ABSTRACT
By any stretch of the imagination Hitler’s rise and fall was extraordinary. He was not an intellectual. He produced no great works of philosophy or art. He was not a military leader of genius or insight and yet this petit-bourgeois Austrian came to power constitutionally in 1933, he remained in power for 12 years and by 1941 he commanded a European empire not seen since the days of Napoleon. He was also the instigator of a genocidal war of unparalleled scope and brutality. How can the Hitler phenomenon be explained and, indeed, does it have any relevance over 50 years after his death? The publicity accorded in 1995 to the fiftieth anniversary of the collapse of the Third Reich and the death of its leader Adolf Hitler testifies to the undiminishing fascination with Nazism and the individual figure of Hitler. The two are inexorably linked both historically and in the manner in which they developed once in power. The historian K.D.Bracher has even asserted
that Hitler’s personality is almost “totally submerged in the history of his political movement and the Third Reich” (Bracher 1979:212). This interest has surely something to do with the general public’s readiness to see the past in terms of the “history of great men”. “Can we call him great?” asked Joachim Fest, one of Hitler’s biographers. In terms of personality Hitler was a quite unremarkable and unlovely man. But his historical impact has been immense. The word most commonly associated with Hitler is “evil” and commentators have been quick to emphasize his role and personal responsibility for the undeniable crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Invariably Hitler is seen as a man who achieved power through the exercise of his own demonic will. Albert Speer’s view that he was an “inexplicable demonic figure” that occurs only rarely in history is still widely shared. Indeed many of his biographers have sustained this view. The continuing public obsession with Hitler’s personality (and sexuality) has resulted also in a widening gap between popular and scholarly views of Hitler. While most historians would agree on the centrality of Hitler to the phenomenon of Nazism, locating Hitler’s precise role within the Third Reich has proved controversial.
