Hitler Biographies

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Archie
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Hitler Biographies

Post by Archie »

There are a lot of books on Hitler. It can get a bit bewildering. Given that there is so much to choose from, I thought it would be worth compiling some info on these to help people decide what to read. Not many people have read all of these, so please add your own comments.

Early Works
  • Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol I (1925)
  • Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (1936-1937), Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944)
Stolfi's List of Great Hitler Biographers
  • Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952)
  • Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legend, Myth & Reality (1971)
  • Joachim Fest, Hitler (1973)
  • John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1976)
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1998) & Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (2000)
[For comparison, Ullrich lists four great biographies: Heiden, Bullock, Fest, Kershaw]

Some More Recent Ones
  • R.H.S. Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny (2011)
  • Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 & Hitler (2013) & Hitler: Downfall 1939-1945 (2018)
  • Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Life (2015)
  • Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography (2019)
The first one I read when I got interested in this a few years ago was a lesser known, out-of-print book, Colin Cross, Adolf Hitler (1973), which I selected based on the review below. It seemed more objective than most and it also has the benefit of being concise (in a field where huge tomes, often multiple volumes, are not uncommon).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-revi ... 9L6OG4WL3/

Heiden and Bullock are probably more of historical interest at this point. I have not read either of them but I wouldn't think these would be ideal places to start today. Ullrich, in his introduction, says of Bullock: "Bullock depicted the German dictator as a completely unprincipled opportunist driven solely by lust for power at its most raw form." But he explains that later biographers have moved away from that sort of thesis and say Hitler did have a worldview (an evil one) beyond lust for power.

There will obviously be a huge amount of overlap in these books. In a way, they should all be suitable for giving you the basic facts. There are also other books that are not Hitler biographies but that go over a lot of the same material. William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for example.

Distortions

While revisionist opinion on Hitler does vary, I think most of us would agree that the common portrayal of him is quite exaggerated and unreliable.
  • The Holocaust: Any mainstream Hitler bio will take the Holocaust as a given and this will of course color the entire perspective. If the Holocaust is the most evil thing ever and Hitler did the Holocaust, then Hitler is the most evil person ever. A lot of books are starting from that position. Needless to say, if the Holocaust is fake, then Hitler is no longer the most evil person in world history and we are free to approach him like we would any other historical figure (e.g. Napoleon).
  • The Jewish Question: The mainstream perspective tends to portray any anti-Jewish views as being a consequence of either insanity, scapegoating, or cynical demagoguery. Most revisionists would probably say that criticism of Jews has more of a rational basis than is commonly acknowledged (a la Kevin MacDonald).
  • The War: The mainstream will tend to present Hitler's moves during the war as unbridled aggression.
Downstream from these, we can see a more general bias, a tendency to spin things negatively as a matter of course. Some authors are loath to acknowledge any favorable traits at all in Hitler, often to the point of pettiness. Depreciating his artistic talent, his war record, saying that he didn't read the books in his library, that sort of thing.

Recommendations?

I think it would make sense to start with a basic cradle-to-grave biography. I liked Cross fine which was the one I started with but it's not very available anymore. Toland is still in print and might be a good default recommendation as it seems more balanced than something like Kershaw (Toland spoke at an IHR conference in the 80s so he can't be too bad a guy). Maser seems like another decent option. I have not read his Hitler bio, but I did read his Nuremberg book and it was more critical than most of the Anglo-American authors. Maser's title is also promising (compared to the obviously negative ones like Bullock and Kershaw).

I started listening to Ullrich's Ascent recently (I noticed it was included for free on Audible) and it's actually better than I expected. When it gets more into his political career I do feel like it started getting more slanted and does not really explain the National Socialist worldview very well at all. But it didn't seem unnecessarily petty. And I would bet, since it is quite new, that it is more accurate on some things than the older biographies. So I wouldn't totally write off these mainstream books.

I have Stolfi's book and have read the introduction. When I get time, I do plan on returning to finish it. Stolfi openly says that his goal is to present a more balanced view of Hitler, as suggested by the title. He explains: "Because I have weighed the great biographies on the scales of historical reality and found them wanting, the book that follows will present a counterbalancing portrait of Hitler and a contrasting view of his times." Please note though that this is more of an extended commentary on other Hitler biographies, especially Kershaw. It's not where you want to start. As he explains, "because another descriptive biography of Hitler would be an exercise in dullness, this book concentrates on interpretation."

David Irving's Hitler's War is probably the most popular Hitler book among revisionists. But it is focused on the war and is not a full account of Hitler's life. It seems like it would be a follow-up book.

Richard Tedor's book Hitler's Revolution is not a biography, but it is a more positive account of the Third Reich's social policies and things like that. This could balance out the mainstream accounts like Richard Evans's Third Reich series.

There are a lot of directions to go after the first book, depending on one's interests. There are opportunity costs as well. If you really want to go deep on the Holocaust, that will leave less time for general WWII, etc. The old forum had sections to discuss WWII but there was never much post volume. I hope we can get some good discussions going on some of these related topics.

Here is an article from Counter Currents from 2011
https://counter-currents.com/2011/10/wh ... biography/
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by SanityCheck »

- Kershaw's biography of Hitler explicitly rejects discussing Hitler in terms of evil, as this is a moral category/judgement and not historical
- one could however write an interesting comparative study of how Hitler and Nazism have been constructed since the 1930s as evil, beyond the pale, etc, the catch being that different societies would not actually agree as much on the Holocaust being the decisive factor. For Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society, the decisive factor would be the war.

- even without the Holocaust, Hitler's legacy of conquest was entirely negative, especially geopolitically, as without WWII, the former Little Entente of East European states would likely not have fallen victim to communist rule until 1990. Unlike Napoleon, the Nazis left absolutely no legacies of worth, whereas the code Napoleon spread to a number of neighbouring societies. From the perspective of British history in the early modern and modern era, preventing the domination of continental Europe by any one country, be that France, Germany or Russia/the Soviet Union, has been a consistent theme. The ability to bring this about faded significantly from WWII onwards, with the US taking up the role of countering any challenger, i.e. Germany in WWII then the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

- all recent Hitler biographies (Kershaw, Ullrich, Longerich) emphasise the radicalising experience of Munich in 1919 on Hitler, but then also have the task of analysing Hitler's ideological evolution through his speeches, interviews and writings through to Mein Kampf. The anti-Bolshevik reaction seen in Bavaria was mirrored elsewhere with different takes on 'Jewish Bolshevism' both among conservatives, radicals and liberals. Hitler soon enough adopted preexisting voelkisch thinking around racial antisemitism, again this was not the only option in the era, political Catholicism took a different stance, as did the Catholic Church as a whole since conversion overrode ethnicity.

- Hitler biographies also have to describe however briefly the extremely varied reactions of European societies and states to the Nazi invitation to participate in, or imposition of, the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'. The variations show strong correlations, e.g. societies with extremely small and well assimilated Jewish minorities, as in Scandinavia, were befuddled and rejected the premise. Other societies with large and less assimilated Jewish minorities in the middleman role, such as Slovakia and Poland, were quite enthusiastic, but Catholicism blocked the full implementation of the 'Final Solution' in several of them (Slovakia, Croatia). Essentially every Axis ally and fellow-travelling state, including Spain and Vichy France, rejected at least some German demands at different points of the war. Some of that was to do with awareness of the changing fortunes of war and the likelihood of a German defeat (Hungary and Romania), some of that reflected the relatively marginal significance of antisemitism or smaller Jewish populations (Italy). The same applies to neutral countries and NGOs - Switzerland and Sweden had shut the immigration gates with a clang in the late 1930s but Sweden changed its stance at the end of 1942 into 1943, and Switzerland could breathe easier from mid-1944.

- Hitler biographies certainly have to recount the trajectory of undoing Versailles then initial peaceful expansion through to the decision to wage war and the purposes for this - which certainly included annexation and the acquisition of Lebensraum in the 'east'. The contrary moves of Britain, France, Poland and then the USSR and US are all well established and easily woven into any narrative - the British guarantee to Poland, Hitler countering through the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the frantic atmosphere before and at the outbreak of war, and beyond. 'Aggression' certainly fits the bill, especially when contrasting the Munich negotiations with the lack of negotiation in 1939. The woe-is-me stance of blaming everyone else for getting invaded was tiresome already in the 1940s.

