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The man known to history as Adolf

Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in the  town of Braunau-am-Inn in Upper Austria.

His father was Alois Hitler, an illegitimate  child of Maria Schicklgruber. He was already

in his early fifties when Adolf was born. A  German nationalist, Alois was nevertheless a

loyal patriot of the Empire of Austria-Hungary  even after the German Empire was formed in 1871

under Prussian leadership and with Austria-Hungary  excluded. He used his mother’s name Schicklgruber

for much of his life before changing it legally,  during which process the name of his stepfather,

Hiedler, was misspelled on the legal documentation  and mistakenly rendered as Hitler. An ill-tempered

and brutish man, Alois worked as a customs  official, a semi-military profession in those

days, and rose through numerous positions to  become a senior customs inspector in Adolf’s

earliest years. He had three different wives  and nine children, of which Adolf was one of

the youngest. Adolf’s mother was Klara Pölzl  , an Austrian woman from a peasant family.

She married Alois in 1885 when she was just 24  and he was 47. Klara was noted as a kind and

pious woman, though as we will see the Hitler  family environment was not a good one.

There is a theory that Hitler may have been  of partly Jewish descent. His grandmother,

Maria Anna Schicklgruber, had never married, but  she did give birth to a child out of wedlock when

she was in her early forties and nearing  the end of her child-bearing years. The

child in question was Hitler’s father, Alois  Hitler. The question is, who was Alois’ father

that had sired him with the unmarried Maria  Anna? Many years later, in the early 1930s,

a senior Nazi official, the future governor of  the Nazi General Government of Poland, Hans Frank,

was charged with investigating this very issue.  Though his official report contained nothing

controversial, in private elsewhere he stated  that he had come across evidence which pointed

towards Alois’ father, Adolf’s grandfather,  potentially being Leopold Frankenberger,

a member of the Jewish Frankenberger family, in  whose household Maria Anna worked for a time as

a cook. Frank noted that the Frankenberger family  had later paid for much of Alois’ upbringing in a

manner which was suggestive that Leopold felt  some responsibility for the child. Historians

have tended to approach Frank’s claims with some  scepticism, although a DNA study produced in

2010 yet again suggested that Hitler may have  had some Jewish heritage. These points aside,

there is still no definitive evidence to suggest  this and Hitler’s possible Jewish heritage remains

a theory, though an interesting one. Adolf’s early life was not an easy one.

His three older full siblings from Alois’  marriage to Klara, Gustav, Ida and Otto,

all died in infancy in 1887 and 1888, Otto just  days after he was born, while both Gustav and

Ida died of diphtheria within a few weeks of  each other in December 1887 and January 1888.

This meant that Adolf was Klara’s eldest surviving  child. She doted on him and it has been speculated

that some of Hitler’s narcissism in later years  stemmed from his relationship with his adoring

mother. The same certainly could not be said of  his father. Alois Hitler was a tough, brutish

man. A heavy drinker, he spent much of his time  in local taverns. When he did return home there

was no affection displayed towards his wife and  young Adolf, or his other children. He regularly

physically attacked Klara and his children and  it was a tense and violent environment in which

Adolf grew up. There is also a growing consensus  that Hitler developed monorchism in his youth,

where his right testicle did not descend. It  used to be believed that this was an urban

myth based on a British military song that was  sung during the Second World War, but a recent

study in 2015 claimed based on a re-analysis  of a medical examination Hitler was forced

to undertake when he was imprisoned in Bavaria  late in 1923 that it is in fact accurate.

The Hitler household was also an itinerant one  during Adolf’s youth. Alois continued to work

as a senior customs officer during the early  1890s. In 1892 he was transferred to the town

of Passau and worked there for another two  years before being reassigned again to Linz,

one of the largest urban centres in Austria,  although Klara had just given birth to another

child, a boy named Edmund, and so she remained  in Passau for a time with Adolf, Edmund and Alois

Jnr. and Angela, two older children from Alois’  earlier marriage to Franziska Matzelsberger.

Alois retired not long afterwards and used his  savings and pension to purchase a farm some 50

kilometres from Linz. Though relatively distant  from the city, Hitler would develop an affinity

for Linz. After Alois’ efforts at farming failed,  the family moved back to Passau in the late 1890s.

Here Adolf’s younger brother Edmund died in 1900,  though by then he did have a new younger sister,

Paula Hitler. Born in 1896, she was one of  the few members of the Hitler family who

would live a long life. Hitler performed poorly  in a school in Linz that he was sent to attend,

much to his father’s consternation, although  Alois died in January 1903, bringing to an

end his tempestuous relationship with Adolf  and the other members of the family.

As he entered his late teens Hitler left Linz  in 1907 and headed for Vienna, the capital of

the very large Austro-Hungarian Empire. There  he developed a great interest in fine art. This

was an era of immense vitality in European  art as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

were still impacting on artistic styles and new  movements like Expressionism were also emerging.

Hitler wanted to be part of this and applied  on several occasions to study at the Academy

of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was rejected. This  disappointment was compounded by the loss of his

doting mother from breast cancer on the 21st  of December 1907. Nevertheless he continued

to pursue his dreams of becoming a painter.  These hopes were overly ambitious. Hitler’s

watercolour paintings and other pieces from the  late 1900s and into the early 1910s reveal a

painter of very modest ability. He was able  to paint a functional landscape scene and

a decent representation of famous buildings  around Vienna, but his paintings lacked any

depth or emotional resonance. Unsurprisingly many  critics who viewed his work at the time advised

him to steer his career towards architecture  and over time his paintings of buildings,

notably Die Karlskirche im Winter, painted in  1912, did show some technical improvement.

By 1909 Hitler’s pursuit of his dream of becoming  an artist had placed him in a dire economic

position as he ran out of what small amount of  money he had received following the death of his

parents in 1903 and 1907. He soon began acquiring  odd jobs as a labourer and also managed to sell

some of his watercolour paintings, though these  were not being sold to galleries but rather as

functional pieces people bought to furnish  their homes with generic scenes of Viennese

life. Eventually he ended up homeless for a time,  effectively living for much of 1909 and 1910 as a

tramp moving between homeless shelters in Vienna  and boarding houses for men. This was a highly

unusual period for a person who would rise to  become a leader of a major European state one

day and one of the most significant figures in  modern history. There are very few other examples

of someone being both a tramp at one point  in their life and a head of state in another.

Indeed such was the scale of the difficulties  that Hitler experienced in Vienna between 1907

and 1913 that many historians have speculated  that his later hatred of non-German groups

developed during this time, particularly his  adoption of the virulent Anti-Semitism which

was so prominent across Europe in the late  nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hitler moved to Munich in the Bavaria  region of southern Germany in May 1913,

a city in which both his future and that of  Nazism would be forged. He was called up for

conscription to the Austro-Hungarian army a few  months later but was excused on medical grounds,

a decision that he later claimed he was content  with as he now viewed Austria-Hungary as being

un-German in its multi-ethnic nature. There is  probably considerable truth to this being his

reason for trying to avoid military service  in Austria-Hungary, as when the First World

War broke out in the final days of July 1914  and the first days of August, Hitler quickly

enlisted with the Bavarian divisions of the German  imperial army. Like so many other young German,

French and British men of the time he was posted  to the Western Front in the trenches of Flanders

and north-eastern France. Over the next four  years he served as both a runner carrying messages

between staff headquarters behind the front lines  and sometimes on the front lines at engagements

such as the First Battle of Ypres early on  in the war and the Battle of Passchendaele

in the autumn of 1917. He was wounded several  times and received numerous commendations for

bravery including both the Iron Cross Second Class  and First Class and the Black Wound Badge.

In the final stages of the war, as Germany  was faced with the prospect of major invasions

of its own territory by the British, French  and Americans for the first time, Hitler was

temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on  the 15th of October 1918. While recuperating in

hospital he learned of the political, social and  military unrest that was spreading across Germany,

the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II that followed  and the German surrender and armistice on the 11th

of November 1918. He would later claim that  he was so traumatised to learn of the German

capitulation and the betrayal of those who had  fought for the cause of an imperial Germany

that he temporarily went blind for a second time  in hospital. While this claim remains dubious,

a more widely accepted theory in the early  twenty-first century is that Hitler might

have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder  as a result of his wartime experiences between

1914 and 1918. This was known euphemistically as  ‘shell-shock’ at the time, but is a much better

understood condition today. A great many soldiers  of the First World War suffered from PTSD later.

If Hitler was afflicted by it then it might  well explain a lot of his more severe behaviour

following the First World War. Once the war ended and he had sufficiently

recovered from his own injuries,  Hitler returned to Munich. It was

a period of intense political and social change  in Germany. The German Revolution was underway,

with socialist groups trying to seize control of  Berlin, Munich and other cities in imitation of

the Russian Revolution of 1917 that had seen  the Bolshevik Communists seize power there,

while other right-wing groups were also  forming in Germany to resist the socialists,

many of which were employed as Freikorps  irregulars by the German government to try

and re-establish some sense of law and order in  the new German republic. Into this milieu Hitler

returned to Bavaria and soon became immersed  in the vibrant politics of his adopted city.

