Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
World War I made Adolf Hitler.
Before the war, Hitler was aimless, a failed artist, essentially a nobody with little chance of rising in society. The war gave him purpose as well as a respectable identity as a war hero. As much as one thing can create another, the war created Hitler. It was the cause of his euphoria in 1914 when he enlisted and led to his mental collapse in 1918 when Germany surrendered. Hitler vowed vengeance against the “November criminals” who he believed had stabbed Germany in the back, including most infamously Jewish elements as well as communists, socialists, and indeed anyone against war.
World War II created the conditions under which the Nazis could give free rein to their most barbaric impulses, including the massacre of all “undesirables,” whether Jews, Gypsies, Russian POWs, and so on. All the “inferior” people. Everything was permitted, the worst brutalities, the most brutal and bestial behavior, in the alleged cause of fighting and winning the war.
It’s vitally important to recognize how war liberates, reinforces, and serves to justify the very worst impulses in humanity. We’re seeing this in Gaza now, as Israel uses the cover of a war on Hamas to facilitate ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.
I shared these thoughts with a friend after he sent me a New Yorker article on “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich,” a new book by Richard J. Evans, an expert on Nazi Germany. The article asks whether it’s acceptable to “humanize” the Nazis, and to me the answer is obvious. Of course it is. The Nazis were human, not monsters. That they were able to behave monstrously for so long is partly due to how they justified their actions by citing the necessity and extremity of war, both world wars.
In understanding history, personality and biography is important, but so too are the conditions within which those personalities are forged and in which they emerge. The Nazis were, if nothing else, systematic, and they promoted within that system based on attributes like ruthlessness, brutality, hardness, and similar qualities. Thus they both found and forged the “willing executioners” of the Nazi regime, both to execute policy and to execute people.
That said, I want to stress again how Hitler and the Nazis used war to justify their worst impulses, and also how those “worst impulses” were forged during war. There remains a tendency in western society to ennoble war, to celebrate it, to talk about “greatest generations” and heroism and the like. The history of Nazi Germany reminds us that war isn’t something to be celebrated and commemorated: It is a catastrophe to be avoided at almost any cost.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.