- one fascination with Hitler and the Third Reich is the extremely rapid 'rise and fall' of both. Thus the title of William Shirer's classic overview, and the use of terms like 'zenith of power', 'downfall' and other narrative phrases for chapter and book titles. Hitler and the Nazis continue to fascinate for the extreme drama of taking on in the end almost the entire world, and losing so apocalyptically in 1945. How this turned from 1940 to 1943 and did so in such a bloody fashion, including for the German people, is perhaps the core of it. All Hitler biographies note his peak of popularity in mid-1940 having seemingly won the rerun of WWI at such low cost. They then discuss the strategic dilemma and growing hubris where Germany massively overestimated its true strength as well as what it could get out of the new empire.

- countless books in the wider literature have contemplated whether Nazi Germany did in fact have a chance of winning the war, or could have taken better decisions, or what the turning points were. Most of this looks risible after the digestion of all of the facts, or is best suited to what-if alternate history fiction. Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction is a must-read to assess the actual economic strength of Germany through this era: the effects of the Great Depression and recovery (plus break with the international economic order) in the 1930s, and the premature mobilisation for war, long before the mooted 1943 deadline, to exploit a perceived window of opportunity. The failure to mobilise 'fortress Europe' fully and the weakness of the Axis coalition militarily and economically explain the eventual outcome, i.e. every single Axis ally switching sides other than a rump Hungary.

- despite the overall inevitability of strategic and global failure, the details and events continue to fascinate, even if some no doubt will bore people should they have been over-exposed to the German debates about how best to counter D-Day and where to deploy panzer divisions. It's maybe more interesting now to read about other Nazis responding to the shifting strategic circumstances, thus I just read Katrin Paehler's study of Schellenberg and Amt VI SD-Ausland, which was quite revealing of the shenanigans in 1944-45 as well as the delusions of some of the SS (especially Himmler) that they might ever be acceptable negotiating partners, as well as Michael Mueller's biography of Canaris, whose fall from grace in 1944 dovetails with the rather belated and somewhat pointless takeover of intelligence by the SS. I'm looking forward to the publication of the diaries of Friedrich Fromm and Erich von Manstein over the winter of 2024-2025 for similar reasons.

- Hitler's personality generally takes a back seat to his function as a charismatic leader. I am not sure that dwelling on whether he read his entire library or not is especially telling or indeed much emphasised in all mainstream works. It's more significant to note the well informed but often wayward intervention into armaments production and development, or other minor interferences. What can be missing from many biographies is a detailed reconstruction of the political/domestic side of Hitler's leadership during the war. One tends to have to go elsewhere for this. The exception is Hitler's popularity and how that waned. Kershaw but following him Ullrich and Longerich all chart very well how Hitler's withdrawal to his role as supreme military commander coupled with the cascade of defeats and the war reaching Germany by the air and then in 1944-45 on land totally undermined his charisma and political appeal to all but a minority. There is however a human drama to Hitler's retreat into the bubble of his entourage and military staff which the film 'Downfall' brings out very well. For me, 'Downfall' humanises Hitler. His life ended in suicide, as a result of a quasi-breakdown. Given how Goering managed to enliven Nuremberg and proved a tougher challenge for the prosecution than had been expected, one can only wonder what might have happened if Hitler had been given a renewed chance to justify himself, as he had in the 1924 trial (albeit before much more sympathetic judges). Or he could have been gunned down by an overenthusiastic krasnoarmeets in the Fuehrerbunker.

- National Socialism as a political ideology was rooted in its time and place; it was never an ideology to be fully exported, since the core of it was German ethnonationalism. After the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, the strategic premises for aiming for national expansion in Europe or the creation of a German-led empire vanished entirely. Empire and Lebensraum were absolutely at the core of National Socialism and the raison d'etre for the 1930s armaments build-up. No state can hope to repeat such expansion without triggering a massive response through to nuclear war. German society and its economy have also fundamentally changed; very little of what the Nazis enacted practically has any relevance to the contemporary world, or was done and dusted back then. German historians have debated how much Nazism modernised Germany, and found various examples where this was true, e.g. introducing the Latin script instead of Gothic, or which can be fitted into social welfare state trajectories (the 1942 iteration of the Mutterschutzgesetz, the DAF and its projects for mass tourism, consumerism, housing and motor cars) which continue to this day. Economic recovery in the 1930s looks feeble compared to the Wirtschaftswunder and post-1945 decades of European and German economic growth (which then stalled in the 1970s). The national and international economic orders are simply too different for anything Hitler did after 1933 to have any chance of meaningful success. The autobahns have long been built!

This also applies to the regimentation of German society - whether one considers this totalitarian, corporatist, association-driven or aspiring to the much-vaunted 'people's community'. Society will scarcely tolerate being shoehorned back into a mould from one hundred years ago, nor were the results especially promising in the short term. German society after the Wilhelmine era and WWI was much more collective, uniform-wearing and militarist. So were other societies in the same era! Plus the shit-brown former colonial uniforms used at first by the SA and NSDAP were frankly *terrible*.

The residue of National Socialism which continues to appeal to a minority seems to revolve around a desire for a strong man as leader (authoritarianism) plus the racial construction of German ethnonationalism, including its definition of racial antisemitism, and some of the negative definitions of who was to be excluded from the national community. Such views will likely long be stigmatised as 'too Nazi'; they stand more chance of success if they are rebranded or made more subtle, especially as the circumstances of contemporary societies, their ethnic makeups and social stratifications, are so vastly different to the 1920s-1940s.

Right wing populism has been infinitely more successful in the 21st Century than hardcore neo-Nazism, at least in terms of mobilising political support. But no populist party has really been fully tested, certainly calls for repatriation have not. And non-populist governments can be as vigorous now in enforcing borders and immigration - Poland's border with Belarus has been practically militarised, while Germany has just effectively abandoned the Schengen free movement agreement. The issues arising from increased migration will only sharpen and will require a very different response to the introduction of immigration restrictions in the 1900s-1930s in the UK, US and Europe. The upswings are going to be better explained by bright shiny things attracting people north, labour market requirements due to declining populations in advanced post-industrial societies, climate change and civil wars elsewhere in the world, rather than whatever is currently being babbled on X.

- finally, Wolfram Pyta's Hitler: der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr; eine Herrschaftsanalyse (Munich: Siedler, 2015) has been translated to English and should appear in the next few years. The German original is well worth a read if you are interested in Hitler as a politician and as a supreme commander; the latter half on his conduct of the war is a persuasive take on his fortress mentality (inspired by WWI experiences, of course) and strategy.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by SanityCheck »

Would recommend as conveying the conventional general understandings of the Third Reich and WWII in Europe, and the conventional view of the Holocaust across Europe during the war
- Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006)
- Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008)
- Richard Evans, Third Reich trilogy, especially The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008)
- Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination (2007)
- Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (2007 originally in German, long since translated)
- Peter Longerich, Goebbels: A Biography (2015)

Either Volker Ullrich or Peter Longerich's biographies of Hitler build on the above syntheses from the 2000s and other research. Kershaw's biography of Hitler synthesised the 1990s research but has been criticised for not getting things right about Hitler himself. The consensus seems to have shifted to rejecting Hitler's self-portrayal in Mein Kampf of his pre-1914 years and to emphasise the radicalisation of 1919.

Military and diplomatic histories of WWII and its origins, especially viewed globally, are difficult to summarise in single volumes. Gerhard Weinberg's A World At Arms (originally 1994) is still the most exhaustive study and the longest. Other recent single volume WWII histories are either very narrative (Beevor, Hastings) or quite thematic (Richard Overy's Blood and Ruins, from 2021). But Overy's book is definitely worth a read, synthesising recent literature and taking a properly global approach.

Stephen Kotkin's volume II of his Stalin biography covering 1929-1941 (published in 2017) is another must-read, covering the crucial upheavals of the Stalinist era and their bloodbaths, but also the diplomatic history. The Soviet position contending with both Germany and Japan as potential enemies underscores the need to 'globalise' one's perspective.