He gravitated towards the German Workers’ Party,  an outfit led by Anton Drexler that existed in

Munich for not much more than a year between  early 1919 and the spring of 1920. Hitler was

working clandestinely as an army intelligencer  charged with investigating the activities of

parties such as the German Workers’ Party, but  he was soon genuinely drawn to Drexler’s ideas,

in particular his belief that Germany had  been betrayed at the end of the war.

There was a strange paradox in this period. While  Hitler was primarily associated with the German

Workers’ Party, he also had ties during these  years to the Bavarian Communist movement. For four

weeks in April and early May 1919 the Bavarian  Communists had succeeded in gaining control over

much of Bavaria and had declared the creation of a  Bavarian Soviet Republic, though their revolution

was quickly suppressed. During this Hitler had  clearly been involved with the Communists in

some capacity, though the extent to which this  was part of his work with the army or whether

he was a supporter of the Communists remains  a topic of considerable debate. For instance,

Hitler attended the funeral of Kurt Eisner, a  prominent Jewish-German Communist in Bavaria in

the spring of 1919 and wore a mourning band. Given  Hitler’s later vitriolic hatred of the Bolshevik

Communists of Russia and the view of fascism  as being the far-right opposite of the far-left

socialist policies of interwar Europe, it seems  completely out of character that he would have

engaged in such activities in 1919. Yet it is not  as strange as it might first appear. Many fascists

across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s flirted  with Communism before drifting towards fascism.

Moreover, both movements placed an emphasis on  the idea of the members of a society working

together as a cohesive whole, and on labour  movements. Indeed, the Nazi Party’s official name,

when translated into English, was the National  Socialist German Workers’ Party. Thus, the

paradox of Hitler flirting with Communism before  moving towards the far-right is not as unusual as

it might seem. The far-right and the far-left  in interwar Europe had some aspects in common,

despite their differing ideologies. After he more firmly began to adhere to the

German Workers’ Party of Drexler rather than the  Bavarian Communists, Hitler’s political ideology

began to become more firmly established.  Influenced by Drexler and Dietrich Eckart,

another founding member of the Workers’ Party,  he began to adhere to an ultra-nationalist,

anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist and patriotic  political ideology, one which had roots in

the pre-war Völkisch German nationalist folk  tradition. This looked back to the medieval period

to when the German people had expanded eastwards  into Poland, the Baltic States and other regions,

Christianizing the Pagan people found here. In  time this would cohere into the Nazi idea that

Germany should acquire vast lebensraum or ‘living  space’ in Eastern Europe where a new German Reich

or empire would be built. He also developed a  virulent opposition to the Treaty of Versailles.

So too was Hitler largely responsible during  this period for the adoption of the swastika

as the party emblem, one which was associated with  Aryanism and the Völkisch movement long before the

First World War. It was also in 1919 and 1920 that  Hitler’s existing Anti-Semitism became much more

extreme, with many individuals like himself  in Germany in the post-war years beginning to

associate the Jewish people with German defeat in  the war. As early as September 1919 he was writing

to some of his new political associates in Munich  in apocalyptic terms about the complete removal

of the Jewish people from German society. In order to appeal to individuals who might have

been briefly inclined to support the Bavarian  Communist movement in 1919, in the spring of

1920 the name of the German Workers’ Party  was changed to the National Socialist German

Workers’ Party. The acronym for this in German  is where the term ‘Nazi’ comes from. The black

swastika on a red background now fully emerged  as the emblem of the party. From its inception,

Hitler, who was now discharged from the army  around the same time and committed himself

fully to the Nazi movement thereafter, was one  of its central figures. In the anarchic political

environment of Munich in the early 1920s he  emerged as a noted speaker at political rallies,

his energetic performances drawing large crowds,  sometimes more out of curiosity than any major

desire to join the Nazis. In the summer of 1921  he exploited a controversy over a proposed merger

with the German Socialist Party, based out of  the city of Nuremburg, as a means to outflank

his former mentor, Drexler, and become the new  leader of the Nazis. The two years that followed

between 1921 and 1923 were important in growing  the Nazi movement, though its popularity did not

extend much beyond Munich and the wider Bavaria  region, while this was also a period when key

members of the later Nazi government such as  Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Röhm

and Rudolf Hess first join the Nazi Party. The first occasion on which Hitler and the Nazis

came to notoriety beyond their immediate sphere of  political fringe groups in Munich and Bavaria was

in the early winter of 1923. By then the crisis of  the German Revolution and the hyperinflation that

had ravaged the German economy after the war were  finally beginning to abate as new currencies, the

rentenmark and the reichsmark, were introduced.  Hitler decided the time was ripe to try and seize

power in a military coup before the government  fully stabilised the situation. On the night of

the 8th of November 1923 he and approximately 600  members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA seized

control of one of the largest beer halls in Munich  and declared their intention to take control of

the city and then the wider government of Bavaria.  Their attempted coup was a pathetic one. Hitler

delayed into the early hours of the morning  of the 9th and by the time wider Nazi units

were being called to act in different locations  several Bavarian officials who had been allowed

to escape the previous night at the beer hall  had alerted authorities and the city police and

security forces were in place to stop the march  of the Nazis through central Munich the following

morning. After a limited exchange of fire, the  Nazi leaders essentially ran off. Years later

the attempted Beer Hall Putsch in Munich would  take on a legendary status amongst the Nazis,

but what was primarily striking about it  was how disorganised and ill-conceived an

effort it had been. Hitler had fled from Munich in the aftermath of

the Putsch. He was quickly arrested and on the  24th of February 1924 he was placed on trial.

It would last five weeks. Hitler ultimately lost  the legal battle and was found guilty of high

treason in fomenting an attempted coup d’état,  but he emerged successful from the trial in so

far as it garnered quite a lot of regional  and even national press attention for him

to promote his views about German politics and  society. He was given a sentence of five years,

which it was intended he would serve at Landsberg  Prison, however Hitler would ultimately serve less

than one year even with time served during  his trial taken into account. Moreover,

his months at Landsberg Prison in 1924 were  formative in his political outlook. It was here

that he determined that the Nazis would henceforth  seek to use the parliamentary process to destroy

the Weimar Republic from within. He also composed  much of his sprawling political testament here,

Mein Kampf, meaning My Struggle. It is easy to  dismiss Hitler's political tome today as simply

a statement of his racial views. That certainly  was a major factor in it, but there were a great

many other sections to what ultimately became  a long book, ones describing the use of new

Nazi and German paramilitary units to govern the  continent and notions surrounding the acquisition

of lebensraum or ‘living space’ in the east to  build a vast new Germanic empire in Europe.

Hitler and much of his ideas in Mein Kampf were  a by-product of his belief in racial hierarchies,

a tendency in Europe in the late nineteenth  and early twentieth centuries which categorised

different racial or ethnic groups not through  the religious lens that they had been viewed

in centuries gone by, but instead through  allegedly scientific arguments. This involved

everything from scientists collecting skulls  and measuring them to allegedly demonstrate

that some racial groups had bigger brains than  others to repurposing the theories of Charles

Darwin to argue that not only had human beings  evolved through natural selection, but that some

racial groups such as the Germans, British and  other people of Europe had evolved beyond other

human groups in places like the Americas,  Africa and parts of Asia. At its most extreme,

adherents of this view on the different races  of the world and eugenics argued that there was

a legitimate argument for furthering the more  advanced races over the allegedly less advanced

ones through political and social movements.  In all of this Hitler would continue to be

influenced, even after the composition of Mein  Kampf by the writings of Hans F. K. Gunther,

a German writer who published numerous works in  the 1920s in which he outlined a hierarchy of

the different racial groups of Europe, arguing  for the Germanic or Nordic people being at the

top of this racial pyramid and others such  as the Jewish and Slavic people being at the

bottom of it. Gunther was a major influence  on Hitler.

This being said, it would be incorrect to view  Hitler’s ideological outlook as being entirely

the product of the politics and culture of Germany  in the 1920s. Many of the ideas that the first

Nationalist Socialists and other radical groups  in Bavaria and elsewhere in the years between

1918 and 1923 were trading in, had deep roots in  German culture and political discourse throughout

the German Empire. As early as the 1870s and  1880s notions about the supposedly problematic

elements of Jewish culture within Europe were rife  within German public discourse as were the ideas

put forward about national revitalisation. The  difference was that in the 1890s or 1900s these

views were professed in relation to a newly  reunited Germany taking its place amongst the

Great Powers, often through carving out its  own colonial empire, whereas in the 1920s a

more sinister turn emerged when this desire  for great power status turned into a feeling

of exceptional bitterness at the manner in which  the German people had been humiliated at the end

of the First World War. It was in the mid-1900s  that the German state first oversaw a genocide,

this one against the Herero and Namaqua people of  German South West Africa in what is now Namibia.

