Hitler isn’t dead and buried. His ghost haunts the world nearly 80 years since his suicide and with the rise of the “alt-right,” his spirit is more restless now than it was 20 years ago.
For a while, it was fashionable in academic circles to minimize the history-shaping significance of individuals such as Hitler and emphasize instead the importance of social structures. But reality, as Hitler’s latest biographer Peter Longerich explains, is more complicated. The structures are important, but people populate them, lead them and drive their changes. Individuals have the power (for good or ill) to move history off course and put their own stamp on our world.
In Hitler: A Life, Longerich, professor of modern German history at London’s Royal Holloway University, explains that despite various factors at work in Germany, there “had to be a political figure who knew how to exploit these preconditions and forces to integrate them and channel them.”
Why Hitler Remains One of History’s Tragic Mysteries
Longerich agrees with most previous biographers that Hitler was “simply insignificant, a nobody” at the end of World War I. The first 20 years of his life occupy only one chapter among Longerich’s 1,200 pages. Hitler returned from Germany’s defeat to a nation racked by resentment, revolution and economic upheaval. By itself, this proves nothing. Among the millions of German veterans who came home scared by war and facing uncertainty, only one became the Führer.
Longerich doesn’t try to explain the transformation of Hitler from non-entity to world leader, but he shows the steps and the conditions of his ascent to power. He was a rabble-rouser, appointed chancellor with the connivance of conservatives who thought they could control him and realized too late that he now controlled them. Although capable of political pragmatism, Hitler emerged on the public stage with the ideology and agenda he pursued until death. He was a true believer in the order he sought to impose on the world.
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Longerich is careful not to venture far beyond established facts. Of Eva Braun, he writes, “one can only speculate about the relationship between the dictator and the woman.” Hitler never signed an order for the “Final Solution,” however, Longerich maintains, his central role in all previous aspects of Nazi Jewish policy points to him as the source. Anti-Semitism had been widespread throughout the world, but no one acted on it with Hitler’s militant determination to eliminate the Jewish people. For anti-Semitism “to be geared to the most radical solution required the engagement, the coordination, the driving force of the authoritative man at the top of the regime,” Longerich writes. The Holocaust was abetted by social structures but instigated by an individual.