Sources for Stalin allow for a much easier reconstruction of his day to day meetings and decisions, whereas such sources for Hitler were destroyed down to fragments; there are only a few surviving protocols of the situation conferences, only a limited selection of the 'table talk' (and many of these were composed weeks later by Bormann acolytes, so may not be a fully reliable guide to Hitler's actual thinking), and so on. Biographers of Hitler have not yet presented the thick description of Hitler's known decisions, meetings and moments. Kershaw for example did not make use of the Heinz Linge appointments calendar which survives for much of 1943 - a crucial year with many key turning points, especially the fall of Mussolini. The default tendency is to rely on Goebbels' diaries and not to integrate the meetings with other ministers and Reichsleiter or Gauleiter, and to not know how to deal with the military and economic conferences which clearly predominated the war years.

For the mid-war years, Hitler's public appearances were largely photographs and maybe some newsreel clips of him meeting foreign dignitaries or awarding medals - and this appears to be too trivial for some biographers to integrate. But it clearly matters that Hitler did award a medal to Leon Degrelle, and it also matters whether other decisions were ever taken about occupied Belgium, or the other occupied countries, and how Hitler via Ribbentrop and others related to the crumbling Axis alliance as well as the neutrals.

There's a lot of such evidence lying about, e.g. this photo of Michael Wittmann being awarded the Swords to the Knight's Cross on February 2, 1944
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_W ... Hitler.jpg

Such evidence needs to be put into context, i.e. cross-checked against the press, and indeed the press plus newsreels deserve more attention for what they indicate about the public activities of Nazi political leaders. One gets a sense of that largely only with biographies of Goebbels and some recent studies of Speer, not for the leadership as a whole, and not for Hitler's role. Did that photo of Wittman and Hitler appear in the press? Probably, but nobody bothers much to track these details down when writing hagiographies of German military personnel, any more than studies of British tanks might highlight how often King George, Churchill and others inspected different armoured units.

There are also unused sources in foreign diplomatic records, especially the Swiss embassy and attaches in Berlin for the war years. These plus the numerous Berlin diarists were plugged in to gossip networks about the military and political leadership as well as Hitler himself. Some of the gossip was amusingly wrong, but a lot rings true or offers additional insights into the overall trajectory. This can be even more amusing with some of the agents/spies; one of the more voluminous spies passing information on to the Swiss reported Hitler appearing all over Europe for big conferences in Norway etc, accompanied by Keitel, which was clearly inaccurate information based on Hitler's known movements. But it would matter whether Keitel et al had indeed taken trips away from Rastenburg or Berchtesgaden, and how often ministers and Reichsleiter went on inspection tours or conducted foreign trips.

The thick description of what Hitler actually did on a day to day basis ultimately matters if one is to assemble a full picture of his life and career as national leader, and highlight patterns. We already know Hitler gave very few speeches in 1943-44 but he did appear in photos etc in the press. Acting as head of state and congratulating war heroes, and intervening to sack people, all counts. Some of that was fulfilling a proper leadership function, some of that reflected bad tendencies to sack generals for failures he himself had helped bring about by refusing to accept battlefield realities. If one only compiled pictures of Hitler awarding medals to Waffen-SS men and ignored the sackings of Army generals, that would be distorted, but arguably it's also true the other way around. There's little doubt that Hitler was an inspiring national leader who could motivate great tactical performances in the right circumstances, and continue to inspire tactical commanders and men. And he did a better job as a director of operations than is sometimes acknowledged in postwar generals' memoirs. But... he lost the war.
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Archie
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Archie »

SanityCheck wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:39 pm - Kershaw's biography of Hitler explicitly rejects discussing Hitler in terms of evil, as this is a moral category/judgement and not historical
- one could however write an interesting comparative study of how Hitler and Nazism have been constructed since the 1930s as evil, beyond the pale, etc, the catch being that different societies would not actually agree as much on the Holocaust being the decisive factor. For Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society, the decisive factor would be the war.
I don't have a full copy of it, but from the title and the online samples Kershaw's book seems quite negative on Hitler, and I would assume it's more Holocaust-focused than the older books. Stolfi certainly seems to think Kershaw passes moral judgments.

Kershaw himself is careful to reassure his readers in his introduction that he won't be favorable to Hitler.
A feasible inbuilt danger in any biographical approach is that it demands a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration. The pages which follow must stand witness to the avoidance of this risk. Perhaps, in fact, it is even the case that comprehensive repulsion more than the possibility of sympathy poses the greater drawback to insight.
I can't really imagine a biographer of e.g. FDR saying something like that.
- Hitler's personality generally takes a back seat to his function as a charismatic leader. I am not sure that dwelling on whether he read his entire library or not is especially telling or indeed much emphasised in all mainstream works.
I think if he had a large library and is described by many contemporaries as being a voracious reader, this should be acknowledged, not spun so as to denigrate his intellect for petty reasons. It's taking a positive (particularly relative to modern politicians like Trump and Harris, lol) and trying to spin it in a negative way. I've seen this with his war record as well.
Richard Breitman called Maser's biography of Adolf Hitler "the least reliable among the major biographies" and criticized Maser for giving credence to Hitler's alleged familiarity with many classics, preferring Robert G. L. Waite's depiction of Hitler as someone who "perused various sources for specific information to reinforce his own views".
Breitman/Waite seem like they are trying to play down his reading here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Maser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hit ... te_library
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by curioussoul »

SanityCheck wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:39 pm-National Socialism as a political ideology was rooted in its time and place; it was never an ideology to be fully exported, since the core of it was German ethnonationalism. After the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945, the strategic premises for aiming for national expansion in Europe or the creation of a German-led empire vanished entirely. Empire and Lebensraum were absolutely at the core of National Socialism and the raison d'etre for the 1930s armaments build-up. No state can hope to repeat such expansion without triggering a massive response through to nuclear war. German society and its economy have also fundamentally changed; very little of what the Nazis enacted practically has any relevance to the contemporary world, or was done and dusted back then. German historians have debated how much Nazism modernised Germany, and found various examples where this was true, e.g. introducing the Latin script instead of Gothic, or which can be fitted into social welfare state trajectories (the 1942 iteration of the Mutterschutzgesetz, the DAF and its projects for mass tourism, consumerism, housing and motor cars) which continue to this day. Economic recovery in the 1930s looks feeble compared to the Wirtschaftswunder and post-1945 decades of European and German economic growth (which then stalled in the 1970s). The national and international economic orders are simply too different for anything Hitler did after 1933 to have any chance of meaningful success. The autobahns have long been built!
Most of the above is just nonsense. It's true that National Socialism probably could never have been successfully exported globally as a political ideology because of its deep roots in German ethnonationalism and European-style enlightenment philosophy, but the idea that National Socialism was rendered useless as an ideology by 'modernism' and economic developments post-WWII is idiotic. Many of the major civilizational problems facing European countries today, such as low birth rates, mass immigration and cultural decay, are the result of global developments that were antithetical to National Socialist beliefs and would have never taken place if Germany remained a global power broker under a National Socialist regime. Economically, the National Socialist government navigated through and established the rules of engagement for a nationalist state in a rapidly growing globalized economy. The modern global economy is largely the result of the outcome of WWII and the establishment of the U.S. as the world's 'police' and guarantor of global trading routes and shipping lanes. We do not know what the global economy would necessarily look like if Germany won the war and imposed its nationalist beliefs in geopolitics. The idea that 'empire' and 'Lebensraum' was at the very heart of the ideology of National Socialism itself is furthermore very ill-informed. Hitler sought to avoid another war in Europe while balancing the German aspirations of reclaiming land lost after WWI with the more ideologically rooted aspirations of uniting the Germanic parts of Europe in a quasi-political union led by Germany. Given the virtual insigificance of Europe in the global geopolitical landscape today, I think a lot of people would agree that this outlook on the future of Europe as a global force to be reckoned with was quite foresighted. In that regard, Goebbels' prophetic plea to the Western powers that "das Abendland ist in Gefahr" ("the West is in danger") couldn't ring more true. In fact, it might be argued that the defeat of Germany was essentially the implicit defeat of the Western world, the nation state, and the enlightenment values that underpinned National Socialism as a political movement, as authors such as Lawrence Birken have argued.
Right wing populism has been infinitely more successful in the 21st Century than hardcore neo-Nazism, at least in terms of mobilising political support. But no populist party has really been fully tested, certainly calls for repatriation have not. And non-populist governments can be as vigorous now in enforcing borders and immigration - Poland's border with Belarus has been practically militarised, while Germany has just effectively abandoned the Schengen free movement agreement. The issues arising from increased migration will only sharpen and will require a very different response to the introduction of immigration restrictions in the 1900s-1930s in the UK, US and Europe. The upswings are going to be better explained by bright shiny things attracting people north, labour market requirements due to declining populations in advanced post-industrial societies, climate change and civil wars elsewhere in the world, rather than whatever is currently being babbled on X.
That might be due to the fact that "hardcore neo-Nazism" is literally illegal or borderline-illegal in many European countries, and in the countries where National Socialism is not outright banned, many of its symbols or beliefs are. And where it's not directly illegal to support National Socialism, it has been taught to generations of children as the most backwards and evil ideology in human history, one based solely on the mass murder and genocide of Jews. There's an argument to be made that the entire ethos of post-WWII liberal democracy in Western Europe is to avoid another Holocaust. The "right wing populism" you tout as being "inifinitely more successful" is only more successful in the sense that it exists, the same way democratic socialism and communism exist, because there are almost no significant parallels between "right wing populism" and National Socialism. National Socialism was a revolutionary, anti-democratic and antisemitic ideology. Right wing populism is merely conservatism with some anti-immigration sentiments sprinkled on top.
Last edited by curioussoul on Mon Nov 04, 2024 3:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by curioussoul »

