had Chamberlain and Daladier not relented, Hitler would almost certainly have seized the Sudetenland by force. He was not bluffing in the autumn of 1938. In retrospect many people might wonder why the leaders of Britain, France

and other nations placated or appeased Hitler and the Nazis for as long as they did in the 1930s? Firstly, in assessing any historical situation like this, one needs to be wary of reading events backwards, looking at the actions of the Nazis during the Second World War and assuming that statesmen like Chamberlain and Daladier should have predicted what would happen years later. They cannot have expected the horrors of the death camps or the carnage that would ensue during the war, though some such as the future Prime Minister and British war leader, Winston Churchill, saw Hitler for

what he was early on. Others simply viewed Hitler and the Nazis as the lesser of two evils. The economic crisis and instability of the Great Depression years had seen parties and movements which inhabited the two extremes of the political spectrum rising in popularity in most European nations. Faced with a choice between the communists on the far-left or fascists and corporatists on the far-right, some viewed the fascist approach as the better of the two options in the 1930s. It is for this reason that we find individuals like the former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and

a great many other prominent British people, visiting Germany between 1935 and 1938 and forming a positive view of the economic revival that the Nazis had overseen and how it had staved off the rise of the communists in the country. The Munich Conference and Agreement also points towards the often tepid relationship between Hitler and the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. Despite both being ideological fascists and Mussolini’s movement having formed the template for fascist movements and how they might seize power in the 1920s and 1930s, the pair were not such firm allies as their later alliance would

suggest. At Munich Mussolini, who was uneasy about Germany’s advance to the Alps and the Italian border, was wary of Hitler and demanded some limited Austrian land concessions to the east of Venice as the cost of his acceptance of the German acquisition of the Sudetenland. It is sometimes overlooked that when Germany went to war with Britain and France a year later, Mussolini’s Italy did not become involved immediately, holding its powder dry until the 10th of June 1940 after the British Expeditionary Force had fled back to England and Paris was about to fall. It was only then

that Mussolini optimistically fixed his mast to Hitler’s, realising he could expand his own dominions by allying closely with the Germans. Hitler would always consider him a more junior partner, a feeling which became stronger in the course of 1941, 1942 and 1943 when German armed divisions constantly had to come to the rescue of Italian armies in North Africa, the Balkans and Italy. More reticent still was the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, who despite having acquired considerable support from Germany and the Nazis in the 1930s at the time of the Spanish Civil War, decided to remain outside

of the larger European war, despite German negotiations for him to join the growing Axis alliance between 1939 and 1941. Circumstances would soon create a situation wherein Mussolini moved closer to Hitler and the German fascist movement. The Munich Agreement was almost dead on arrival and no sooner had Hitler overseen the annexation of the Sudetenland than he began preparing for the fuller conquest of Czechoslovakia. In mid-March 1939, exactly a year after the Anschluss, diplomatic pressure was ratcheted up against the government in Prague and within days German armed divisions began rolling over the border into the country. The

conquest of it was completed when the Czech government agreed to annexation on the basis that it would be given considerable autonomy within the growing Third Reich. Hitler agreed to this and then immediately reneged on his promise. From Prague Castle on the 16th of March 1939 he issued a declaration in which he noted the creation of a new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A Czech civil government remained in existence, but in reality the new ruler was a German governor personally appointed by Hitler. The aftermath is very well-known. Within weeks Hitler stepped up his rhetoric concerning lands

Germany had lost in Poland through the Treaty of Versailles. On the 1st of September 1939, after a ridiculous false flag operation was carried out to try to suggest that Germany was acting in self-defence, the Germans invaded Poland. Two days later, the British and French declared war on Germany, commencing the Second World War. Hitler now moved to recast his position as Führer, moving from being a peace-time leader whose primary goal was to rejuvenate the German state, to now being a war leader who would oversee the German conquest of Europe. Hitler very nearly lost his life just

