Speaker 1: Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Adolf Hitler
Speaker 1: was a German politician, leader of the Nazi Party, dictator
Speaker 1: in Germany from nineteen thirty three to ninety, initiator of
Speaker 1: World War Two, perpetrator of the Holocaust, and widely considered
Speaker 1: one of the most evil leaders in all of history.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gail Songs, and my guest
Speaker 1: today is Dr Benjamin Carter, author of the Death of Democracy,
Speaker 1: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,
Speaker 1: and professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate
Speaker 1: Center of the City of New York. One of the
Speaker 1: most tyrannical monsters of the last century. Adolf Hitler was
Speaker 1: born in eighteen eighty nine to Aloise and Clara Hitler.
Speaker 1: His father, Aloise, was much older than his mother, and
Speaker 1: it was his third marriage. Aloise was an extremely severe man,
Speaker 1: but intelligent and ambitious, having been born into a lower
Speaker 1: social class and then raising himself up to the middle class.
Speaker 1: Alouise was a very authoritarian, tyrannical father that was not
Speaker 1: in any way unusual in late nineteenth century Austria or
Speaker 1: Germany or many other places. There does seem to have
Speaker 1: been a difference of degree. Though Aloise had a drinking problem,
Speaker 1: he was often very violent, very brutal, both towards Hitler's mother, Clara,
Speaker 1: and towards Hitler himself and occasionally his siblings. So we
Speaker 1: know that he was raised in this environment where he's
Speaker 1: dealing with this very, very difficult father and their relationship
Speaker 1: was never good. I think a key element here is
Speaker 1: to understand that parents did hit their children, but Aloise
Speaker 1: really beat his son, and Paula, the younger sister, reports
Speaker 1: some severe beatings where he was almost left for dead.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about his relationship with his mother, because of
Speaker 1: course we don't know. A psychoanalyst said, the relationship with
Speaker 1: mom is hugely important. So he loved his father, and
Speaker 1: he hated his father, and he had difficult to get
Speaker 1: along with him, but he loved his mother. And his mother,
Speaker 1: who was younger, was a very attentive mother in the
Speaker 1: sense that children that were born to the marriage before
Speaker 1: out off died in infancy or really even at birth,
Speaker 1: and so he was the first surviving child in that sense.
Speaker 1: She had a kind of miserable life with this alcoholic,
Speaker 1: authoritative husband and also the loss of multiple children before
Speaker 1: out off, but she did focus a lot of attention
Speaker 1: on him, so she's reported as loving, but he didn't
Speaker 1: really get enough, not enough love, because she didn't protect
Speaker 1: him against the father. Yes, that's absolutely right. He wrote
Speaker 1: in Mindkom of his infamous partial autobiography, that he had
Speaker 1: respected his father and loved his mother. There's no doubt
Speaker 1: about his really close bonds of affection to his mother.
Speaker 1: Other people who knew him when he was young testified
Speaker 1: to this. It is widely believed by scholars of Hitler
Speaker 1: that if he ever loved, really loved one human being,
Speaker 1: it was his mother. He was always very indirect in
Speaker 1: the way that he wrote about his childhood. He never
Speaker 1: wrote or spoke really directly harshly about his father, But
Speaker 1: there is a fascinating kind of indirect reference. In Mind Comfort.
Speaker 1: He describes a working class family in Vienna where the
Speaker 1: father drinks and beasts the children, and a son turns
Speaker 1: to juvenile delinquency, and most scholars of Hitler think this
Speaker 1: is actually a rather indirect reflection of personal experience, which
Speaker 1: gives us a bit of a sketch of what the
Speaker 1: reality was like in the Hitler household and as a
Speaker 1: young boy he went to elementary school in the town.
Speaker 1: By all reports, he was actually a great student, a
Speaker 1: very accomplished elementary school student, and so people thought or Hitlers.
Speaker 1: His family thought that he was intelligent and his father
Speaker 1: had aspirations for him. His father, of course, had socially
Speaker 1: risen quite a long way from a poor peasant background
Speaker 1: up to being a customs official in the Austro Hungarian government.
Speaker 1: By the standards of that time and place, that was
Speaker 1: a highly prestigious job. To be in state service in
Speaker 1: Central Europe in those days was to have really the
Speaker 1: most honored kind of job that there was, So that
Speaker 1: was a big deal that he got there. And of course,
Speaker 1: as typically happens in these kinds of family patterns, he
Speaker 1: wants his son to carry on the rise. So he
Speaker 1: has aspirations for his son to get a good education
Speaker 1: and to rise higher in the civil service. Now, this
Speaker 1: was something that Adolf Hitler was absolutely the farthest thing
Speaker 1: possible from anything he wanted to do. He had this
Speaker 1: vision of himself as a kind of great romantic Bohemian
Speaker 1: artist and a kind of Nietzschean mold, which was a
Speaker 1: very common way for young people to think about how
Speaker 1: they're sort of romantic future might expand in the late
Speaker 1: nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. So that was another kind
Speaker 1: of arena of father's son conflict, and the conflict became
Speaker 1: were pronounced as he moved into what we call middle
Speaker 1: school and high schoo where he started performing very poorly
Speaker 1: in pretty much every subject. When they look at the
Speaker 1: rankings of the subjects, either he either did barely scraping
Speaker 1: by or he failed. He had to repeat grades. And
Speaker 1: about the only thing that he performed quote well and
Speaker 1: was essentially physical education and art and history. Actually he
Speaker 1: was always very interested in history, but yes, as he
Speaker 1: got older, he became a much more indifferent student. This too,
Speaker 1: i think reflects his kind of growing sense of himself
Speaker 1: as somebody a bit apart, somebody who's not going to
Speaker 1: advance through the kind of conventional channels, with the conventional
Speaker 1: education and the conventional aspiration that his father wants him
Speaker 1: to have. His father decides to quote retire, and he
Speaker 1: spends much of his day in the pub because he's
Speaker 1: not actually very happy being retired, and so it is
Speaker 1: presumed that he had really an alcohol problem, and then
Speaker 1: he would come home and be angry and particularly angry
Speaker 1: at his son who was doing poorly, and yet out
Speaker 1: Off maintained this line. He sort of didn't dig in
Speaker 1: hard to know whether he was lazy, couldn't do, didn't
Speaker 1: want to do. This was his form of Protestation and
Speaker 1: you know, resistance towards his father. But he really didn't
Speaker 1: do much except draw, essentially, and he started to have
Speaker 1: these aspirations of being an art student and being an artist,
Speaker 1: which made his father very unhappy. Also at the same time, right,
Speaker 1: he's entering puberty, and this is a time when most
Speaker 1: boys of that age are becoming sexually interested, meeting girls,
Speaker 1: dating girls, and as they age, perhaps even you know,
Speaker 1: sleeping with girls, sleeping with prostitutes. And Hitler took the
Speaker 1: really opposite stance. He was seemed incredibly inhibited. He admired girls,
Speaker 1: or a girl from Afar. Actually there was a young woman, Stephanie,
Speaker 1: who his friend reports he had a crush on for
Speaker 1: three years, never spoke to her, became immensely jealous of
Speaker 1: anyone who did speak to her, but never spoke to her,
Speaker 1: and maintain this sort of puritanical stance right that one
Speaker 1: should not sexually partake. Yes, he seems to have been
Speaker 1: terrified at funereal disease. And as you mentioned, it was
Speaker 1: quite common for young men in that era to get
Speaker 1: their first sexual experience by going to a brothel. He
Speaker 1: absolutely wouldn't do that because of his terror of syphilis
Speaker 1: or something similar. And yes, he had a fixation on
Speaker 1: this young woman in his hometown named Stephanie, but never
Speaker 1: seems to have approached her. He does seem to have
Speaker 1: been very, very worried about his own physicality, his own body.