Archie wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2024 10:46 pm
Richard Breitman called Maser's biography of Adolf Hitler "the least reliable among the major biographies" and criticized Maser for giving credence to Hitler's alleged familiarity with many classics, preferring Robert G. L. Waite's depiction of Hitler as someone who "perused various sources for specific information to reinforce his own views".
One can't help but note the overrepresentation of Jews among the ranks of Hitler biographers. That, surely, has had an impact on the objectivity, or lack thereof, of retellings of his life and works. I think it was Dr. Andrew Joyce who wrote about the problem of Jews defining antisemitism, defining fascism, and Jews essentially writing their own lachrymose history and dominating the field of Jewish historiography to an almost comical extent.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by SanityCheck »

Archie wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2024 10:46 pm
SanityCheck wrote: Thu Oct 31, 2024 8:39 pm - Kershaw's biography of Hitler explicitly rejects discussing Hitler in terms of evil, as this is a moral category/judgement and not historical
- one could however write an interesting comparative study of how Hitler and Nazism have been constructed since the 1930s as evil, beyond the pale, etc, the catch being that different societies would not actually agree as much on the Holocaust being the decisive factor. For Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society, the decisive factor would be the war.
I don't have a full copy of it, but from the title and the online samples Kershaw's book seems quite negative on Hitler, and I would assume it's more Holocaust-focused than the older books. Stolfi certainly seems to think Kershaw passes moral judgments.

Kershaw himself is careful to reassure his readers in his introduction that he won't be favorable to Hitler.
A feasible inbuilt danger in any biographical approach is that it demands a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration. The pages which follow must stand witness to the avoidance of this risk. Perhaps, in fact, it is even the case that comprehensive repulsion more than the possibility of sympathy poses the greater drawback to insight.
I can't really imagine a biographer of e.g. FDR saying something like that.
- Hitler's personality generally takes a back seat to his function as a charismatic leader. I am not sure that dwelling on whether he read his entire library or not is especially telling or indeed much emphasised in all mainstream works.
I think if he had a large library and is described by many contemporaries as being a voracious reader, this should be acknowledged, not spun so as to denigrate his intellect for petty reasons. It's taking a positive (particularly relative to modern politicians like Trump and Harris, lol) and trying to spin it in a negative way. I've seen this with his war record as well.
Richard Breitman called Maser's biography of Adolf Hitler "the least reliable among the major biographies" and criticized Maser for giving credence to Hitler's alleged familiarity with many classics, preferring Robert G. L. Waite's depiction of Hitler as someone who "perused various sources for specific information to reinforce his own views".
Breitman/Waite seem like they are trying to play down his reading here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Maser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hit ... te_library
It is very difficult to be positive 'overall' about Hitler when considering how he fought WWII, even if one is only interested in purely strategic and operational matters. While the chorus of generals and others in the regime criticising him need to be treated critically and with a certain skepticism since blaming the now dead Fuehrer was an easy out, the fact remains that somewhere between 1939 and 1945 Hitler made some extremely bad decisions *for his own cause* as well as *for Germany*.

It's also difficult to be positive about a dictator who suspends political pluralism, freedom of speech and the rule of law. This also goes for absolute monarchs in the modern era. Dictators and absolute monarchs have to be overthrown or replaced by someone else when they die, and ideally replaced by a more normal system. The class of dictators and absolute monarchs in the 19th to 21st Centuries is quite large: Louis Napoleon, Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Idi Amin, Mao, and many more. One party states are rarely a good idea, and they all failed in the Cold War to keep place with pluralist societies. China after transitioning from communism to a form of capitalism is so far the main real exception to the pattern.

Very few biographies of dictators or absolute monarchs written outside those dictatorships are especially 'positive', mainly because default pluralism and basic liberalism will find fault with them, as they also do with semi-authoritarians and indeed the liberals of the past when they turned out to be censorious, corrupt or just stupid, or indeed overly aggressive and launching foreign wars as a distraction (a theme right through to at least Dubya and beyond).

The 'can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' abstraction of whether a dictator was a Great Man emerges fairly clearly with Stalin. As the USSR was on the winning side of WWII, this is 'balanced' in the minds not only of contemporary Russian nationalists but implicitly everyone when weighing up his overall rule. Germany and the Axis coalition went to war with the Soviet Union because they saw it as an active menace and needed to be stopped. Their methods for doing so were so screwed up they made the world's greatest mass murderer up to 1941 look like a sympathetic figure. Britain and the US decided in 1941 that the USSR was the lesser of two evils - and this determined the ultimate outcome of the war. But we know that Britain and France came within weeks of bombing the Soviet Union (the Baku plan) and that their dilatoriness in 1939 in seeking an alliance with the USSR stemmed from the general opposition to Bolshevism in the interwar period and 1930s. And when WWII was over, containment of communism became the basic stance of the US and its allies, thus the Cold War.

Stalin and Hitler are frequently compared - Alan Bullock is not the only one to have written their biographies as parallel lives. One way or another they were duelling from the 1930s onwards, both also contended with Japan, the US, Britain and other European states and leaders, but the central turning point of the 20th Century was the conflict between Hitler and Stalin and struggle for control. Hitler lost that struggle, in part because his regime was a personalist dictatorship, despite reusing old elites and institutions and having a party. The dysfunction in National Socialist Germany led to bad decisions, and the loss of millions of lives. The dysfunction in the Soviet Union under Stalin led to the loss of even more lives, but produced victory and won control of a security glacis which was maintained up to 1989.

Stalin and Hitler, like Churchill but unlike Roosevelt, were all writers and authors as well as public speakers. Hitler failed to get into art school and Stalin dropped out of a seminary. Only Churchill completed officer training at Sandhurst, thus completed a form of tertiary/professional education. But all were autodidacts and Stalin an especially accomplished one, since he was able to contribute to Marxism-Leninism. Much of this was waffle, but some of his observations were perfectly sound (Stalin's 1920s definition of nationalism sounds quite reasonable at first glance). Churchill became a journalist and from there learned how to be a semi-decent historian, including of his own political career and premiership in the six volume history of the war/his autobiography.

Hitler's reading and consumption of culture wasn't enforced on German academia or culture in quite the same way that Stalin's tastes often were. The battles over what was acceptable culture and indeed the past involved other leading Nazis. Who were generally better educated at least in formal terms (Himmler studying agriculture taught him management), but some of them were utter cranks (Himmler!). Rosenberg and Goebbels both had very different attitudes to various art forms and fought like cats and dogs about this. Hitler just liked his Wagner operas and was a bit miffed to realise most of the Gauleiter and Party leaders didn't actually share his tastes.

There's complete agreement that Hitler could absorb a lot of information and was especially well informed about armaments systems. He certainly learned on the job about overseeing military operations (with some serious limitations when the tide turned against Germany). And he was certainly not ignorant of German history, culture, and various aspects of science. BUT his curiosity about the wider world was often extremely blinkered.

