Housden M. Hitler. Study of a Revolutionary? (2000)
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188 Hitler: Study of a revolutionary?
orator who knew how to motivate a dynamic following. Initially he grasped the
political initiative to pursue violent, illegal action which in 1923 culminated in a direct
revolt against the state. Failure at this point led to imprisonment and (despite his
enduring revolutionary instincts) compelled him to seek power not through direct
action, but through the parliamentary process. As a result Hitler changed to a
position of pseudo-legality from which he still managed to threaten and glorify
violence against both the republican state and his enemies.
‘Dictator’ discussed whether Hitler led National Socialism as a revolutionary
movement and the Third Reich as a revolutionary state. Through the abolition of
civil rights in Germany and the supersession of rule by multi-party democracy, he
brought about a fundamental change to the constitution of the nation’s political
power. He presided over institutions which meted out violence against perceived
opponents and attempted to root them out as social ills. This was done to left-wing
activists and Jews in particular. By necessity the actions implied changes to
Germany’s social structure. The sort of violence Hitler unleashed across the
country was illegal by any reasonable standards. From this chapter Hitler emerged
as a ruthless manipulator of everything around him – people and political
organisations alike. It was a style of leadership which enabled him to motivate
followers to implement his desires. As Reich Chancellor he embarked on a
significant effort to mobilise behind him as much of the nation as possible. Even
when possible limitations to Hitler’s revolutionary credentials were identified (e.g.
the facts that he came to power in a coalition cabinet with traditional conservatives
and that he refused to try to Nazify the army at an early point), these were
explained as short-term measures to improve the prospects for bringing about
subsequent lasting change.
The chapter ‘Deceiver’ asked if there can be a revolutionary foreign policy and
whether Hitler implemented one. Certainly it reiterated the image of the man as a
motivator. Foreign policy triumphs rallied the German people behind him. He
displayed substantial initiative, toughness of mind, self-confidence and ruthlessness
as he lied to and bullied Europe’s statesmen to achieve his objectives. Transcending
the reasonable approaches of his predecessors such as Stresemann and Rathenau,
Hitler showed a readiness for violence in dealing with Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Illegally he supported fifth columns abroad. As first came to light in the chapter
‘ldeologue’, Hitler championed completely new legitimating principles and myths
for the implementation of foreign policy. Through a programme of the most radical
imperialist expansion he hoped to rectify perceived social ills facing Germany, such
as the danger of over-population. By early 1939 he had taken the initiative to pursue
aggressively expansionist ends. He overturned the Versailles system (which he had
always despised as unjust) and transformed the constitution of political power in the
international arena. If anything ever constituted a revolutionary foreign policy, this
was it.
‘Warlord’ raised the possibility that the Second World War was led as a
revolutionary conflict. From 1939 on, Hitler applied political violence across Europe
to alter the constitution of international and national power structures in the most
Conclusion: study of a revolutionary? 189
direct and radical of ways. The single-party nation gave way to the single-party
continent as country after country toppled before Hitler’s armies. In the process,
Europe was edged along the road to becoming a function of Germany’s needs as
Hitler defined them. From the outset Hitler embarked on a project to transform the
social structures of the nations his forces occupied. This was evident in plans to
eradicate Polish intellectuals and to resettle Polish lands with ethnic Germans. He
took the initiative in 1941 and escalated the conflict with an assault on the Soviet
Union. The nature of warfare was redefined by a series of orders sponsored by
Hitler which must be defined as illegal by any reasonable standards. Massive plans
for extermination (of Communists, Jews and Slavs) became part and parcel of the
war in the East such that Hitler championed the most radical political and social
transformation of the whole continent. There is no doubt that he used war as a
means to export his revolutionary principles (both in the way it was fought and in
the occupation policies which followed his victories) and used the period 1939–45
as an opportunity to realise his ideas in their most murderous form. The extremity
of the exterminatory actions expressed thought that was ‘black and white’, violent
and idealistic in equal measure. In Hitler’s mind the bases of evil were being
destroyed as a means to eradicating social ills (e.g. Jewry and Communism) which
were perceived as threatening Germany. The seizure of land was a means to solving
the perceived social ill of over-population.
