The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      Adolf Hitler

      Dictator of Germany. Twelve years of force and tyranny.

      30 April 1945

      Few men in the whole of history and none in modern times have been the cause of human suffering on so large a scale as Hitler, who died in Berlin yesterday. If history judges to be greatest those who fill most of her pages, Hitler was a very great man; and the house-painter who became for a while master of Europe cannot be denied the most remarkable talents. He found Germans depressed, bewildered, aimless. After five years in office he had united the German race in a single Reich, abolished regional diversities of administration, and got rid of unemployment. But these achievements were merely instruments of an overwhelming lust for power. Nazi domination over Germany was a stepping stone towards the domination of Nazi Germany over the world. The process was continuous, and the methods were the same. Hitler effected the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany by a mixture of deceit and violence; he then employed the same devices to destroy other nations. From the time he became master of Germany he made lies, cruelty, and terror his principal means to achieve his ends; and he became in the eyes of virtually the whole world an incarnation of absolute evil.

      Hitler was unimpressive to meet on informal occasions, but became transformed when he was face to face with a crowd, especially if it was an audience of his followers. He would speak to them like a man possessed and give the appearance of utter exhaustion when his speech was over. His speeches betrayed few if any original ideas, and even his belief in the suggestive power of reiteration scarcely justified the repetitions of past history with which most of his public orations were overladen. He was, however, a propagandist of the first order, and his uncannily subtle and acute understanding of the mind of his own people was the ultimate source of his power for evil.

      Early Years

      Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau-am-Inn, on the frontier, as he said himself, of the two German States, the reunion of which he regarded as a work worthy to be accomplished by any and every means. His parents were of Bavarian, and perhaps Bohemian, peasant descent, and his father – who until his fortieth year was known as Schicklgruber – was a Customs officer in the Austrian service and married three times – Adolf being the only son of his young third wife. Adolf was sent to the best school available, being intended for the Government service, though he himself had artistic inclinations. In 1902 his father died suddenly, leaving no resources available for the continued education of his son.

      From 1904 to 1909 the young Hitler lived a life of hardship. He moved after the loss of his mother to Vienna where he had dreams of becoming an architect, but could earn only a hazardous livelihood as assistant to a house-painter and by selling sketches. For three years he lived the life of the poorest man in Vienna, sleeping in a men’s hostel, eating the bread of charity at a monastery, occasionally reduced to begging. The food for thought also presented gratuitously by life in a great city, to such as care to receive it, was not left untasted by him. Hazy legends like the Nordic saga jostled in his mind with illusions regarding the ennobling effect of war and with more rational dreams of German national unity. He saw and hated the growing Slav ascendancy and the enfeeblement of the German elements in the racially mixed Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He drank in the pan-Germanism of Luege, in which all the original elements of ‘Hitlerism’ are to be found. He read assiduously the works of Marx and his disciples, and thoroughly disagreed with their conclusions. He discovered the Jews and acquired a fanatical aversion to them. By 1910 he had so far improved his professional position as to be able to set up as an independent draughtsman; and, still hoping to become an architect, removed to Munich thinking to find wider scope in the Bavarian capital.

      A year or two later the 1914–18 war broke out, and Hitler, preferring to enrol himself in the German national army rather than in the polyglot forces of the Hapsburgs, although he was an Austrian subject, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a volunteer. His war service was meritorious, but not distinguished. He won the Iron Cross, and rose to the rank of corporal. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, and badly gassed in the later stages of the war. It was while lying in a Berlin hospital, temporarily blinded, that he learned of the events known as the November Revolution of 1918.

      Political Career Begun

      On leaving hospital he returned to Munich. That pleasant city soon became the prey of his enemies the Marxists. The reaction against their regime made a breeding-ground for Fascism. It was at that moment that Hitler began his political career. Thousands of bewildered and workless young Germans were meeting and talking and propounding every sort of theory and scheme. Hitler possessed what most of these fumblers lacked, a few definite ideas and a knowledge of the value and of the art of propaganda. One night he attended in Munich a meeting of a newly formed German Workers’ Party, and decided to join it. He was its seventh member, and was not long in making himself its leader and his nationalist and anti-Marxist creed its programme. The movement soon took hold in Bavaria.

      Hitler discovered his remarkable oratorical powers and proved himself an adept in the management of large meetings. He realized to the full the value of repetition and of reiterating a single theme over and over again in a slightly different form. ‘All propaganda,’ he said, ‘should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address.’ A pillar of strength in these days was Captain Röhm, a staff officer at Munich and a valued organizer in the councils of his military superiors. He won for Hitler the tacit approval of the local high command and certain financial resources without which two-fold help little progress could have been achieved.

      Thus supported and encouraged, Hitler, in conjunction with Röhm, Göring, General Ludendorff, and others, made his first attempt to seize power in the notorious Munich Putsch of November 10, 1923. They were met outside the Feldherrnhalle by police, who fired upon them, killing Hitler’s nearest companion and 15 others. Hitler lay flat on his face. Only Ludendorff marched straight on. As soon as the firing slackened Hitler, with a dislocated shoulder, fled in a motor-car, but was arrested two days later and imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg. During the nine months he spent there he wrote the greater part of Mein Kampf, that turgid, rambling, remarkable book of nearly 1,000 pages, which became the Bible of the Nazi movement.

      Hitler’s authority declined after the fiasco of Munich, and for a while Gregor Strasser, the creator of the Nazi Party in North Germany, counted for more than he in the party ranks, whose strength in the Berlin Reichstag was no more than 12. Hitler gradually reasserted himself, however, and in the elections of 1930, when Dr Brüning was Chancellor, and when the economic crisis was already creating widespread unemployment and distress, the number of National-Socialist Deputies jumped to 107.

      The political situation rapidly deteriorated. Faced by the growth of the extremist vote and the chaotic state of the party system, the Chancellor was forced increasingly to govern by decree, and though his intentions were most genuinely liberal, he led СКАЧАТЬ