From 1920 to 1945, with the sole interruption being his spell in prison, Hitler was working a full-time job leading a political party then a government. He still managed to find time to read books, but it would have been a miracle if he had much time to digest them all. He wrote two books in the 1920s, but as things became more hectic, he was clearly more dependent on newspapers and briefing papers, with the greater inclination being towards face to face meetings or in small groups. Then from the 1930s to 1940s he spent many evenings giving monologues to his inner circle over tea, at dinner and well into the small hours of the morning. This is so well attested as to be basically indisputable. Unsurprisingly he could hardly unwind with endless books - yet still managed to find time to read about Frederick the Great in 1945 in the Berlin bunker. So reading for pleasure was something he could do, and one can track references to it. But most of the time he was clearly in the moment making political, diplomatic and military decisions.

It's doubtful that other national leaders had much time to keep up with their reading when running their respective dictatorships or democracies. Stalin had time to edit manuscripts and do writing in the 1930s, but that seems to have flown out of the window once things really hotted up.

In the grand scheme of things, 'was a bit of a shallow reader' seems the least of Hitler's problems and one of the least significant criticisms to make of him.

As for Hitler's WWI record: while some might have niggled about this the consensus is he was a brave soldier who earned his medals. The bigger criticisms are those now outlined, convincingly, by Wolfram Pyta, which are that his military perspective was fatally influenced by a WWI fortress mentality. Given the stand-fast orders, the investment in the Atlantic Wall and other defense lines, the 'Fester Plaetze' order in 1944 and ensuing loss of countless divisions in 'fortresses' in the east and west, this is far from unjustified, even if advocates of mobile warfare like von Manstein often oversold the virtues of this mode of warfare compared to the ability to hold proper lines. The fact was that from 1943 the Germans did not have the strength to hold any lines for prolonged periods or against determined assaults, as they lacked the operational reserves to shore up any breaches in their lines.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by SanityCheck »

curioussoul wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 2:09 am Most of the above is just nonsense. It's true that National Socialism probably could never have been successfully exported globally as a political ideology because of its deep roots in German ethnonationalism and European-style enlightenment philosophy, but the idea that National Socialism was rendered useless as an ideology by 'modernism' and economic developments post-WWII is idiotic. Many of the major civilizational problems facing European countries today, such as low birth rates, mass immigration and cultural decay, are the result of global developments that were antithetical to National Socialist beliefs and would have never taken place if Germany remained a global power broker under a National Socialist regime. Economically, the National Socialist government navigated through and established the rules of engagement for a nationalist state in a rapidly growing globalized economy. The modern global economy is largely the result of the outcome of WWII and the establishment of the U.S. as the world's 'police' and guarantor of global trading routes and shipping lanes. We do not know what the global economy would necessarily look like if Germany won the war and imposed its nationalist beliefs in geopolitics. The idea that 'empire' and 'Lebensraum' was at the very heart of the ideology of National Socialism itself is furthermore very ill-informed. Hitler sought to avoid another war in Europe while balancing the German aspirations of reclaiming land lost after WWI with the more ideologically rooted aspirations of uniting the Germanic parts of Europe in a quasi-political union led by Germany. Given the virtual insigificance of Europe in the global geopolitical landscape today, I think a lot of people would agree that this outlook on the future of Europe as a global force to be reckoned with was quite foresighted.
European dominance was already significantly undermined by the bloodletting of the First World War; this also started in motion various trends which led to the end of European colonial empires. Wilhelmine Germany had very few colonies and these were shared out easily enough as 'mandates', the key issue was whether the British, French, Dutch and Belgian colonial empires could be sustained. It turned out that they could not.

Some of that was down to the contingent events of 1940. Rapid defeat in western Europe coupled with the German-Japanese alliance undermined European colonial empires in Asia, starting with the Japanese occupation of Indochina, and climaxing in 1941-2. African colonies were not affected by this but all were given up around 1960, with only Portugal clinging on to Angloa and Mozambique until the mid-1970s, around the same time as Portugal and Spain ceased being dictatorships.

There were already extensive movements agitating for national liberation and thus decolonisation in the interwar era. Gandhi and the Congress Party of India ring any bells? Many British and French colonies contributed their share to their imperial war efforts in WWII as they had in WWI - Algerian troops were used in Italy, France and Germany, just as African troops were used in Burma, yet in Kenya and Algeria there were significant anti-colonial uprisings in the 1950s.

European prosperity rested on a combination of industrialisation of western and central Europe together with the ability to import foodstuffs either from Eastern Europe or from colonial or semi-colonial regions elsewhere in the world. The Great Depression and slump in trade did not help manufacturing, food continued to be imported up to WWII. After 1945, both western and eastern Europe became remarkably successful in developing industry while western Europe solved the food supply issue with the 'green revolution' in agriculture. Suddenly there were EEC food mountains and surpluses. The secular trend towards a smaller agricultural sector continued.

Nazi economics contended with agriculture, land and questions of settlement to a far greater degree than is ususally realised if one focuses on armaments and the autobahns. Germany was still a significantly agrarian society, especially compared to Britain whose agricultural workforce had shrunk drastically by the 1930s. Most European societies were similar: agrarian.

Settlement dynamics and population economics influenced Nazi policies of annexation around the borders of the Greater German Reich and underpinned the longer-term logic of conquering *and colonising* the Soviet Union in its European part. This vision was central to Hitler's writings in the 1920s and was not forgotten through to the 1940s. Hitler repeatedly noted the unfairness of German population densities being so markedly higher than those of other major European powers: he did not just want to gather in Germans but also to acquire land for them. That meant expelling non-Germans which irrefutably began in late 1939, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were transferred from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union.

If Hitler had been born later, he would not have obsessed over the land/population issue as he would be growing up in a post-1945 world where agricultural productivity had shot through the roof. The ongoing problems of ensuring proper agricultural productivity undermined the Soviet Union, which was forced to import grain at various times from elsewhere in the world. Some East Bloc countries did okay, like Poland, setting up a smoother transition towards EU integration after 1990. Today, Poland continues to export a fair amount of agricultural products while still retaining an industrial sector.

So the basic economic premises of National Socialism evaporated by the 1970s. They belong to a bygone era.
In that regard, Goebbels' prophetic plea to the Western powers that "das Abendland ist in Gefahr" ("the West is in danger") couldn't ring more true. In fact, it might be argued that the defeat of Germany was essentially the implicit defeat of the Western world, the nation state, and the enlightenment values that underpinned National Socialism as a political movement, as authors such as Lawrence Birken have argued.
One problem here is the 'Enlightenment' is a historiographical construct, as J.C.D. Clark has argued in a recent book. I have been meaning to read Clark's full book and now will also review Birken's arguments on this matter.

The bigger problem is the utter failure of National Socialist Germany to provide proper leadership of 'Europe'. They were extremely well placed to do so in 1941, following the pivotal victories in 1940 which meant that essentially the whole of continental Europe was under direct German rule or had gravitated to the German side one way or another. The 'crusade against Bolshevism' had a considerable popularity as an idea across Axis and Axis-sympathising Europe, but the failure to fully incorporate the peoples of the Soviet Union and callousness of invasion and occupation policies was conspicuous. Pretty much all Axis states urged Germany and Hitler to pursue more conciliatory policies in the Soviet Union, as did the nationalists in the Baltic and Ukraine, as did much of the German Army leadership, as eventually did Goebbels.

In hindsight, the 'New Order' proclaimed in 1940 was too underdeveloped to mount a successful campaign to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941: there was simply not enough military force, mechanisation, air power and logistical capability, especially considering how weak the Axis contingents were. Their expansion for the 1942 campaign ensured Germany's defeat on the Volga and Don. Pure imperial overstretch.

So if 'Europe' was to be saved, then holding a defensive line against potential Soviet aggression was needed in conjunction with knocking the British Empire out of the war, i.e. the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern strategy which was semi-seriously considered in 1940-41, and certainly advocated by various advisors. Fighting the war they were actually in rather than the war that was fantasised would have been a real start.

But one can go back to 1938-1939 and observe that Germany had expanded successfully and recovered its economic strength while also rearming to a level ensuring it could defend itself, and wonder why the intransigence over Danzig and Poland. From an anti-Bolshevik perspective, convincingly soliciting Poland and Romania as allies against the Soviet Union required postponing the expansion of German territory and bringing ethnic Germans in Poland into the national fold. There were equally large ethnic German minorities in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia; all of these states needed to be on Germany's side and not simply subjugated. There was ongoing fairly successful economic diplomacy going on to yoke southeastern Europe to the German economy through trade deals and via cultural influence, which was further reorienting the European economy away from the 'Atlanticist' states towards a European order. Certainly the potential was there to have a bigger bloc than the Central Powers of WWI (which was not a viable power bloc in military-economic terms, as it was economically crushed in WWI).

