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I am in the process of reading about Adolf Hitler, initially because I have been working on a historical novel in which Hitler plays a part and I need to know more about him. This is quite a large subject because many people have written about Hitler. They all have different opinions about who he was and what his career meant. This book is an anthology written for intelligent young adults and makes a very good introduction to the subject. There is an introductory thumbnail biography of Hitler which is then followed by chapters that are actually excerpts from books about Hitler by a number of well-known authorities. Among the most famous of these are H.R. Trevor-Roper and Lucy Dawidowicz. The book 19s choice of excerpts does not tend toward one point of view but rather each contributor is liable to offer a view that is contradicted by other contributors.

Another, unintended consequence of reading such a book is that it makes me look at the world in which I live and see parallels between history and the present. The economic collapse of Germany after World War I, some contributors argue, made for a perfect storm in which Hitler could rise; if the Great Depression had not occurred, Hitler might have continued to be a rabble-rouser whom no one took seriously. One wonders whether there is a Hitler in the wings or already out and about in our own time.

Once Hitler got into power, there were those who thought that he would moderate under the responsibilities of power, but he only consolidated his absolute control, and the more authority he was given the more he took, and the more he took, the more he followed the twin plans that he had set out in his book, 1CMein Kampf 1D: marginalize and ultimately exterminate undesirables, believing them to have been the source of all tribulation, and seize as much land as possible between Germany and Asia, subjugating and, yes, exterminating the people who already live there. Hitler was like the serial killer John Wayne Gacy: the only one of his victims who survived said that as soon as he gained full power over his victim he changed in the blink of an eye into a monster. Hitler knew how to bide his time until he got the upper hand, but when he got all the power he needed to do whatever he wanted, he suddenly became less tolerant of opposition of any kind and destroyed anything and everyone in his path.

One of the questions I have been asking 14as I have opened several books about Hitler at once 14is 1CJust who was he? 1D This is a question that historians have been asking, too. Most seem to have given up on a real psychological investigation, and you will find little of that in this anthology. Hitler is as Hitler does. He is the focus of his fixed ideas about Jews and Lebensraum (living space), a bundle of prejudices wherever they came from. (It is my impression that, while anti-Semitism and anti-communism as well as anti-capitalism were popular sentiments in Central Europe and were heightened following World War I, Hitler was more anti-Semitic than the average anti-Semite and he brought together this animus with an almost equal hatred of the Slavic peoples including or I should say especially the Russians, and he married all of this to an ideology of xenophobic nationalist socialism as opposed to international socialism.)

H.R. Trevor-Roper notes that Hitler 19s own words show that he was consistent in his ideology from the early 1920s until his death in his intent to seize territory in the whole of Eastern Europe and subject it to a kind of neo-feudalism in which Germans would lord it over the few indigenous people they did not exterminate. Even when Hitler seemed to set aside or deviate from this goal, as when he made a pact with Stalin in 1939, it was a calculated delay rather than a change of mind. Trevor-Roper cites Hermann Rauschning 19s book "Hitler Speaks" (1939) for its quote of Hitler saying that he might have to gamble on a temporary peace with the Russians in order to consolidate his expansion into Eastern Europe. Trevor-Roper also remembers vividly that Sir Robert Ensor predicted Hitler 19s annexing of Austrian and threats to Czechoslovakia. When these events came to pass exactly as Ensor predicted he was asked how he had known. 1CI read 18Mein Kampf 19, 1D he replied. This inspired Trevor-Roper to read Hitler 19s book himself, even though he found it badly written and its author 19s arrogance and poisonous animosity hard to take.

