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