Hitler then crossed a red line with the annexation of the Czech lands in March 1939, at a time when he was actively pressuring Poland and when the forced emigration of Jews had ramped up significantly. This was really the moment when appeals to 'Europe' ring most hollow, since National Socialist Germany began a process of treating other Europeans as colonial subjects - something that is frankly undeniable, since it was repeated even more viciously in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and then inflicted on former equal status allies like Italy.

Thus it's more persuasive to view 1914-1945 as 'the European civil war' and to note how several powers involved, especially National Socialist Germany, ended up erasing fellow European nation-states (especially Poland), undermining every occasion where a pan-European solidarity might have developed further, and generally conducting themselves in such an arrogant and violent fashion as to alienate an entire continent.
Right wing populism has been infinitely more successful in the 21st Century than hardcore neo-Nazism, at least in terms of mobilising political support. But no populist party has really been fully tested, certainly calls for repatriation have not. And non-populist governments can be as vigorous now in enforcing borders and immigration - Poland's border with Belarus has been practically militarised, while Germany has just effectively abandoned the Schengen free movement agreement. The issues arising from increased migration will only sharpen and will require a very different response to the introduction of immigration restrictions in the 1900s-1930s in the UK, US and Europe. The upswings are going to be better explained by bright shiny things attracting people north, labour market requirements due to declining populations in advanced post-industrial societies, climate change and civil wars elsewhere in the world, rather than whatever is currently being babbled on X.
That might be due to the fact that "hardcore neo-Nazism" is literally illegal or borderline-illegal in many European countries, and in the countries where National Socialism is not outright banned, many of its symbols or beliefs are. And where it's not directly illegal to support National Socialism, it has been taught to generations of children as the most backwards and evil ideology in human history, one based solely on the mass murder and genocide of Jews. There's an argument to be made that the entire ethos of post-WWII liberal democracy in Western Europe is to avoid another Holocaust. The "right wing populism" you tout as being "inifinitely more successful" is only more successful in the sense that it exists, the same way democratic socialism and communism exist, because there are almost no significant parallels between "right wing populism" and National Socialism. National Socialism was a revolutionary, anti-democratic and antisemitic ideology. Right wing populism is merely conservatism with some anti-immigration sentiments sprinkled on top.
The irrelevance of Nazism to the current era is further illustrated by technological and social change, some revolutionary and some secular/long-term. To quote you from earlier in your reply:
Many of the major civilizational problems facing European countries today, such as low birth rates, mass immigration and cultural decay, are the result of global developments that were antithetical to National Socialist beliefs and would have never taken place if Germany remained a global power broker under a National Socialist regime.
I'm afraid low birth rates reflect a secular change in advanced industrial societies. This is CLEARLY visible with South Korea and Japan, which are otherwise very ethnically homogeneous and which provide two contrasting cases of modernisation having the same end results. Japan modernised and industrialised earlier, and treated Korea as a colony, then after the Korean War, South Korea was able to modernise and industrialise very successfully. Both now have sub-replacement levels of fertility.

Pro-natalist policies were widely adopted in interwar Europe, certainly in Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union but also echoed elsewhere. It took until after 1945 for France to experience a proper baby boom and population growth in the trentes glorieuses, with immigration forming only part of the cause of this growth. French population growth from 1870-1945 was almost flat because of dividing agricultural estates, discouraging farmers from having more sons who stood to inherit.

Pro-natalist policies made only modest boosts to fertility.

The 1960s brought the pill - and Nazi Germany was ALL about contraception and tolerating premarital safe sex - but also jet travel. Tertiary education expanded everywhere and became a source of invisible earnings if marketed globally, as did tourism! All trends which have clear roots in the pre-1945 period but which became more and more significant in the postwar era.

The bigger problem is the general modernisation of European societies around the axis of motor vehicles. 1930s Germany had a much lower rate of car ownership than did France and Britain at this time; this wasn't just the result of redirecting vehicle production to military and state purposes, it reflected the fact that for all the amazing achievements in Germany during the second industrial revolution (chemical industries etc), it was simply a less wealthy, less 'advanced' and more agrarian society. The Nazis knew this and were promising German workers the Volkswagen. Those continued in production after 1945 firstly to equip British military police in the BAOR, then to satisfy the pent-up consumer demand for cars along with all the other cool products of post-1945 advanced societies: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and more.

This is why I said that National Socialism was modernising Germany in ways that can "be fitted into social welfare state trajectories (the 1942 iteration of the Mutterschutzgesetz, the DAF and its projects for mass tourism, consumerism, housing and motor cars)." Some like the Mutterschutzgesetz went back to Bismarck, like old age pensions and other Wilhelmine innovations.

Cars, tourism and consumerism were demonstrably collective - and also rationed - in the Third Reich but became more group-oriented and individualised in post-1945 societies. Package holidays were innovated around 1950 on a commercial basis - they're an evolution from the KdF cruises of the 1930s and the parallel collectively organised tourism of communist countries.

How long could a collectivist society persist while everything was modernising? The East Bloc gives us something of an answer: maybe forty years, one or two generations, and that is if one is starting from a less advanced place.

Germany lost the war because of a lack of oil supply, despite seizing and controlling oil being a major component of Hitler's strategy (aiming to conquer the Caucasus). But also because its engine, vehicle and aviation industries were outproduced by the Allies, and lacked a depth of support from Axis industries or other European economies which could be exploited effectively. The French economy was much more heavily dependent on oil imports to run a larger fleet of motor vehicles; without the oil, the economy suffered. Conversely, the Allies won WWII in part because they controlled oil supplies in the Middle East over and above domestic production in the USSR and USA, and achieved massive economies of scale with engine, vehicle and aviation industries.

The counterfactual of what-if-National-Socialist-Germany-had-survived has to be dialled back to October 1938 to at the latest February 1939 if one is to consider how it might have persisted into the 1960s or beyond. Anything after 1939 involves war, and barring a few contingent forks in the road, like what if Germany had pursued the Mediterranean strategy and conquered the Middle East, that foredoomed National Socialist Germany to eventual defeat. But not, one hastens to add, the destruction of the machine tool park that despite dismantling and reparations was still larger in 1945 than had been the case in the 1930s, and which was then put to good use fuelling West German exports and domestic consumption in the Wirtschaftswunder.

The Wirtschaftwunder was in turn fuelled by the extra labour power of expellees from East Prussia, Silesia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, along with the steady brain and brawn drain from the DDR up to the Berlin Wall going up in 1961. The Wall stabilised East Germany and allowed it a decade plus of growth and relative prosperity with all the same consumer goods becoming available there, just at a slower more rationed pace.

Keeping the Wirtschaftswunder going meant importing Gastarbeiter, and it was former Nazi civil servants who did some of the planning there. The decision to invite Turks in rested on the colossally naive assumption that these were guest workers and they would go home when no longer needed. The Nazis had of course forcibly imported 8-9 million foreign workers during WWII, with over 7 million in autumn 1944, expanding prewar trends of seasonal labour and cross-border workforces from Poland and the Netherlands. Italian workers were also a Thing from the 1930s onwards, and there was a continued economic migration in postwar West Germany from Italy.

One can wonder what would have happened if Nazi Germany had been at peace from 1938 to the 1960s; whether the investments of the 1940s into extra machine tools would have happened at the same pace, whether the crucial industries in the west of the country would have expanded so fast. In this counterfactual, Germany does keep Silesia and its coal fields but has to export more to import the oil and fuel needed to maintain the advanced car-centric economy it would have had. Or Germany falls behind France and Britain still further and remains underdeveloped. Are the synthetic fuel plants economically viable? In the medium term maybe not, or maybe the output is reserved for the Me-262s it develops a bit more slowly later into the 1940s, and the battleships which were ordered in 1939 but unfinished. So National Socialist Germany has to negotiate with either communist or Islamic countries to access the closest major sources of oil, since the oil fields of Poland, Romania and Hungary are not going to be enough.