Speaker 1: Even later on, far into his adult life. He would
Speaker 1: never go to the beach or go swimming because he
Speaker 1: didn't want to be seen in swim trunks. He never
Speaker 1: wanted to be seen in anything but either full formal
Speaker 1: dress or a uniform. He was very conscious about sort
Speaker 1: of preserving a certain amount of dignity, and he didn't
Speaker 1: want his body showing at all. He didn't want to
Speaker 1: be seen playing any kind of sports where he might
Speaker 1: flub something. He was really sort of physically closed down
Speaker 1: in all kinds of ways when we try to understand
Speaker 1: what what is that about. Syphilis was a big problem
Speaker 1: in that era, and people suffered and people died of syphilis.
Speaker 1: He had an idea that his father might have had syphilis,
Speaker 1: and he also had an idea, even though this is
Speaker 1: very strange because it was understood at the time that
Speaker 1: syphilis was a contagious disease and not a hereditary disease.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless he had the idea syphilis maybe hereditary, and
Speaker 1: in fact has concerns that perhaps he got this from
Speaker 1: his father, even though there was no evidence that he
Speaker 1: ever had syphilis, not clear evidence that his father ever
Speaker 1: has syphi with but he is very concerned about this
Speaker 1: idea of being infected, of being degenerate. This is important
Speaker 1: because later we'll talk about the path that he took
Speaker 1: in terms of needing to cleanse the world as it were.
Speaker 1: That he has great concerns about degeneracy, and one of
Speaker 1: those is about syphilis or sexually transmitted disease, which seems
Speaker 1: to roll over to sex in general, and that he
Speaker 1: maintained this very inhibited way of behaving, particularly with women,
Speaker 1: which really lasts his entire life. We have no evidence
Speaker 1: whether he ever actually consummated via sexual intercourse any relationship
Speaker 1: actually with a woman, though he had some romantic interactions
Speaker 1: with women, but we're not clear how much beyond that
Speaker 1: it actually went. Yeah, all of the reports that we
Speaker 1: have about his sex life, pretty much naturally, are sort
Speaker 1: of hearsay or speculation, and in many cases come from
Speaker 1: people who are inherently rather unreliable. I think it is
Speaker 1: generally believed that later on, when he was in power
Speaker 1: and his mistress was the woman Ava Brown, who he
Speaker 1: always kept secret from the German people at large. But
Speaker 1: I think it is generally believed they had a more
Speaker 1: or less normal sex life. But Hitler definitely had a
Speaker 1: certain fixation about purity of blood, and some of it,
Speaker 1: as you said, has to do with the possibility of
Speaker 1: his father having had syphilis. But the other big part
Speaker 1: of it is that he was terribly afraid that he
Speaker 1: himself might have some Jewish ancestry. And this is an
Speaker 1: interesting story because it has been pretty effectively debunked actually
Speaker 1: by modern historical research. The issue here is that his father, Alois,
Speaker 1: was born out of wedlock, and we don't know who
Speaker 1: his father was exactly. It was speculated for a long
Speaker 1: time that Hitler's grandmother might have been a domestic servant
Speaker 1: in the home of a Jewish family and might have
Speaker 1: had relations with perhaps an elder son or the father
Speaker 1: of that family, and that might have been Autolf's grandfather.
Speaker 1: That has been pretty effectively debunked as really not even possible. However,
Speaker 1: the really important thing for sort of historical evolution is
Speaker 1: that it seems that Hitler really believed it, or at
Speaker 1: least was very afraid that that was actually true. And
Speaker 1: there's a couple of interesting consequences the flow from this.
Speaker 1: Later on, when he was in power, when the Germans
Speaker 1: got control of Austria, in Hitler turned over the village
Speaker 1: where his grandmother had lived to the German army to
Speaker 1: serve as an artillery range. All the people who lived
Speaker 1: there were evacuated, and the German army obliterated the town
Speaker 1: by practicing artillery fire, including the cemetery where his grandmother
Speaker 1: was buried, which, you know, to put it mildly, speaks
Speaker 1: of no very great reverence for his grandmother's grave. The
Speaker 1: other thing that's a little striking is that in as
Speaker 1: part of the famous Nuremberg Laws, which notoriously stripped Germans
Speaker 1: Jews of full citizenship and made sexual relations between Jews
Speaker 1: and non Jews of criminal offense forbid marriage between Jews
Speaker 1: and non Jews. One other little thing that those laws
Speaker 1: did was prohibit a non Jewish woman from working as
Speaker 1: a domestic servant in a Jewish household until a woman
Speaker 1: had reached the age of forty five. So the fact
Speaker 1: that that gets inserted into this law speaks again probably
Speaker 1: at least inferentially to this fear that Hitler had, that
Speaker 1: that's actually where his father had come from. So we
Speaker 1: can start to look at these threads which really started
Speaker 1: very early on of his own feelings about potentially being
Speaker 1: infected in some way or degenerate in some way, and
Speaker 1: of course the thoughts about being Jewish. Even at that
Speaker 1: time in the culture, there was a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: anti Semitism. Yeah, European anti semitism is of course a
Speaker 1: huge and complex theme, and one of the ironies of
Speaker 1: history is that in Germany before the First World War,
Speaker 1: in any way that we can sort of measure, this
Speaker 1: anti Semitism was probably less prevalent than in some other countries,
Speaker 1: notably the Russian Empire, also possibly even France. In Austria
Speaker 1: it probably was more prevalent, and Hitler's certainly picked up
Speaker 1: some of that, some of the increasingly virulent anti semitism
Speaker 1: of pre World War One Vienna. So that's definitely something
Speaker 1: that was in the air. However, the other intriguing thing
Speaker 1: is that from all evidence that we have of Hitler
Speaker 1: prior to the end of World War One, so in
Speaker 1: the first thirty years more or less of his life,
Speaker 1: there is no evidence of his having made anti Semitic
Speaker 1: statements or having anti Semitic views. If anything, quite the contrary.
Speaker 1: He had Jewish friends and associates in his younger days,
Speaker 1: he had a live respect for Jewish culture, Jewish artists,
Speaker 1: and which he expressed, and so there's not only is
Speaker 1: there no evidence of any real anti Semitism on his part,
Speaker 1: there's even a little evidence rather to the contrary. Now,
Speaker 1: he spun that story himself differently. Later in his autobiography
Speaker 1: Mind comp he described a process whereby he became anti
Speaker 1: Semitic living in Vienna in nineteen o seven and eight.
Speaker 1: That is considered by Skull there's to be expost facto construction.
Speaker 1: There's really no evidence of that at the time. So
Speaker 1: important other formation issues in his young life. So he's
Speaker 1: already actually starting to express some difficulty and conflict around aggression.
Speaker 1: He unlike many people that we later think, oh, this
Speaker 1: person actually was a sociopath from the get go, he
Speaker 1: doesn't do things like kill animals or pluck the wings
Speaker 1: off insects, etcetera. But he does have tremendous temper tantrums,
Speaker 1: tantrums that last through his adolescence, which is unusual. And
Speaker 1: so he struggles with that emotional control and these emotional outbursts.
Speaker 1: And we also see the beginnings of paranoia. So he
Speaker 1: already sort of frames his world often as who is
Speaker 1: against me? I believe that people are against me, And
Speaker 1: in fact his father was one of the primary people,
Speaker 1: but other people in his mind become, let's say, against him.
Speaker 1: And then he has essentially these two major losses. So
Speaker 1: his parents not only die young, but die when he
Speaker 1: is young. So his father first dies and he's fourteen,
Speaker 1: of what we presume is probably complications of alcoholism essentially,
Speaker 1: and then shortly thereafter a couple of years later, his
Speaker 1: mother develops breast cancer and she dies, which he really
Speaker 1: describes as the greatest loss, maybe of his whole life later,
Speaker 1: even in retrospect that he is completely mournful and distressed
Speaker 1: about this. But there's an important element too, and who
Speaker 1: took care of his mother? Yeah, the doctor who treated
Speaker 1: his mother was a local doctor named Dr Bloch and
Speaker 1: Dr Bloch was Jewish, and this actually is another interesting
Speaker 1: little strand in, you know, the evidence that we have
Speaker 1: of the development of Hitler's anti Semitism, because he was very,
Speaker 1: very respectful to Dr Block and very grateful for the
Speaker 1: treatment that Dr Block had given his mother. Bloch said
Speaker 1: later he had never seen a young man who loved
Speaker 1: his mother so much and was so devoted to her.