Ultimately a far-right German nationalist in  1909, if transported to a Nazi party rally in the

mid-1920s, would have found a lot of what he saw  and heard there to be quite familiar to him.

Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison on  Christmas Eve 1924 after serving less than a

year in jail for launching a military coup against  the government, unsuccessful though it might have

been. He immediately began rebuilding the Nazi  Party and by mid-February 1925 had succeeded in

convincing the Bavarian authorities to lift the  ban on the party. Thus, just over 15 months after

the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was a free man  and the Nazis were back in action in Bavaria.

It was a new Germany though by the spring of  1925. The hyperinflation and the political,

economic and social chaos that had characterised  German politics and society from 1918 to 1923 had

finally come to an end and the country had  instead entered into a period of pronounced

economic growth. In this environment Hitler and  his allies now committed to trying to secure power

in Germany at the ballot box rather than at the  end of a gun. In fact, Hitler had only managed

to secure the acquiescence of Heinrich Held,  the head of the Bavarian regional government,

for the party to be reformed once he promised  that they would engage in democratic politics

going forward. That is exactly what the Nazis  initially did and the period from 1925 to 1929 was

one of rebuilding the party and trying to expand  it to become a national political entity.

It is important to remember that Hitler was not  always the all-powerful Führer that he became in

1934 after he combined the offices of Chancellor  and President of Germany and once he dispensed of

the threat posed by Ernst Röhm and the SA that  same year. He also had rivals for power in the

1920s, none more so than the Strasser brothers,  Gregor and Otto. In another development which

points towards the unusual ways fascism and  socialism could overlap in interwar Europe,

the Strassers represented a more left-wing element  within the Nazi Party from 1925. They built up

their support within the more northerly branches  of the party, while Hitler’s main support base was

in Munich and southern Bavaria. Eventually Hitler  would manage to outflank them, principally at the

Bamberg Conference in Upper Franconia on the  14th of February 1926 at which he won over a

large cohort of the party to his agenda, though  the Strassers would remain a perceived threat

for several more years. In any event, the Nazis  failed to make any major electoral breakthrough,

whether on Hitler’s watch or under the Strassers.  In the 1928 Reichstag elections just 810,000

people voted for them throughout Germany, meaning  the party’s number of representatives in the

national parliament fell to 12 from the 14 that  had been elected in 1925 when they ran under the

moniker of the National Socialist Freedom Movement  while the Nazi Party itself was still banned.

After he secured his grip on the leadership,  Hitler effectively began running the Nazi Party

like a mob boss. The Nazis were primarily based  out of Munich, though with branches in other

cities to the north, much like the Italian  American Mafia expanded westwards from New

York and Chicago in the interwar period. While  they were engaged in parliamentary democracy

in their new iteration from 1925 onwards,  they were still steeped in illicit activity,

their paramilitary wings like the SA and SS using  violence and intimidation to further the party’s

interests, while the proceeds of crime were often  used to fund the party machinery. Individuals met

with Hitler in various locations around Munich and  were handed out orders on how to promote the Nazi

mission. There were few of the democratic inner  workings one would expect of a normal political

party with votes on key matters and appointments.  Instead Hitler dispensed patronage like a mafia

don, while members of crews were put in place  to run Nazi operations in various districts,

towns and cities. This methodology would continue  long after Hitler’s ascent to power and eminent

historians of the Third Reich have noted the  manner in which the Nazis in power operated as

a series of interpersonal relationships between  Hitler and leading ministers and officials. This

was not a cabinet-style form of governance, but  rather a pyramid, with Hitler at the top, followed

by a lower layer of sub-bosses and then a broader  layer of enforcers and henchmen. Soon a fourth

layer would be added in the shape of the German  people in much the same way as entire communities

can become the subjects of criminal organisations  where they become extremely powerful.

There was often scandal thrown into the mix  within Nazi circles in Munich in the late 1920s

and into the early 1930s. Some members engaged  in activities which were deemed to be sexually

or socially deviant by the standards of the time.  Indeed the Nazis seemed to continuously attract

eccentrics and social outcasts during the 1920s  and social gatherings of party members were often

peculiar affairs. Hitler was not above attracting  scandal himself. In 1925, his 17-year old

half-niece, Geli Raubal, a daughter of Hitler’s  half-sister Angela, moved with her mother to

Bavaria, Angela’s husband having died many years  earlier. There they were in regular contact with

Adolf and eventually Angela became a housekeeper  to her half-brother and she and Geli moved into

his home. From late 1927 onwards Hitler became  more and more controlling of his half-niece’s

movements, often restricting her from leaving his  apartment. It was soon rumoured that Hitler and

Geli were involved in a sexual relationship  of some kind, although historians have been

unable to disentangle to what extent this is  true or whether it was largely the by-product

of a campaign by the Strassers and others to  discredit Hitler. Whatever the exact nature of it,

there is no doubt that the relationship was  an inappropriate one between half-uncle and

half-niece and was probably sexual to some extent.  Some individuals who were in Munich in the early

1930s even later claimed that Geli may have  fallen pregnant with Hitler’s child in 1931. We

will never know the truth of this. Geli was found  dead in Hitler’s apartment in Munich on the 18th

of September 1931 after apparently shooting  herself. Hitler had left the city to visit

Nuremburg earlier that evening after arguing with  Geli. After her death Hitler became profoundly

depressed and later allegedly claimed that she was  the only woman he ever loved.

What was especially controversial about the  entire episode between Hitler and his niece

was that it occurred at a critical juncture for  the Nazi leader and his party’s ascent to power.

The Nazis were a joke in the eyes of most Germans  throughout the 1920s, a potentially dangerous one,

given their efforts to overthrow the regional  Bavarian government in Munich back in 1923,

but certainly not an organisation that many  people believed could ever realistically claim

control over Germany. Their electoral showing  after Hitler was released from Landsberg at

the end of 1924 reflected this. They had  obtained just over 2.6% of the national vote

in the 1928 Reichstag elections and the percentage  would have been much slimmer had it not been for

a solid base amongst disaffected men in Bavaria.  Thus, the sudden and rapid rise in popularity of

the party following the Wall Street Crash of late  1929 and the Great Depression which followed it

caught many people by surprise. It should not be  attributed to any great strategy on Hitler’s part.

The Nazis, with their message of bitterness,  resentment and anger, had simply been out of

vogue during the prosperous years between 1925 and  1929. Now, in the early 1930s, they captured the

Zeitgeist of a changed Germany experiencing  a fresh crisis. In the federal elections of

September 1930, nearly six and a half million  Germans voted for them, more than any other

party except the Social Democratic Party. Hitler was an important component of the Nazi

Party’s success in the early 1930s. Though it  may seem peculiar to us with the benefit of

hindsight and the passage of nearly a century, the  strange performance by Hitler at political rallies

in which he delivered raging speeches almost in  a reverie were enormously popular in the crisis

years of the Great Depression. Many people who  joined the Nazi movement during these years and

who went on to occupy senior positions within the  Third Reich spoke after the Second World War of

the personal magnetism of Hitler and he developed  an almost messianic following. Yet it was not this

alone which led to the Nazi’s growing success. It  was the bitterness of the German people combined

with an immensely effective propaganda and  marketing campaign overseen by figures like

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda Tsar. As energetic as Hitler’s campaigning and

leadership was in 1931 and 1932 it could not  bring him to the top of the state. Despite

their enormous popularity, in a fractured  political landscape, the best result that

the Nazis ever came out of a Reichstag election  with, was in July 1932. On that occasion they won

over 37% of the vote, with nearly two out of  every five Germans who voted indicating their

support for the peculiar Austrian and his bunch  of strange adherents from Bavaria. This made

them the largest party in the Reichstag by quite  some margin, but with none of the other parties

willing to countenance offering them sufficient  support to form a working coalition government,

Hitler was left on the side-lines proclaiming his  utter unwillingness to enter government unless he

was made Chancellor of Germany. It was only in  January 1933, after emergency meetings between

the heads of the centrist parties and the leaders  of big business in Germany, that an agreement was

reached whereby a coalition government would be  formed with Hitler as chancellor. They thought

they could contain him. How wrong they were.  Within months the Nazis had brushed aside all

political opposition and in 1934 after the death  of President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler won

election as President too and dually united the  positions of Chancellor and President, proclaiming

himself to be Führer , ‘Leader’, of a new Germany.  The Weimar Republic was dead.