The chapter ‘Artist and architect’ explored how Hitler’s artistic conceptions
related to his revolutionary credentials. Here the most significant potential flaw in
his revolutionary character came to light. Hitler’s tastes, which revolved around
grandeur, classicism and insipid pastoralism, were hardly a break with tradition.
They were a reaction against the way the contemporary arts had been developing
since about 1910. Hitler was no supporter of the cultural modernisation which
Germany experienced after the First World War. But this does not mean that his
approach to the arts lacked everything revolutionary. On the one hand, he
introduced racism as a new source of legitimation defining the type of artistic
expression he expected in Germany. On the other hand, he wanted to use ‘racially
sound’ construction projects to establish a national myth supporting principles of
community, national greatness and the permanence of his political values. If we
interpret Hitler’s approach to the arts as a propagandistic device to reinforce the
wider changes to political systems and social structures which he brought about
across Europe, even this aspect of his life becomes revolutionary.
Finally ‘Mind’ addressed whether Hitler had a revolutionary personality. Worries
about his mortality and drug abuse encouraged him to accelerate and radicalise his
policies from the late 1930s. The latter must have boosted his self-confidence and
ruthlessness. In terms of Hitler’s experiencing a personality disorder, it has been
proposed that he suffered from an Oedipal complex. This possibility was left to one
side for lack of evidence. Instead it was proposed that at the end of the First World
War, while stressed and depressed in Pasewalk hospital, Hitler suffered a paranoid
psychotic episode which mobilised his mind against Jews and encouraged him to
understand the world in terms of a Darwinian struggle of each against the other.
190 Hitler: Study of a revolutionary?
This experience, which was never treated properly, added a significant dynamism to
his subsequent political career.
A careful tracing of these comments shows that Hitler’s life covered all of the
definitional characteristics of what it is to undertake a ‘revolution’ and to be a
‘revolutionary’. The main points are summarised in the table here.
Summary of Adolf Hitler’s revolutionary credentials
Conclusion: study of a revolutionary? 191
192 Hitler: Study of a revolutionary?
Just one important issue has been left largely to one side (as indicated in the table):
the aim of modernising or improving the world. Strong cases have been made by a
number of historians that fascists, Hitler along with them, were fundamentally
reactionary. The nature of Hitler’s artistic tastes supports the proposition. Famously,
in the 1960s Ernst Nolte argued that Hitler’s National Socialism was a rejection of
historical progress (Nolte, 1969, p. 529). Recent interpretations have maintained the
image of a strongly conservative strain in the movement. Jeffrey Herf has coined the
phrase ‘reactionary modernism’ to describe Hitler’s politics. It applied modern
techniques to promote ends which were still fundamentally reactionary (Herf, 1984,
pp. 1–2).
It is easy to see Hitler’s central fixation on racism as a kind of throwback. Anti-
Semitism has existed for millennia and there was certainly nothing new about anti-
Slavic prejudice in either Germany or Austria (Herbert, 1997, chapter 2; Mason,
1988, p. 11). It is impossible to deny there was something atavistic about the passion
and intensity Hitler brought to his prejudice. This should be no surprise if we are
right that it was energised significantly by a bout of mental ill-health experienced at
the end of the First World War (see Chapter 8). But there was more to his hatred
than just this. Its expression was actually quite complex, as were the initiatives it
spawned. As early as his first anti-Semitic tract (see document 2.2), Hitler said his
aim was to transcend the traditional ‘pogrom’ mentality (which characterised
established anti-Semitism) in favour of something else, by implication something
new. Hitler was not interested in just expressing hatred of Jews. He expected their
removal from society to herald the creation of a different society, by implication a
better one (Baumann, 1989, p. 91). It is also quite correct that, once Reich
Chancellor, Hitler’s practical objective of trying to create a community without
‘lesser races’ was not ‘a form of regression to past times’. No comparable project
had ever been attempted before in German history (Burleigh and Wippermann,
1991, p. 301).