Speaker 1: Hitler took really good care of his mother when she
Speaker 1: was sick. He was at her bedside all the time.
Speaker 1: He was a good son in that regard, and the
Speaker 1: relationship with Dr Bloch was an interesting one because he
Speaker 1: retained a kind of gratitude and reverence for the doctor
Speaker 1: for decades after, to the point that in when again
Speaker 1: Hitler had gotten control of Austria, he made a point
Speaker 1: of sending a squad of soldiers to Dr blosh house
Speaker 1: to protect him, to keep him safe from other Nazi marauders,
Speaker 1: who were of course inflicting terrible violence on Jews at
Speaker 1: that moment. He made sure Dr Blosh was kept safe,
Speaker 1: and he went so far as to facilitate Dr bloss
Speaker 1: immigration to the United States at a time when it
Speaker 1: was getting very very difficult for Jewish people to leave
Speaker 1: Central Europe, and Dr Bloch made it to the United
Speaker 1: States and survived. Hitler probably the only Jewish person whom
Speaker 1: Hitler would dream of helping in that way, and so
Speaker 1: that was a rather odd relationship, but an odd insight
Speaker 1: into the way his anti Semitism developed. Let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break here, we'll be back in a moment. After
Speaker 1: the death of his mother, he essentially leads kind of
Speaker 1: a wandering, failed life. He fails on two occasions to
Speaker 1: get into art school, which is actually quite devastating. He
Speaker 1: lives in hostels and men's homes. He financially can barely
Speaker 1: or not make it. He literally paints postcards to try
Speaker 1: to sell to make money to eat. We would kind
Speaker 1: of today define him essentially as a loser up until
Speaker 1: about the age of thirty that he really is completely unaccomplished.
Speaker 1: And it is really when World War One breaks out
Speaker 1: that he develops a role for himself. The outbreak of
Speaker 1: World War One clearly is the kind of providential turning
Speaker 1: point in his life, which he himself said he had
Speaker 1: failed twice to get admitted to the Vienna Academy of Arts.
Speaker 1: The take that the professors there had on his artwork
Speaker 1: was that it was rather skillful in terms of its draftsmanship,
Speaker 1: but it was sterile. And if you see his paintings,
Speaker 1: it's true. It has been pointed out that he could
Speaker 1: paint or draw buildings really quite well, but not people,
Speaker 1: which is maybe a bit revealing. So he drifted for
Speaker 1: a few years. He lived in Vienna, painting postcards mainly
Speaker 1: for tourists for a few years. He moved to Munich,
Speaker 1: Germany in nineteen thirteen, effectively as a draft dodger, because
Speaker 1: he did not want to or in the army of
Speaker 1: the Austro Hungarian Empire, because he's strongly disapproved of the
Speaker 1: ethnic and racial diversity of that empire. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be in a German country, so he fled to Germany
Speaker 1: and he was living the same kind of life in
Speaker 1: Munich in nineteen thirteen, and then, of course, in August
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, there comes the war. There's a famous photograph
Speaker 1: that shows Hitler with an ecstatic look of joy on
Speaker 1: his face in a crowd of people in Munich Odeon's
Speaker 1: Plats as war is being declared. This is the greatest
Speaker 1: thing that's ever happened to him, he said in mind
Speaker 1: con I fell down on my knees and gave thanks
Speaker 1: that I could be alive in this hour. And he
Speaker 1: volunteered right away for the Bavarian Army, which was administratively
Speaker 1: separate from the main German army, and went through a
Speaker 1: very quick training was at the front already in the
Speaker 1: fall of nineteen fourteen. At the front, he manages to
Speaker 1: do something that actually is quite a feat and let's
Speaker 1: not get killed. History might have been very different in
Speaker 1: a good way had he been killed. But he manages
Speaker 1: to be one of the few that does not get shot,
Speaker 1: and to some degree that may have been partially of
Speaker 1: his own doing, and that he manages to get assignments
Speaker 1: that have more to do with hurrying information back and forth.
Speaker 1: But he occasionally does have some very dangerous and risky
Speaker 1: maneuvering to do, and he does seem to pride himself
Speaker 1: on having been very brave and not being afraid to
Speaker 1: do whatever he was asked to do. But ultimately he
Speaker 1: has a mustard gas injury and this causes him nothing permanent,
Speaker 1: a conjunctivitis what we call bluff rightis, but you know, painful.
Speaker 1: He sent to the hospital, he's treated, he gets better.
Speaker 1: But then something fascinating happens while he's in the hospital.
Speaker 1: Germany surrenders, and Hitler has a really devastating reaction to this.
Speaker 1: This is the other and possibly the most important turning
Speaker 1: point in his life, because although he liked being in
Speaker 1: the army, his wartime record is strange. On paper, on
Speaker 1: one level, looks quite good. He was awarded the Iron
Speaker 1: Cross first as well as second class. An Iron Cross
Speaker 1: first class was as high an award as someone at
Speaker 1: his rank could earn, so that speaks to a certain courage. However,
Speaker 1: it has been pointed out by the story and Thomas
Speaker 1: ab who has written really effectively about this, that because
Speaker 1: of the job he had as a regimental courier, not
Speaker 1: as a rifleman in the front line trench, officers tended
Speaker 1: to give awards to soldiers they knew, and they knew
Speaker 1: the regimental couriers because they're at the base with the officers,
Speaker 1: not like the men who were in the front line trench.
Speaker 1: So that's partially explains Hitler's decoration. The other thing is
Speaker 1: he never got promoted beyond the rank of the equivalent
Speaker 1: in u S terms would be private first class are
Speaker 1: in German and this is really strange. I mean, the
Speaker 1: two things that are really strange about his wartime service,
Speaker 1: as he said, is that he didn't get killed. He
Speaker 1: was at the front basically for the entire war and
Speaker 1: didn't get killed, which is a statistical fluke of the
Speaker 1: highest order given World War One casualties. But also in
Speaker 1: any army in World War One, anyone who was serving
Speaker 1: at the front in nineteen fourteen, by nineteen eighteen was
Speaker 1: either dead or an officer, because the promotion, especially with
Speaker 1: the casualties, was quite rapid, and so the fact that
Speaker 1: Hitler ended up only as a private first class is
Speaker 1: very strange. Much later, testifying after World War Two, one
Speaker 1: of his officers said, this is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: Hitler facts. We didn't promote him because we thought he
Speaker 1: lacked the leadership qualities to be a sergeant. This is
Speaker 1: a remarkable reflection on Hitler. So in a certain sense,
Speaker 1: he's maintaining that kind of loser pattern that he had
Speaker 1: before the war. That's what changes with the armistice and
Speaker 1: with the German surrender of the Fall of nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: This hits him like a proverbial ton of bricks. And
Speaker 1: this is one of the things he says in mind
Speaker 1: conf which I think we can probably believe, when he
Speaker 1: describes the anguish that he had when he learned of
Speaker 1: the armistice, and he actually wrote there that he had
Speaker 1: not wept since the death of his mother in nineteen
Speaker 1: o seven, but now he wept again. So he's drawing
Speaker 1: up parallel probably between these two most painful moments of
Speaker 1: his life. In the defeat of Germany hits him in
Speaker 1: the same way that his mother's death had done, and
Speaker 1: not only did he weep, but psychologically what's fascinating is
Speaker 1: that after his eye situation was completely healed, upon hearing
Speaker 1: this news and having this emotional reaction, he says that
Speaker 1: he's blind again, and he has several days of quote blindness,
Speaker 1: which of course have no medical explanation and are believed
Speaker 1: to be what is called in psychiatry a conversion reaction. Basically,
Speaker 1: this is psychological blindness, which is a symptom experience because
Speaker 1: of being so emotionally overwhelmed. And the nature of this
Speaker 1: emotional overwhelming is important. It's not just that he's sad
Speaker 1: and upset, it is that he is completely humiliated, that
Speaker 1: he feels totally shamed by the surrender of Germany, and
Speaker 1: in a way that is overwhelmingly intolerable. So the physical
Speaker 1: manifestation of this is this conversion blindness, which after a
Speaker 1: few days resolved. But how does he psychically grapple with
Speaker 1: feeling this humiliation and shame which is intolerable, absolutely intolerable
Speaker 1: pain that he feels on the signing of the armistice means,
Speaker 1: I think if I can camp on your territory for
Speaker 1: a moment, I think it's psychologically unsustainable that that could
Speaker 1: somehow be the fault of himself or Germany at large.