Hitler’s ascent to power was not without  its missteps. In Mein Kampf years earlier,

he had written at length about the need for  a paramilitary force known as storm-troopers

and their employment to foment the coming Nazi  revolution. Now in 1933 he found himself having

attained to the highest position in Germany, yet  he faced a threat to his power within Nazism from

Ernst Röhm , the head of the Stormtroopers or  Sturmabteilung Nazi paramilitary organisation,

better known simply as the SA. By the end of 1933  the SA had more than three million members and

continued to grow, with some speculating that  the much smaller Reichswehr, the very small

national army that the Weimar Republic had been  allowed to retain under the terms of the Treaty of

Versailles, would soon be absorbed into the SA and  that Röhm would become head of the German armed

forces and a threat to Hitler in the process. And  Röhm displayed all the characteristics of a person

who felt he was a rival to Hitler. Hitler and his  closest allies acted on the 30th of June 1934,

launching a series of attacks across Germany which  lasted into the 1st and 2nd of July. The key goals

were the elimination of Rohm and the other heads  of the SA, but the Night of the Long Knives,

as it became known, was also a means for  Hitler to settle scores with all manner of

perceived enemies and rivals. These included  the murder of Gregor Strasser and several

officials involved in foiling the Munich Putsch a  decade earlier. It was all a sign of how ruthless

the Führer could be after acquiring power. When Hitler secured power in 1933 and 1934 he did

so with the goal of quickly revitalising Germany’s  economic, social, political and military fortunes,

all with the goal of initiating a new European war  that would overturn much of the rest of the First

World War and make Germany the dominant power  on the continent. This is often depicted as a

war of revenge against Britain and France, but  it was more complex than this. Certainly Hitler

wanted to reverse the humiliation of the Treaty of  Versailles, but his primary purpose in instigating

a new war was ideological, aiming to acquire vast  new territories to the east of Germany, where

the new German Third Reich would primarily be an  empire stretching from the River Rhine to the Ural

Mountains. Yet, given the diplomatic alignment of  Europe in the aftermath of the First World War,

he was in little doubt that this would probably  necessitate a conflict with Britain and France

and that it would be best to neutralise France on  Germany’s western border to the greatest extent

possible. With all this in mind, Hitler began  taking steps immediately to bolster the German

armed forces and from 1935 onwards Germany  was openly rearming in breach of the Treaty

of Versailles. One of the first major moves of the new regime was

to begin acting on the Anti-Jewish views Hitler  had put forward in Mein Kampf years earlier and

which he continued to articulate in his speeches  and political rhetoric thereafter. On the 1st of

April 1933, just over a week after the passage  of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler and the

Nazis to rule by decree, a national boycott of  Jewish businesses was decreed, while in mid-May

Nazi book burnings targeted works by Jewish  authors in particular. In 1935 Hitler did briefly

criticise random attacks by the SA and other Nazi  paramilitary groups against individual German

Jews, but this was not borne out of any sympathy,  rather a desire to ensure that the state’s

Anti-Semitism was co-ordinated. Thus, at a special  meeting of the German Reichstag at Nuremburg in

September of that year Hitler instructed several  Nazi government ministers and officials to begin

drawing up the Nuremburg Laws, a series of pieces  of legislation which effectively moved to make

second-class citizens out of Germany’s Jews,  forbidding marriage and intercourse between Jews

and non-Jews in Germany, as well as targeting  Jewish businesses and banning Jewish people

from employing Germans of a certain age and  gender. The Nuremburg Laws were only imposed

in a piecemeal fashion for a time, but once the  Summer Olympics had been held in Berlin in 1936

Hitler ordered them to be stringently imposed.  The Kristallnacht or ‘Night of the Broken Glass’,

in which thousands of Jewish homes, businesses  and synagogues were attacked, and hundreds of Jews

were arrested, with many being killed, followed on  the night of the 9th of November 1938 as the Nazi

drift towards the Holocaust gathered pace. We might ask what daily habits the Führer kept

once he came to power? While he was a workaholic,  he was one of a different kind to many modern

workaholics. For instance, he often did not rise  until 10am or 11am, or depending on his schedule

sometimes close to midday. Conversely he would  work long into the night, with some who knew his

habits in Berlin and the Wolf’s Lair in later  years attesting to the fact that he regularly

stayed up until 3am or 4am working. An animal  lover, he kept numerous dogs over the years,

of which his German Shepherds, Blonda and Blondi,  were the most well-known. This extended to

adhering to a largely vegetarian diet long before  this was in anyway common in European societies,

something which he adopted in the mid-1930s,  although he occasionally did eat meat and fish.

Having smoked heavily in his younger years, often  as many as 40 cigarettes a day, he quit and even

offered gold watches to any of his associates  who were also able to break the habit. He also

quit drinking alcohol for the most part in the  mid-1930s, though again would still imbibe small

amounts on very rare occasions. The general sense  we get is of an individual who as he entered his

mid-forties became concerned with being healthier,  although things like the cessation of smoking and

adopting a vegetarian diet were hardly commonplace  pieces of health advice offered by doctors in the

1930s. His one major vice remained a sweet tooth,  with Hitler often eating many cream pastries in

a day, sometimes while watching his favourite  films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,

released in 1937. Of course many people have tried to understand

the psychology of Hitler and why he behaved in the  way he did. A wide range of theories have emerged,

beginning during the Second World War when the  Führer was still alive. These have ranged from

suggesting that Hitler was bipolar, had psychotic  tendencies or was schizophrenic to the previously

noted idea that he was suffering from a prolonged  form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder induced

by his experiences during his childhood and the  First World War. More obscure hypotheses include

that he may have had an abnormal brain structure  or that he had multiple psychological conditions

which led to his peculiar personal development.  Unfortunately reaching a firm conclusion on this

issue has been hampered by the fact that Hitler’s  body would be burned and very few of his remains

survived beyond the end of the Second World War,  meaning that an autopsy which might inform how his

physical health impacted on his psychological  well-being could not be carried out. In the

absence of concrete evidence of any kind the most  plausible explanation is that Hitler exhibited

symptoms of histrionic personality disorder,  paranoia bordering on schizophrenia, narcissistic

personality disorder and borderline personality  disorder, perhaps with PTSD. As we will see,

these issues were exacerbated in his later years  by an increased intake of multiple narcotics that

made his already erratic behaviour worse. There have been other theories to explain how

Hitler’s psychology functioned and how  he reached such a position of power

within Germany. One of the leading historians  of the Third Reich and biographers of Hitler,

Ian Kershaw, has argued that Hitler actually had a  very limited personality and life. He had very few

interests beyond politics and the acquisition  of power and was effectively a void or vacuum

as an individual. His personality reflected this.  Instead, Kershaw argues, Hitler was able to reach

such a position of power because of social and  political undercurrents that had been present in

German society for decades and which Hitler  became the fulcrum for the expression of in

the 1930s. Even when he attained power he took a  decidedly hands-off approach to many aspects of

government. However, his manipulation of his  underlings and his creation of a competitive

environment in which ministers and officials all  competed against one another to curry favour with

the Führer combined to ensure that Hitler’s  wishes were being executed across Germany and

then Europe without the dictator ever having to  become personally involved. This, after a phrase

by a Prussian civil servant, Werner Willikens,  has become known as the ‘Working Towards the

Führer’ theory, the idea that Nazism functioned  in a way in which all individuals sought to

achieve the designs of Hitler, sometimes almost  unconsciously.

Despite his many ailments, Hitler was  contradictorily said to have been rather

mild-mannered and amiable when in company he liked  in the period between his assent to power in 1933

and the zenith of the Third Reich in 1941. This  was also the period in which he formed the most

important relationship of his entire life,  one which would end in a very brief marriage,

though as with everything with Hitler it was not  without considerable turmoil. In October 1929,

right around the time the Wall Street Crash was  preparing the ground for the Nazis to rise in

popularity, Hitler met 17-year old Eva Braun who  was working at the time in the office of Heinrich

Hoffmann, a photographer employed by the Nazi  Party. In the years that followed they continued

to cross paths and Braun became intent on winning  Hitler’s affections, such that in August 1932 she

attempted to kill herself in a peculiar effort to  demonstrate her fidelity to the Nazi leader. It

worked and thereafter their relationship became  more and more serious. A second attempt to kill

herself in 1935 led to Braun becoming a permanent  fixture of Hitler’s household and from 1936

onwards she might be described as his partner, as  he ended other fleeting courtships he had engaged

in during the 1930s. However, they would not marry  until April 1945 and their relationship remained

extremely private, with Hitler instead cultivating  an aura of a leader who remained a bachelor,

wedded to Germany rather than to any woman. Upon assuming control of Germany in 1933,

Hitler’s plan had been to gradually strengthen  Germany’s economic and military position with

a view to launching his war of revenge against  the European powers in 1941 or 1942, the belief

being that Britain, France and others would begin  to rearm as well once they saw what Germany was

doing. The British and French did do so and it  is something of a myth that Prime Ministers in

London and Paris like Stanley Baldwin, Neville  Chamberlain and Léon Blum simply did not respond

to the growing threat posed by the Nazis. Still,  they did not rearm at anything near the same speed

as Germany. Hence, by 1937 Hitler was aware that  the start date of the intended war could be moved

forward. Matters accelerated thereafter. In the  first weeks of 1938 a number of developments at

home in Germany presented an opportunity to  remove the War Minister, Werner von Blomberg,

and the Commander-in-Chief of the German  Heer or armed forces, Werner von Fritsch,

from their positions and replace them with more  biddable generals, iron-cladding Hitler’s control

over the armed forces. Then in mid-March  the Anschluss or union with Austria to

form a Greater Germany was completed through  diplomatic pressure. By the summer Hitler’s

rhetoric about annexing the Sudetenland,  a region of north-western Czechoslovakia

where German-speaking people pre-dominated, was  escalating.

