Emily's Reviews > Hitler

Sometimes when I spend too much time reading on the minutiae of the Third Reich, it starts to look strange in my head--like when you look too long at your own hand or ponder the spelling of your own name too long and it begins to seems weird and unreal. I'm not saying that I doubt the facts of the era any more than I doubt my own name or the existence of my hands, just that those facts begin to feel surreal and unbelievable despite their familiarity. This book does nothing to alleviate that feeling. Since it is a biography rather than a history, it makes no attempt to explain what the German people were thinking. You might hope it would explain what Hitler was thinking, but instead he is revealed (or not) as an opaque, unknowable person. This is the history of an individual rather than a psychological portrait.

I've mostly read about the pre-war period and the war itself in separate accounts, so one benefit of this book is that it presents the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the run-up to the Nazi period, and the Second World War as a single narrative, giving me a better sense of proportion of how long the liminal period of Nazism was in contrast to the hasty, lurching, disastrous progress of the war after the first winter in the USSR.

Kershaw presents one aspect of Hitler's influence differently than I've seen elsewhere. Instead of suggesting that the German people were blindly following orders, or even that they were willingly following orders, Kershaw presents Hitler as relatively uninvolved in the details of the Final Solution. Instead, he shows Hitler as intimating, somewhat vaguely, what he wanted done while his followers were "working towards the Führer." Hitler was an erratic, capricious manager--really, the worst boss ever--endlessly interfering with the military in contrast to a cavalier indifference to the effects of his policies on the German public that he was purportedly defending, let alone any other civilians. His underlings, in this view, were the ones who took Hitler's exterminationist zeal and turned it into an actual program of genocide. I found the "working towards the Führer" concept persuasive because it does not rely on the idea that millions of people could be somehow persuaded to do something they knew was wrong, nor on the idea that Hitler personally directed every detail of the Holocaust. Instead, it attributes the Holocaust to a combination of mass hysteria or enthusiasm, attaching itself to the idolized person of Hitler and seeking to please him. In the disorganized world of the Third Reich, Hitler was the only source of authority, so individuals and departments competed for his approval, which resulted in constantly escalating radicalization.

I should mention that this volume, an abridgement of Kershaw's two-volume biography, seems shoddily put together to me, as though it were the work of an able and fluent writer, slapped together and published without enough editing. Figures appear without being introduced; the narrative might switch from talking about the German Workers Party to the DAP without any explanation. If you are familiar with the period and/or speak German, you can ride this out, but this book does not recommend itself as an introduction to the period.