Speaker 1: It has to be transferred somewhere else. We call that projection.
Speaker 1: So he projects out those horrible feelings that he can't own.
Speaker 1: He projects it onto Jews and socialists, which for Hitler
Speaker 1: are probably one category. Really, this is something else that
Speaker 1: he says in mind, which probably does come with some sincerity.
Speaker 1: He writes of this feeling he had at the signing
Speaker 1: of the armistice, he found it intolerable that a gang
Speaker 1: of criminals could have taken control of the fatherland. And
Speaker 1: that's what he makes of the regime change that happens
Speaker 1: at that time, when the Emperor Kaiser Vilhelm abdicates and
Speaker 1: flees to Holland and is replaced by a left of
Speaker 1: center social democratic government in Germany becomes a democracy, and
Speaker 1: for Hitler, that's criminals getting ahold of the fatherland and
Speaker 1: betraying the fatherland. He's someone who just intuitively believes what
Speaker 1: later is called the stab in the back idea that
Speaker 1: the German army had not been defeated, it was betrayed
Speaker 1: by these quote unquote criminals that he thinks have sees
Speaker 1: power in Berlin and signed the armistice. And this is
Speaker 1: a further evidence of these paranoid thoughts that he has,
Speaker 1: because basically what he's saying is it's the enemy within.
Speaker 1: It's not circumstance, it's not someone was more powerful. We
Speaker 1: have been attacked from inside, which is almost a paranoid
Speaker 1: delusion if you think about it, because of course there's
Speaker 1: no evidence that that was the case at all. The plain,
Speaker 1: unromantic fact is that, as it would in World War Two,
Speaker 1: Germany was overwhelmed by a coalition that was just economically
Speaker 1: in terms of resources, in terms of manpower, just too strong,
Speaker 1: and Germany ultimately cracked under the pressure of that strong coalition.
Speaker 1: But that's exactly what Hitler can't take on board. It
Speaker 1: has to come from betrayal. Following this period, he essentially
Speaker 1: has nowhere to return. Unlike some soldiers who had built
Speaker 1: some sort of life, had gone to school, had a degree,
Speaker 1: he had nothing, and he didn't want to return to
Speaker 1: that life. So he was basically a person in search
Speaker 1: of a role and identity, and this is what essentially
Speaker 1: led him to a political life. Yeah, the army had
Speaker 1: become in a sense, his home, and he had no
Speaker 1: life of any kind to return to. So he desperately
Speaker 1: wants to stay in the army. But of course, following
Speaker 1: the armistist the army is largely being demobilized and ski down.
Speaker 1: So it's a real trick for him to figure out
Speaker 1: a way he can stay in the army, which he
Speaker 1: desperately wants to do. What he ultimately finds is that
Speaker 1: he has really one skill, which is speaking. An alert
Speaker 1: officer puts him in charge of a political education program
Speaker 1: that the army is running for soldiers. Really in an
Speaker 1: effort to insulate the army against spreading socialism or communism
Speaker 1: in that era, they want soldiers to be educated in
Speaker 1: kind of conservative nationalism, and so they send Hitler out
Speaker 1: to give lectures to soldiers, and as he writes in
Speaker 1: mind comf again, I think we can take this is
Speaker 1: more or less valid. As he wrote, I found that
Speaker 1: I could speak, you know, with a capital lest he
Speaker 1: puts that he could speaking. He turned out to be
Speaker 1: a gifted speaker. And his officers are alert to this,
Speaker 1: and they realized this is a guy with a speaking town.
Speaker 1: Then they start using him as sort of a political spy.
Speaker 1: If there are many fringe political groups of all kinds
Speaker 1: springing up in Munich at that time. Munich is where
Speaker 1: Hitler is at this moment, and so his officers start
Speaker 1: sending him out just sort of witness and take notes
Speaker 1: on political meetings being held by these friends groups. Later
Speaker 1: in he goes to a meeting being put on by
Speaker 1: a small fringe group called the German Workers Party or
Speaker 1: d a P. And he's supposed to just sit and listen.
Speaker 1: But what happens is a speaker at this meeting gives
Speaker 1: a speech arguing in favor of Bavarian independence, of Bavaria
Speaker 1: breaking away from Germany. The various kind of German Texas
Speaker 1: it always has its own sort of ideas of its
Speaker 1: own sovereignty. It did then it still does so, this
Speaker 1: which Hitler views his treason. This argument for Bavarian sovereignty
Speaker 1: provokes Hitler into one of those temper tantrums, and he
Speaker 1: rises in absolute rage. And you know, probably many people
Speaker 1: have seen sort of film clips or even the movie Downfall,
Speaker 1: which illustrates Hitler's temper. It could be formidable. This is
Speaker 1: what happens. Now. He pours out this stream of Hitlarian
Speaker 1: rage and invective over this man who had given this speech.
Speaker 1: And the leaders of the d a P are sitting
Speaker 1: around watching this, and the one who was the founder
Speaker 1: of it, Anton Drexler, watches Hitler with awe and then
Speaker 1: he says to her friend more or less that guy's
Speaker 1: got a mouth on him. We could use him. And
Speaker 1: in fact that's what happens. Hit that gets drawn into
Speaker 1: this circle of the d a P. He gradually becomes
Speaker 1: their more effective speaker. After about six months of this,
Speaker 1: early in n they reformulate the party with Hitler as
Speaker 1: now sort of de facto leader, and they give the
Speaker 1: party a new name. Instead of d a P, they
Speaker 1: changed it to n S d a P. The n
Speaker 1: S part is National Socialist and so now the Nazi Party,
Speaker 1: as we call it is in existence. At this juncture
Speaker 1: in his life, he still has these uncontrollable aggressive feelings.
Speaker 1: He's now realized that he can utilize them and even
Speaker 1: manufacture them, and they work for him. He continues to
Speaker 1: have these paranoid thoughts and this sort of drives him
Speaker 1: further towards needing to be the one in power, be
Speaker 1: the one in control. And he has at this point
Speaker 1: a very good dollop of narcissism, mean that this is
Speaker 1: about him, and he personally wants to gain control, and
Speaker 1: this leads him essentially to a premature attempt to take over. Yes,
Speaker 1: after a few years of building up the n s
Speaker 1: D A p of speaking mostly in beer halls in Munich,
Speaker 1: he's made a bit of a name for himself regionally,
Speaker 1: not yet nationally, he decides that what he and his
Speaker 1: movement need to do is emulate Benito Mussolini in Italy,
Speaker 1: who the year before had staged actually mostly faked, but
Speaker 1: it was believed to be legit the idea of a
Speaker 1: march on Rome. Mussolini put out this idea that his
Speaker 1: fascist basically storm trippers had marched on Roman, seized power,
Speaker 1: and then created the first fascist dictatorship. Hitler wants to
Speaker 1: do the same thing. He wants to march on Berlin,
Speaker 1: starting in Munich, a bit of an odd idea given
Speaker 1: how far away it is. Nonetheless, this is the idea.
Speaker 1: He'll launch a couda taught from a Munich beer hall
Speaker 1: and see his power in Germany. This goes very badly,
Speaker 1: more or less from the start, because the sort of
Speaker 1: mainstream conservatives that he thinks are working with him peel
Speaker 1: away from him as soon as they can. The army
Speaker 1: and the police stay more or less and somewhat grudgingly
Speaker 1: loyal to the existing democratic state, and so they intervene
Speaker 1: and they crush his revolt in a shooting match which
Speaker 1: leaves twenty three Nazis dead. Hitler himself kind of scuttles
Speaker 1: away and is arrested the next day. That's the end
Speaker 1: of his coup. He's put on trial for treason. But
Speaker 1: the courts in Germany and that era tended to be
Speaker 1: staffed by judges who were highly conservative, highly nationalist, and
Speaker 1: the court turns out to be very sympathetic to this
Speaker 1: young ex soldier who's only driven by his patriotism for Germany.