On the 12th of September 1938 Hitler gave a speech  at a Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg during which he

denounced the Czech government, employing a line  of attack which argued that Czechoslovakia was a

multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state in which  Germans, Hungarians and others were being

denied their rights, much like minorities had  been under the Austro-Hungarian Empire Hitler

had been born in. He used this as a pretext for  ordering border incursions from Germany in the

days that ensued and even made paranoid claims  that France was trying to turn Czechoslovakia

into a base of operations from which it could  launch bombing raids against Berlin. In response,

the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,  requested a meeting with Hitler, an initiative

which culminated in the famous meeting in Munich  at the end of September where after deliberating

with Hitler, the French Prime Minister, Edouard  Daladier, and the Italian fascist dictator, Benito

Mussolini, Chamberlain emerged claiming that there  would be a peaceful resolution of the dispute.

Hitler and the Nazis were granted the ethnically  German Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia,

in return for promises that the Führer would  make no further territorial claims. Maybe they

had little choice? What is often overlooked when  historians rush to blame Chamberlain for allegedly

capitulating at Munich, is that Hitler had already  ordered sizeable military incursions and artillery

bombardments of Czech territory in the second  half of September 1938 and had Chamberlain

and Daladier not relented, Hitler would almost  certainly have seized the Sudetenland by force.

He was not bluffing in the autumn of 1938. In retrospect many people might wonder why the

leaders of Britain, France and other nations  placated or appeased Hitler and the Nazis for

as long as they did in the 1930s? Firstly, in  assessing any historical situation like this,

one needs to be wary of reading events backwards,  looking at the actions of the Nazis during the

Second World War and assuming that statesmen  like Chamberlain and Daladier should have

predicted what would happen years later. They  cannot have expected the horrors of the death

camps or the carnage that would ensue during the  war, though some such as the future Prime Minister

and British war leader, Winston Churchill,  saw Hitler for what he was early on. Others

simply viewed Hitler and the Nazis as the lesser  of two evils. The economic crisis and instability

of the Great Depression years had seen parties  and movements which inhabited the two extremes

of the political spectrum rising in popularity  in most European nations. Faced with a choice

between the communists on the far-left or  fascists and corporatists on the far-right,

some viewed the fascist approach as the better  of the two options in the 1930s. It is for this

reason that we find individuals like the former  British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,

and a great many other prominent British  people, visiting Germany between 1935 and

1938 and forming a positive view of the economic  revival that the Nazis had overseen and how it

had staved off the rise of the communists  in the country.

The Munich Conference and Agreement also  points towards the often tepid relationship

between Hitler and the Italian fascist leader,  Benito Mussolini. Despite both being ideological

fascists and Mussolini’s movement having formed  the template for fascist movements and how they

might seize power in the 1920s and 1930s, the pair  were not such firm allies as their later alliance

would suggest. At Munich Mussolini, who was  uneasy about Germany’s advance to the Alps and the

Italian border, was wary of Hitler and demanded  some limited Austrian land concessions to the

east of Venice as the cost of his acceptance of  the German acquisition of the Sudetenland. It is

sometimes overlooked that when Germany went to war  with Britain and France a year later, Mussolini’s

Italy did not become involved immediately, holding  its powder dry until the 10th of June 1940 after

the British Expeditionary Force had fled back  to England and Paris was about to fall. It was

only then that Mussolini optimistically fixed his  mast to Hitler’s, realising he could expand his

own dominions by allying closely with the  Germans. Hitler would always consider him

a more junior partner, a feeling which became  stronger in the course of 1941, 1942 and 1943

when German armed divisions constantly had to come  to the rescue of Italian armies in North Africa,

the Balkans and Italy. More reticent still was  the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco,

who despite having acquired considerable support  from Germany and the Nazis in the 1930s at the

time of the Spanish Civil War, decided to  remain outside of the larger European war,

despite German negotiations for him to join the  growing Axis alliance between 1939 and 1941.

Circumstances would soon create a situation  wherein Mussolini moved closer to Hitler

and the German fascist movement. The Munich  Agreement was almost dead on arrival and no

sooner had Hitler overseen the annexation of the  Sudetenland than he began preparing for the fuller

conquest of Czechoslovakia. In mid-March 1939,  exactly a year after the Anschluss, diplomatic

pressure was ratcheted up against the government  in Prague and within days German armed divisions

began rolling over the border into the country.  The conquest of it was completed when the Czech

government agreed to annexation on the basis that  it would be given considerable autonomy within the

growing Third Reich. Hitler agreed to this and  then immediately reneged on his promise. From

Prague Castle on the 16th of March 1939 he issued  a declaration in which he noted the creation of

a new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A  Czech civil government remained in existence,

but in reality the new ruler was a German governor  personally appointed by Hitler. The aftermath is

very well-known. Within weeks Hitler stepped  up his rhetoric concerning lands Germany had

lost in Poland through the Treaty of Versailles.  On the 1st of September 1939, after a ridiculous

false flag operation was carried out to try to  suggest that Germany was acting in self-defence,

the Germans invaded Poland. Two days later,  the British and French declared war on Germany,

commencing the Second World War. Hitler  now moved to recast his position as Führer,

moving from being a peace-time leader whose  primary goal was to rejuvenate the German state,

to now being a war leader who would oversee the  German conquest of Europe.

Hitler very nearly lost his life just ten weeks  into the war. There had been many assassination

attempts against him already in the 1930s.  For instance, back in 1932, in an effort to

prevent the popular political leader becoming  Chancellor before he reached that office,

several local Bavarians had posted poisoned  letters to Hitler. A cadre of officers within

the Foreign Office in 1935 were planning  to murder their boss, believing he would

bring disaster upon Germany if left in charge. The  closest of these early plots came on the night of

the 8th of November 1939. Georg Elser, a German  carpenter with left-leaning politics had come

to believe that Hitler would bring destruction  upon the nation. Thus, he planted a bomb under

the podium where Hitler was scheduled to give a  speech that evening to mark the 16th Anniversary

of the attempted Munich Putsch back in 1923.  Elser’s bomb detonated and worked as planned,

killing eight Nazi officials and injuring  dozens more, unfortunately though Hitler

had left earlier than expected that evening, in  order to head back to Berlin for discussions on

the war effort. Had he remained 15 minutes longer  he would have been killed by Elser’s bomb. There

would be at least another dozen assassination  attempts in the years that followed.

While Elser had failed to assassinate Hitler in  November 1939, the Nazis were otherwise hard at

work preparing to visit death on much of the  continent. After the outbreak of the Second

World War, Poland had been quickly overrun and  conquered in a six week campaign in September and

early October. Then, even as Elser was planning  to murder the Führer, a brief period of peace was

descending, as the British and French re-armed  furiously and the Germans planned their next

steps. In the end it was not until the late spring  of 1940 that fresh campaigns were undertaken,

but when they were launched, they were done so  with great speed. In two co-ordinated actions

beginning on the 9th of April 1940 Hitler oversaw  the invasion of two neutral countries, Denmark

and Norway. After their swift conquest, the  attention turned westwards and a month later the

German Wehrmacht attacked three further neutral  nations, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg,

before finally heading into the cauldron of the  First World War, north-eastern France. There

would be no slow, lethargic campaign like the  trench warfare Hitler had seen here a quarter

of a century earlier. The German army won a  devastating victory over the French in little more

than six weeks, entering Paris on the 14th of June  1940. The Battle of Britain followed soon after,

with the Germans intending to pummel the British  into submission by cutting off their supplies at

sea and bombing their cities into oblivion from  the air.

