"Blitzed" by Norman Ohler - a historian's review

Hitler - cynics say - is the gift that keeps on giving.  He still holds us all, it seems, in his awful thrall.  We are fascinated and appalled by him in equal measure.  But we should perhaps also be grateful - grateful that, where once he inspired genocide and war, now he just inspires occasionally dodgy history.

This last week saw the publication in the UK of "Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany" by German author Norman Ohler.  The PR campaign here in the UK was immense.  Perhaps it was the book's heady combination of "Hitler" and "drugs" that did it; catnip to the media - but it received prominent reviews in the press, alongside a "news" item on the BBC website, which amounted to little more than a breathless extended plug by the author.  Nonetheless, after the book's success when published in Germany last year, I was keen to see it, hoping for a treatment of the subject that would be typically 'Germanic' and thorough.

Ohler's thesis is twofold.  Firstly, he suggests that Hitler himself was addicted to the cocktail of drugs supplied to him by his personal physician; Theodor Morell, which included cocaine, the morphine-derivative Eukodal, and Pervitin; a form of methamphetamine.  This addiction, he says, had political and military consequences, as Hitler's sense of invincibility and his inability to see reason grew unchecked, and - in 1945, when he struggled with the consequences of withdrawal.

The second strand of the book is that - despite Nazism's official disapproval - drug use was actually rather commonplace during the Third Reich and in particular that the use and abuse of Pervitin was widespread, especially in the military.  Pervitin - which induced feelings of euphoria, alertness and diminished inhibitions - was certainly exploited by the German armed forces, and Ohler says, seems to have played a key role in the early successes that are so often attributed to the tactical genius of the Blitzkrieg.

Both these subjects are well worthy of historical examination, yet - for all the hyperbole - neither is entirely new.  Hitler's drug habits have often been discussed in detail - in (for instance) Leonard Heston's "Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler" from 1979 or Ernst-Gunther Schenck's "Patient Hitler" from 1989.  In addition, it is a subject that has been discussed - at least in passing - in all the Hitler biographies, including Alan Bullock's "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny" from 1952.  Hitler's drug use has even been the subject of a couple of low-rent TV documentaries in recent years. Ohler's claim to novelty on this therefore, should be taken with a considerable pinch of salt.

Where Ohler is rather more novel is in his claims that Hitler was addicted to the cocktail of drugs that he received.  Of course, the honest answer is that we can't know for sure as there is not enough evidence to be had - but I think it is telling that more circumspect commentators - such as Schenck, who was an SS doctor - have concluded that, as far as the evidence allows a conclusion to be drawn, Hitler was most probably not addicted to any of the substances that he was given.  Nonetheless that doesn't stop Ohler from jumping to his sensational conclusion not only that Hitler was addicted, but that the addiction had political and military consequences.

The material on the use of Pervitin - though less spectacular than the tales of Hitler's supposed addictions - is rather more interesting.  Certainly Pervitin use appears to have been widespread before and during the war, particularly in the military - and this has also been written about before - but again Ohler overplays his hand by making some claims for pharmacological explanations for military events that are scarcely sustainable in the sober light of day.

Stylistically, "Blitzed" is very readable; Ohler has written novels previously, and it shows.  But, while his story rattles along well, he rather struggles with the requirements of serious non-fiction.  The twin strands of his narrative are imperfectly spliced, and he undermines his own credibility by adding a smattering of contemporary drug-related words "junkies", "high", "doped up" throughout his narrative.

In sum, there is some engaging and enlightening material here - but very little that has not been said before elsewhere.  All that is provable isn't new; and all that is new isn't provable.  "Blitzed" is certainly sensational - but whether it is good history or not is another matter.

Was Hitler a Zionist?

Yesterday, British politics was plunged into an improbable, yet nonetheless frenzied discussion of Adolf Hitler and Zionism.  Despite the multifarious threats of ISIS, the Migration Crisis, the EU's slow-motion car crash and the faltering world economy - journalists were quoting Mein Kampf and dissecting the finer points of Hitler's policies towards the Jews.

The reason for this rather preposterous state of affairs was the veteran left-wing politician, Ken Livingstone, who - on riding to the support of a Labour MP, Naz Shah, who was exposed as having made anti-Semitic remarks - successfully poured fuel on the flames.  Apropos of not very much, he said in a radio interview:

"Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

Now, given the obvious historical ignorance on show in that sentence - Hitler didn't "win" an election, he was appointed Chancellor in 1933, he didn't "go mad" and Israel was not established until 1948 - it is perhaps surprising that Livingstone's suggestion that Hitler supported Zionism was given any credence at all, but the press (and others) nonetheless had a field day.  So let's give the subject the once over.

Hitler was an anti-Semite.  He was an ingrained and impassioned anti-Semite.  Anti-Semitism was the guiding principle of his political life and it ran through his career like the text in a stick of seaside rock.  Hitler's primary political ambition was to remove the Jews from Germany.  As we all know, this he would later do by extermination in the Holocaust - but in the early years of the Third Reich, he sought to do it by "encouraging" emigration; making conditions for Jews within Germany so bad through boycotts, purges and persecution, that they would opt to leave of their own accord.  In this, indeed, he was relatively successful.  Between 1933 and 1939, the Jewish population of Germany fell from over 500,000 to little over 200,000, with German Jews finding refuge across Europe and the wider world.

Some of those emigrants found their way to British Mandated Palestine - or, as Ken Livingstone would put it: "Israel".  Indeed, there was a scheme in place called the Ha'avara Agreement, made in 1933 between the new Nazi government and Zionist German Jews, to facilitate emigration to Palestine.  It required the payment, up front, of a £1,000 fee, which would be used to effectively 'purchase' the possessions of would-be emigrants, thereby neatly getting around the fundamental problem that the Nazis did not allow German Jews to remove their property and wealth from the country.

This shakedown of the desperate might feasibly be what Livingstone was referring to when he stated that Hitler "supported Zionism".  But, there are a number of caveats that he should perhaps have borne in mind.  For one thing, Hitler was no fan of the Ha'avara arrangement, fearing that the Jews - if concentrated in Palestine - would simply form a new outpost of his imagined "Grand Jewish Conspiracy".  Neither were all German Jews "Zionists" - Zionism was a particular strand of Jewish political thought and was by no means shared by all German Jews, even in the increasingly perilous situation that they found themselves in the 1930s.  Also, the British in Palestine were far from enthusiastic about encouraging a wave of Jewish emigration that would be bound to upset their fractious province.  In addition to all that, the up front costs of the Ha'avara deal meant that many German Jews were unable to take up the offer, even had they wanted to.  In the end, some 50,000 German Jews used the scheme, barely one in six of the total that left Germany between 1933 and 1939.

So, there was a Zionist arrangement of sorts with Hitler's Germany - but to conclude that Hitler therefore "supported Zionism" is not only historically inaccurate, it is historically illiterate.  But then, this particular storm in a teacup was never really about history. It was just a crude, rather cretinous attempt to smear by association.