Speaker 1: In the courtroom, when Hitler and a number of others
Speaker 1: who were with him were on trial for treason. Hitler
Speaker 1: breaks into another of his nationalist tirades, and instead of
Speaker 1: condemning him, the judges listen with the same sort of
Speaker 1: odd respect that Anton Drexler had earlier. The presiding judges
Speaker 1: heard to say, what a splendid chap this Hitler. So
Speaker 1: you can imagine that that court is not going to
Speaker 1: go very hard on this young ex soldier. He is convicted,
Speaker 1: but he's given an extremely light sentence of five years,
Speaker 1: everybody knowing he'll be out on parole much much sooner
Speaker 1: than that. And very importantly, Hitler was not yet a
Speaker 1: Hman citizen. He was still an Austrian citizen despite his
Speaker 1: war service, and the law is very clear that following
Speaker 1: conviction for treason, a non citizen must be deported. So
Speaker 1: Hitler should have been deported after this back to Austria,
Speaker 1: but the court expressly refused to do that, citing his
Speaker 1: war service and his evident patriotism. The court ruled that
Speaker 1: it would be wrong to support such a glowing German
Speaker 1: patriot back to Austria, and so they did not deport him,
Speaker 1: a clearer violation of the law. But that's the thing
Speaker 1: which allowed Hitler to go on to have a political career.
Speaker 1: He gets out of jail, only serving after six months
Speaker 1: of his sentence. He gets out in December, and he's
Speaker 1: the way is clear for him to revive the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party and to go on his way politically. So psychologically
Speaker 1: there's almost a feedback loop going on here where the
Speaker 1: culture and the psyche of the culture essentially is promoting
Speaker 1: Hitler because there is anti Semitism and there is a
Speaker 1: wish for nationalism, and there is an anger about the
Speaker 1: Treaty of Versailles, limitations, the need for reparations, the fact
Speaker 1: that employment is ropping and that people are starting to starve,
Speaker 1: and there's tremendous anger and resentment. And he is a
Speaker 1: great mouthpiece for this. So he is spurred on by
Speaker 1: the culture psychologically speaking, and the culture is spurred on
Speaker 1: by him. He by being able to articulate angrily the
Speaker 1: same feelings that many people are having, they rise him up.
Speaker 1: But he is also incredibly seductive to them. Yes, they
Speaker 1: want someone who will say the things that they are
Speaker 1: feeling in a temper tantrum form um and express the
Speaker 1: anger that they cannot. Yes, that's that's right, although there
Speaker 1: are a couple of interesting factors here. One is time
Speaker 1: and one is basically region and demographics. On the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole period from eighteen from the end of the
Speaker 1: war until they're coming to power in three is a
Speaker 1: time of crisis on many levels in Germany, which I
Speaker 1: think it's important to remember just the scale of crisis.
Speaker 1: There's the war dead Germany lost one point seven million
Speaker 1: in the First World War, followed by revolution, regime changed,
Speaker 1: the new regime is not universally popular. There's ongoing civil
Speaker 1: war for several years, the famous hyper inflation, so currency
Speaker 1: becomes completely worthless. That all lasts up until about up
Speaker 1: until hit there's COO attempt. But then things turn a
Speaker 1: little bit and for a few years the economy starts
Speaker 1: to get better, and as the economy gets better, the
Speaker 1: democratic system somewhat consolidates, and Hitler struggles a bit in
Speaker 1: this environment because he really only has one mode as
Speaker 1: a politician. As you said, he can channel rage at
Speaker 1: conditions which many Germans feel to be profoundly unjust. He
Speaker 1: can channel rage, but he can't navigate a political environment
Speaker 1: where there isn't crisis. So it's not altogether a coincidence
Speaker 1: that it's when crisis returns to Germany after this brief
Speaker 1: four or five year interval, when the Great Depression hits
Speaker 1: in nine, the German economy again goes into free fall.
Speaker 1: By two unemployment is at Since welfare payments were very
Speaker 1: limited for people who are unemployed, this basically meant that
Speaker 1: families whose breadwinner was unemployed were kind of slowly starving
Speaker 1: to death. There was a kind of creeping famine. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the crisis is back, and in this atmosphere
Speaker 1: there can channel the rage that many people feel with
Speaker 1: the other important qualification of region and demographics. So it's
Speaker 1: even then, even in ninety two, when Hitler's starting to
Speaker 1: get significant electoral support, it's not everybody's rage he's channeling.
Speaker 1: There are constituencies within Germany that even then he doesn't
Speaker 1: appeal to. Working class urban people generally stay with their
Speaker 1: traditional parties, which basically means the left of center social
Speaker 1: Democrats and to some extent, especially people who are unemployed,
Speaker 1: the more radical communists. Catholic Germans, which is about one
Speaker 1: third of the population, basically stay with the one political
Speaker 1: party that is expressly for Catholics. So Hitler makes relatively
Speaker 1: few inrows into those groups. The rage they is really
Speaker 1: channeling is the rage of people who are religiously Protestant
Speaker 1: and generally rural. That's where the Nazis really have their
Speaker 1: strengths in northern and eastern Germany, largely rural regions, largely Protestant.
Speaker 1: By the early nineteen thirties, the Nazis in some areas
Speaker 1: are getting six of the vote. That's their bastion. They
Speaker 1: never do very well in Berlin, they never do very
Speaker 1: well in humb Or. These kind of relatively cosmopolitan big
Speaker 1: cities are not Nazi territory. It's really a kind of
Speaker 1: blues day rest day thing, and and that maps rather
Speaker 1: closely onto the Germany of the early thirties. Let's talk
Speaker 1: for a minute about his grandiosity, which is initially perhaps
Speaker 1: a function of some narcissism, which is really an insecurity
Speaker 1: right that he wasn't doing anything and he needs to
Speaker 1: be super special, the most important, the best to counter
Speaker 1: those fears. But as he moves along and takes on
Speaker 1: the title of Feor or the leader, he starts to
Speaker 1: evolve this concept of himself which he projects to everyone
Speaker 1: that he really essentially is the chosen one that he
Speaker 1: is a demigogue of sorts, and he does things from
Speaker 1: a pr perspective to maintain this image, which something that
Speaker 1: wasn't done at the time, but flying on a plane
Speaker 1: from place to place, only being seen in these speaking modes,
Speaker 1: otherwise his private life not being seen at all. Part
Speaker 1: of that actually was to uh not marry, he said
Speaker 1: he did. He would never take a wife anyway, because
Speaker 1: he had to be married to Germany. It was important
Speaker 1: to him. He was aware that women you know, would
Speaker 1: write him letters love letters of please be with me, etcetera.
Speaker 1: That he had a seductive ability, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: keep that role. That he should be available and people
Speaker 1: should love him, and he couldn't therefore belong to anybody else.
Speaker 1: But more than that, he started to, let's say, drink
Speaker 1: his own kool aid. He was very very conscious of
Speaker 1: his image and the importance of his image as the leader,
Speaker 1: and he was very careful and very clever at maintaining
Speaker 1: this image of the leader a bit apart, a bit
Speaker 1: aloof He never wanted it known that he had any
Speaker 1: relations with women. For most of the time he was
Speaker 1: in power. He had an unofficial mistress, if a Brown,
Speaker 1: but he kept her very secret, because he said he
Speaker 1: was married to Germany. The other thing, especially up to
Speaker 1: thirty three, when he had to win elections, he understood
Speaker 1: that he had what we would today call a kind
Speaker 1: of Kissinger effect on German women. Personally, I find this
Speaker 1: very hard to grasp, but we know that it happened.
Speaker 1: He said to one of his associates, ones, if Germans
Speaker 1: knew that I had, you know, a woman, and why
Speaker 1: for mistress whatever, I would lose on my women's supporters.