ten weeks into the war. There had been many assassination attempts against him already in the 1930s. For instance, back in 1932, in an effort to prevent the popular political leader becoming Chancellor before he reached that office, several local Bavarians had posted poisoned letters to Hitler. A cadre of officers within the Foreign Office in 1935 were planning to murder their boss, believing he would bring disaster upon Germany if left in charge. The closest of these early plots came on the night of the 8th of November 1939. Georg Elser, a German carpenter with left-leaning politics had come

to believe that Hitler would bring destruction upon the nation. Thus, he planted a bomb under the podium where Hitler was scheduled to give a speech that evening to mark the 16th Anniversary of the attempted Munich Putsch back in 1923. Elser’s bomb detonated and worked as planned, killing eight Nazi officials and injuring dozens more, unfortunately though Hitler had left earlier than expected that evening, in order to head back to Berlin for discussions on the war effort. Had he remained 15 minutes longer he would have been killed by Elser’s bomb. There would be at least another dozen

assassination attempts in the years that followed. While Elser had failed to assassinate Hitler in November 1939, the Nazis were otherwise hard at work preparing to visit death on much of the continent. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland had been quickly overrun and conquered in a six week campaign in September and early October. Then, even as Elser was planning to murder the Führer, a brief period of peace was descending, as the British and French re-armed furiously and the Germans planned their next steps. In the end it was not until the late spring of

1940 that fresh campaigns were undertaken, but when they were launched, they were done so with great speed. In two co-ordinated actions beginning on the 9th of April 1940 Hitler oversaw the invasion of two neutral countries, Denmark and Norway. After their swift conquest, the attention turned westwards and a month later the German Wehrmacht attacked three further neutral nations, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, before finally heading into the cauldron of the First World War, north-eastern France. There would be no slow, lethargic campaign like the trench warfare Hitler had seen here a quarter of a century earlier. The

German army won a devastating victory over the French in little more than six weeks, entering Paris on the 14th of June 1940. The Battle of Britain followed soon after, with the Germans intending to pummel the British into submission by cutting off their supplies at sea and bombing their cities into oblivion from the air. Throughout this period there were concerted negotiations between a peace party in England and the German government to organise a negotiated peace between Britain and the Nazi regime. However, once Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain, a figure who had been warning of

the dangers of Hitler and the Nazis for many years, there was a much more limited possibility of a rapprochement between Britain and Germany. And yet Hitler continued to believe that there might be. It was here that we see how his ideological views could severely skew his judgement when it came to strategic matters. In the course of the autumn, winter and spring of 1940 and 1941 the German Blitz and blockade of Britain inflicted grave damage on the only major country standing against the Nazis at that point. Had he continued to pursue the campaign against the British,

Hitler might have managed to damage public confidence in the war effort to such an extent in Britain that Churchill was in turn forced out, paving the way for a recommencement of concerted peace negotiations. Instead, he decided before long to abandon the Battle of Britain and turn his attentions and Germany’s resources eastwards to invade the Soviet Union, the ideological enemy of Nazism, but a state which Germany was at peace with, until they invaded the USSR in June 1941. Hitler’s ideological stringency simply convinced him that as fellow Aryans and what he perceived as a civilized race like

the German people, the British would eventually see sense and ally with Germany against Bolshevism. It was the first of several major strategic errors he made, based on his ideological tunnel-vision which contributed to German defeat in the Second World War. Hitler’s growing plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union from late 1930s onwards was predicated on the mistaken assumption that as soon as a large show of German force was displayed and the Blitzkrieg warfare that had been employed with such devastating results in the Low Countries and France was brought to bear, a swift victory would also

ensue in Russia. He was closely involved in the organisation and planning of Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the operation derived from the name of the famous high medieval German emperor who had done much to extend Christianity and German power into the Pagan east of Europe. Hitler made a major mistake in all of this. Firstly, he failed to take sufficient stock of the extent of land involved in trying to capture Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and numerous other cities east as far as Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan. Secondly, he didn’t account for the fact that the Red Army could suffer