This was an initiative whose time had come. Debates about biological and social
engineering were well-established in circles of German life beyond National
Socialism. Since at least 1895 they had involved some established intellectuals. As a
result one historian has concluded that the morality of biological engineering is not
so much a problem of fascism, but one of modernity (Schwartz, 1998, p. 619). Not
even Hitler’s wartime efforts to restructure Europe’s populations can be divorced
from modern trends of thought. During the 1920s and 1930s German scientists
embarked on significant projects to assess objectively the extent to which eastern
European states were over-populated (Aly and Heim, 1993, pp. 72–82 and 104–
19). The implication was that something had to be done to improve the economic
efficiency of eastern European societies. In this light, Hitler’s plans to depopulate
the East through genocide can be linked to ideas that were current at the time among
progressive economists and demographers (Aly and Heim, 1993; Housden, 1995, p.
479). Even his eliminationism cannot be divorced entirely from notions of
purposeful, progressive change (Baumann, 1989, pp. 91–2).
Wider perspectives add more to the understanding of Hitler’s career. While
Conclusion: study of a revolutionary? 193
National Socialism was the most obvious political movement to promote racial
hygiene this century, it was far from the only one. Increasingly today the measures
pursued in Germany are being understood as encapsulating ‘merely one offshoot
of an international movement with many national variations’ (Quine, 1996, p. 134).
Even admitting that the fixation on excluding Jews from the community was singular
to Hitler’s politics, legislating about what constituted acceptable sexuality (as he
outlined it in the Nuremberg Laws, document 4.18) was not. At about the same
time Hitler was pursuing his ends in the Third Reich, democracies such as the USA
‘implemented aggressive and activist policies aimed at biological engineering and
social regimentation’ (Quine, 1996, p. 136). In the end, it is inescapable that during
the early half of the twentieth century, biological and social engineering were
widely believed to be valid components of strategies to improve and modernise
society.
So even if it is accepted that, objectively speaking, something about Hitler’s
prejudice spoke of a primeval force at work, there are still compelling grounds for
maintaining that when he peddled his racism, in the ‘rational’ part of his mind Hitler
believed he was pursuing a radical new policy, fit for the times, which was tailored to
bringing about the improvement and modernisation of Germany. In terms of what
was accepted as valid during his lifetime, Hitler’s application of prejudice (not to
mention the fact that he found people ready to go along with it) cannot be divorced
from the context of the modern world and modern ideas (Baumann, 1989, p. xiii).
The way his racism was expressed and applied was only conceivable in the early
twentieth century (Payne, 1995, pp. 483–4). It may have offered an alternative view
to that which is generally held about progress today, but it was not a rejection of
that which at the time in the minds of many people constituted bona fide elements of
modernity and the process of modernisation (Griffin, 1993, p. 47). In the last
analysis (and whatever the exact nature of the forces which generated it) Hitler’s
racism cannot simply be used to define him as a reactionary. It spoke of a
revolutionary whom history subsequently showed to have got things wrong.
This is indeed the study of a revolutionary. The proposition is true regardless of
the limiting points touched on here, for example, Hitler’s participation in Germany’s
electoral process, his coming to power in a coalition government, his reluctance to
Nazify the armed forces quickly and his reactionary artistic tastes. With this said,
even if, like Karl Dietrich Bracher, we want to maintain that Hitler was an inferior
individual (for instance intellectually) in comparison to other revolutionary figures
such as Rousseau, Robespierre, Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, still it
has to be recognised that he actually fulfilled the roles of all of them put together.