A 'National Socialist Europe', whether overtly imperial or including genuine alliances of equals, was never going to succeed, I'm afraid. The track record from 1939-1945 says otherwise; everybody hated the Germans in their Nazi incarnation by the end of the war, and hated them often more than they hated the already much loathed communists.

But I do think it would behove those inclined to what-if fantasies to consider reading more on the post-1945 world, as this might correct some misconceptions. 'Hitler would have done it differently' cannot explain away change forever, since eventually the man born in 1889 would have died, long before his 100th birthday and continued false sightings of him in a Brazilian jungle or Neuschwabenland.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Nazgul »

SanityCheck wrote: Tue Nov 05, 2024 6:12 pm That might be due to the fact that "hardcore neo-Nazism" is literally illegal or borderline-illegal in many European countries, and in the countries where National Socialism is not outright banned, many of its symbols or beliefs are. And where it's not directly illegal to support National Socialism, it has been taught to generations of children as the most backwards and evil ideology in human history, one based solely on the mass murder and genocide of Jews.
Neo Nazism is hardly Nationalsozialismus. Quite the opposite in fact. The new bogeyman perhaps.
A 'National Socialist Europe', whether overtly imperial or including genuine alliances of equals, was never going to succeed, I'm afraid. The track record from 1939-1945 says otherwise; everybody hated the Germans in their Nazi incarnation by the end of the war, and hated them often more than they hated the already much loathed communists.
It was the Bolshevik Jews they were fighting, trying to save Europe. Even Putin admitted the majority of the early Bolshevik movement were Juden. Sadly in a war of annihilation the worst of people comes to the fore.
But I do think it would behove those inclined to what-if fantasies to consider reading more on the post-1945 world, as this might correct some misconceptions. 'Hitler would have done it differently' cannot explain away change forever, since eventually the man born in 1889 would have died, long before his 100th birthday and continued false sightings of him in a Brazilian jungle or Neuschwabenland.
Hitler created Hitlerism, which even Churchill acknowleded. Nationalsozialismus died June 30th, 1934, Unternehmen Kolibri, along with the Sturmabteilung. Strasserismus tried to fill the hiatus but failed. Keep in mind that Nationalsozialismus started as a German labour party, the German Workers Party, socialist in character. It is debatable whether der Führer held those principles as a light in the dark.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Strode »

I have read Stolfi's book, and it is an excellent rebuttal to all the biographies he mentioned, in particular Kershaw's which he quotes throughout the book.
One book I can recommend is Hitler's National Socialism by Rainer Zitelmann. It provides something close to a fair overview of Hitler's political thought, which would quickly refute a poster in this thread who insinuates National Socialism was mainly about Lebensraum. A much shorter work on the same topic, which could serve as a primer is Hitler as Philosophe by Lawrence Birken.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Archie »

Strode wrote: Sat Nov 16, 2024 6:26 am I have read Stolfi's book, and it is an excellent rebuttal to all the biographies he mentioned, in particular Kershaw's which he quotes throughout the book.
One book I can recommend is Hitler's National Socialism by Rainer Zitelmann. It provides something close to a fair overview of Hitler's political thought, which would quickly refute a poster in this thread who insinuates National Socialism was mainly about Lebensraum. A much shorter work on the same topic, which could serve as a primer is Hitler as Philosophe by Lawrence Birken.
Thanks for your informed comments, Strode.

Kershaw's book seems to be considered the gold standard among mainstream academics. Judging from the index, it does seem Stolfi discusses Kershaw by far the most. Toland and Maser are discussed relatively less, which is partly why I'm inclined to think those are a bit more balanced (even if still "wanting" in some ways).

The Simms book (which I listed but did not discuss) seems to have more coverage of Hitler's political thought than most of the others.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-revi ... 43UL8HRCSL
Spoiler
An interesting contrarian biography of Hitler. A good read, but not for those without a prior background in the subject. This is a political biography and not in any way an account of his personal life.

In the beginning the author outlines three points he intends to develop:

1. “Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism”
2. “Hitler’s view of the German Volk–even when purged of Jews and other ‘undesirables’–was highly ambivalent, reflecting a sense of inferiority by comparison with the ‘Anglo-Saxons”
3. “we have–for very understandable reasons–focused too much on Hitler’s murderous ‘negative eugenics’ against the Jews and other ‘undesirables’ and not enough on what he regarded as his ‘positive eugenics’, which were designed to ‘elevate’ the German people to the level of their British and American rivals."

The second and third points are used mainly to support the first.

Most biographies of Hitler have looked east to the Soviet Union and focused on his obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism” as the primary driver of his beliefs and actions. This biography looks west and presents Hitler’s perception of Anglo-America, global capitalism and the generations of German immigrants that made such a vital contribution to America (to the detriment of Germany) as the primary driver of his beliefs and actions.
The author brings to light a great deal of important information either neglected or omitted in other works on Hitler. There is a wealth of new material here that is critical in understanding Hitler and how the evil he unleashed developed. But in swinging the pendulum west, the author neglects the role the Soviet Union and communism played in Hitler’s thinking and planning. What is needed here is also needed in other biographies – a balance that looks both east and west for an explanation of Hitler. This in no way diminishes the important information the author presents. But the reader should be aware that both east and west were significant factors in Hitler’s thinking and planning and that there is more to the story than what is presented here (or in any other single biography). This focus west sometimes leads to some distortions (my opinion) regarding the weight the author places on Anglo American actions and the effect they had on the Nazi war effort (such as the impact of bombing and the campaign in North Africa) as compared with Soviet actions.

The original research the author did on the development of Hitler’s thinking from 1919 – 1925 is very impressive. He makes an attempt at finding a unifying thread in Hitler’s thinking / philosophy and gets off to a good start here. But at some point (probably around 1925) Hitler’s thinking is consumed by the pursuit of power and his “philosophy” becomes whatever fits a particular time and circumstance. What he says depends almost entirely on his audience and his intentions at that moment and can and often is completely disconnected from what has come before or will come after.

The author avoids rewriting much that has already been written exhaustively about Hitler. The use of Rosenberg’s writings is interesting (and a welcome relief from the same quotations from Goebbels). This is not just another rewriting of his life using the same information, same evidence, same stories. This will make the book very interesting for people who have already read much about Hitler. But on the opposite side, this is not an ideal book for someone who has not read other biographies of Hitler (Ian Kershaw’s “Hitler” is a much better starting point). The lack of information about the impact Albert Speer had on Hitler’s understanding of the United States is disappointing given Speer’s role in industrial reorganization / management. The same could be said of Joseph Goebbels’ role in the tension between those that looked east and those that looked west for a solution to the post 1941 failing war effort.

The reader should have some knowledge of the Third Reich and the Holocaust before reading this work (Richard Evan’s “The Third Reich in Power” and Henry Friedlander’s “The Origins of Nazi Genocide” are excellent). This is not a history of the Third Reich, the Holocaust or World War II – it is a political biography of Hitler. Since the author brings to light much about Hitler’s thinking regarding the United States and Britain, the reader should consider "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire" by Lawrence James, “The American West and the Nazi East” by Carol Kakel and “Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars" by Edward B. Westermann as excellent companions for this book. "Hitler's 'National Community': Society and Culture in Nazi Germany" by Lisa Pine would also be excellent to read with / after this biography.

Overall a good biography, definitely one with a different viewpoint. It has flaws like all biographies, but the different viewpoint makes it a worthwhile read with an important perspective.
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Archie
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Re: Hitler Biographies

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curioussoul wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 2:15 am
Archie wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2024 10:46 pm
Richard Breitman called Maser's biography of Adolf Hitler "the least reliable among the major biographies" and criticized Maser for giving credence to Hitler's alleged familiarity with many classics, preferring Robert G. L. Waite's depiction of Hitler as someone who "perused various sources for specific information to reinforce his own views".
One can't help but note the overrepresentation of Jews among the ranks of Hitler biographers. That, surely, has had an impact on the objectivity, or lack thereof, of retellings of his life and works. I think it was Dr. Andrew Joyce who wrote about the problem of Jews defining antisemitism, defining fascism, and Jews essentially writing their own lachrymose history and dominating the field of Jewish historiography to an almost comical extent.
Jews seem to write a lot about Hitler but they seem to gravitate more to meta-discussions rather than doing strict biography. For instance, something like Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of his Evil.