catastrophic losses of hundreds of thousands of men at a time in July, August, September and October 1941, which it did, and still be able to put forward sustained resistance outside Moscow and Leningrad when the worst of the winter struck. Hitler, it seems, had also failed to fully learn from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, when the Tsar had simply ordered the abandonment of Moscow and the devastation of the countryside to deprive the French of vital resources. Hitler was critical to the planning and execution of Operation Barbarossa and was one of the main driving forces behind

the decision to abandon the Battle of Britain and attack the Soviet Union, though it should be noted that most of the generals of the Wehrmacht were in agreement with the plan. Some expressed reservations about elements of the strategy that Hitler wanted to employ but nearly all were agreed that victory would follow. Many of the leading German commanders in 1941, it must be remembered, were veterans of the First World War who had experienced Germany’s massive victories over the Russian Empire at that time. As such, it is something of a myth that Hitler pursued Operation Barbarossa in

the face of opposition from many senior German commanders. This would be a war of unbridled violence, with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel issuing the Barbarossa decree to the German high command on the 13th of May 1941, six weeks before the invasion began, on Hitler’s orders, an injunction which effectively called for a war of extermination and would later be shown as clear evidence at the Nuremburg Trials of the manner in which the German war had been criminal in basic intents. The invasion commenced on the 22nd of June 1941, with three million German military personnel invading the Soviet

Union. For nearly four months the Germans would meet with unparalleled success, inflicting millions of casualties on the Soviets in terms of men killed, wounded and captured, and seizing control of vast amounts of territory and cities like Minsk and Kyiv in the autumn of 1941. However, the Blitzkrieg here was unlike what had been seen in France and the Low Countries a year earlier. Eventually in the course of September and October Hitler’s forces began to run out of energy and met with stiffer resistance. Ultimately, they would stop short of seizing Moscow and Leningrad that winter and the

war on the Eastern Front would turn into a war of attrition. There is something of a myth concerning the German invasion of 1941. By late October and November the Germans had advanced as far as the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. It was here that the German war effort ran into what would ultimately become a fatal issue. They finally met concerted Russian resistance outside the two cities, while the German lines were stretched, their men tired and their tanks running short on fuel and other vital supplies. Then to compound matters it turned out that they had not

been issued with adequate winter clothes as the worst of the Russian winter set in, causing hundreds of thousands of German men to become injured or immobilized through frostbite, or even to die, with many losing fingers, toes or worse. There is no doubt that Hitler’s ideological sense that the tough German warrior would simply persevere through the cold, was an incredibly stupid decision in not providing sufficient winter clothing for the Germans on the frontline, but it should also be acknowledged that the winter of 1941 was the coldest experienced in western Russia in the entirety of the twentieth

century. Mother nature was now turning against the Führer. The final months of 1941 were the critical period in the war. Had things developed differently on two different fronts the conflict and modern world history might have ended very differently. Hitler’s plan had been to secure Moscow and Leningrad, then launch a pincer movement southwards to secure the Caucasus oilfields. Simultaneously the German Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel was making good headway in pushing the British and their Commonwealth allies eastwards from the Western Desert towards the River Nile. Their goal was to capture Cairo and then the Suez Canal,

following which the Axis forces in North Africa would have been able to proceed into the Middle East and ultimately join up with the Germans emerging south through the Caucasus. Other powers like Turkey in the region would then have fallen into line with Hitler’s plans, leaving the Führer victorious in the war. Robbed of its own oil supplies from the Middle East and largely cut off from the British Raj and its Commonwealth allies like Australia and New Zealand, Britain would have had little option but to come to terms with the Nazis and the war could have ended

in a Nazi victory. This is the counterfactual of how Hitler could have emerged victorious. It all hinged on those few crucial months in late 1941, but as we will see, things played out very differently to what the Nazi dictator had planned. For three years after the invasion of the Soviet Union and down to when it all started to turn very severely against Germany, Hitler made his base at the Wolfsschanze or ‘Wolf’s Lair’, a major military bunker and headquarters which he ordered the construction of near the village of Görlitz now Gierłoż in north-eastern Poland near the