Throughout this period there were concerted  negotiations between a peace party in England

and the German government to organise  a negotiated peace between Britain

and the Nazi regime. However, once Winston  Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain,

a figure who had been warning of the dangers  of Hitler and the Nazis for many years,

there was a much more limited possibility of a  rapprochement between Britain and Germany. And yet

Hitler continued to believe that there might be.  It was here that we see how his ideological views

could severely skew his judgement when it came to  strategic matters. In the course of the autumn,

winter and spring of 1940 and 1941 the German  Blitz and blockade of Britain inflicted grave

damage on the only major country standing against  the Nazis at that point. Had he continued to

pursue the campaign against the British,  Hitler might have managed to damage public

confidence in the war effort to such an extent  in Britain that Churchill was in turn forced out,

paving the way for a recommencement of concerted  peace negotiations. Instead, he decided before

long to abandon the Battle of Britain and turn  his attentions and Germany’s resources eastwards

to invade the Soviet Union, the ideological enemy  of Nazism, but a state which Germany was at peace

with, until they invaded the USSR in June 1941.  Hitler’s ideological stringency simply convinced

him that as fellow Aryans and what he perceived  as a civilized race like the German people,

the British would eventually see sense and ally  with Germany against Bolshevism. It was the first

of several major strategic errors he made, based  on his ideological tunnel-vision which contributed

to German defeat in the Second World War. Hitler’s growing plan for the invasion of the

Soviet Union from late 1930s onwards was  predicated on the mistaken assumption that

as soon as a large show of German force was  displayed and the Blitzkrieg warfare that had

been employed with such devastating results in  the Low Countries and France was brought to bear,

a swift victory would also ensue in Russia. He  was closely involved in the organisation and

planning of Operation Barbarossa, the codename  for the operation derived from the name of the

famous high medieval German emperor who had  done much to extend Christianity and German

power into the Pagan east of Europe. Hitler  made a major mistake in all of this. Firstly,

he failed to take sufficient stock of the extent  of land involved in trying to capture Leningrad,

Moscow, Stalingrad and numerous other cities east  as far as Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan. Secondly,

he didn’t account for the fact that the Red Army  could suffer catastrophic losses of hundreds of

thousands of men at a time in July, August,  September and October 1941, which it did, and

still be able to put forward sustained resistance  outside Moscow and Leningrad when the worst of the

winter struck. Hitler, it seems, had also failed  to fully learn from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

in 1812, when the Tsar had simply ordered  the abandonment of Moscow and the devastation

of the countryside to deprive the French of  vital resources.

Hitler was critical to the planning and execution  of Operation Barbarossa and was one of the main

driving forces behind the decision to abandon the  Battle of Britain and attack the Soviet Union,

though it should be noted that most of the  generals of the Wehrmacht were in agreement

with the plan. Some expressed reservations  about elements of the strategy that Hitler

wanted to employ but nearly all were agreed that  victory would follow. Many of the leading German

commanders in 1941, it must be remembered,  were veterans of the First World War who had

experienced Germany’s massive victories over  the Russian Empire at that time. As such,

it is something of a myth that Hitler pursued  Operation Barbarossa in the face of opposition

from many senior German commanders. This would be  a war of unbridled violence, with Field Marshal

Wilhelm Keitel issuing the Barbarossa decree to  the German high command on the 13th of May 1941,

six weeks before the invasion began, on Hitler’s  orders, an injunction which effectively called

for a war of extermination and would later  be shown as clear evidence at the Nuremburg

Trials of the manner in which the German  war had been criminal in basic intents. The

invasion commenced on the 22nd of June 1941,  with three million German military personnel

invading the Soviet Union. For nearly four months  the Germans would meet with unparalleled success,

inflicting millions of casualties on the Soviets  in terms of men killed, wounded and captured, and

seizing control of vast amounts of territory and  cities like Minsk and Kyiv in the autumn of 1941.

However, the Blitzkrieg here was unlike what had  been seen in France and the Low Countries a year

earlier. Eventually in the course of September and  October Hitler’s forces began to run out of energy

and met with stiffer resistance. Ultimately,  they would stop short of seizing Moscow and

Leningrad that winter and the war on the Eastern  Front would turn into a war of attrition.

There is something of a myth concerning the German  invasion of 1941. By late October and November the

Germans had advanced as far as the outskirts of  Leningrad and Moscow. It was here that the German

war effort ran into what would ultimately become  a fatal issue. They finally met concerted Russian

resistance outside the two cities, while the  German lines were stretched, their men tired and

their tanks running short on fuel and other vital  supplies. Then to compound matters it turned out

that they had not been issued with adequate winter  clothes as the worst of the Russian winter set in,

causing hundreds of thousands of German men to  become injured or immobilized through frostbite,

or even to die, with many losing fingers, toes or  worse. There is no doubt that Hitler’s ideological

sense that the tough German warrior would simply  persevere through the cold, was an incredibly

stupid decision in not providing sufficient  winter clothing for the Germans on the frontline,

but it should also be acknowledged that the  winter of 1941 was the coldest experienced in

western Russia in the entirety of the twentieth  century. Mother nature was now turning against

the Führer. The final months of 1941 were the critical

period in the war. Had things developed  differently on two different fronts the

conflict and modern world history might  have ended very differently. Hitler’s plan

had been to secure Moscow and Leningrad, then  launch a pincer movement southwards to secure

the Caucasus oilfields. Simultaneously the  German Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel was

making good headway in pushing the British  and their Commonwealth allies eastwards from

the Western Desert towards the River Nile. Their  goal was to capture Cairo and then the Suez Canal,

following which the Axis forces in North Africa  would have been able to proceed into the Middle

East and ultimately join up with the Germans  emerging south through the Caucasus. Other

powers like Turkey in the region would then  have fallen into line with Hitler’s plans,

leaving the Führer victorious in the war. Robbed  of its own oil supplies from the Middle East and

largely cut off from the British Raj and its  Commonwealth allies like Australia and New

Zealand, Britain would have had little option  but to come to terms with the Nazis and the war

could have ended in a Nazi victory. This is  the counterfactual of how Hitler could have

emerged victorious. It all hinged on those few  crucial months in late 1941, but as we will see,

things played out very differently to  what the Nazi dictator had planned.

For three years after the invasion of the Soviet  Union and down to when it all started to turn very

severely against Germany, Hitler made his  base at the Wolfsschanze or ‘Wolf’s Lair’,

a major military bunker and headquarters which  he ordered the construction of near the village

of Görlitz now Gierłoż in north-eastern Poland  near the Kaliningrad Oblast today. Here he was

close enough to the frontlines to be able to  receive news of developments on the fronts near

Moscow and other cities quickly and commanders  at places like Leningrad and Stalingrad could

be flown in to meet directly with the Führer .  Located in the Masurian Woods in East Prussia,

the stronghold was an enormous bunker and  fortress, with walls that were two metres

thick and made from reinforced concrete. The  building was also heavily camouflaged to avoid

it being bombed from the skies. The Wolf’s Lair  was divided up into different security zones,

with Hitler and his closest aides operating in  Zone 1, several cabinet members sharing offices

in Zone 2 and so on and so forth. The surroundings  here were not salubrious and had none of the pomp

and splendour one would usually associate with  the rulers of such a vast empire as the Third

Reich. Here Hitler began each day by doing some  light work before taking his dogs for a walk

and returning to his desk. Meals were often  communal. Over time, as the war effort soured,

the atmosphere here became more tense, certainly  not celebratory in the manner which prevailed a

year earlier, as the Third Reich expanded ever  further east.

It was during his first months at the Wolf’s  Lair that the Nazi’s adopted what came to be

known as the Final Solution towards the Jewish  population of the expanding Third Reich. After

the Nuremburg Laws and the Kristallnacht of the  1930s, thoughts had turned in 1939 to how the

Jewish population of Europe would be approached  by the Nazis, an issue which grew in importance

following the conquest of Poland where some  three and a half million Jews lived at the time.

Numerous strategies were developed in the months  that followed. Firstly, the Jews of Poland were

corralled into ghettos in cities like Warsaw and  Krakow where they were stripped of their rights

and made to subsist on starvation rations. In  tandem, a more comprehensive set of proposals was

devised which envisaged the mass deportation  of the Jews of Europe from the continent,

with the most outlandish scheme being to send  them en-masse to the east African island of

Madagascar once the Suez Canal was captured.  However, eventually, as German successes in

the war mounted and the fear of any future  recriminations for their actions dissipated,

the Nazi higher-ups decided that the genocide of  Europe’s Jewish people would be initiated. Thus,

as Operation Barbarossa began, the Einsatzgruppen  death squads travelled in the rear of the

Wehrmacht, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews  in places like Ukraine and Belarus in the second

half of 1941. Soon specially designed trucks into  which poisonous gas was filtered to mass murder

people were being used on the Eastern Front. It  wasn’t too much of a leap from there to concluding

that the Jews of Europe could be transported to  a number of concentration camps in Poland, of the

kind which the Nazis had been using as makeshift  prisons in Germany since the mid-1930s, where gas

would also be used to mass-murder the continent’s  Jewish people. Thus did the Final Solution develop

between 1939 and 1941. The Holocaust began after  a conference at the suburb of Wannsee outside

Berlin on the 20th of January 1942 held to alert  senior Nazi officials to the new strategy.

The role of Hitler in the development and  implementation of the Final Solution has

been debated for decades. A form of Holocaust  denial has emerged which claims that Hitler

was not actually involved in the decision and  that it was effectively orchestrated by the

SS paramilitary group and the leaders of it  like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich,

the latter of whom oversaw the Wannsee Conference.  This is a spurious argument. While it was indeed

the SS who oversaw the concentration camp system  and hence the management of the six death camps,

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno,  Majdanek and Bełżec , this does not constitute

evidence of any kind for the SS going ‘rogue’ and  acting without the authorisation of the Fuhrer.

Indeed we find Hitler in December 1941 authorising  the Final Solution during a meeting with Himmler.