Speaker 1: And we need the women voters now. That may have
Speaker 1: also partially been an excuse for his great inhibition, because
Speaker 1: he did often choose to be infatuated with women who
Speaker 1: were unavailable, right the wives of colleagues of his, and
Speaker 1: you know, but I can't have you because you are
Speaker 1: already taken. And the other women that we know that
Speaker 1: he had some interactions with. One was his niece, something
Speaker 1: that could never get out because it would look terrible
Speaker 1: for him. But in fact he did keep her in
Speaker 1: an apartment, didn't want her to see other men. Something
Speaker 1: clearly went on there, and she, like several other women
Speaker 1: that he became involved in, ultimately killed herself, clearly having
Speaker 1: something to do with whatever went on with him, and
Speaker 1: he continued on this sort of build up of feeling
Speaker 1: that he was godlike, which emboldened him as he moved
Speaker 1: through World War two to lay out all kinds of plans,
Speaker 1: including the Holocaust, which is something that perhaps the people
Speaker 1: around him would not have necessarily supported, but he was,
Speaker 1: you know, I laid down the law. Most people who
Speaker 1: have studied to other very closely see a sort of
Speaker 1: progression in his ego and sense of mission. It seems
Speaker 1: that early on in the twenties and probably into the thirties,
Speaker 1: he saw himself as what they called in those days
Speaker 1: the drummer, meaning basically a salesman. That he was someone
Speaker 1: who was going to mobilize Germans for the tasks that
Speaker 1: he thought they had to do, which basically was conquering
Speaker 1: a huge empire in Eastern Europe so that the country
Speaker 1: could expand and have a big enough food supply and
Speaker 1: be strong enough to compete globally with other great powers.
Speaker 1: He saw himself as sort of mobilizing Germans for that
Speaker 1: and creating the state that could facilitate that project. But
Speaker 1: it seems he did not see himself initially as the
Speaker 1: leader who would be called upon to actually carry that out,
Speaker 1: and at some point he's thinking on that seems to
Speaker 1: have changed. He clearly does get to a point where
Speaker 1: he thinks, no, I'm going to be the one who's
Speaker 1: going to have to launch this war that he thought
Speaker 1: Germany needed to conquer a huge empire. And there were
Speaker 1: a couple of factors here, one of them being that
Speaker 1: he recognized eised that he probably was the only leader,
Speaker 1: at least inside at that time, who would have the
Speaker 1: combination of as he saw it, vision and as we
Speaker 1: might see it, recklessness and evil for one of a
Speaker 1: better word, to carry out this mission. He recognized that
Speaker 1: his associates would never do that, and he was almost
Speaker 1: certainly right about that. The other thing was his fear
Speaker 1: of his own mortality. As you mentioned, both of his
Speaker 1: parents had died young. He was therefore convinced that he
Speaker 1: would too, and he felt he had very limited time,
Speaker 1: and as he approached his fiftieth birthday in nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: he felt times running out. Also, he was aware by
Speaker 1: that some of the democratic powers, notably Britain, were starting
Speaker 1: to rearm in recognition of the threat that he post
Speaker 1: and that would close the window eventually. So as the
Speaker 1: thirties go on. You can really see it quite clearly.
Speaker 1: Thirty seven, thirty eight, he's in more and more of
Speaker 1: a hurry, and he's pushing the people around him towards war.
Speaker 1: Many of the people around him, particularly his military officers,
Speaker 1: his diplomatic people, his intelligence people. There's a kind of
Speaker 1: adults in the room thing going on here, because really
Speaker 1: none of them why to the war that Hitler was
Speaker 1: driving them too, not because they were great humanitarians or
Speaker 1: democrats or anything. They were pragmatic people who didn't want
Speaker 1: to be driven into a war that they were convinced
Speaker 1: they would lose. There's a kind of string of attempts
Speaker 1: of these people to try and tie Hitler down and
Speaker 1: keep him from doing the crazy things that he's doing.
Speaker 1: But Hitler, with his ruthlessness and skill, one by one
Speaker 1: gets rid of them all, as he had earlier gotten
Speaker 1: rid of rivals in his rise to power, and of
Speaker 1: course we know the outcome. They failed to restrain him,
Speaker 1: but that effort was there, in this sort of self
Speaker 1: consciousness of being the season skillful professionals dealing with this
Speaker 1: sort of crazy, reckless demagogue. That was very much the
Speaker 1: consciousness that his senior national security people had Let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: So Hitler is clearly laid out, actually in mind camp
Speaker 1: his plans for the Holocaust. That he feels Jews need
Speaker 1: to be exterminated, and that other groups need to be exterminated,
Speaker 1: the mentally ill, Gypsies, anyone who is other that it
Speaker 1: is important to have only the as he calls it,
Speaker 1: the Aryan race. And so he has already in his
Speaker 1: mind laid out this idea for the Holocaust, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't really embark on this until the early nineteen forties. Yes,
Speaker 1: and there's a really interesting and important moment. In January nine,
Speaker 1: Hitler gives a speech on the occasion of his sixth
Speaker 1: anniversary coming to power, and he delivers what he calls
Speaker 1: his prophecy. And his prophecy basically is that if international
Speaker 1: jury drives the world into another World War in an
Speaker 1: effort to benefit both communism in the Soviet Union and
Speaker 1: finance capital in the Western democracies, then he says, the
Speaker 1: result will not be the defeat of Germany and the
Speaker 1: triumph of jury. The result will be the annihilation of
Speaker 1: the Jewish race in Europe. So what's important here is
Speaker 1: He's got an idea of a Jewish conspiracy which actually
Speaker 1: encapsulates both Soviet communism and Anglo American capitalist democracy. He
Speaker 1: sees that as two sides of the same coin, which
Speaker 1: is a Jewish conspiracy directed at Germany. His understanding of
Speaker 1: what a world war would be is a war in
Speaker 1: which Germany is at war with both sides of that conspiracy,
Speaker 1: with the Anglo American democracies and with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: So if we fast forward to August ninety one, at
Speaker 1: this point, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union is about
Speaker 1: a month and a half in progress, and in early August,
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin DONLANDA. Roosevelt meet
Speaker 1: off the coast of Newfoundland in the famous Atlantic Conference,
Speaker 1: and the issue a document called the Atlantic Charter which
Speaker 1: expressly calls for the abolition of Nazi tyranny and calls
Speaker 1: for a post war world of democracy and international trade
Speaker 1: and freedom and so on. Hitler reads this as the
Speaker 1: sign that that world war is at hand. He takes
Speaker 1: this as basically an American declaration of war. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is months before Pearl Harbord still, but Hitler reads
Speaker 1: this as being the United States is now in the war.
Speaker 1: So the United States alongside Great Britain, is in the
Speaker 1: war against Germany, as he's fighting the Soviet Union, and
Speaker 1: so in Hitler's mind, the logical consequence is that the
Speaker 1: full on war of the Jewish conspiracy against him is there,
Speaker 1: so he must strike out against Jews and that and
Speaker 1: I elation of Jews that he had spoken about in
Speaker 1: nineteen nine is now at hand. And so it is
Speaker 1: I think not at all a coincidence that it's at
Speaker 1: that moment that we start to see the steps ramping
Speaker 1: up towards what's going to become the Holocaust, the systematic
Speaker 1: murder of European Jews in a very planned way, carried
Speaker 1: out after late ninety one in the camps that we've
Speaker 1: all heard about, Alschwitz, ander Blick and so on. The
Speaker 1: real point of origin for that is this realization in
Speaker 1: August that the war that Hitler thinks it's going to
Speaker 1: be a world war is coming, and really pushed forward
Speaker 1: by this paranoid delusion which he's really had for a
Speaker 1: long time about the Jews, he does something that essentially
Speaker 1: you believe would never have happened without Hitler that while
Speaker 1: there was great anti Semitism, and certainly they would have
Speaker 1: removed the rights of the Jews or done things essentially
Speaker 1: make them second class citizens and limit them. That it
Speaker 1: really is Adolf Hitler the man who ultimately drives this Holocaust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely right. I think this is something on which
Speaker 1: versuly all historians agree. Without Adolf Hitler, you would not
Speaker 1: have the Second World War, at least in the form
Speaker 1: that it came, and you would not have the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: It's very likely that any kind of right wing perhaps
Speaker 1: military government in Germany would have restricted the rights of
Speaker 1: Jews in some ways, but would not have proceeded to
Speaker 1: anything like full on genocide. It's possible that our right
Speaker 1: wing military government of some kind might have launched a
Speaker 1: war against Poland to reclaim territory that Germany had lost
Speaker 1: in World War One, but they would never have at
Speaker 1: least wanted to go to war against Britain or France,
Speaker 1: and certainly not the USA. So without Hitler you don't
Speaker 1: have that. It's one of these remarkable things in history.