Kaliningrad Oblast today. Here he was close enough to the frontlines to be able to receive news of developments on the fronts near Moscow and other cities quickly and commanders at places like Leningrad and Stalingrad could be flown in to meet directly with the Führer . Located in the Masurian Woods in East Prussia, the stronghold was an enormous bunker and fortress, with walls that were two metres thick and made from reinforced concrete. The building was also heavily camouflaged to avoid it being bombed from the skies. The Wolf’s Lair was divided up into different security zones, with

Hitler and his closest aides operating in Zone 1, several cabinet members sharing offices in Zone 2 and so on and so forth. The surroundings here were not salubrious and had none of the pomp and splendour one would usually associate with the rulers of such a vast empire as the Third Reich. Here Hitler began each day by doing some light work before taking his dogs for a walk and returning to his desk. Meals were often communal. Over time, as the war effort soured, the atmosphere here became more tense, certainly not celebratory in the manner which prevailed

a year earlier, as the Third Reich expanded ever further east. It was during his first months at the Wolf’s Lair that the Nazi’s adopted what came to be known as the Final Solution towards the Jewish population of the expanding Third Reich. After the Nuremburg Laws and the Kristallnacht of the 1930s, thoughts had turned in 1939 to how the Jewish population of Europe would be approached by the Nazis, an issue which grew in importance following the conquest of Poland where some three and a half million Jews lived at the time. Numerous strategies were developed in the

months that followed. Firstly, the Jews of Poland were corralled into ghettos in cities like Warsaw and Krakow where they were stripped of their rights and made to subsist on starvation rations. In tandem, a more comprehensive set of proposals was devised which envisaged the mass deportation of the Jews of Europe from the continent, with the most outlandish scheme being to send them en-masse to the east African island of Madagascar once the Suez Canal was captured. However, eventually, as German successes in the war mounted and the fear of any future recriminations for their actions dissipated, the Nazi

higher-ups decided that the genocide of Europe’s Jewish people would be initiated. Thus, as Operation Barbarossa began, the Einsatzgruppen death squads travelled in the rear of the Wehrmacht, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews in places like Ukraine and Belarus in the second half of 1941. Soon specially designed trucks into which poisonous gas was filtered to mass murder people were being used on the Eastern Front. It wasn’t too much of a leap from there to concluding that the Jews of Europe could be transported to a number of concentration camps in Poland, of the kind which the Nazis

had been using as makeshift prisons in Germany since the mid-1930s, where gas would also be used to mass-murder the continent’s Jewish people. Thus did the Final Solution develop between 1939 and 1941. The Holocaust began after a conference at the suburb of Wannsee outside Berlin on the 20th of January 1942 held to alert senior Nazi officials to the new strategy. The role of Hitler in the development and implementation of the Final Solution has been debated for decades. A form of Holocaust denial has emerged which claims that Hitler was not actually involved in the decision and that

it was effectively orchestrated by the SS paramilitary group and the leaders of it like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the latter of whom oversaw the Wannsee Conference. This is a spurious argument. While it was indeed the SS who oversaw the concentration camp system and hence the management of the six death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and Bełżec , this does not constitute evidence of any kind for the SS going ‘rogue’ and acting without the authorisation of the Fuhrer. Indeed we find Hitler in December 1941 authorising the Final Solution during a meeting with Himmler. Thereafter

he left Himmler and the SS to carry it out in collaboration with the Gestapo and other entities in much the same way that he delegated things like the governance of countries like the Netherlands and Norway to imperial governors or would eventually place ministers like Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer in charge of running the war economy in Germany itself. Instead Hitler focused his attentions on the war effort and, in particular, the campaign against the Soviet Union. The fact that he never visited the death camps means little. The decision to murder approximately six million of Europe’s Jews,

along with numerous other minority groups such as the Roma and Sinti, ultimately lay with Hitler. The decision by the Nazis to initiate the Final Solution and to engage in ever more extreme programmes of racial mass murder was indicative of their growing confidence in 1940 and 1941 that they would soon dominate all of Europe and would never be held to account for their actions. But even by the time a cadre of senior Nazi bureaucrats were meeting at Wannsee on the 20th of January 1942 to discuss the practical application of the Final Solution across the Third Reich,