Thereafter he left Himmler and the SS to carry it  out in collaboration with the Gestapo and other

entities in much the same way that he delegated  things like the governance of countries like

the Netherlands and Norway to imperial governors  or would eventually place ministers like Joseph

Goebbels and Albert Speer in charge of running  the war economy in Germany itself. Instead Hitler

focused his attentions on the war effort and, in  particular, the campaign against the Soviet Union.

The fact that he never visited the death camps  means little. The decision to murder approximately

six million of Europe’s Jews, along with numerous  other minority groups such as the Roma and Sinti,

ultimately lay with Hitler. The decision by the Nazis to initiate the Final

Solution and to engage in ever more extreme  programmes of racial mass murder was indicative

of their growing confidence in 1940 and 1941 that  they would soon dominate all of Europe and would

never be held to account for their actions.  But even by the time a cadre of senior Nazi

bureaucrats were meeting at Wannsee on the 20th of  January 1942 to discuss the practical application

of the Final Solution across the Third Reich,  the situation had changed on the Eastern Front

in a manner which would ultimately spell disaster  for the Nazi cause. Here the Germans had failed

to gain a complete victory over a foe in a  matter of six or seven weeks. That would have

been entirely expected in a nation the size of  the Soviet Union, but when the Germans failed

to take Leningrad and Moscow before the  winter set in and then Russian resistance

was galvanized into late 1941 and early 1942,  Hitler and his generals would have been aware

that this was a major setback. It was compounded  by the entry into the war of the United States

with its great industrial power and wealth  on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union

in December 1941 after it was attacked  by Germany’s ally, the Empire of Japan.

1942 would see bitter fighting on fronts in  Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Pacific,

but it was really in early 1943, that the tide  turned as the Germans and Italians were defeated

in North Africa and the Soviets started pushing  the Germans back towards Berlin in Eastern Europe,

that the changed nature of the war became evident  to all but the most delusional of figures.

An interesting report was produced on Hitler’s  psychology around the time of this decisive shift

in the war. Entitled The Mind of Adolf Hitler,  it was drawn up in 1943 by Walter C. Langer,

an American psychoanalyst who was tasked  with assessing Hitler’s psychological state,

based on the available evidence and producing a  report for the Office of Strategic Services in

the US. Basically, the government wanted to know  how Hitler might act as the war went on. Langer’s

report would have been disheartening for those who  read it, though it was strikingly prescient in its

predictions. He first traced what was known about  Hitler’s personality based on a wide range of

different evidence, including accounts by people  who had known him. From these Langer concluded

that Hitler was a complex mix of a neurotic  psychopath, with schizophrenic tendencies. As

the war continued to turn against Germany, Langer  predicted, Hitler’s emotions and actions would

become even more volatile. He correctly surmised  that the Führer who had once so revelled in

speeches before large audiences would become more  reclusive. As criticism of the regime mounted,

new assassination attempts would be made, possibly  involving senior elements within the army,

but Hitler would staunchly refuse to countenance  any surrender or negotiated peace. He would,

Langer predicted, probably try to kill himself  before he ever had to face justice for his

actions. It is a fairly remarkable document, as  virtually everything Langer predicted eventually

did come to pass in the course of 1944  and 1945.

As the war turned against the Germans in  the course of late 1941 and into 1942,

the Nazis moved towards what is generally  termed ‘Total War’. Eventually Hitler would

appoint the Nazi Propaganda Minister and one  of his most trusted acolytes, Joseph Goebbels,

as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War. On the  18th of February 1943 at the Sportpalast in

Berlin Goebbels gave a famous speech in which he  asked the audience, quote, “Are you and the German

people determined, if the Leader orders it, to  work ten, twelve, and, if necessary, fourteen and

sixteen hours a day and to give your utmost for  victory?” The inference here was that the German

people would enter into a Total War economy to  try to emerge victorious in the conflict under

the eyes of Hitler as the Führer. The Nazi leader  would consequently oversee the development of a

total war effort through 1942, 1943 and 1944, one  in which the German people were required to make

some sacrifices, but where in reality the people  who really suffered were millions of Polish,

Czech and other ethnic workers that were brought  in as slave labourers to keep the German war

economy running. Meanwhile, at the heart of this  was a dictator who was beginning to behave in an

increasingly erratic manner, much as Langer had  predicted in The Mind of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s

decisions were less consistent from 1942 onwards,  his temper grew and he tended to dismiss generals,

commanders and officials for small perceived  infringements of his orders or their inability

to live up to his unrealistic expectations. By  1944 Hitler was a very different figure to the

one who had ruled Germany for much of the  decade between 1933 down to 1942 when the

war effort had clearly started to go wrong. Perhaps the most glaring element of this erratic

behaviour concerned Hitler’s relationship with  the senior-most German generals and commanders.

As soon as military setbacks began mounting from  late 1941 onwards, he began retaliating against

his leading commanders, blaming them for German  military reverses. This was in stark contrast

to the period between 1939 and the autumn of  1941 when Hitler had generally tried to claim

credit for German strategic successes, claiming  that he was the mastermind of the Nazi takeover

of most of the European continent down to  October 1941. It was only when the German

advance on Moscow and Leningrad faltered and  it became clear that the knockout blow would

not be struck before the winter set in, that  Hitler suddenly started asserting that the

generals of the Wehrmacht were the ones making the  decisions after all. Like a supreme narcissist,

Hitler took credit for it when things  went right on the battlefield and then

blamed others when they went badly. A striking  example was that of the German tank general,

Heinz Guderian, who was successively promoted  by Hitler between 1939 and 1941 after playing

a critical role in the Polish campaign and then  the Blitzkrieg assault on the Low Countries and

France. Having been involved in the stalled  drive towards Moscow, Hitler dismissed him

from his command during the winter. This tendency  only became more pronounced as the war went on,

such that eventually Hitler ended up  coming back to figures like Guderian

and reappointing them to senior commands once  their replacements had failed to make miracles

happen on the Eastern Front. Try though he might to siphon off the blame for

Germany’s military defeats on the generals of  the Wehrmacht, the reality was that Hitler was

increasingly responsible for some of the  more tactically stupid decisions. A clear

example of this is the Battle of Stalingrad,  the engagement which became the crucible of the

war on the Eastern Front between the autumn of  1942 and the first weeks of 1943. Securing the

city was considered vital to gain control of the  Caucasus oilfields, both to provide the German

army with petroleum and to deprive the Soviets  of it. To that end, Hitler ordered Field Marshal

Friedrich Paulus to ensure the capture of the  city with the German 6th Army at all costs.

Paulus managed to nearly secure control over  the entire city in September and October 1942,

but then a massive Soviet counterattack succeeded  in stemming the German attack, following which

they began to encircle the 6th Army. Hitler  then made the disastrous decision to order

Paulus to hold firm and secure the city instead  of attempting a breakout which might rescue the

remnants of the 6th Army. In the end, the Fuhrer’s  attitude of ‘no surrender’ led to the destruction

of most of the German forces and the capture of  the remnants of Paulus’ army in late January and

early February 1943. In the end, the Germans  lost over half a million men, a cripplingly

high figure given the numerical inferiority  of the Germans and their Axis allies to the

Soviets. Hitler was responsible for this. In other ways Hitler’s strategic decisions were

poor, though not quite as strikingly as those  made with the Battle of Stalingrad. For instance,

the series of massive fortifications and defensive  points which Hitler ordered the construction of,

all along the coast of France, the Low Countries,  western Denmark and Norway through Führer

Directive No. 40 on the 23rd of March 1942,  and what became known as the Atlantic Wall,

was semi-successful, in so far as it did make  the Allies think very hard about how they would

launch an amphibious assault on Western  Europe in the summer of 1944. Similarly,

the decision to take over the Italian armed  forces and territories in September 1943,

when it became clear that the fascist government  in Rome was about to switch sides and join the

Allies after they invaded southern Italy, stalled  the Allied advance in the Mediterranean. But all

of these measures point towards an awareness of  the futility of the war effort after a certain

point. Issuing commands to build a giant series  of defences across the Atlantic coast of Europe

indicates that Hitler realised the strategic  situation had changed immensely over the winter

of 1941. Yet surrender or a negotiated peace of  any kind was never countenanced by the Führer . He

transformed Germany into a death cult in the  process.

As the war shifted in this way Hitler was becoming  an increasingly frail individual. Some of this

was the result of the most serious assassination  attempt he faced during his entire reign as the

Nazi dictator, one which again fulfilled part of  Langer’s predictions in The Mind of Adolf Hitler.

On the 20th of July 1944 a cohort of German army  officers led by Friedrich Olbricht and Claus von

Stauffenberg conspired to leave a briefcase full  of explosives in a conference room in the Wolf’s

Lair during a meeting Hitler was chairing  there. They then initiated an attempted coup,

but unbeknownst to them, the briefcase had been  placed in such a way that Hitler did not suffer

the full impact of the explosion and survived.  The plotters were rounded up in the hours and days

that followed and Hitler ordered the Gestapo  to oversee a ruthless policy of eliminating

anyone who was connected to the plotters in  the slightest manner. However, the Führer

had not escaped unharmed. The conference table  shielded him from the worst impact of the blast,

but he suffered a perforated eardrum and  numerous other injuries. A stenographer

attending the meeting was killed and over twenty  people were injured, a sign of how close the 20th

of July Plot came to ending Hitler’s life  and changing the course of the war.