He compiled a most extensive set of revolutionary goals (calling for radical social
and political change); he mobilised a revolutionary following so extensive and
powerful that many of his aims were achieved; he established and ran a dictatorial
revolutionary state; and he disseminated his ideals abroad through a revolutionary
foreign policy and war. In short, he defined and controlled the National Socialist
revolution in all its phases (Bracher, 1976, p. 206). Even taking his shortcomings into
account, a good case remains for saying that Hitler approximated to ‘the prototype
194 Hitler: Study of a revolutionary?
of a revolutionary’ (Bracher, 1976, p. 206). With this established, we can provide
five final theses about the nature of Adolf Hitler. These grow out of a series of
central observations highlighted during the course of the study.
Thesis I : In Adolf Hitler’s revolutionary life, ideas provided a continuity which
determined actions.
Of course not everything Hitler said and wrote before 1933 was realised thereafter,
but enough did come to pass to underline the validity of the proposition. He
denounced Marxist Socialism in the pages of Mein Kampf and as soon as he was
dictator took decisive steps against its appearance in Germany. He spoke and wrote
about anti-Semitism at length in the 1920s and from 1933 pursued an ever more
radically anti-Semitic path. He first wrote about the need to establish a sizeable core
of Germandom in central Europe and subsequently set out to achieve this. He wrote
about a Lebensraum empire and then pursued it through war. As both a teenager
and during the 1920s he created architectural plans which he set about realising once
he was in charge of Germany. Adolf Hitler shaped the world as he did because he
believed consistently that to do so was correct.
This position looks at variance with that championed by Hans Mommsen. He has
argued that Nazi ideology and Hitler’s personality are not enough to explain policy
formulation in the Third Reich (Mommsen, 1976, p. 156). He believes Hitler only
became involved in formulating Germany’s domestic policy rarely and, like Karl
Schleunes, does not accept for a minute that Hitler ever had a systematic plan of
how to approach the Jewish Question (Schleunes, 1970, p. 257; Mommsen, 1976, p.
227 1991, p. 233). Only hindsight gives a sense of consistency and ideological pre-
determination to events as they unfolded. Policy in the Third Reich came into effect
largely through a process called ‘cumulative radicalisation’ (Mommsen, 1976, p.
156). This involved government functionaries losing their sense of reality and
radicalising their actions as they struggled to function in a state system that was
corrupt, which could be self-contradictory and which engendered dramatic
competition between operatives. Amidst the organisational chaos, policy
developments took on a dynamism all of their own. Only such a train of events
could ever have brought into sight, as actual goals of policy, the sort of metaphorical
statements (including extreme racialist pronouncements) Hitler made in keynote
speeches (Mommsen, 1991, pp. 236–7).
Mommsen’s analysis is intellectually challenging and does reflect the
administrative complexity which characterised the Hitler state. But just because a
state system was terribly ill-defined and ‘irrational’ does not actually mean it failed
to do exactly what the person leading it always wanted. Mommsen himself accepts
that Hitler’s personal ideas certainly did involve the destruction of the Jews and
other entire populations (Mommsen, 1976, p. 234). There is no sign that the Third
Reich brought about initiatives Hitler did not want to see happen, and there is no
question that he ever considered preventing the steady radicalisation of the
treatment of Jews (Schleunes, 1970, p. 259). All the signs are that for the key areas
of his government, Hitler’s beliefs were absolutely central (Dülffer, 1996, p. 293). In
Conclusion: study of a revolutionary? 195
other words, even if some process of ‘cumulative radicalisation’ did operate within
the Hitler state, pushing its functionaries down particular avenues of policy, the
impression remains that the system was only achieving exactly the sort of
‘ideological drive’ Hitler wanted anyway (Kershaw, 1995, p. 336). In the last
analysis, Hitler established the state and was responsible for the way it worked. The
system he presided over was orientated decisively towards important goals he
believed in personally. No matter how exactly it functioned, it is inescapable that
when it really mattered the Third Reich provided a pretty effective platform for its
dictator and his ideas. Notwithstanding Mommsen’s analyses, the truth of this
thesis stands.
Thesis 2 : Adolf Hitler was a racial revolutionary.