the situation had changed on the Eastern Front in a manner which would ultimately spell disaster for the Nazi cause. Here the Germans had failed to gain a complete victory over a foe in a matter of six or seven weeks. That would have been entirely expected in a nation the size of the Soviet Union, but when the Germans failed to take Leningrad and Moscow before the winter set in and then Russian resistance was galvanized into late 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and his generals would have been aware that this was a major setback. It was compounded

by the entry into the war of the United States with its great industrial power and wealth on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union in December 1941 after it was attacked by Germany’s ally, the Empire of Japan. 1942 would see bitter fighting on fronts in Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, but it was really in early 1943, that the tide turned as the Germans and Italians were defeated in North Africa and the Soviets started pushing the Germans back towards Berlin in Eastern Europe, that the changed nature of the war became evident to all

but the most delusional of figures. An interesting report was produced on Hitler’s psychology around the time of this decisive shift in the war. Entitled The Mind of Adolf Hitler, it was drawn up in 1943 by Walter C. Langer, an American psychoanalyst who was tasked with assessing Hitler’s psychological state, based on the available evidence and producing a report for the Office of Strategic Services in the US. Basically, the government wanted to know how Hitler might act as the war went on. Langer’s report would have been disheartening for those who read it, though it was strikingly prescient

in its predictions. He first traced what was known about Hitler’s personality based on a wide range of different evidence, including accounts by people who had known him. From these Langer concluded that Hitler was a complex mix of a neurotic psychopath, with schizophrenic tendencies. As the war continued to turn against Germany, Langer predicted, Hitler’s emotions and actions would become even more volatile. He correctly surmised that the Führer who had once so revelled in speeches before large audiences would become more reclusive. As criticism of the regime mounted, new assassination attempts would be made, possibly involving senior elements

within the army, but Hitler would staunchly refuse to countenance any surrender or negotiated peace. He would, Langer predicted, probably try to kill himself before he ever had to face justice for his actions. It is a fairly remarkable document, as virtually everything Langer predicted eventually did come to pass in the course of 1944 and 1945. As the war turned against the Germans in the course of late 1941 and into 1942, the Nazis moved towards what is generally termed ‘Total War’. Eventually Hitler would appoint the Nazi Propaganda Minister and one of his most trusted acolytes, Joseph Goebbels,

as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War. On the 18th of February 1943 at the Sportpalast in Berlin Goebbels gave a famous speech in which he asked the audience, quote, “Are you and the German people determined, if the Leader orders it, to work ten, twelve, and, if necessary, fourteen and sixteen hours a day and to give your utmost for victory?” The inference here was that the German people would enter into a Total War economy to try to emerge victorious in the conflict under the eyes of Hitler as the Führer. The Nazi leader would consequently oversee the development

of a total war effort through 1942, 1943 and 1944, one in which the German people were required to make some sacrifices, but where in reality the people who really suffered were millions of Polish, Czech and other ethnic workers that were brought in as slave labourers to keep the German war economy running. Meanwhile, at the heart of this was a dictator who was beginning to behave in an increasingly erratic manner, much as Langer had predicted in The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s decisions were less consistent from 1942 onwards, his temper grew and he tended to dismiss

generals, commanders and officials for small perceived infringements of his orders or their inability to live up to his unrealistic expectations. By 1944 Hitler was a very different figure to the one who had ruled Germany for much of the decade between 1933 down to 1942 when the war effort had clearly started to go wrong. Perhaps the most glaring element of this erratic behaviour concerned Hitler’s relationship with the senior-most German generals and commanders. As soon as military setbacks began mounting from late 1941 onwards, he began retaliating against his leading commanders, blaming them for German military reverses. This

was in stark contrast to the period between 1939 and the autumn of 1941 when Hitler had generally tried to claim credit for German strategic successes, claiming that he was the mastermind of the Nazi takeover of most of the European continent down to October 1941. It was only when the German advance on Moscow and Leningrad faltered and it became clear that the knockout blow would not be struck before the winter set in, that Hitler suddenly started asserting that the generals of the Wehrmacht were the ones making the decisions after all. Like a supreme narcissist, Hitler took

credit for it when things went right on the battlefield and then blamed others when they went badly. A striking example was that of the German tank general, Heinz Guderian, who was successively promoted by Hitler between 1939 and 1941 after playing a critical role in the Polish campaign and then the Blitzkrieg assault on the Low Countries and France. Having been involved in the stalled drive towards Moscow, Hitler dismissed him from his command during the winter. This tendency only became more pronounced as the war went on, such that eventually Hitler ended up coming back to figures like