The injuries which Hitler sustained in the  20th of July Plot added to his many health

issues by the closing year of the war. There  has been much recent study of his conditions

by historians. These have concluded that he was  variously suffering from physical ailments such

as the damage to his hearing and wounds from  the blast, as well as many other potential

afflictions including things like Parkinson’s,  syphilis, Huntington’s Disease and severe stomach

and bowel problems. Some of these theories  would explain how his hands developed serious

tremors and shakes in his final years and other  afflictions of that kind. What then compounded the

problem was that Hitler employed an experimental  physician, Dr Theodor Morell, a figure who began

flooding Hitler’s system with a growing cocktail  of narcotics and bizarre potions to treat his many

ailments and allow him to continue functioning as  Germany’s ruler and war leader. Some of these were

rather benign, if somewhat strange, including  large concentrations of injected vitamins and

things like pig’s liver extract, however,  others were potent narcotics. By the final

stages of the war Hitler was a drug addict  by many modern definitions of the condition,

essentially being brought up and down by Morell’s  injections depending on whether he needed to be

active or needed to sleep. He cut a frail and  ill figure in the Wolf’s Lair and the Berlin

bunker in 1944 and 1945, one very different  from the energetic Fuhrer of the 1930s.

By the late autumn of 1944 the Allies  were advancing in Europe on all fronts.

The Western Allies had opened Western Fronts in  France and were massing in eastern France and

the Low Countries for a winter offensive towards  the Rhineland, while the Soviets were liberating

western Ukraine, Poland and parts of the Balkans  and the Baltic States region. Accordingly,

the decision now needed to be made to abandon the  Wolf’s Lair and retreat back to Berlin for the

final defence of Germany. This occurred on Monday  the 20th of November 1944, by which time the

Soviet advance divisions were just 15 kilometres  away. Thereafter Hitler would make his new base

of operations out of the Reich Chancellery  in central Berlin, eventually withdrawing

to the bunker there, when the city came under  threat. This was the final act of the war. By

the first weeks of 1945 the US, British and other  Western Allies began advancing into the Rhineland,

while the Soviets entered eastern Germany and  began the encirclement of Berlin.

From the capital of the thousand-year Reich  that Hitler had proclaimed the creation of

just a few years earlier, the Fuhrer now began  overseeing the final months of its existence

just twelve years after he came to power.  By the spring of 1945 a huge proportion of

German men of a suitable fighting age in their  twenties, thirties and forties had been killed,

wounded or otherwise incapacitated by  the war. Hitler consequently ordered the

conscription of men in their fifties and sixties,  along with teenage boys, to defend the capital in

the futile last stand. He also sent out directives  for commanders and officials to initiate a policy

of scorched earth whereby anything that the  advancing Allied armies might use, be it food,

livestock, petroleum or other resources was to be  destroyed rather than allowing it to fall into the

hands of the enemy. Even some of the most ardent  Nazi officials chose not to implement this policy.

Meanwhile other ministers such as Himmler began to  secretly explore the possibility of a last-minute

surrender to the Western Allies instead of the  Soviets. As all of this occurred, Hitler met

with many of his ministers and commanders through  February, March and April 1945, often dismissing

them from their positions over perceived failures,  blaming everyone other than himself for the

destruction now being wrought on Germany. After weeks of fighting in and around the city,

the battle for the centre of Berlin commenced  on the 16th of April 1945. Four days later,

Hitler made his last appearance above ground in  order to fasten some badges to the jackets of

teenage soldiers who he was ordering to be sent  out to fight the Soviets. Thereafter he withdrew

underground to the Reich Chancellery bunker in  the centre of the city. On the same day that

he withdrew into the bunker for the final time,  Hitler angrily dismissed Dr Theodor Morell from

attending him as his physician. He continued  to take some of the medications that Morell had

prescribed over the years, but some were simply  no longer available and so it is actually more

than plausible that in his final days, Hitler  was experiencing some withdrawal symptoms as

the flow of opiates and other narcotics into his  system declined. It was a strange end to the Third

Reich. As Hitler, Eva Braun, the Goebbels family  and other close adherents conversed in the bunker,

fighting raged in the city around them, while  upstairs from the bunker many Nazi officials and

commanders engaged in drunken revelry, aware  that prison or death awaited them now.

On the 29th of April 1945, Hitler completed his  last will or what he called Mein Politisches

Testament, My Political Testament. It was an  utterly brief document when one considers how

verbose and extensive a work like Mein Kampf  had been, twenty years earlier. It made some

brief allocations of his personal effects, with  the Führer requesting that his art works should

be sent to be displayed in Linz in Austria,  where he had spent much of his earliest years,

while other things which he had acquired over the  years, were to be given to the Nazi Party and the

German people, with his secretary, Martin Bormann,  who almost certainly died just four days later,

being charged with distributing his possessions.  Then there were provisions made for the succession

and a cabinet reshuffle in line with who had  fallen out of or gained Hitler’s favour in the

last weeks of the conflict. The longstanding  heir designate as leader of the Third Reich,

Hermann Goering, was declared to be a  traitor and expelled from the party,

along with Himmler. Goebbels was appointed as  Hitler’s successor instead in the officer of

Chancellor, while Karl Dönitz , the head  of the German navy, was chosen to be the

next President of Germany. Thus, the position  of Führer would cease upon Hitler’s death and

the powers of Chancellor and President would be  devolved to two individuals once again, as it

had been prior to 1934. The will was significant  in so far as Dönitz would become the head of the

government which came into being in the town of  Flensburg on the German-Danish border just days

later and which would surrender to the Allies. Once the last will and testament was completed,

Hitler began preparing to take his own life along  with Eva Braun whom he had married not long after

midnight on the 29th of April. He also learned  that day that his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini,

had been killed in northern Italy. Although  Hitler had been provided with cyanide pills

in order to end his life, in the end he shot  himself in the temple in the afternoon of the

30th of April. He was 56 years of age at the  time. Eva Braun ended her own life using the

cyanide pills. Thereafter attendants took their  bodies upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden

and doused them in fuel before setting them  on fire even as the Soviet Red Army shelled

the city centre of Berlin. Very little remains  were ever recovered from the Chancellery garden

and there were conflicting accounts of what fate  their dental remains had experienced thereafter,

leading to conspiracy theories that Hitler had  not died at all and had gone into hiding after

the war. In reality, what small elements of their  remains there were left, were kept in East Germany

for a quarter of a century before possibly being  removed to Moscow. A death certificate was only

finally issued in 1956 when the government of West  Germany decided to do so. A day after Hitler’s

death, Joseph Goebbels and his wife also took  their own lives in the bunker after murdering

their children. A week later the German government  at Flensburg surrendered to the Allies. The Second

World War was over in Europe. It had resulted in  over 40 million deaths across the continent.

Adolf Hitler was, in the most unfortunate way  possible, one of the most important figures in

modern world history. He was a most peculiar man.  He came from a dysfunctional family background

in Austria and grew up to have a wide range of  psychological issues, ones which were exacerbated

by his experiences in Vienna prior to the Frist  World War, on the Western Front during it and

in Bavaria after it. In Munich in the early 1920s  his peculiar characteristics became a boon to him

in rising to the top of the nascent Nazi Party,  a collection of malcontents and misfits living in

southern Germany at the time. His rise to supreme  power in Germany in the early 1930s was the result

of a global financial crisis and a Faustian  bargain between the German middle classes and

this perverse ideologue. Long before the Second  World War broke out, Hitler’s worst excesses were

already on display or being hinted at in terms of  the state persecution of Jewish people and other

groups. Then, from 1939 onwards, devastation  was unleashed across Europe. The worst of it

began in the summer of 1941 when the Soviet  Union was invaded and Eastern Europe became

the crucible of the war, leading to the deaths  of tens of millions of people through warfare,

bombing, mass executions and famine. What was  worse, the Holocaust of six million of Europe’s

Jews was carried out, along with the genocide  of other groups such as the Roma and Sinti,

while the deranged Ostplan would have seen  the Nazis intentionally mass-murdering tens

of millions of Slavic people across Eastern Europe  to create lebensraum for German settlers if it had

been implemented. For much of these years Hitler’s  supreme focus was on the war effort and his view

of himself as a German warlord and leader saw  him delegate the Third Reich’s programmes of

mass-murder to the SS. Ultimately, despite the  enormous successes the Germans won on the field

of battle between September 1939 down to around  October 1941, when he failed to defeat the Soviet

Union in the winter of 1941 and the United  States entered the war at the same time, the

game was up for Hitler and his many cronies. What do you think of Adolf Hitler? Does he deserve

his place as history’s most reviled dictator  or do Stalin and Mao supersede him? Please

let us know in the comment section, and in the  meantime, thank you very much for watching.