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.
So very true and very well said….
The problem is that it’s de facto illegal, and even de jure illegal, to talk about the period.
As a result, you have people who don’t believe the Germans did everything they’re accused of doing. When it’s finally allowed to debate the period, the evidence will be long gone. And people won’t even believe much of it.
The same is true of Soviet crimes: Too little evidence.
If millions are murdered, and the evidence is destroyed; did anything happen at all? The period should be debated sooner rather than later.
"The Nazis were human, not monsters. "
Is there a difference?
As an aside, a closer study of the Nazis will show they inherited a "worldview" that went back decades before WWI, based on a biased view of the superiority of the Germanic race. Hitler didn't invent that – he inherited it.
I've read numerous biographies of Hitler in the past. As a child, he was entirely normal – until his brother died, of a respiratory disease IIRC. Then he became more morose – a telling sign that his first brush with death affected him deeply.
This altered his psychology in ways that compelled him to find a spiritual solution for the problem of death and a personal solution in terms of "defeating" death by becoming larger than life in some form – a common response by humans. WWI war gave him a chance, and the failure of Germany in that war forced him to turn to politics to resolve that failure. He already had a "messianic" personality based on his exposure to the music of Wagner and Germanic myth. As he put it in Mein Kampf, with the moribund political parties available to him, he was forced to create his own.
He was probably one of the most politically astute men in history and thoroughly understood how religions were used to brainwash the masses. He adopted religious imagery and pomp for the Nazis. He got a lot of support from the Catholics in Germany, who were mostly old-school anti-Semites (the Catholic Church being the prime promoter of anti-semitism next to the Protestants.) He was also smart enough to make deals with the wealthy who thought they could control him for their own ends, not realizing that his ideology would be outside of anyone's control but his.
Of course, Astore is right that without the German defeat and impact on the German economy and living conditions, a party like the Nazis might have had a harder time getting accepted over the Communists and Socialists. But we'll never know.
What you say about the importance of Catholics supporting the Nazi's is not true. You should consult Richard F. Hamilton's book, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, 1982). Here is an excerpt from a retrospective review in The Nation (1/15/21):
"The rural groundswell for Hitler included people of all classes and income levels. And the more it was a question of Protestant communities, the better Hitler did. It would later become something of a footnote, but throughout most of these years, the conservative lay Catholic Zentrumspartei (Center Party) was a bulwark against Hitler’s Nazis, along with the radical Communists, and the once-dominant SPD socialists."
Let's not pretend the Soviets, Americans, and British were saints. Each killed millions of innocents too. The Germans were angry after they agreed to Wilson's Armistice in 1918 and pulled back, but the Brits then demanded Germany give up one-third its land and kept a sea blockade in place until they complied after over a million starved. Then the devastated nation was forced to pay billions of dollars in reparations.
All Americans know about the war is mostly propaganda.
Few know that Hitler's goal was to unite all the German people in Europe into a powerful nation. After crushing the French and British in 1940, he repeatedly offered a peace plan in which he would pull his forces back to Germany. But madman Churchill wanted to fight on and win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXHxiKDTHfU&t=24s
Turn on the radio in NYC today and you will hear talk show hosts bragging proudly about the IDF genocide going on against the Palestinians and complaining bitterly that they are not getting enough support and praise for killing 40,000 Arab people including at least 10,000 children. Hitler is dead but unfortunatel fascism is not.
The madness of Hitler and companions, as much as the psychological aspects mentioned here, seems to have it's origins in the madness of trench warfare where he was a corporal, certainly, like Tolkein on the other side, hearing the screams of soldiers, and the futility and madness of sending so many to their deaths over a few hundred yards of field.
Whereas for Tolkein, the beginning of his great tale began by thinking about hobbits who lived "underhill", to become the image of The Shire where people lived cooperative village and farm life, a way of life that many tried to revive as a response to the madness of this war, to Tolkein's ultimate point, that the nature of power is to be accumulated into a few hands, and even the Good are tempted toward madness, and thus, only two humble hobbits were able to resist this temptation and destrpy the ring of power, while Hitler is a combination of Gollum and Saruman
As another commentator pointed out, is the madness of the Germans, perhaps even predicted by Shelly's "Frankenstein", the narcissism of being in love with one's ingenuity, the great German science and industrialization that arose, is this madness any greater than that of the British, with the same scientific and industrial inventiveness of the 19th century, yet already dominant of the seas and already a globalist colonial power?
Is the madness of Churchill and the Great Game strategists since the 19th century pushing for war and enforcing the dominance of the British pound as the common currency any less than Hitler's madness? And then the madness of Wilson and his and his companion's globalist ambitions sending American farmboys as cannon fodder any less mad? Even Shakespeare seems to point this out in the "Merchant of Venice" which could be reinterpreted as "The Ascent of Money and War's Pound of Flesh"
What of the Balfour Agreement before the war even ended, seemingly nothing to do with the War, yet the cause of the geopolitics of today?
In short, Tolkein points to the true response to the madness of war, to reject the ring of power and live the cooperative, virtuous life of The Shire. Many who tried after WWI were sent to gulags and concentration camps, or eliminated by intelligence agencies, but many today are being reawakened to the lessons of history
Woodrow Wilson is considered a hero to most Americans, he changed his position on WWI to fight in the war against Germany. That led to Hitler's rise to power.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the UK during WWII is said to have made the mistake of trying to avoid war with Germany by negotiating with Hitler. Antiwar.com should do a story about him.