Guderian and reappointing them to senior commands once their replacements had failed to make miracles happen on the Eastern Front. Try though he might to siphon off the blame for Germany’s military defeats on the generals of the Wehrmacht, the reality was that Hitler was increasingly responsible for some of the more tactically stupid decisions. A clear example of this is the Battle of Stalingrad, the engagement which became the crucible of the war on the Eastern Front between the autumn of 1942 and the first weeks of 1943. Securing the city was considered vital to gain control of the

Caucasus oilfields, both to provide the German army with petroleum and to deprive the Soviets of it. To that end, Hitler ordered Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus to ensure the capture of the city with the German 6th Army at all costs. Paulus managed to nearly secure control over the entire city in September and October 1942, but then a massive Soviet counterattack succeeded in stemming the German attack, following which they began to encircle the 6th Army. Hitler then made the disastrous decision to order Paulus to hold firm and secure the city instead of attempting a breakout which might

rescue the remnants of the 6th Army. In the end, the Fuhrer’s attitude of ‘no surrender’ led to the destruction of most of the German forces and the capture of the remnants of Paulus’ army in late January and early February 1943. In the end, the Germans lost over half a million men, a cripplingly high figure given the numerical inferiority of the Germans and their Axis allies to the Soviets. Hitler was responsible for this. In other ways Hitler’s strategic decisions were poor, though not quite as strikingly as those made with the Battle of Stalingrad. For instance, the

series of massive fortifications and defensive points which Hitler ordered the construction of, all along the coast of France, the Low Countries, western Denmark and Norway through Führer Directive No. 40 on the 23rd of March 1942, and what became known as the Atlantic Wall, was semi-successful, in so far as it did make the Allies think very hard about how they would launch an amphibious assault on Western Europe in the summer of 1944. Similarly, the decision to take over the Italian armed forces and territories in September 1943, when it became clear that the fascist government in Rome

was about to switch sides and join the Allies after they invaded southern Italy, stalled the Allied advance in the Mediterranean. But all of these measures point towards an awareness of the futility of the war effort after a certain point. Issuing commands to build a giant series of defences across the Atlantic coast of Europe indicates that Hitler realised the strategic situation had changed immensely over the winter of 1941. Yet surrender or a negotiated peace of any kind was never countenanced by the Führer . He transformed Germany into a death cult in the process. As the war

shifted in this way Hitler was becoming an increasingly frail individual. Some of this was the result of the most serious assassination attempt he faced during his entire reign as the Nazi dictator, one which again fulfilled part of Langer’s predictions in The Mind of Adolf Hitler. On the 20th of July 1944 a cohort of German army officers led by Friedrich Olbricht and Claus von Stauffenberg conspired to leave a briefcase full of explosives in a conference room in the Wolf’s Lair during a meeting Hitler was chairing there. They then initiated an attempted coup, but unbeknownst to them,

the briefcase had been placed in such a way that Hitler did not suffer the full impact of the explosion and survived. The plotters were rounded up in the hours and days that followed and Hitler ordered the Gestapo to oversee a ruthless policy of eliminating anyone who was connected to the plotters in the slightest manner. However, the Führer had not escaped unharmed. The conference table shielded him from the worst impact of the blast, but he suffered a perforated eardrum and numerous other injuries. A stenographer attending the meeting was killed and over twenty people were injured, a