From Rosenbaum's preface,
It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question "Why?" The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about he explainers--about the eyes of the beholders--and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

The hopelessly confused and conflicting psychoanalytic modes (was it the bad father of the overprotective mother?). The "psychohistorical" (the discredited "Jewish blood" theory), the psychosexual (the largely discredited Geli Raubal rumors). The ideological (was Hitler's anti-Semitism the result of nineteenth-century German "racial science" or nineteen centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, or a fusion of both?). The theological (what do the savants of Holocaust theodicy--the search for a reason for ultimate evil in a universe supposedly ruled by a just and loving God--tell us?). And the metaphysical: What do we make of George Steiner's "threefold blackmail of transcendence"?

Not neglecting the disease models (Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's lifelong, unsupported belief that Hitler contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna). A sad symptom of the recurrent effort to find a Jew to blame, such as the Australian obsessive who wrote a tick book based upon the supposition that Ludwig Wittgenstein--probably, though not definitely, a classmate of Hitler in middle school and the product of a family that converted from Judaism to Christianity--was somehow to blame.

Or did it all come down to a mosquito bit (the deferred "psychopathic" symptomology of epidemic encephalitis, a disease Hitler supposedly contracted in the World War I trenches)? Just to name a few, examined skeptically herein.

Everyone seems to want to have one pet theory of Hitler, almost like a talisman against "the horror of inexplicability" as I call it.


And then some Jews like Claude Lanzmann have said that Hitler cannot be explained.
It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms Why have the Jews been killed? for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... 057-2094r/

Elie Wiesel said similar stuff. The Holocaust is this mystical, unknowable, incomprehensible thing. Blah, blah, blah.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Hektor »

Strode wrote: Sat Nov 16, 2024 6:26 am I have read Stolfi's book, and it is an excellent rebuttal to all the biographies he mentioned, in particular Kershaw's which he quotes throughout the book.
One book I can recommend is Hitler's National Socialism by Rainer Zitelmann. It provides something close to a fair overview of Hitler's political thought, which would quickly refute a poster in this thread who insinuates National Socialism was mainly about Lebensraum. A much shorter work on the same topic, which could serve as a primer is Hitler as Philosophe by Lawrence Birken.
Biographies are prone to eisegesis into the data that is remotely verifiable. In the case of Adolf Hitler it's probably more so the case than with other historical figures. If it can't be corroborated in the hard way, I started taking this with a grain of salt over time.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by curioussoul »

Archie wrote: Wed Nov 20, 2024 12:45 am
curioussoul wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2024 2:15 am
Archie wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2024 10:46 pm
One can't help but note the overrepresentation of Jews among the ranks of Hitler biographers. That, surely, has had an impact on the objectivity, or lack thereof, of retellings of his life and works. I think it was Dr. Andrew Joyce who wrote about the problem of Jews defining antisemitism, defining fascism, and Jews essentially writing their own lachrymose history and dominating the field of Jewish historiography to an almost comical extent.
Jews seem to write a lot about Hitler but they seem to gravitate more to meta-discussions rather than doing strict biography. For instance, something like Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of his Evil.

From Rosenbaum's preface,
It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question "Why?" The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about he explainers--about the eyes of the beholders--and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

The hopelessly confused and conflicting psychoanalytic modes (was it the bad father of the overprotective mother?). The "psychohistorical" (the discredited "Jewish blood" theory), the psychosexual (the largely discredited Geli Raubal rumors). The ideological (was Hitler's anti-Semitism the result of nineteenth-century German "racial science" or nineteen centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, or a fusion of both?). The theological (what do the savants of Holocaust theodicy--the search for a reason for ultimate evil in a universe supposedly ruled by a just and loving God--tell us?). And the metaphysical: What do we make of George Steiner's "threefold blackmail of transcendence"?

Not neglecting the disease models (Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal's lifelong, unsupported belief that Hitler contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna). A sad symptom of the recurrent effort to find a Jew to blame, such as the Australian obsessive who wrote a tick book based upon the supposition that Ludwig Wittgenstein--probably, though not definitely, a classmate of Hitler in middle school and the product of a family that converted from Judaism to Christianity--was somehow to blame.

Or did it all come down to a mosquito bit (the deferred "psychopathic" symptomology of epidemic encephalitis, a disease Hitler supposedly contracted in the World War I trenches)? Just to name a few, examined skeptically herein.

Everyone seems to want to have one pet theory of Hitler, almost like a talisman against "the horror of inexplicability" as I call it.


And then some Jews like Claude Lanzmann have said that Hitler cannot be explained.
It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms Why have the Jews been killed? for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... 057-2094r/

Elie Wiesel said similar stuff. The Holocaust is this mystical, unknowable, incomprehensible thing. Blah, blah, blah.
This sort of pathologizing of "antisemitism" has been around since at least the 1920's. After WWII, Jews spearheaded an entirely new branch of sociology aimed at attempting to understand the "sick" European mind and why people of European descent seemingly for no reason at all just hate Jews. Books such as The Authoritarian Personality attempted to legitimize anti-White pseudoscience by pathologizing White people who aligned ideologically with "authoritarianism". Since Jews were by default the most innocent people in the history of mankind, disliking them had to be a mental disorder that could be diagnosed and cured.
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Re: Hitler Biographies

Post by Hektor »

curioussoul wrote: Sat Nov 23, 2024 12:17 am
Archie wrote: Wed Nov 20, 2024 12:45 am ...
Elie Wiesel said similar stuff. The Holocaust is this mystical, unknowable, incomprehensible thing. Blah, blah, blah.
This sort of pathologizing of "antisemitism" has been around since at least the 1920's. After WWII, Jews spearheaded an entirely new branch of sociology aimed at attempting to understand the "sick" European mind and why people of European descent seemingly for no reason at all just hate Jews. Books such as The Authoritarian Personality attempted to legitimize anti-White pseudoscience by pathologizing White people who aligned ideologically with "authoritarianism". Since Jews were by default the most innocent people in the history of mankind, disliking them had to be a mental disorder that could be diagnosed and cured.
"The Authoritarian Personality" was written by scholars from the Frankfurt School. And I won't know who of those folks didn't have a Jewish background in some way. But the Frankfurt School did not start with 'pathologizing Antisemitism'. They started with attacking the institution of the family portraying it as a factory for authoritarian personalities. One can read that in the books and articles they wrote prior to WW2. Or even prior to the NS-takeover in Germany 1933. Their initial motivation was disappointment with the "Russian" Revolution. They viewed it as a failure, because it turned to 'old structures of authority' again. They found the Materialism of Marx to be insufficient as motor of Revolution. And hence looked out for psychological and cultural factors that needed to be considered. So they essentially brought in Psycho-Analysis from Freud into the Marxist models of society. This is somewhat paralleled by the Italian Writer and Communist Antonio Gramsci. He was not Jewish, but nevertheless had an axe to grind with Church and Italian Society.

Now both the Frankfurt School and Gramsci (who I think is a better writer than the Frankfurtians) try to come over very rational in their approach. Although Gramsci doesn't display that much academic arrogance. The Mysticism in the Holocaust Narrative was brought in by other writers. The Frankfurt school avoided attacking culture and religion directly. Although it's on their list to be 'critiqued'. And they understood critical thinking to be negative. A common misunderstanding. Critique has a more neutral meaning in philosophy. It isn't about nagging and shooting down proposals or ideas. It's even more about appreciating them.

The Frankfurt School approach is that they think that they must destroy the super-ego (the morals and ideals) of people in order to liberate the IT (the desires of people). When that's done the individual is liberated and an era of bliss and pleasure can start. That's why they supported the 'sexual revolution', since they view 'sexual norms' as 'repressive'. They are against parental authority for the same reasons. And the political class also sees parents as competitors for authority over children. But it is vital to control the thinking of children to create the "New Man" required for a "New Society". The progressives are there on the same side as the orthodox Marxists were. And make no mistake about it. Those are counter designs towards Christianity that offers regeneration. The difference is that those utopian ideologies have man creating his own heaving, essentially becoming its own savior and while this got a worldly/political component it goes further then this. Essentially it's about creating a new religion. With mankind as it's own savior. But that religion will need a new priesthood as well as a leadership figure as well. And it's unfolding with the old Post WW2 structures collapsing at the moment. Now they still may function, but they are losing direction and reasonability in this all.
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