In establishing his project for the internal constitution of Germany, and especially in
his planning for her external expansion, Hitler was prepared to give pride of place to
what he deemed racial necessities. In this light Hermann Rauschning’s idea, expressed
long ago, that Hitler led a ‘revolution of nihilism’, which lacked any fixed aims, is
wrong (Rauschning, 1939a, pp. xii and 23). National Socialism did stand for something:
the radical denial of universal values to mankind (Sternhell, 1994, p. 251).
Under Hitler, Germany saw a completely new kind of racial revolution (Hauner,
1984, p. 670). He spoke to audiences in Munich’s beer halls as a convinced anti-
Semite; he led the nation as an anti-Semitic dictator; he fought the Second World
War as a convinced racist; he theorised about art in the same way he theorised
about politics, economics and history, namely in the manner of a prejudiced zealot.
Hitler breathed a bigotry which found the most profound form of expression in
everything he did. Daniel Goldhagen has taken the analysis of this reality to its logical
conclusion. He says that radical racial convictions and an appropriate agenda made
Hitler and his followers the ‘most profound revolutionaries of modern times’. They
brought about a revolution that was the ‘most extreme and thoroughgoing in the
annals of western civlization’ (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 456). It is hard to quibble with
the point.
With this said, Rainer Zitelmann’s equating of Hitler’s movement with
Communism (see Chapter 1) runs the risk of becoming misleading. This is so
despite the very well-documented cross-over of party memberships which occurred
during the later 1920s and early 1930s between followers of the German
Communist Party and the NSDAP, and also despite the fact that the two movements
certainly did compete for the same votes (Fischer, 1991, p. 117 and chapter 8;
Housden, 1993, pp. 478–9). Document 3.12, which advertises a Nazi meeting,
actually specified that Communists and Socialists could attend the event free of
charge. But Hitler was not just anti-Communist because the two movements
sometimes competed for the same supporters and tended to use comparable
political techniques. These points are superficial and do not get to the heart of
Hitler’s attitude towards Communism. Before he was even a V-Mann (see Chapter
3), Hitler hated Marxism enough to denounce soldiers who had sympathised with
the Munich uprising. As his thinking grew, he equated Communism with Judaism
196 Hitler: Study of a revolutionary?
and allocated it to the ranks of all that was truly evil in the world. As with his stance
on the Jewish Question (and appropriately since he understood the two as
overlapping categories), there was never really any way back from this position. It
was logical that the invasion of the Soviet Union was conceived in a particularly
bloody way and became enmeshed with the implementation of the Holocaust. The
ultimate ‘land grab’ was at the same time the ultimate racial action. Hitler and
Communists may both be classified as revolutionaries, but Hitler was certainly not
a closet Bolshevik. He was something else: a racial revolutionary who understood
Communism as a racial phenomenon that required eradication.
Thesis 3 : Adolf Hitler was a turn-of-the-century revolutionary.
We have accepted that Hitler wanted to solve society’s ills by the application of his
own ideas and that he wanted to see social improvement and modernisation according
to his understanding of the terms. The irony is that much of his thinking for the
future was rooted in the past. The primitive side of his prejudice has been mentioned
in this chapter already. More specifically, he took intellectual inspiration from the
world as it was particularly before 1914. In the field of politics he looked to the turn-
of-the-century anti-Semites, Schönerer and Lueger. As regards ideology, he was
inspired by the racial fantasies which were abroad in pre-war Austria. Hitler’s ideas
about foreign policy built on paradigms that had been well-established in right-wing
circles before 1914 and which could be found among the members of the General
Staff during the First World War. As an artist he rejected all developments since
about 1910; in music he was enthralled by Richard Wagner (who lived from 1813 to
1883); in architecture he revelled in the classicism of the late nineteenth century.