sign of how close the 20th of July Plot came to ending Hitler’s life and changing the course of the war. The injuries which Hitler sustained in the 20th of July Plot added to his many health issues by the closing year of the war. There has been much recent study of his conditions by historians. These have concluded that he was variously suffering from physical ailments such as the damage to his hearing and wounds from the blast, as well as many other potential afflictions including things like Parkinson’s, syphilis, Huntington’s Disease and severe stomach and bowel problems. Some

of these theories would explain how his hands developed serious tremors and shakes in his final years and other afflictions of that kind. What then compounded the problem was that Hitler employed an experimental physician, Dr Theodor Morell, a figure who began flooding Hitler’s system with a growing cocktail of narcotics and bizarre potions to treat his many ailments and allow him to continue functioning as Germany’s ruler and war leader. Some of these were rather benign, if somewhat strange, including large concentrations of injected vitamins and things like pig’s liver extract, however, others were potent narcotics. By the final

stages of the war Hitler was a drug addict by many modern definitions of the condition, essentially being brought up and down by Morell’s injections depending on whether he needed to be active or needed to sleep. He cut a frail and ill figure in the Wolf’s Lair and the Berlin bunker in 1944 and 1945, one very different from the energetic Fuhrer of the 1930s. By the late autumn of 1944 the Allies were advancing in Europe on all fronts. The Western Allies had opened Western Fronts in France and were massing in eastern France and the Low Countries

for a winter offensive towards the Rhineland, while the Soviets were liberating western Ukraine, Poland and parts of the Balkans and the Baltic States region. Accordingly, the decision now needed to be made to abandon the Wolf’s Lair and retreat back to Berlin for the final defence of Germany. This occurred on Monday the 20th of November 1944, by which time the Soviet advance divisions were just 15 kilometres away. Thereafter Hitler would make his new base of operations out of the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin, eventually withdrawing to the bunker there, when the city came under threat. This

was the final act of the war. By the first weeks of 1945 the US, British and other Western Allies began advancing into the Rhineland, while the Soviets entered eastern Germany and began the encirclement of Berlin. From the capital of the thousand-year Reich that Hitler had proclaimed the creation of just a few years earlier, the Fuhrer now began overseeing the final months of its existence just twelve years after he came to power. By the spring of 1945 a huge proportion of German men of a suitable fighting age in their twenties, thirties and forties had been killed,

wounded or otherwise incapacitated by the war. Hitler consequently ordered the conscription of men in their fifties and sixties, along with teenage boys, to defend the capital in the futile last stand. He also sent out directives for commanders and officials to initiate a policy of scorched earth whereby anything that the advancing Allied armies might use, be it food, livestock, petroleum or other resources was to be destroyed rather than allowing it to fall into the hands of the enemy. Even some of the most ardent Nazi officials chose not to implement this policy. Meanwhile other ministers such as

Himmler began to secretly explore the possibility of a last-minute surrender to the Western Allies instead of the Soviets. As all of this occurred, Hitler met with many of his ministers and commanders through February, March and April 1945, often dismissing them from their positions over perceived failures, blaming everyone other than himself for the destruction now being wrought on Germany. After weeks of fighting in and around the city, the battle for the centre of Berlin commenced on the 16th of April 1945. Four days later, Hitler made his last appearance above ground in order to fasten some badges

to the jackets of teenage soldiers who he was ordering to be sent out to fight the Soviets. Thereafter he withdrew underground to the Reich Chancellery bunker in the centre of the city. On the same day that he withdrew into the bunker for the final time, Hitler angrily dismissed Dr Theodor Morell from attending him as his physician. He continued to take some of the medications that Morell had prescribed over the years, but some were simply no longer available and so it is actually more than plausible that in his final days, Hitler was experiencing some withdrawal symptoms

as the flow of opiates and other narcotics into his system declined. It was a strange end to the Third Reich. As Hitler, Eva Braun, the Goebbels family and other close adherents conversed in the bunker, fighting raged in the city around them, while upstairs from the bunker many Nazi officials and commanders engaged in drunken revelry, aware that prison or death awaited them now. On the 29th of April 1945, Hitler completed his last will or what he called Mein Politisches Testament, My Political Testament. It was an utterly brief document when one considers how verbose and extensive a