Speaker 1: He statistically so should have been killed in the First
Speaker 1: World War. Maybe statistically he should have died in infancy,
Speaker 1: as what's so common has happened to some of what
Speaker 1: would have been his siblings. This man survived again and
Speaker 1: again and again and again against all odds, and without him,
Speaker 1: these historical events of the twentieth century would not have happened.
Speaker 1: He became increasingly a bigger and bigger risk taker, which
Speaker 1: actually being a risk taker can be a good quality
Speaker 1: of a leader. Many leaders who are wonderful leaders are
Speaker 1: risk takers, are in our cystic, meaning they have trend's
Speaker 1: confidence in themselves and they're willing to take the risk,
Speaker 1: but for the furthering of the people that they're leading.
Speaker 1: In his case, it was for the furthering of himself.
Speaker 1: The problem became that ultimately, and we have to wonder
Speaker 1: why he made decisions later that were unreasonable risks that
Speaker 1: ultimately led to his downfall, the invasion of Russia, which
Speaker 1: seems in retrospect like a very very poor decision. Why
Speaker 1: is that so? One hypothesis is that Hitler suffered from
Speaker 1: Parkinson's disease. Many diagnosticians have looked at films of Hitler,
Speaker 1: and it is evident that he had a pill rolling tremor,
Speaker 1: that he had a shuffling gait, that he had what's
Speaker 1: called masked faces or very blunt expression that had grown
Speaker 1: as he aged. He had typhosis of the back. He
Speaker 1: had numerous symptoms that really define Parkinson's disease, and it's
Speaker 1: possible that he either developed early Parkinson's or that he
Speaker 1: developed what's called posts encephalopathic Parkinson's, which was due to
Speaker 1: viral illnesses that occurred in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty.
Speaker 1: But the mental effects essentially of Parkinson's are this increase
Speaker 1: in grandiosity, increase in paranoia, and a decrease in judgment
Speaker 1: and the ability to look at consequences. So whether this
Speaker 1: fueled some poorer decisions later, or whether his narcissism and
Speaker 1: his belief in himself, this demagoguery got the better of him,
Speaker 1: or politically, whether he was being pushed in certain directions. Actually,
Speaker 1: I would argue that probably by certainly in the last
Speaker 1: year of the war, maybe in the last two or
Speaker 1: three years of the war, he is making decisions where
Speaker 1: his grip on reality is clearly weak. The interesting thing, though,
Speaker 1: is that as a former trial lawyer, I think I
Speaker 1: would have a great deal of trouble making out, you know,
Speaker 1: an insanity defense for him there for any time prior
Speaker 1: to about ninety two, because the interesting thing about his
Speaker 1: decisions up to that point, including the decision to invade
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, is that although they didn't turn out
Speaker 1: well for him, clearly there was a kind of rationality
Speaker 1: to his thought process, certainly an evil rationality, no question
Speaker 1: about that. If you accept his premise, you have to
Speaker 1: accept his premise. His premise is Germany must expand, must
Speaker 1: conquer territory in Eastern Europe, or won't be able to survive.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't do that, Germany will be overwhelmed eventually
Speaker 1: by Britain and particularly by the United States. So if
Speaker 1: you accept that premise, the way he's operating in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty one is actually rational. The initial motive for the
Speaker 1: invasion of the Soviet Union, and this is something that
Speaker 1: Hitler basically decides in July of nineteen forty. It's a
Speaker 1: very important moment because at that moment he has defeated
Speaker 1: France in a campaign that has swift and has shocked
Speaker 1: the world. Britain is, as Hitler see is a stubbornly
Speaker 1: and crazily refusing to accept reality and surrender. Winston Churchill
Speaker 1: has become Prime Minister and is spouting defiance from Britain.
Speaker 1: The Germans are dealing with the fact that they think
Speaker 1: they will probably have to invade Great Britain. But that's
Speaker 1: going to be a very difficult operation, and Hiller and
Speaker 1: his generals are a bit afraid of that. But they're
Speaker 1: pondering what to do. But that issue is entirely unresolved,
Speaker 1: and even with the British issue unresolved, and even with
Speaker 1: the famous air battle Battle of Britain not even having
Speaker 1: been fought yet, which the Germans will eventually lose, but
Speaker 1: they don't know that. In July, right then he starts
Speaker 1: to think about invading the Soviet Union. The reason is
Speaker 1: he thinks the British are hanging on only because they
Speaker 1: think the Soviets are out. There is a potential ally
Speaker 1: and if they could knock out the Soviets, that will
Speaker 1: be a roundabout way of knocking out the British. So
Speaker 1: that is actually rational if you accept his premise. Also
Speaker 1: the military advice he was getting. Surprisingly, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: his delusion. All of his senior military commanders were confident
Speaker 1: that Germany could beat the Soviet Union and beat it quickly.
Speaker 1: They were not confident that they could beat Great Britain.
Speaker 1: They were terribly afraid of trying to land troops on
Speaker 1: Great Britain, but they thought the Soviet Union would be
Speaker 1: a quick campaign. Everybody shared that delusion, and you know,
Speaker 1: we know what happened after that, of course, the invasion,
Speaker 1: Although it went initially very well for the Germans, it
Speaker 1: ends up being the thing that military early really brings
Speaker 1: Hitler down. But his thought process to get there was actually,
Speaker 1: you know, not yet I think disturbed by any kind
Speaker 1: of clinical mental illness. Well, I think clinically we can
Speaker 1: say that the degree to which he believed that Jews
Speaker 1: were dangerous and would infest, as it were, the Aryan
Speaker 1: race is supported by no evidence, even by those around him.
Speaker 1: It's a paranoia that reaches a delusional level, and that
Speaker 1: really was a sort of a fixed delusion for much
Speaker 1: of the rest of his life, you know, for his
Speaker 1: later life, and he he really maintained that. I think
Speaker 1: we could also say that in that late period his
Speaker 1: narcissism and his cruelty, or let's say, his sociopathy. He
Speaker 1: he is known to say, for example, that if we
Speaker 1: can't invade Russia, if we can't have everything, if the
Speaker 1: German people won't get behind this. On this point, I
Speaker 1: am ice cold. They don't deserve to live. He was
Speaker 1: willing to jettison anybody, including his own people, if they
Speaker 1: would not follow him. So that degree of let's say,
Speaker 1: a lack of empathy of any sort, you know, we
Speaker 1: would have to say is sociopathic. His lack of empathy
Speaker 1: actually is really interesting because the historian Timothy Snyder has
Speaker 1: a clever term for this. He writes that Hitler was
Speaker 1: not even really a nationalist. He was a zoological anarchist,
Speaker 1: and precisely because he thought, well, if the Germans aren't
Speaker 1: up to this sort of Darwinian struggle, then they deserved
Speaker 1: to all be exterminated. Fine. There's a sort of famous
Speaker 1: story of how during the war, his special train was
Speaker 1: parked at a siding alongside a train of wounded soldiers
Speaker 1: and he just pulled the blinds down. He just didn't
Speaker 1: want to deal with their being wounded soldiers. A different
Speaker 1: kind of political operator would probably have gone into the
Speaker 1: train and shaking some hands and you know, sort of
Speaker 1: been a politician. But that was not Hitler's thing. He
Speaker 1: had zero concern. He was apparently once handed a casualty
Speaker 1: report that was very high about Germans on the Eastern Front,
Speaker 1: and his officers expected him to be horrified, and Hitler
Speaker 1: strugs and said, that's what the young men are there for.