That Hitler owed much to the past does not at all invalidate his revolutionary
status. It should be expected. All revolutions draw on references from history
(Weber, 1976, p. 514). The bible of revolutionary Marxism, The Communist
Manifesto, was written in 1847–8. That twentieth-century figures from Lenin to Che
Guevara drew on it hardly lessens their revolutionary status. The point only serves
to support the truth of Billington’s argument that the revolutionary fervour of the
twentieth century grew out of that previous one (Billington, 1999, p. vii). The
nineteenth-century cultural movements experienced in Germany, as exemplified
especially by Wagner’s artistic projects, were revolutionary in the widest sense
(Rose, 1990, p. 16). The nationalist anti-Semitism of that period was similar. It
promised the ‘moral regeneration of the German people’ through the removal of
Jews (Rose, 1990, p. 18). It is just an empirical fact that the revolutionism begun
during this earlier time provided the inspiration for, and found its ultimate
expression in, the minds of men like Adolf Hitler in the wake of the First World War.
Even if there were few completely new principles in his thinking, he did build upon
the pre-existing foundations with the important characteristics of rigour, scale,
passion and total want of moral restraint. Colossal classical building projects and
colossal exterminationism: the traits were intimately related and spoke of an
intensity of belief, commitment and idealism which was nothing if not revolutionary
(Billington, 1999, p. 3).
Conclusion: study of a revolutionary? 197
Thesis 4 : The normal and pathological mental worlds of Adolf Hitler corresponded
closely. This proximity helped render him particularly energetic and at times
precipitative. It predisposed him to revolutionary action.
The key ideological tenets of Hitler’s life, namely anti-Semitism (linked to the fear of
global Jewish conspiracy) and a belief that life is a struggle for existence, fitted together
well, and expressed the paranoia associated with a psychotic delusional experience.
The result of this overlap could only be a flowing together of motivation stemming
from the ‘rational’ thoughts of the individual (i.e. that a course of action should be
pursued because it seems intellectually supportable) and from the pathological (i.e.
that a course of action should be pursued because paranoia dictates as much). The
result helps account for the profound energy Hitler showed throughout much of his
life, as well as his capacity to dash towards showdowns. If he wanted, he could always
find reasons to act today, rather than wait until tomorrow. For example, in 1939
economic problems became grounds to invade Poland, not reasons to defer action.
In 1940/41 the need to defeat Britain militarily became (after an initial hesitation) a
justification to race eastwards against the USSR; it was not a reason to bide one’s
time. Likewise in 1941 Hitler’s belief that the Soviet armed forces had to be weak
held sway over his understanding that, once war was declared, anything could happen.
This perspective on the causal mechanism which lay behind Hitler’s actions is
supplementary to what we know of other issues, such as drug abuse, fears for his
health and the concrete circumstances in which given political decisions were taken.
It goes without saying that the coalescence of drives predisposed Hitler to take
revolutionary measures. The intensity of belief and fixity of purpose this coalescence
must have engendered also helps explain why he never wavered in his determination
to realise a set of ‘visions of forceful change and domination’ (Bracher, 1976, pp.
205–6). Without such singlemindedness, the history of Germany and Europe would
have been very different.
Thesis 5 : Adolf Hitler was a criminal revolutionary.
According to our definition, all revolutionaries act outside the law. But Adolf Hitler
was not just interested in petty crime. He did not infringe the law only here and
there as a short-cut to the creation of a better world for the vast majority of its
inhabitants. He was a criminal in the first degree. His politics became the premeditated
mass murder of vast swathes of Communists, Slavs and Jews. Even his hope that the
aim of civilisation should be the production of great works of art was fatally
compromised by the conviction that race determines artistic sensitivity. Had he
survived 1945, his only hope at a war crimes trial would have been to plead insanity.
At the time no one would have listened. He had been the initiator of far too much.
The extent of his criminality underlines the fact that Hitler’s revolution was only ever
perceived to be modernising. There was a terrific gulf between conception and reality.
Principles of division, hatred and murder are hardly the lasting values of mankind.
The actuality of the revolution which shook Europe between 1933 and 1945 was
hopelessness: it led nowhere worth going. So although his figure undeniably exerts a
voyeuristic fascination even today, and notwithstanding so much being written about