Volkswagen - founded by the Nazis - felled by eco-fibbing

The emissions scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen this week is a reminder of the precariousness of even the most apparently established brands in the modern marketplace.  Just as a misjudged aside at a conference sank Gerald Ratner’s jewellery business in 1991, so it seems some eco-fibbing might just torpedo the second largest car manufacturer on the planet.

All of which is rather surprising, when one considers Volkswagen’s thoroughly toxic early history.  Given the almost reflexive opprobrium that is (rightly) directed at companies tainted by association with the Third Reich, is it not astonishing that a company established by the Nazis to build a car that was in integral part of Hitler’s social project – should have survived at all?

Hitler examining a model Volkswagen

Volkswagen was set up in 1937, at Hitler’s command, by the Nazi DAF; the ‘German Workers’ Front’, itself a nazified substitute for the smashed trades unions.  Given that cars were very much luxury items in Europe in the 1930s, Volkswagen’s brief was to design and build a “People’s Car” – that’s what the name means in German – a budget model, which would be priced to be affordable for the average household. and could carry a family of four at 100kmh.  Hitler himself was said to have even made some preliminary sketches. 

It was no pipe-dream.  A purpose-built factory was established in 1938 at Wolfsburg, near Fallersleben, with a projected capacity of 1.5 million cars per year, which came complete with a nearby ‘new town’ to accommodate the necessary workers.  Moreover, the renowned car designer Ferdinand Porsche was brought in to hand-pick the car’s design team.  Wind-tunnels were employed to utilize the very latest ideas in aerodynamics. 

The car that they were to produce was to be officially known as the “KdF-Wagen” – named after the Nazi freetime organisation; Kraft durch Freude, or ‘Strength through Joy’.  It was to be marketed for 990 Reichsmarks; a fraction of the price of other marques then available, and could be paid off by weekly subscription; 5 Reichsmarks per week.  Over ⅓ of a million Germans signed up.  The era of mass popular motoring, it seemed, had dawned.

Of course, the Nazis did not go to all this trouble and expense out of altruism.  To some extent, the KdF-Wagen – like its eponymous, parent organisation – was a propaganda exercise; an attempt to convince ordinary Germans that they were part of a bright, new, consumerist world, ushered in by their Nazi masters.  But it was more than just propaganda eyewash.  By appealing to the ordinary German people – the “Volk” – the KdF embodied the ‘socialist’ element of the Nazis’ ‘National Socialism’; convincing the ordinary worker – who once might have voted socialist – to shift his loyalty to Hitler.  In this way, Volkswagen became an essential component in the Nazis’ seduction of the German people.

Hitler being presented with a prototype "KdF-Wagen"

Of course – like the Third Reich – it did not end well.  Hitler was presented with a prototype “KdF-Wagen” for his birthday in 1939, and 50-odd further completed vehicles were gifted to foreign potentates and Nazi bigwigs.  But none of the 300,000-odd ordinary Germans, who had dutifully paid their dues and collected their stamps, ever owned the car. 

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the Wolfsburg factory shifted production to German military jeeps, consuming in the process many thousands of slave labourers sourced from the local concentration camp. 

The world would have to wait until 1946 to see the first “KdF Wagen” – or as we know it today – the Volkswagen Beetle.

On one level, I suppose, Volkswagen did remarkably well to shed its Nazi past and become one of the world’s most famous and most successful car manufacturers. 

But – given its intimate links to the Third Reich, its use of concentration camp labour, and its central importance to the toxic Nazi ‘dream’ – I personally find it astonishing that the company lasted long enough to be brought low in 2015 by something as banal as an emissions scandal.  Given its hideous early history, it should have been killed off long ago.  

© Roger Moorhouse 2015

On Hitler's Teeth - or, the Death of a Dictator.

Alongside his many other faults, Adolf Hitler had very bad teeth - catastrophically bad teeth.  It is not clear precisely why - bad genes, bad diet or poor personal hygiene - but some among his entourage would later claim that his halitosis was sometimes so bad that they involuntarily took a step back when talking to him.  By the last year of the war, his teeth had deteriorated to such a state that only 5 of his 32 adult teeth were his own.  This X-Ray of Hitler's skull, taken in the autumn of 1944 in the aftermath of the 20th July Bomb Plot, shows the scale of the problem.  The dark patches where his teeth should be are crowns, with only the five front teeth of Hitler's bottom jaw showing as his own.

An apple a day...

Given that Hitler had the teeth of a Berlin hobo, therefore, he required some elaborate dentistry to conceal the dark truth.  Consequently, his dentist Hugo Blaschke constructed a network of gold crowns and bridges with porcelain veneers inside the Führer's mouth.  Now, to any German of that generation, working in close proximity to their leader would have been a memorable experience, but for Blaschke and his assistants - Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann - it was also the complex dentistry that stuck in their minds, not least the famed "telephone bridge" that spanned a crown in Hitler's lower jaw. 


Such recollections were to come in useful.  Though Blaschke escaped to the south and was eventually captured by the Americans, and the dental records were destroyed in the Börnersdorf plane crash (which also ultimately spawned the "Hitler Diaries" fiasco), the two assistants - Heusermann and Echtmann remained in Berlin and were duly arrested by the Soviets.  Under interrogation, they were asked to describe Hitler's elaborate dentistry from memory - Heusermann had been Blaschke's dental assistant, and Echtmann had crafted the bridges.  They did so; they also produced sketches - Heusermann's sketch (complete with Russian annotation) is here..

Then, on 9 May 1945, Heusermann and Echtmann were shown pieces of jaw that the Soviets had retrieved from one of the 14 or so charred corpses that had been discovered in the Reich Chancellery garden the week before.  Both immediately affirmed that the teeth and bone that they were handling were indeed those of Adolf Hitler.  The dentistry on show also conformed precisely to what the two had described and sketched prior to being shown the remains.  The teeth were Hitler's. 


Thereafter - according to Heusermann, who was flown back to Moscow for 10 years of further questioning - the teeth were carried around in a cigar box and were opened referred to by their NKVD handlers as "Hitler". These, incidentally, are the same jaw fragments that are still kept in the Moscow Special Archive. Clearly, it seems, the Soviets were convinced that the teeth in their possession were those of Hitler and - logically - that Hitler was therefore dead. Indeed, in mid-May, Soviet intelligence officers confirmed to their Western counterparts that Hitler had "been poisoned" and Zhukov admitted to Khrushchev that they had found Hitler's "charred carcass".

Hitler's teeth, with the 'telephone bridge' (right)

Sadly, however, within a few days Soviet leaders had opted to deny the obvious and chose instead to sow confusion over Hitler's death, insinuating that the German dictator had somehow survived and had escaped to the Western zones of occupation - thereby giving themselves an excellent stick with which to beat the West in the opening exchanges of the Cold War.  It is the subsequent campaign of disinformation and obfuscation that led to the outlandish tales of Hitler's survival - in the jungles of Patagonia, in fascist Spain, or in the secret Nazi base on the moon - that occasionally resurface to this day.  

Of course, it should be clear from this brief essay that if Hitler did in fact escape Berlin, we have to assume that he did so missing both his upper and lower jaw.  That 'escaped Hitler' would not only have to have been a master of disguise and have had the escapology skills of a Houdini - he would have been a medical miracle...

A Danish adventure

I spent last weekend in Copenhagen, launching the Danish edition of my last book "The Devils' Alliance".  Beautifully presented by the Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, "En djaevelsk alliance" is a handsome looking volume and is the first foreign-language edition of this book to be published.  So, as you can imagine, it was a great pleasure to formally launch the book at the inaugural "Historiske Dage" history festival in the Danish capital.

What was more exciting, however, was that the Danes evidently "got" the book.  They grasped what I was trying to do, without any bafflement, confected outrage or ridiculous suggestions that I was in some way "whitewashing Nazism". In review after review, they just seemed to "get it".  This was especially satisfying.  One reviewer even went so far as to suggest that perhaps it was time to regard Communism as having been just as great a threat to Denmark during World War Two as Nazism had been.  There were criticisms, of course, and valid ones, but in Copenhagen at least the unthinking binary formulation of "Stalin good/Hitler bad", that still seems to prevail in sections of the British media and academia, seems to have been consigned - praise the Lord - to the rubbish heap of history.

There are a couple of reasons for this enlightened attitude.  Firstly, Denmark has a natural connection to the Baltic States, not only though a shared status as a small state in northern Europe historically at the mercy of its larger neighbours, but also because Denmark was often used during the Cold War as an intermediary for American policy towards to the Baltics.  As a result, the historic sufferings of the Baltic peoples, far from being a largely unwritten chapter (as in the UK), are rather better understood in Denmark. Indeed, I met a couple of Sybiraks - survivors of the Soviet deportations, who grew up in Siberian exile - during my short stay there.

In addition, as I learned from the review of my book in the Berlingske Tidende, the issue of misplaced 'progressive' tolerance for the USSR and for Stalinism has already, to some extent, been worked through in Danish public life. Around the turn of the millennium, a Danish Encyclopedia appeared (in those old-fashioned days when such a thing would still be printed) whose academic editors, it seemed, went rather too easy on Communism.  In response, a philosopher pointed these oversights out, concluding that there was still a reluctance to acknowledge that Nazism and Communism had had much in common.

The result, then, had been a blazing row - something akin to the German "Historikerstreit" of the 1980s - in which learned commentators slugged out their ideas in the broadsheets and the news programmes - finally arriving at a more mature assessment of what those two great totalitarian systems of the 20th Century had signified.  That is why, it seems, Denmark "gets it".  The idea of Communism as 'progressive' and Stalin as the avuncular "Uncle Joe" might still hold sway in the remaining squats and foggy communes of Christiania, but they no longer go unchallenged in public life.

Which is all good.  Good news for the book, and a great pleasure to be preaching to the converted. Floreat Dania...
 En djævelsk allianceEn djævelsk allianceEn djævelsk alliance by the Kristeligt Dagblad

The republication of "Mein Kampf" - a storm in a camomile teacup...

So, it was finally announced today that a new edition of Adolf Hitler's autobiography/manifesto "Mein Kampf" will be published early in 2016.  Cue much gnashing of liberal teeth and wringing of progressive hands.

Though some lunatics and professional fibbers will tell you otherwise, we are now 70 years after the date of Hitler's death - 30 April 1945 - and so the copyright on his most famous book expires at the end of 2015, hence the book can be published (theoretically) by anyone.  So, the German Institute fur Zeitgeschichte in Munich is first off the blocks by announcing that it will be offering an annotated edition of the book - taking the original 700 pages up to a whopping 2,000 - thereby making sure that no incautious or inattentive reader can possible take any positive message from Hitler's words.

If we are honest, there is little chance of that.  Not only has Hitler's toxic ideology comprehensively disgraced itself, its disgrace is paraded and showcased, analysed and reanalysed, hashed and rehashed in thousands of history books, novels and TV documentaries.  One would have to have been living under a rock to have missed the message... and we really should not make public policy to cater for the tiny minority amongst us who choose to live under rocks.

Aside from the political, it is reassuring to report that Hitler's prose is practically unreadable.  So keen was he to impress his followers when he wrote the book in prison in 1924, that he crammed everything he thought he knew into it - never a good idea for a first-time author - and consequently it it one of the most awfully badly written books in history.  Even the English translation - despite the best mediating efforts of the translator - is turgid; reading it is like wading through fascist molasses.

That English edition - which I have on my shelf - actually raises an interesting point. Many out there are worried that this republication will be hugely significant, exposing a new, innocent generation to the poisoned words of a racist madman.  Well, no.  The book's publication has been controlled by the Bavarian State (to whom the rights fell on Hitler's death in 1945) and they have strictly limited publication ever since.  But the English edition - through some quirk of the publishing history - is under a different copyright and has been freely available all the way through; you can easily find it on the internet, and even get it on your kindle for a bit of light holiday reading.

So, the lapse of the book's copyright and the prospect of its non-English language republication is - I suggest - a bit of a storm in a camomile teacup... I think it says much more about Germany's continued obsession with Hitler, and the curious assumption that his horrid, outdated ideas are still 'infectious', than it does about the book itself.

Let them publish, let Hitler be read (if you can), and let him be damned all over again.

(And - by the way - if you want to read about Hitler's time in prison during which he wrote "Mein Kampf" - here is my new eBook "His Struggle" which will explain everything...)

Defending the indefensible - Vladimir Putin on the Nazi-Soviet Pact

This week, in a meeting with young historians in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rather startling statement.  In a discussion of 'falsifications of history' (an old Soviet favourite) and national bias, he stated not only that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been in line with the then current "methods of foreign policy", but moreover that the Pact had not been so bad - "What is bad about it that the Soviet Union did not want to fight?" he said. 

Stalin and Heinrich Hoffman toast the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939

Putin has commented on the Nazi-Soviet Pact before.  In 2009, for instance, at the commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the start of World War Two, at the Westerplatte outside Gdansk, he was more conciliatory, stating that "all treaties" with the Nazis had been "morally unacceptable" and "politically senseless".  

This shift to a more unapologetic stance is symptomatic, of course, of the wider collapse in relations between Russia and the West that has peaked in the last year with the Russian invasion and partition of Ukraine.  But there is actually little that is genuinely new about it.  In fact, it echoes the old exculpatory Soviet line that Stalin signed the Pact to give him the chance to better defend himself against the 'inevitable' German aggression, and that anyway it had been the fault of the Western Allies, who had set a dangerous precedent by making an agreement with Hitler in Munich in 1938.

Both positions are thoroughly disingenuous and are challenged in my new book "The Devils' Alliance". Nothing prior to Hitler's attack of 1941 suggested that Stalin's motivation in signing the Pact was 'defensive' - in fact the opposite is true. He signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in large part out of a desire to turn Hitler westwards to attack and undermine his old enemy, the Western Imperialists.  At that point, he thought, he would be able to march west unopposed, thereby turning the entire continent of Europe communist. We know this was the thrust of Kremlin thinking because numerous senior Soviet politicians said as much at the time.  

The juxtaposition of the Nazi-Soviet Pact with the Munich Agreement is similarly mendacious. It is true that collective security had failed by 1938, and each state was seeking to make the best bilateral arrangements that it could.  But the British and French effort to placate Hitler in 1938 cannot seriously be viewed in the same category as Stalin's pact with him of the following year. One was a failed attempt to preserve the peace (admittedly at the expense of Czechoslovakia), the other was a successful attempt to launch a war. One was a political arrangement to head off a crisis, the other was the opening of a two year economic and strategic relationship, which was an alliance in all but name.  Including both under the rubrik of "treaties with the Nazis" is a deliberate obfuscation. 

So, what about Mr Putin's contention that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was "not so bad".  Well, I suppose it depends on where you were standing. From the vantage point of the Kremlin, perhaps, it might seem so, but few people further west would have agreed.  The Nazi Soviet Pact launched World War Two.  It divided eastern Europe between the Nazis and Soviets and directly affected some 50 million people.  It left Poland divided and enslaved, the dismembered prey of the two most hideous and murderous totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen.  

The Pact gave Stalin the green light to launch an unprovoked attack on Finland in the winter of 1939; a short, bitter conflict that would see at least 150,000 killed.  It left the Baltic States at Stalin's mercy, consigned by the stroke of Ribbentrop's pen to a dark fate of occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union - their brave generation of independence snuffed out. The Romanian province of Bessarabia was similarly affected; annexed, occupied and wiped from the map.  

Stalin's march westwards in 1939-40 also had profound human effects.  Over 2 million people were deported from Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia to the wilder shores of the Soviet Union. Countless thousands more endured persecution, hardship and privation. For many of them, it was a life sentence.  

Comparing this litany of horrors to the Munich Agreement is not only disingenuous, it is downright daft. 

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was an archetype of cynical, Machiavellian totalitarian politics, and as such was a natural product of the two hateful regimes that spawned it. The Pact may have been "typical" by the perverted standards of Stalin's Soviet Union, but that does not mean that modern politicians can glibly play it down or make light of it.

The fact that Mr Putin sees fit to defend it in this way - in 2014 - speaks volumes about the current Kremlin mindset. The West, and its Polish and Baltic partners, should be very worried indeed. 

(Readers in the USA might be interested in the US edition of the book - which is here)

Hitler biographies - Do we really need another one?

I spent some time over the weekend reading Volker Ullrich's new, German-language biography of Hitler. Released in 2013, it is due to appear in the UK next year, but I wanted to consult it on a few points for a forthcoming e-Book of mine (watch this space), so got hold of a copy.

A lot of people will question why we need a new biography of Hitler.  Aren't there enough already? They will ask.  Didn't Ian Kershaw's two volume offering of 15 years ago satisfy our collective fascination with that most odious dictator? Is there anything new that can be said about the man?

Well, yes and no.  As one might expect, my office shelves are rather loaded with 'Hitleriana', including all of the serious biographies.  Though there are countless books which touch on the subject in some way, or treat Hitler's life more or less tangentially - one is tempted here to recall Alan Coren's famous marketing ploy for his "Golfing for Cats" - in terms of straight biographies of Hitler, there are actually not that many available.   The most significant are Ian Kershaw's above mentioned, of course, but also those by Joachim Fest, John Toland, Alan Bullock and Konrad Heiden.

Now, one point springs to mind.  The fact that the three German volumes (Fest, Heiden and now Ullrich) were written by journalists and not historians says rather a lot, I think, about the impenetrable nature of most of the output of German historians.  If you thought British academics struggled to communicate to a wider public, spare a thought for their German counterparts, whose strictly 'scientific' approach and needlessly convoluted prose make them all but unreadable for the layman.

But, crucially, 6 major biographies over 70 years does not appear excessive.  Also, one has to bear in mind that new interpretations, archival revelations and new ideas have also informed those accounts.  The process of historical revision has been constantly at work.  So, on that basis, it is perhaps justified, even timely, that Ullrich's book should now appear.

However, I think there is something more profound at play here.  Reading Ullrich's book, it is immediately apparent that he is seeking to tell a human story as much as a political one - and that is something quite novel.  Kershaw's books, for all their brilliance, are unashamedly political biographies: they are primarily interested in Hitler as a political actor, rather than as a human being.  Hence, what we might call the 'human Hitler' is almost completely absent.  This omission is deliberate, and in line with Kershaw's belief that "Hitler the man" is less important than the structures that he put in place and the events that he inspired.

Whatever one thinks of that contention, the desire to overlook "Hitler the man" is perhaps understandable on a more visceral level.  As I have written elsewhere, I think we tend to play down Hitler's humanity as a self-defence mechanism; a way of distancing ourselves from him, and from his beliefs and actions.  Like the perennial nonsense about his supposed monorchidism, it is a way for us to set him apart - to say he is not one of us...

However, Ullrich's book marks the return of the "human Hitler" to the historical canon.  He is not afraid to foreground the human aspect of his subject, and indeed he does so very well; using eye-witness and memoir accounts to great effect.  This does not make it an extended gossip-fest; far from it.  The history presented is sound, and is amplified and enriched by the additional material.  It is worth mentioning as well that the German edition is beautifully written...

So, for that reason at least, Ullrich's is a significant book.  Is there anything really 'new' in there?  Probably not.  Is the new addition worth reading?  Most certainly.

On Hitler and Chemical Weapons

The universal Bogey-Man

On the Internet, its known as "Godwin's Law" - the assertion that, at some point in any lively political discussion, one party or individual will inevitably be compared to Hitler.  So far, so ridiculous.  Indeed, rather than being a serious observation, one might imagine that "Godwin's Law" is merely an indication of the generally poor quality of internet discussion.  

Yet, if one stops to think for a moment, one realises that "Godwin's Law" also applies to our political elites. After all, wasn't Saddam Hussein repeated described as a 'Middle-Eastern Hitler', when the West was agitating for war against Iraq? (Actually, I think Saddam was more of a 'Stalin', but the point is moot).  And, just last week US Secretary of State John Kerry made a 'triple-whammy' with the remarkable assertion that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had "joined Hitler and Saddam" with his apparent use of chemical weapons against his own people.

Whatever the merits of the case for intervention in Syria, the perennial twinning of Hitler with the concept of 'evil incarnate' is understandable, if rather tiresome.  We are well-accustomed to accusing Hitler of all sorts of failings: all the way from psychopathic paranoia to monorchidism and a passion for coprophilia.  But the suggestion that Hitler should be tarred with the 'chemical weapons' brush cannot go unchallenged. This, then, is a brief exploration of the subject.

A British Vickers Gun team 
equipped with gas masks

Many countries have used chemical weapons over the years.  The Kaiser's Germany pioneered the tactic at the second Battle of Ypres in 1915, sending Chlorine gas over the Allied trenches, killing around 6,000.  After that debut, both sides used chemical weapons thereafter, including Mustard Gas and Phosgene, with around 90,000 more men dying agonising deaths from asphyxiation and chemical burns.

Chemical weapons were used sporadically thereafter, most notably by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War and by the Italians in Ethiopia.  By World War Two, all sides had considerable stockpiles of such weapons - indeed the Germans had devoted the most time and energy to the subject, developing the nerve agents that would feature well into our own century: Tabun and Sarin, the latter of which is thought to have featured in Syria recently.  Yet, for all their ubiquity, few of the combatants dared to make the step of using their stockpiles.  Only Japan used chemical weapons in its brutal conflict with China.  Churchill, embarrassingly, was also in favour of their use, but was persuaded otherwise and railed against the 'moralistic arguments' of what he called the "parsons" surrounding him.  But what about Hitler?

Hitler, it seems, desisted from ordering his extensive chemical weapons stocks from being used in combat. (It is sometimes, rather mischievously, suggested that the gassing of the Jews constituted the use of chemical weapons - but this investigation is into the use of such agents in military combat, so cannot include the use of Zyklon-B and Carbon Monoxide in the death camps.)  The reasons for this non-use are still the subject of debate.  In the first instance, Hitler - perhaps rightly, given Churchill's inclinations - feared Allied retribution if he did.  He may also have had a disinclination towards the weapon from his own experience of being gassed in World War One (though this seems a tad implausible).  Also, it was supposedly suggested by Göring, that as the Germans did not have satisfactory gas masks for horses - and most of their army was still horse-drawn - any such strike could have been as destructive to their own side as to their opponents.  Whatever the reason, Hitler did not order the use of chemical weapons.

But, it seems, a few of Hitler's field commanders may not have been so abstemious.  Certainly on two occasions in World War Two, German troops appear to have used chemical weapons in anger.  The first of these was on the Eastern Front in 1942, when Red Army soldiers were holding out in the tunnels of a quarry in eastern Crimea and were evidently 'dealt with' using poison gas.  It is possible, however, that this is rather apocryphal and actually refers to the use of 'smoke candles', which the Germans certainly employed elsewhere to flush out or incapacitate dug-in opponents.

The second such instance is rather more convincing and is mentioned in eye-witness accounts of the Soviet siege of Breslau in 1945.  There - in the bitter urban fighting that ensued - a Soviet unit isolated in a cellar were dispatched by the use of so-called 'piss bags', containing a noxious yellow liquid, probably Tabun from the nearby Nazi chemical weapons plant at Dyhernfurth.

Though Hitler himself may have refrained from ordering the general use of chemical weapons, then, it seems that a few of his commanders in the field might not have been above using them on a very localised basis, assuming that the conditions were right and that they had access to the necessary agents.  Whether Hitler even knew about, never mind authorised, these very isolated examples is highly doubtful.

So when John Kerry, and others, lazily invoke "Godwin's Law", they should be reminded that the online convention is that he who 'plays the Hitler card' is thereby considered to have lost the argument.  More seriously, such interventions should remind the rest of us that - as always - the truth is rather more complex than our leaders - and the media - would have us believe.

The Reichstag Fire - an end to the controversy...?

When the German parliament building in Berlin - the Reichstag - caught fire shortly after 9pm on the evening of 27th February 1933, it marked the beginning of a lengthy controversy. Already that same night, in the Reichstag building itself, Nazi authorities picked up a young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who had apparently been caught red-handed setting the fire.  Upon his arrest, it was said, he was asked why he had done it.  He answered: "Protest! Protest!"

Despite this apparently copper-bottomed case, many of the opponents of the Nazis - especially on the political left - were swiftly proclaiming the fire to be an archetypal 'false flag' operation; an arson attack carried out by the Nazis themselves, to be pinned onto their opponents.

This hypothesis had two primary foundations: the first was the so-called 'Oberfohren Memorandum' - a selection of circumstantial evidence collected at the time and later expanded and published as the "Brown Book", which pointed to the Nazis as the culprits.

The second was based on the principle of "Cui bono?" - 'who benefits?'.  Given that the Nazis clearly benefited enormously from the fire - in that by foreshadowing a communist rising it eased their passage of laws clamping down on the left in particular and on civil rights in general - it seemed plausible to suggest that they must have started it themselves.  This line was very popular outside Germany during the war, was presented at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and has long held currency.  Indeed, when Georg Elser attempted to assassinate Hitler in Munich in 1939, many on the left immediately branded the near miss as "a second Reichstag Fire" - that is, a attack orchestrated by the Nazis themselves for their own political benefit.

This controversy rumbled on through the post-war years, bursting into life occasionally as new 'documents' came to light and the German press interested itself once again.  In fact it almost became another mini 'Historikerstreit', except that, in this case, most of the serious historians tended to be on one side of the argument.

A recent book by Berlin historian Sven Felix Kellerhoff has now arguably put the story to bed for the last time. "Der Reichstagsbrand" (The Reichstag Fire) is only short, at about 160 pages, but provides a punchy, readable account of the case itself as well as its curious afterlife, and benefits from official documents released following German reunification in 1989.

Kellerhof is clear in his conclusions.  Van der Lubbe was the lone culprit, setting the fire himself, intending it to provide the spark for a communist rising against the Nazis. As he concludes, there is not a shred of evidence that the Nazis committed the crime, indeed it seems that Hitler initially feared that the fire would be a hindrance to him rather than a help, and it was Alfred Hugenberg, rather than Hitler, who first advocated clamping down on the Communists in response.

The case against the Nazis, Kellerhoff argues, is a confection of circumstantial evidence, misunderstandings, forgeries and politically motivated conspiracy theories, which merits little serious consideration.  The fact that the Nazis were the main beneficiaries from the crime - and Hitler's exploitation of the Fire was certainly a virtuoso performance - should not blind us to the fact that he and they were not the authors of it. Far from providing an explanation, 'Cui Bono', in this case, merely leads us down a blind alley of conspiracist nonsense, involving secret tunnels into the Reichstag, and a mystery team of SA arsonists, who were in turn bumped off during the Roehm Purge in 1934.

Most tellingly, I think, it seems that - in continuing to pin the crime on the Nazis - we are in danger of attributing far too much Machiavellian cunning to them and by extension to Hitler - and in so doing, we are guilty of a perverse mirror image of the totalitarian cult of personality.  If we assume that Hitler had all the strings in his hands in February 1933; that he and his minions were able to burn down a major public building in the German capital, pin the crime on an innocent communist, do away with the real culprits, and cover up the entire story - then surely we are ascribing talents to Hitler and the Nazis that were way beyond their real abilities.  A generation of Germans might have wished that Hitler really was possessed of such diabolical cunning as to be capable of such things, as it would - in part - absolve them of their complicity in following him, pied-piper-like, into the abyss.  But it is simply not plausible.

Van der Lubbe, it seems, really was guilty of setting the Reichstag fire himself, unaided.  Perhaps now, with the benefit of 8 decades of hindsight, we can all accept that to be the most likely conclusion to this story.

On Socialism and National Socialism

Twitter took another scalp a couple of weeks ago, when one of the UK's newly appointed 'Deputy Police & Crime Commissioners" - one Dr Rachel Frosch - was obliged to resign after passing on (retweeting) a rather clumsy comment linking Socialism and Nazism.

Of course, the political left cried foul and Dr Frosch was hung out to dry by her own side (the Conservatives).  She was certainly guilty of an error of judgement - in the sense that she should have known better when in public office than to goad the left side of the electorate so blatantly.  Yet, there was nothing wrong with the suggestion that Socialism and Nazism are intimately linked.  Her actions might not have been good politics, but they made pretty sound history.

As it happens, yesterday was the 93rd anniversary of the promulgation of the Nazi Party's "25 Point Programme" - a quasi-manifesto for the nascent party, so this gives a good opportunity to take a look at the Nazi Party's origins, and see what it stood for at the start of its odious, calamitous, political journey.

The party, which was then known as the DAP - "Deutsche Arbeiter Partei", or "German Workers' Party" - had only just fallen under Hitler's leadership at that point, having been founded by a Munich railwayworker, Anton Drexler, in 1919.

The Hofbrauhaus, Munich

Hitler's "25 Points" was an attempt to formalise the nascent party's programme and push it out to a wider electorate - and for that reason, the programme was announced at the cavernous Munich "Hofbrauhaus" beerhall, with a capacity of over 2,000.

The "25 Point Programme" includes many of the staple demands and complaints that one would expect of the Nazi Party: the creation of a "Greater Germany" encompassing all German people (Point 1); the scrapping of the Treaty of Versailles (Point 2); the demand for land for colonisation (Point 3) and the exclusion of Jews from the German body politic (Point 4).

The Nazi "25 Point Programme"

Yet, alongside the xenophobic, anti-Semitic demands, there is also a rich seam of populist 'socialism' - including the following: the abolition of unearned income (Point 11); the criminalisation of "war profiteering" (Point 12); the nationalisation of all "trust" industries (Point 13); profit sharing of all heavy industrial concerns (Point 14); an expansion of old age welfare provision (Point 15) and finally a thoroughgoing land reform (Point 17).

So, the 'socialist' aspect of the Nazi Party Programme of 1920 is indisputable.  Indeed, part of the Party's rationale was to attempt to craft a form of socialism in which loyalty to the nation was paramount, but by which the nation's working class could still be won round.  In short, an attempt to supplant the "International Socialism" of Marxism with a new form of "National Socialism".  Appropriately, this formulation was duly added to the Party's name a couple of months later - the DAP became the NSDAP - the "National Socialist German Workers' Party - known to its opponents as the Nazis.

This 'socialism' was no passing dalliance.  Much changed in the years between 1920 and the Party's 'seizure of power' of 1933, of course; accommodations were made with 'big business' and a cruder realpolitik supplanted some of the early working class populism.  Of course, Hitler's personal adherence to any ideology - beyond anti-Semitism and his own advancement - is rather dubious, yet the broadly 'socialistic' strand within Nazism was never fully extinguished.  Indeed, it was demonstrated by the "Strength through Joy" workers' leisure organisation and the central importance throughout of the 'volksgemeinschaft' or 'national community'.  Goebbels himself, alongside the Strasser brothers, was a proponent of the 'socialist' strand of National Socialism.

All of which merely goes to show that the traditional "left-right" typology of politics can be profoundly unhelpful in understanding such complexities - and that the 140 character tweet is not the place for such challenging and divisive issues to be aired.

The "Mössingen General Strike"

 This curious story caught my eye this morning.  


Yesterday - 30th January - was the 80th anniversary of Hitler's so-called "seizure of power", and the day involved much memorializing and a good deal more soul-searching about the fragility of democracy and the need for vigilance...

Of course, the "seizure of power" was really nothing of the sort.  Hitler was merely given his opportunity on that day, because he was elevated to the German Chancellorship by the country's elites in the hope that they might be able to control him and - through him - govern Germany. He did not need asking twice.  He took them for all they were worth and swiftly showed them who controlled whom.  But, though the 30th January was feted in Nazi Germany as the "day of the seizure of power" - of the "Machtergreifung" as the German version has it - it was just the beginning of that process in which Hitler's power was secured and extended and the dictatorship was built - it was in fact to be a process that would last around 18 months until August of 1934.  

So, 30th January as a turning point is a bit of a red herring, historically speaking.  But the day's significance to contemporaries was still considerable, as this following story demonstrates.

On the afternoon of 30th January - as news of Hitler's appointment spread - a group of communists and socialists in the small town of Mössingen in south-western Germany decided to organise a protest of their own.  As preparations continued for calling a strike for the following day a demonstration began that evening in which locals cried "Hitler means War!" and "Perish Hitler!" - a corruption of the Nazi slogan "Juda verrecke" or "Perish Juda". 

The following day - the 31st - protests continued along the same lines, and a strike was called of local workers.  At around 2pm, some 600 workers were already out in protest, their numbers swelling as the workmen from other factories were called out.  

By early evening, the authorities seem to have decided that the workers of Mössingen had had their fun and a group of police armed with rubber truncheons broke up the demonstration and sent the protesters fleeing over the surrounding fields. 

In the aftermath - 98 strikers were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace.  A smaller number of ringleaders were singled out for harsher treatment, with some being imprisoned and at least one being sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, (which opened in March).  

After that, the story of the "Mössingen General Strike" disappeared.  The Nazis did not want any blemish on their narrative of a grateful nation welcoming the Führer to its bosom.  Post-war history also forgot about Mössingen, a small town caught up in the maelstrom of events.  Yet, the strike at Mössingen, for all its modest origins, was the only strike organised in Germany in direct protest at Hitler's appointment - and for that fact alone, it deserves to be better known. 

This small tale tells us that Germany did not "go gently" into the Nazi night.  At least some of its citizens saw clearly the danger that Hitler portended - even on the day of his appointment - and were prepared to act . 

Hitler and his 'charisma'

Hitler's 'charisma' & Laurence Rees' new book... 

One of the most interesting developments in our understanding of Nazi Germany in recent years has been the recognition of Adolf Hitler as a charismatic ‘personality’; an apparently magnetic character instead of merely a malevolent, psychopathic void.  It is indeed a paradox that such a fundamentally dysfunctional individual - unable to form normal relationships, unable to debate rationally, unable to perform most normal social interactions - could have become a figure of adulation for so many millions of Germans.

It’s a very valid question, and Laurence Rees’ new book – and the TV series that it accompanies – draws on this trend to examine Hitler’s charismatic appeal and ask how all this was possible.  Rees goes some way to providing an answer, arguing that Hitler’s rise to power was attributable – at least in part – to an unholy fusion of his own most peculiar nature and the urgent need of the German people in the inter-war years to find some sort of messiah-figure to save them from their malaise.  Germans, Rees suggests, desperately projected their political and messianic desires onto Hitler, and his arrogant, intolerant, inflexible personality appeared to confirm that he was, indeed, someone who was ‘on a mission'.  It turned out to be a marriage made in the darkest depths of Hades.

In fact, I think there are two points relating to Hitler's charisma.  On the one hand, there is what we might call Hitler's 'political charisma' - the aspect outlined above, which encompasses his undoubted sense of political 'style', his speaking manner, his dress sense, his image-consciousness - his charisma, as it was experienced by the many millions of his followers across Germany, the vast majority of whom never met the man, and never even saw him up close.  This aspect of the story Rees explains rather well.

The other aspect - that of Hitler's personal charisma - is a little more complex, and this Rees handles rather less well.  Peculiar though it may sound to our modern sensibilities, Hitler undoubtedly had a magnetic personal appeal.  This has been confirmed many times by members of his household - those that knew him best and saw him most often and, crucially, when off-duty - all of whom testified to his immense personal charm; his bourgeois manners, his sense of humour and his caring, avuncular nature towards his secretaries.  

On another level, Hitler also had the knack of impressing those who visited him in his headquarters.  He tended - according to those that met him - to use his striking blue eyes to great effect, holding his gaze on a new arrival to 'test' them, for instance. Few were unmoved - Stauffenberg was one of those that found Hitler personally most unimpressive, but he was very much in the minority. In other instances, Hitler proved himself most adept at convincing his underlings of his point of view, not always by ranting and raving (though that also played a part, especially as the war turned against him), but by persuasion.  There are countless examples of military men coming to the Fuhrer-HQ urgently seeking to convince Hitler of their opinion, and coming away equally passionately convinced of Hitler's...  

This is an important distinction.  If we suggest that the "political charisma" is most important in Hitler's rise to power, it is then the "personal charisma" that is surely more instrumental in keeping him there, in heading off potential rivals and critics - with ultimately disastrous effect.

This aspect of his personal charisma, I would argue, still does not get sufficient attention.  We saw a glimpse of it in the excellent German film "Downfall"- where it was almost possible - thanks to Bruno Ganz's brilliant performance - to feel sympathy for Hitler as his Reich collapsed about him.  Yet, this is still rather the exception.  It seems, perhaps, that we are still unable to acknowledge Hitler's humanity - we still prefer to see him as an 'other', someone quite apart from ourselves.  I would suggest, on the contrary, that acknowledging his humanity tends to make his crimes all the more horrendous.  

Though it does not go far enough then, Rees' book is nonetheless interesting, and is a useful vehicle for many of the first-hand accounts from eye-witnesses and participants that he has collected over his years as a TV documentary film-maker.  Consequently, there are numerous interesting contributions from ordinary Germans; those transfixed by a Hitler speech or perhaps unnerved by his piercing blue eyes or his unblinking stare.  

But the book feels padded and overlong.  And, with other venerable Hitler volumes available, I would suggest that this subject would have been better treated in a shorter, more essayistic style, rather than producing yet another full-length narrative. It is also curious that the book comes to a rather abrupt halt, covering the last two years or so of the war in a final, breathless chapter, despite this being a time when – as Ian Kershaw has convincingly shown – it was Hitler’s charismatic leadership that was largely instrumental in keeping the Third Reich fighting to the bitter end.  Perhaps this is where Rees reveals his blindspot - Hitler's "personal charisma".

Hitler was undoubtedly charismatic, and this is an aspect of the story of the Third Reich that is well-worth examining in some detail.  Unfortunately, however, Rees’ book does not quite do the job well or coherently enough.  It is too long, too unfocused and too obviously a TV tie-in.  There is certainly a book to be written on Hitler’s charismatic aspect – but, sadly, this isn’t it.  

(this is an extended version of the review that appeared in the Independent on Sunday: 14.10.2012)

What to do with Hitler's House?

There was a furore in Austria last week, after the mayor of the small Austrian town of Braunau-am-Inn declared that he thought that an 18^th century house in the town should be converted into flats.

Hitler's 'House' in Braunau

Small place Austria, but even that story would not make the news were it not for the toxic association with Austria’s most infamous son, Adolf Hitler.  The house in question – formerly the Gasthof zum Pommer – was where Hitler was born in April 1889, and where he spent the first three years of his life. 

Naturally, this connection has loomed large over the years.  In the Third Reich, the house was purchased by the Nazi Party, festooned with swastikas and became a place of pilgrimage for the Nazi faithful.  Hitler himself, visited in 1938 at the time of the Anschluss with Austria, but never returned.

After the war, the connection was largely forgotten, until the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung reached even this pretty corner of Austria in the late 1980s.  Close to the centenary of Hitler’s birth in 1989, the then mayor of the town had a large piece of Mauthausen granite erected on the pavement outside the house, bearing the legend “Nie wieder Faschismus” (Fascism, never again). 

Since that time, the building – now privately owned once again – has served in a number of capacities, not least as a workshop for disabled people.  But now, once again, stands empty – hence the intercession of the town’s mayor last week and the resulting furore.

To my mind, there are a couple of points here.  First of all - to be clear, Hitler lived in Braunau as a baby, moving to Passau when he was 3.  He did not spend his formative years there, did not go to school there, did not become a Nazi there.  He returned to the house only once - for a photo opportunity - in 1938.  It obviously did not mean much to him. 

Bearing this in mind, it strikes me that some of the various suggestions for the building's use – 'inter-cultural understanding workshop', disabled centre, and so on – risk fetishising the poor benighted building (on the flimsiest of evidence) just as much as the Nazis did.  The idea of putting something in that building that Hitler would have despised – a spurious act of posthumous revenge – seems faintly ridiculous and, I think, says much more about us than it does about him.   

Secondly, if something is to be made of the building - let it at least be relevant to that history.  Germany (and Austria) have made great strides in recent years in the thorny process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ – the famed Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  The information boards erected in the last decade at places like the Berghof on Obersalzberg and the site of the Chancellery Garden in Berlin are testament to a growing confidence in dealing openly and honestly with this most toxic legacy.  Also, the excellent “Documentation Centres” (museums) at former Nazi sites around Germany are an imaginative and educational way of handling that difficult past.  Perhaps it’s too soon for a “Documentation Centre: Hitler” at Braunau – and as I’ve said, the connection is a rather tenuous one – but, in another decade or so, maybe that idea will not seem quite so outlandish.  Time will tell.