Speaker 1: So empathy even for people he would have regarded as
Speaker 1: zone is utterly lacking, completely absent. So we know that
Speaker 1: as they closed in on him and it was the
Speaker 1: end um, he actually expressed oft and then he was
Speaker 1: not afraid of death and if you couldn't accomplish this mission,
Speaker 1: then it was over for him, and he committed suicide
Speaker 1: Eva Bron. He killed his dog beforehand, which was one
Speaker 1: of the few things he actually apparently loved. So we
Speaker 1: know how it ends. What I think is fascinating and
Speaker 1: I want to take a moment for you to reflect on,
Speaker 1: is there are a lot of things about this time
Speaker 1: period building up to the war, otherism, populism that are
Speaker 1: very reminiscent for many people of what is happening right
Speaker 1: now in the United States. And so there is great
Speaker 1: concern and we have a certain kind of leader right now,
Speaker 1: We have a certain kind of cultural concern about unemployment,
Speaker 1: about the economy, and what can we do about that
Speaker 1: that maybe takes precedence. So things that are frighteningly reminiscent.
Speaker 1: How do you see the similarities and differences between that
Speaker 1: time period in Germany and what we're experiencing today. The
Speaker 1: way I would put it is it's a bit of
Speaker 1: a good news bad news situation. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: try and tell you that Donald Trump is out off Hitler.
Speaker 1: He's a different person in many, many, many ways. In
Speaker 1: my view, perhaps fortunately, he lacks Hitler's cunning and ruthlessness.
Speaker 1: He's actually much less politically talented than Hitler, which as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned, is fine. There are, at a
Speaker 1: deeper level, though, some structural similarities that I think are
Speaker 1: really worrying. There. Maybe about three. One is that we
Speaker 1: are living in a time we're much like the nineties
Speaker 1: and nineteen thirties. There is a surge of nationalism around
Speaker 1: the world, linked to a surge in support of authoritarian
Speaker 1: politics around the world, linked to a surge in demogogic
Speaker 1: politics around the world, and linked to a kind of
Speaker 1: anti globalist rejection of international ties of all kind, whether
Speaker 1: those ties be ties of migration, ties of economic trade,
Speaker 1: ties of security alliances. Donald Trump stands against all of
Speaker 1: those things. He's for protectionism and trade he doesn't like NATO,
Speaker 1: he doesn't really any of our democratic allies. He certainly
Speaker 1: doesn't like immigrants. In this sense, he's very typical of
Speaker 1: this kind of nationalist, anti internationalist feeling, which was absolutely
Speaker 1: oxygen for the Nazis. This is really what the Nazis
Speaker 1: were about when they were a political movement in the
Speaker 1: sense that they needed to get elected. Their campaign was
Speaker 1: Germany First, make Germany great again. Closed Germany off from
Speaker 1: the world, make it autonomous, close it off from margaint flows,
Speaker 1: close it off from international finance, close it off from trade.
Speaker 1: That is a parallel that is worrying. The second one
Speaker 1: that worries me is the dynamic between Hitler and conventional
Speaker 1: German conservatives, uh sort of mainstream conservatives in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties really maps onto the relationship between Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and his followers and kind of mainstream Republicans. The dynamic
Speaker 1: is that in Germany back then, mainstream conservatives looked at
Speaker 1: Hitler and they saw a guy who they didn't really
Speaker 1: like much or respect. They thought he was crude, they
Speaker 1: didn't like his demagoguery all of this, But they thought,
Speaker 1: here's a guy who is clearly nationalist. He's clearly militarist,
Speaker 1: he's clearly anti socialist. So from the standpoint of politicians
Speaker 1: who represent big business or the armed forces, this seems
Speaker 1: like a guy whose constituency could provide electoral support, electoral
Speaker 1: clout for an agenda of building up the armed forces
Speaker 1: and of scaling back the social welfare policies of democratic
Speaker 1: bymar republic, scaling back other sort of state interventions in
Speaker 1: business life which conservatives really disliked. So for a few
Speaker 1: years there's a kind of dance between these conventional conservatives
Speaker 1: and Hitler, each trying to use the other, each confident
Speaker 1: they can use the other. And of course the dance
Speaker 1: ends with the discovery that the mainstream conservatives have very
Speaker 1: much underestimated Hitler. He's the one who's more cunning and
Speaker 1: more ruthless. He's the one who succeeds in using them.
Speaker 1: I think we are in many ways replicating that right
Speaker 1: now with the relationship between mainstream Republicans and Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and his more core followers. And the last one I
Speaker 1: would say is deliberate, conscious exploitation of dishonesty for political purposes,
Speaker 1: what Hitler himself called the Big I, and Hitler sort
Speaker 1: of extolled the idea of using the big lie as
Speaker 1: an effective political tool. He had a highly talented propagandist,
Speaker 1: Joseph Gibbel's, working for him, who was very skillful at
Speaker 1: manipulating lies for political gain. This is obviously and certainly
Speaker 1: something that we're seeing today. I understand that Donald Trump
Speaker 1: has clocked in at somewhere over ten thousand lies since
Speaker 1: taking the oath of office, and he has a media
Speaker 1: environment to some extent which channels this for him and
Speaker 1: perpetuates it, as unfortunately do many of the people of
Speaker 1: his party in Congress. And so we are living in
Speaker 1: a time where the very possibility of truth. Of course,
Speaker 1: Ms Conway famously said there are alternative facts, apparently considering
Speaker 1: this to be a legitimate argument. So we're living at
Speaker 1: a time where the respect for truth is at a
Speaker 1: low in some corners of our political environment. Again in
Speaker 1: much the same way that Hitler and the Nazis did this.
Speaker 1: I guess on the flip side of this, the thing
Speaker 1: that I would say makes us a bit different from then,
Speaker 1: perhaps two main points. One is I think there is
Speaker 1: a found individualism in American culture which makes us very
Speaker 1: hard to regiment. That is not a bad cultural defense
Speaker 1: against the return of something like the fascism of the
Speaker 1: early in mid twentieth century, and the other is the
Speaker 1: federal system. It's striking that one of the first things
Speaker 1: the Nazis did when they got power. Germany is also
Speaker 1: then and now a federal state. One of the first
Speaker 1: things they did is make sure they could knock out
Speaker 1: the state governments and centralized power in Berlin. At least
Speaker 1: as of right now, we still have a working federal system,
Speaker 1: and we have state governments that often are of a
Speaker 1: different political complexion than the national administration. Means that that
Speaker 1: is a check and balance, even if other checks and
Speaker 1: balances seem to be failing in Washington at the moment,
Speaker 1: that is an effective one, and we've seen it in
Speaker 1: many ways. How some state governments, in various ways are
Speaker 1: able to push back against some of what the federal
Speaker 1: government is doing, hopefully supported by the fact that we
Speaker 1: have been a democracy for a long long time, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and Nazi Germany had prior to that, only been a
Speaker 1: democracy for fifteen years. It had been a full on
Speaker 1: democracy for fifteen years. It had been a somewhat partial
Speaker 1: democracy for a few decades before that. Pre World War One,
Speaker 1: Germany was not entirely not a democracy. It had democratic elements.
Speaker 1: But yes, compared to the United States, the roots of
Speaker 1: democratic culture we're much more shallow than they are for
Speaker 1: us today. A little frightening is the ending. But thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Ben. That wraps things up for this episode.
Speaker 1: A huge thanks to Dr Benjamin carter Head. For more
Speaker 1: on the life of Adolf Hitler, check out his book
Speaker 1: The Death of Democracy, Hitler's rise to power and the
Speaker 1: Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Also, if you're interested in
Speaker 1: more information about the people we discussed in this series,
Speaker 1: you can check out my book The Power of Different
Speaker 1: and make sure to follow me on Twitter at doctor
Speaker 1: Gayl Salts or at Personalogy m D to follow along
Speaker 1: with all the latest news about the show. Personalogy is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are
Speaker 1: Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is
Speaker 1: Dylan Fagan. The associate producer is Loll bur Lanti. Editing
Speaker 1: music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts.