Hitler embodied evil.  It is therefore as well to note some symptoms.  The following observations come from The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner that is the subject of the note below.

There is no development, no maturing of Hitler’s character and personality.  His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be ‘arrested’ – and remains astonishingly consistent; nothing was added to it.  It was not an attractive character.  All soft lovable reconciling traits are missing…. His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty…. a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.  Hitler was all his life exceedingly full of himself and from his earliest to his last days tended to self-conceit……

He did not wish to be the first servant of the state but …. an absolute master.  And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible in an intact state mech anism but only amidst controlled chaos….and he knew how to control it…. A close study of him reveals a trait in him that one might describe as a horror of committing himself, or… anything final.  It seems as though something within him caused him to recoil not only by way of a state system, but also his will by way of a firm set of goals…. As a star performer Hitler probably ranks higher than Napoleon.  But one thing he never was – a statesman….

Of course he was no democrat but he was a populist, a man who based his power on the masses, not on the elite, and in a sense a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  His principal means of rule was demagogy, and his instrument of government was not a structured hierarchy but a chaotic bundle of uncoordinated mass organisations merely held together by his own person.  All these are ‘leftist’ rather than ‘rightest’ features…

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist.  Fascism is upper class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm, but never in order to buttress an upper class.  He was a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but fascism….

…. There is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world; he saw the world as he wanted to see it.  The world is imperfect, full of conflict, hardship and suffering …. he does not state these things with the sad courageous earnestness with which Luther calmly faced what he called original sin, or Bismarck what he called earthly imperfection, but with that frenzied voice with which Nietzsche, for instance, so often hailed what was deplorable.  To Hitler, the emergency was the norm, the state was there in order to wage war.

Three things.  Haffner may have added the frenzy of Wagner, Hitler’s pin-up boy.  The poet said, or meant to say, that comparisons are odious, but the whole fabric of our law turns on learning from the past. 

Finally, fans of the poet, and Coriolanus, will love the reference to a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  In the hands of a genius, you don’t know who is more dangerous – the hero, or the jealous tribunes claiming to stand for that fiction called the people.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

Sebastian Haffner

Folio Society, 2011.  Translated by Ewald Osers and introduced by Mark Roseman. Illustrated.

The author was born in Berlin in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel.  He therefore came of age under the Nazis.  He qualified as a lawyer, but he left Germany in 1938 because of his relationship with a Jewish woman.  Before leaving, he wrote a manuscript of a book that would be published posthumously only in 1992 under the title Defying Hitler.  He was in a law library when the brown shirts came in to round up the Jews.  He joined the staff of the Observer in 1942 and began writing for publication. 

The present book was first published in 1978.  Haffner chose the name ‘Sebastian,’ because it was Bach’s middle name, and ‘Haffner’ after a Mozart sonata.  His writing style is pithy and laconic, and the book was written before the works of Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans were published.

Defying Hitler caused a sensation when it came out.  Here was direct eye witness evidence of the Terror before the Holocaust began – and by someone so well qualified to comment.  It caused me to see a lot of things differently.  In it, Haffner said:

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown….  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law. 

We might pause to note what a biographer of Mussolini had to say as it applies to Hitler word for word.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

In the present work, Haffner says of Hitler (in the second page):

His life lacked – before and after – everything that normally lends warmth, weight and dignity to a human life: education, occupation, love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.  Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life and hence one which was certainly not happy, was strangely lightweight, and lightly discarded.  A continuous readiness for suicide accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.  And, at its end, almost as a matter of course, stood real suicide….Hitler had no friends.  He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff  – drivers, bodyguards, secretaries – but he alone did all the talking….His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be arrested – and remains astonishingly consistent…His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.  Added to these, moreover, from the very start was a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.

Here, then, is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter.  Hitler relied on charisma and terror, hope and fear, the populist trademark.

That ability for mass hypnotism was Hitler’s first, and for a long time his only, political capital……On the whole, the management and dosage of terror during the first years must be described as a masterly psychological achievement by Hitler.

Or again:

Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from a single point of view….For there is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world: he saw the world as he wanted to see it….To Hitler, the emergency was the norm; the state was there in order to wage war.  And that is where he was wrong.

As a cartographer of evil, Haffner is in my view up there with Hannah Arendt.  This book ends this way.

For German history does not end with Hitler.  Anyone believing that it does, and possibly even rejoicing at it, does not realise just how much he is thereby fulfilling Hitler’s last will and testament.