Ultimately, Hitler 19s conviction that he had to conquer Russia rather than merely consolidate German power in western and central Europe led him to bite off more than he could chew. Curiously, he blamed Mussolini's drawing him into the Italian 19s campaign in Greece for delaying Hitler 19s invasion of Russia by five weeks. Hitler thought that made all the difference. No one in this book goes into this too deeply, but another book on my shelf, 1CSun Tzu at Gettysburg, 1D contains an analysis of Hitler 19s strategy in Russia and concludes that he made quite a few mistakes, especially in vacillating between taking Moscow versus taking the Russian oil fields.

An essay in this anthology, by James V. Compton, shows how Hitler refused to appreciate the threat posed by the United States. His prejudices made him think that America, as a racial melting pot and a democracy (and therefore decadent because Germany 19s brief experience with democracy had been attended by decadence), was nothing to worry about. Most of his diplomatic corps warned him that the United States could be a dangerous enemy, but Hitler listened to the one man who told him that the United States was riven by discord and unable to mount a military threat; Hitler believed exactly what he wanted to believe and ignored the rest. Another point that Compton makes that is worth remembering is that Hitler had absolutely no idea of what to do with the German navy and gave them no place in his plan with its monomaniacal focus on Russia. Likewise, he left it to Japan to take care of the United States. This, of course, only led to the United States joining the war in Europe as well as Asia.

Sebastian Haffner argues that Hitler 19s war against the Jews (to borrow another contributor, Lucy Dawidowicz 19s phrase) as well as his extermination programs against Slavs, gypsies and other 1Cundesirables, 1D actually helped bring about the downfall of Nazi Germany because there was no strategic value in devoting resources to mass murders of noncombatants while German troops fighting real enemy combatants had to make do without the timely delivery of weapons, supplies and reinforcements. (Tangentially, I am put in mind of a story that I always associate with Hitler 19s ineptitude at war-waging: One day he met with a sergeant who had won a medal on the Russian front. 1CWhat can I do to help you win the war? 1D asked Hitler. The sergeant readily replied, 1CSend us more assault rifles, 1D to which Hitler reacted with confusion. Until that moment he had all but forgotten about the new kind of automatic rifle whose advantages he had been incapable of seeing and whose production he had cancelled. The German military had gone ahead and ordered the production of the weapon anyway, and it turned out to be exactly what gave the beleaguered and outnumbered German soldiers the extra firepower they needed to postpone their otherwise inevitable defeat. The sergeant knew that the only thing wrong with this weapon was that his men did not have enough of them.)

But if anything is clear about the enigmatic mind of Hitler, it is that he firmly believed that he had to focus on defeating Russia and capturing her land and he had to focus on subjugating and exterminating people he believed were in his way or, as in the case of the Jews in particular, seemed to him to have an almost magical ability to oppose and foil his schemes even after he had disarmed them and rounded them up. He was in a hurry to defeat his imagined enemies and achieve his singular goals regardless of realities that contradicted his faith that if he could only achieve his fixed goals then everything else would take care of itself. For example, he thought that if he could take down Russia, then England and the United States would back off. While there might have been some logic to this notion, there was not as much as Hitler thought there was. And when the Soviet Union pushed back and marched into German territory, Hitler could not do anything but reject the thought that he had made a mistake in attacking Russia in the first place. It was just matter of timing, he told his secretary, Martin Bormann. He believed that he should have invaded Russia earlier than he had.

This book is part of a series called 1CPeople Who Made History. 1D The book is aimed at intelligent young adults, and foreign or unfamiliar terms such as 1Craison d 19etre 1D are given definitions in brackets: [reason for existence]. There are final essays on the impact of Hitler on post-war Europe and on popular culture. There is also an appendix which includes some interpreted excerpts from 1CMein Kampf 1D (the psychoanalysts are represented in this section of the anthology). There are also passages from Hitler 19s speeches, as well as entries by enemies. This section is followed by a "Chronology" of dates in Hitler 19s life and career. The section called 1CFor Further Research 1D includes a dozen memoirs and twice as many biographies. (There have been several more since the 2000 publication of this anthology.)
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
MilesFowler | Jul 16, 2023 |

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