work like Mein Kampf had been, twenty years earlier. It made some brief allocations of his personal effects, with the Führer requesting that his art works should be sent to be displayed in Linz in Austria, where he had spent much of his earliest years, while other things which he had acquired over the years, were to be given to the Nazi Party and the German people, with his secretary, Martin Bormann, who almost certainly died just four days later, being charged with distributing his possessions. Then there were provisions made for the succession and a cabinet reshuffle in line

with who had fallen out of or gained Hitler’s favour in the last weeks of the conflict. The longstanding heir designate as leader of the Third Reich, Hermann Goering, was declared to be a traitor and expelled from the party, along with Himmler. Goebbels was appointed as Hitler’s successor instead in the officer of Chancellor, while Karl Dönitz , the head of the German navy, was chosen to be the next President of Germany. Thus, the position of Führer would cease upon Hitler’s death and the powers of Chancellor and President would be devolved to two individuals once again, as

it had been prior to 1934. The will was significant in so far as Dönitz would become the head of the government which came into being in the town of Flensburg on the German-Danish border just days later and which would surrender to the Allies. Once the last will and testament was completed, Hitler began preparing to take his own life along with Eva Braun whom he had married not long after midnight on the 29th of April. He also learned that day that his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, had been killed in northern Italy. Although Hitler had been provided

with cyanide pills in order to end his life, in the end he shot himself in the temple in the afternoon of the 30th of April. He was 56 years of age at the time. Eva Braun ended her own life using the cyanide pills. Thereafter attendants took their bodies upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden and doused them in fuel before setting them on fire even as the Soviet Red Army shelled the city centre of Berlin. Very little remains were ever recovered from the Chancellery garden and there were conflicting accounts of what fate their dental remains had

experienced thereafter, leading to conspiracy theories that Hitler had not died at all and had gone into hiding after the war. In reality, what small elements of their remains there were left, were kept in East Germany for a quarter of a century before possibly being removed to Moscow. A death certificate was only finally issued in 1956 when the government of West Germany decided to do so. A day after Hitler’s death, Joseph Goebbels and his wife also took their own lives in the bunker after murdering their children. A week later the German government at Flensburg surrendered to

the Allies. The Second World War was over in Europe. It had resulted in over 40 million deaths across the continent. Adolf Hitler was, in the most unfortunate way possible, one of the most important figures in modern world history. He was a most peculiar man. He came from a dysfunctional family background in Austria and grew up to have a wide range of psychological issues, ones which were exacerbated by his experiences in Vienna prior to the Frist World War, on the Western Front during it and in Bavaria after it. In Munich in the early 1920s his peculiar

characteristics became a boon to him in rising to the top of the nascent Nazi Party, a collection of malcontents and misfits living in southern Germany at the time. His rise to supreme power in Germany in the early 1930s was the result of a global financial crisis and a Faustian bargain between the German middle classes and this perverse ideologue. Long before the Second World War broke out, Hitler’s worst excesses were already on display or being hinted at in terms of the state persecution of Jewish people and other groups. Then, from 1939 onwards, devastation was unleashed across

Europe. The worst of it began in the summer of 1941 when the Soviet Union was invaded and Eastern Europe became the crucible of the war, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people through warfare, bombing, mass executions and famine. What was worse, the Holocaust of six million of Europe’s Jews was carried out, along with the genocide of other groups such as the Roma and Sinti, while the deranged Ostplan would have seen the Nazis intentionally mass-murdering tens of millions of Slavic people across Eastern Europe to create lebensraum for German settlers if it had been

implemented. For much of these years Hitler’s supreme focus was on the war effort and his view of himself as a German warlord and leader saw him delegate the Third Reich’s programmes of mass-murder to the SS. Ultimately, despite the enormous successes the Germans won on the field of battle between September 1939 down to around October 1941, when he failed to defeat the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941 and the United States entered the war at the same time, the game was up for Hitler and his many cronies. What do you think of Adolf Hitler? Does

he deserve his place as history’s most reviled dictator or do Stalin and Mao supersede him? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.