Lastly, one has to remember that this story really is a bit of a storm in a camomile teacup.  For all the discussion, the politically-correct suggestions and the hand-wringing, the house is still in private ownership – back in the hands of the family that it was purchased from by the Nazis in the 1930s – and they are apparently not selling.  So, until something changes there, all of this is merely politically charged hot air…

© Roger Moorhouse 2012

Hitler in Lederhosen

Alot of newspaper editors had fun this week with pictures of Adolf Hitler in a variety of outfits - lederhosen, for instance, or a very fetching SA cap. The Telegraph covered it here, as did the Times and the Daily Mail here It was all very amusing - and a chance to dust off a few old puns; "Camp Commandant" said the Daily Mirror, "Mein Camp" quipped The Sun.

Yet, behind the dictator-themed mirth there is an important historical point to be made about these pictures. The photographs were taken by Hitler's photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, in the 1920s and - along with a number of other shots showing Hitler in dramatic poses (as here) - they show Hitler 'working' on his public image.
The concept of a politician honing their public persona does not come as a surprise to our modern minds - its what they do - they preen themselves, construct an acceptable, appealing public persona and then get on with the business of baby-kissing and getting elected.

Yet, the important point to make here is that Hitler was operating at a time when few politicians had any idea at all about public image. Most of his fellow German politicians were top-hatted, frock-coated throwbacks to the 19th century - and the idea that they might experiment with different 'looks' or introduce dramatic gestures into their public speaking routines would have appeared faintly ludicrous to them.

But, Hitler (like Mussolini, in this regard) was of a very different stamp. He worked incessantly on his public persona, practised his public speaking, managed his image - even employing Heinrich Hoffmann, a talented and successful photographer, to help him. Hoffmann served as a visual sounding board for Hitler, photographing him in various outfits and various poses, and then helping him to decide what 'worked' and what didn't (The Lederhosen and the SA cap, by the way, did not 'work' and were duly consigned to Hoffmann's archive). This, then - far from being just an opportunity to have a giggle at Hitler looking silly - is a glimpse into Hitler's political modus operandae. This was how he marked himself out as a 'new' breed of politician. This was how he made himself appealing to the German people, with disastrous consequences.

If we can understand that - and have a laugh at his expense - then fine. But, in our rush to find humour in Hitler, let's not miss the important historical point that these pictures convey.


The book from which the pictures come, by the way, is Heinrich Hoffmann's memoir "Hitler was my Friend", published this week by Pen & Sword Books.  Oh, and it has an introduction on Hoffmann by yours truly...

Nazi Silly Season

It seems a sort of Hitler-silly-season has descended upon us in recent weeks.

Last week, we had the rather frivolous story of Hitler’s bedsheets coming up for auction.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2065162/Hitlers-bed-linen-embroidered-swastika-eagle-initials-goes-sale.html
All well and good, you might say, – and after all the bedlinen was duly monogrammed and festooned with swastikas, so is still of (at least passing) historical interest – but did the story really warrant the coverage that it received? I think not.

Then, last weekend, I was dismayed to read another nonsense story about Hitler in the newspapers, this time attempting to breathe life into the hoary old tale of his having visited the UK in the years before the First World War. We have long had the myth of his having visited Liverpool – which was put out after the war by his half-brother and sister-in-law (who did live in Liverpool), in a cynical attempt to flog an otherwise uninteresting memoir. But now, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3961409/Hitlers-visit-to-London.html the story has sadly been resurrected, apparently on the back of a BBC TV documentary, and further gloss is being added to the mythology. It is claimed that the future Führer visited London, went to see Tower Bridge and even “enjoyed a pint” down the local pub.

Now, as far as I know, there never was any proof that Hitler ever visited Liverpool (beyond the cynical, desperate reminiscences of his estranged former half-sister-in-law), yet now it seems he not only visited Liverpool, but also London, and he even went about to see the sights. Perhaps he even did some watercolours? I’d love to see the proof of all these fevered imaginings, but I would bet my next royalty cheque that there isn’t any.

All this Hitler-themed poppycock comes hard on the heels of another attempted resurrection, this time of perhaps the greatest myth of all in the Hitler canon – the suggestion that he escaped Berlin and lived out his days in Argentina. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050137/Did-Hitler-Eva-Braun-flee-Berlin-die-old-age-Argentina.html (believe it or not, the Daily Mail is actually the most respectable ‘source’ for this report – apart from that it is wackos all the way down)
The reason that this crazy story resurfaced is that it has recently appeared in a book, which astonishingly manages to incorporate almost every Third Reich mystery and conspiracy theory into one bizarre and none-too-believable tale.

Of course, this sort of codswallop is all over the internet. But then, the “World Weird Web” is chock-full of Holocaust deniers, Flat-Earthers and those that refuse to believe that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9-11. Just because they all subscribe to a nonsense theory – doesn’t make it true. And, as before, there is not a shred of credible proof to back up such fanciful imaginings. Trust me, I have had the misfortune to read it…

So, all you hacks, part-time hobby historians and conspiracy theorists, let’s give Hitler a rest for a while, shall we? Serious study of the Third Reich and its Führer is all well and good – but crud such as this is in danger not only of giving us all a bad name, but also of leading an already credulous public even further up the garden path.

Fuhrerbau in Munich

Been a while - busy busy...

Anyway - just back from the inaugural "Historical Trips" tour - all a tremendous success.

Just a quick post here to mention one of the sites that we visited - a rather impromptu visit in fact, as it was not in the original itinerary - the Fuehrerbau in Munich.



Completed in 1937 from plans drawn up by Hitler's first 'court architect' Paul Ludwig Troost (who died in 1934), the building served as Hitler's office when he was in Munich and was the location for the famed Munich Conference of September 1938, where Czechoslovakia was dismembered and the principle of collective security died a death...

Interestingly, the building also stood cheek-by-jowl with one of the 'Honour Temples' in which the Nazi 'martyrs' of 1923 were laid to rest. Naturally, that building - as the very centrepiece of Nazi martyrology was demolished, and only its concrete foundations remain. But the neighbouring Fuehrerbau was permitted to remain after the war, primarily as it served the occupying US Army as a administrative building. It now is home to the Munich School of Music.



Thanks to such vicissitudes, the interior of the building is largely untouched. And it is a spectacular example of totalitarian architecture, not only with its coffered, neo-classical ceiling (right), but also its extensive use of Hitler's favourite red marble (left).

I did half-heartedly try to find Hitler's office - which was supposedly on the southern end of the building on the first floor. However, all I found there were the students' toilets... Who said the Germans didn't have a sense of humour?