Smash hit

What dominated Hitler’s life, beginning with his disillusion with Vienna in his early twenties and confirmed by his happy service in a Bavarian regiment during the First World War, was his almost idolatrous love for Germany and everything German. Here were the seeds for the racism which was to dictate all his actions. Underlying the ideology which he so powerfully communicated to millions was the hate for Jews and contempt of Slavs he conceived during that stay in the liberal and multinational Vienna of the Habs-burgs. And finally, arising out of both, was his conviction that only Germany (perhaps with the collaboration of the racially pure English) was fit to rule Europe and the world.

What we like to forget is that almost until the end of the Thirties, not only most Germans, but much of the world agreed with him. Far too many then, putting aside their unease about his racism and their dismay at the rumoured cruelties in concentration camps, thought he might be a man who could succeed in re-establishing a reformed Germany, in creating a united Europe.

And the truth is that aside from bureaucratic measures against Jews, which met with some sympathy from much of the population, the Nazis exercised considerable restraint until the beginning of the war. The first official order for murder signed by Hitler, the “mercy” killings of the handicapped, was dated September 1, 1939. There is no documented evidence that he ordered the murder of the Jews but, as Albert Speer has told me, nothing happened in Nazi Germany without his knowledge or approval.

But considering that so many Germans and Austrians were involved in these murders — and the subsequent murders of slave labourers from the East, by starvation and brutality — the question has arisen many times whether they can all be laid at Hitler’s door. But without the environment he created, probably none of them would have become killers.

It was only in the autumn of 1944, when facing defeat by the “Russian hordes” he so despised, that, by issuing his “scorched earth” order, he fully played out his newfound contempt for his beloved Germans, and the penchant for destruction Fest claims he had from his youth.

“If the war is lost,” he said to Speer in early 1945 when he remonstrated with him about the order to destroy Germany’s infrastructure, “. . . it is not necessary to worry about what (the people) will need for survival. On the contrary, it is best . . . to destroy even these things. For the nation has shown itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs to the stronger Eastern countries. The garbage left over after this struggle will anyway be only the inferior ones, because the good ones will be dead.”

What’s more . . .

• Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 by Antony Beevor (Penguin)
• The World At War (Fremantle DVD boxed set): award-winning 1973 television series, narrated by Laurence Olivier
• Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny (Picador): biography based on extensive interviews with Hitler’s architect
• The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper (Macmillan): a British officer solves the mystery of Hitler’s disappearance
• The Great Dictator (Warner DVD): Charlie Chaplin’s anti-Nazi spoof

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