Titans of History

HITLER

1889–1945

If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power …

Adolf Hitler, November 27, 1941

Adolf Hitler is the embodiment of the historical monster, the personification of evil and the organizer of the greatest crimes of mass-murder ever committed, responsible for a world war in which more than 70 million died, including 6 million in the Holocaust. No other name has earned such opprobrium or come to typify the depths to which humanity can sink. Amidst the horrors of history, the crimes of the Nazi Führer continue to occupy a unique place.

Born in Braunau am Inn in Austria, Hitler left school at sixteen without any qualifications. He suffered disappointment when his application to study to be an artist in Vienna was twice rejected. He struggled to survive in Vienna on the strength of his painting, imbibing nationalism and anti-Semitism.

In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich, and in August 1914 joined the German army, subsequently fighting on the Western Front and reaching the rank of corporal. When in November 1918 the German government agreed to an armistice, Hitler—and many other nationalistic Germans—believed that the undefeated German army had been “stabbed in the back.” He was appalled by the Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany lost much territory and most of its armed forces.

After the war, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), impressed by its fusion of nationalism, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism. Before long he won a reputation as a rabble-rousing orator, and in 1921 he became leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)—the Nazi Party, evolving a cult of power worship, cleansing violence and wanton killing, racial superiority, eugenics and brutal leadership. He created a paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung or Storm Division), headed by Ernst Röhm.

Inspired by Mussolini’s example in Italy, Hitler resolved to seize power, and in November 1923 in Munich launched an attempted putsch against the democratic Weimar Republic. This failed and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison—but served only a few months, during which period he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which exuded rampant anti-Semitism, anti-communism and militant nationalism. He also changed tactics, deciding to seek power through the ballot box—and then to replace democracy with an autocratic state.

Hitler’s opportunity came with the arrival of the Great Depression. In subsequent elections, as the economy deteriorated, the Nazi Party increased its vote, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) in July 1932, a position confirmed by elections in November. On January 30, 1933 Hitler was sworn in as chancellor.

After the burning down of the Reichstag in February 1933, Hitler suspended civil liberties and passed an enabling act, which allowed him to rule as dictator. Opposition was crushed. Hitler even turned the repression inwards: the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 saw the murder of Röhm and the SA leadership by the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squad). Two months later Hitler, backed by henchmen such as Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, achieved absolute civil and military power when he became Führer (leader) and head of state.

The Nazis initiated an economic recovery, reducing unemployment and introducing ambitious new schemes such as the building of the brand-new autobahn (motorway) network. Many of Hitler’s erstwhile opponents were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet the economic miracle was largely achieved via a huge rearmament drive, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles—the first phase in Hitler’s broader determination to launch a deliberately barbaric European and racial war.

In March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. He carefully noted the response of the international community—nothing. This encouraged him. In March 1938 he annexed Austria; in September he secured the German-speaking Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia; and in March 1939 he occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In each instance, he experienced little resistance from the other European powers. He had fulfilled his core pledge: Versailles had been reduced to nothing more than a “scrap of paper.”

Hitler signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin which partitioned eastern Europe between these two brutal tyrants. In September 1939 Hitler conquered Poland, a move that triggered British and French declarations of war. But in the spring of 1940 the German armies turned west, conquering Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France in a lightning campaign. In 1941 both Yugoslavia and Greece fell, and only Britain remained undefeated. Hitler now dominated his barbaric continental empire and appeared impregnable.

In June 1941, Hitler launched a surprise attack on Stalinist Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the largest and most brutal conflict in human history in which 26 million Soviets alone died. He moved east to command his greatest enterprise from military headquarters in eastern Poland (the Wolf’s Lair). German forces won a series of astonishing victories at the start of the Barbarossa campaign, almost taking Moscow, the Soviet capital, and capturing some 6 million prisoners.

Meanwhile another even more horrific project was gathering steam within Nazi-occupied Europe. Mein Kampf had spoken darkly of Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935–6, which deprived Jews of their civil rights in Germany, had hinted at worse to come. As the war clouds gathered toward the end of the decade there were more ominous signs: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938 had brought a wave of attacks on Jewish homes and properties across Germany.

Hitler was initially content to enslave and starve the Slavs and drive the Jews out of German lands; they were interned in ghettos and concentration camps across occupied Poland. But he now ordered a policy of extermination, using Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to shoot a million Jews. Barbarossa served as the trigger and excuse for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Under Hitler’s orders to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Jews were dispatched to extermination camps to be slaughtered in gas chambers on an industrial scale. The Holocaust, as it became known, claimed 6 million Jewish lives, as well as the lives of many more minorities hated by the Nazis, including Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals. It remains a crime of unparalleled magnitude.

But the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942–3. After their victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Soviets slowly but inexorably destroyed Hitler’s empire, advancing all the way to Berlin. In June 1944, the Allies invaded northern France in the D-Day landings and started to fight their way to meet the Soviets in Germany itself. Yet an ever more deluded, brutal Hitler refused to countenance reality, demanding that his soldiers fight to the last man. As Germany was slowly crushed between the Red Army in the east and the British and Americans in the west, Hitler fled to the Führerbunker in Berlin on January 16, 1945, along with support staff and, later, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family. On April 16 the Red Army launched the Battle of Berlin, attacking in a pincer movement that swiftly smashed into the city.

Hitler spent his time ordering nonexistent armies to launch nonexistent offensives, denouncing his potential successors Goering and Himmler as traitors, and holding dainty tea parties with his devoted female secretaries. Elsewhere in the bunker, his SS guards and female staff held wild drunken orgies. On April 28, hearing of Himmler’s attempt to broker peace, Hitler furiously had SS officer Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun’s brother-in-law and Himmler’s golden boy) shot in the Chancellery garden.

On April 29 Hitler married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. The next day, Braun and Hitler swallowed cyanide capsules—previously tested on his dog, Blondi—and Hitler shot himself in the right temple. Scotching rumors that he escaped to South America, eyewitness claims that his body was burned were substantiated when officers of SMERSH (the Red Army counter-intelligence unit) discovered remains near the bunker, confirmed by dental records as Braun’s and Hitler’s. His skeleton was buried under the Magdeburg Soviet airbase in East Germany, then dug up and incinerated in 1970 on the orders of KGB chief Yuri Andropov. In 2000 part of the skull was put on display by the Federal Archives Service in Moscow.