The most astonishing aspect of this volume, which, as an entry in the World Landmark series was meant for a primarily a young adult audience, is that it was written by an eyewitness to history. William L. Shirer actually met the subject and saw much of what he writes about.
This has been the case for several of the last few in this series I have read, and it makes all the difference. Not only does it cover the material in a detailed and engaging manner, it also humanizes the often-tragic events on a personal level in a way that is difficult for someone who didn't experience them firsthand.
Speaking of human: the subject of this very capable history/biography lacked pretty much everything that makes one human; think on the order of clinical psychopathy. I'm not even going to use his name herein, opting instead to refer to him simply as H. The story of his degenerate life illustrates a case where everything that could go wrong with someone did go wrong. Unfortunately, whether the cause of his malevolence was genetics, environment, abuse, disease, or something else entirely, will never be known.
Somewhat surprisingly, the book doesn't include much content about his early life. H.'s father, Alois H., was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. H.'s father initially bore her surname, but he later took the name of his stepfather, surname HEIDLER, who throughout his life used many alternate spellings, including Hiedler, Huttler, or Huettler, which is based on the German term Hutte, meaning "one who lives in a hut."
The identity of Alois's father is entirely unknown. One German official, Hans Frank, claimed that Alois's mother was employed by a wealthy Jewish family in Graz at the time, and suggested that their nineteen year old son may have fathered him, but for a variety of reasons, historians discount this theory. First and foremost, there is no record of the family that Frank claimed that H.'s mother worked for. The truth is: no one knows what Alois's father's ancestry was, so claims that H. was of Jewish ancestry are at present, at least, unfounded.
H. was born into a fairly large family, in Braunau am Inn, an Austrian town on the German border in the then-Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1889. He was the fourth child of Alois and his third wife Klara. Three of his six siblings died in infancy, but Alois also had two children from a previous marriage living with them. The family moved around quite a lot, eventually settling in Austria, near Linz, where H. attended a local public primary school.
Famously a poor student and a discipline problem from early childhood, H.'s constant misbehavior led to serious conflict with his father, who reportedly beat him on the regular, on account of his refusal to conform to the school's rigid discipline standards. H. reportedly fell into a deeper depression after the death of a younger brother, when he became even more withdrawn and quarrelsome, with both his teachers and his father.
Another bone of contention between the two, as the author notes, was H.'s desire to become an artist, which his father vehemently opposed. H. self-reported that he intentionally did poorly in school (which is questionable, as these claims may just be an attempt to account for his longstanding poor academic performance), hoping that his father would give up on aspirations for his son to follow in his footsteps. Alois made a fairly decent living working in the customs bureau, so he had at least some expectation that his son would likewise become a civil servant.
However, Alois died in 1903, when H. was only thirteen. Now there was no one to keep him in check, with predictable results. His mother allowed him to drop out of his long-hated public school, but he later enrolled in another. He did actually pass the final exam in 1905, but had to repeat it, so he wasn't technically a dropout, as some have claimed.
H.'s early life clearly demonstrates that he displayed at an early age psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies, which would lead to one of the greatest travesties in human history. H. chose to drop out of school because he couldn't abide anyone telling him what to do, but instead of acknowledging his own flaws and shortcomings, he blamed his teachers for his failings even then, calling them mad and claiming that many "ended their lives as lunatics."
As the eyewitness author notes, correctly as far as history can determine, H. was "always looking for a scapegoat," even in childhood, which is a trait highly indicative of narcissism, quite possibly narcissistic personality disorder, which prodigiously manifested in his early childhood. Whatever the cause, it set the stage for what was to come.
Another highly narcissistic trait that H. displayed to a superlative degree was that he believed himself to be superior to everyone around him. In particular, he thought he was too good for menial work, never wanting to start at the bottom where others would be in a superior position. As a result, he could never hold down a steady job, as he was unwilling to work his way up.
As a result, which is all too common in the present-day, he displayed yet another narcissistic trait: he lived off of his widowed mother like a parasite for three years after dropping out of school, and expected her to foot the bill for his support. Rather than work at even a part-time job, he chose to spend his evenings at the opera and his days aimlessly wandering the streets, all the while developing a deep-seated resentment for the self-made, successful people around him.
Despite his abject laziness, it is clear that H. was NOT stupid: quite the opposite. He was self-taught in the areas in which he excelled and didn't have to work very hard, especially history, classical mythology, and, in particular, politics. He became almost singularly obsessed with the writings of those who saw the Germans as some kind of master race who should rule the world.
This view was not H.'s own invention, as many often assume. It was actually a commonly-held belief at the time, promulgated especially by those who chafed at the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, which wrought harsh punishment on Germany at the close of WWI. H. devoured books on ancient history and political thought, which heavily influenced him, as he later modeled much of his visual propaganda on ancient Roman precedents.
His probable personality disorder and psychopathology manifested to an even greater extent in his mid-teens, according to acquaintances. They often reported that H. was singularly intense, and never took anything "lightly." He had NO sense of humor, and reportedly flew into "sudden bursts of hysterical anger" when anyone dared to disagree with him or point out errors or flaws in his arguments.
At odds with the world, resentful and envious of anyone doing better than him, H. resembled a psychologically unstable "emo kid" (I could make a crack about his hair, here, but I'm trying not to) who bore all the hallmarks we see in school shooters in the present-day. He was a bad-tempered loner, not unintelligent, but someone who clearly thought even in his formative years that he was being wronged by the world and everyone in it. As he could never take responsibility for his own actions or failures, he always needed a scapegoat: someone else always needed to be blamed for his own mistakes and shortcomings.
Two terrible blows seemed to herald a turning point in his young life. First and foremost - which probably shaped the course of history - H. flunked the entrance exam at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, TWICE, ending his aspirations of becoming a professional artist. His sub-par drawings apparently didn't pass muster and he was rejected... which essentially proved his father right.
That harsh blow almost certainly inflicted a devastating narcissistic injury, which was then shortly followed by a second event, a personal tragedy: the death of his mother from cancer. It's unclear how much H. actually cared about her death, but she had been the person on whom he had been living his parasitic lifestyle for years. Her untimely demise thus meant that for the first time in his life, H. was on his own, and, like it or not, he was going to have to fend for himself.
There is some inkling, however, at how little he actually cared about his own mother as a human being. He once wrote, in fact: "her death meant an end to all my high-flown plans." This pretty much illustrates just how little he thought of even his own mother as a person rather than just a means of material support. In short, again with the scapegoating, he blamed the death of his own mother, who had been supporting her ne'er-do-well son for years, for derailing his life's ambitions.
Dead mom's to blame... it's her fault. Just... wow.
This dude was a ticking time bomb, and it was thermonuclear.
For some reason, after her death, H. decided to move to Vienna, a stunning, picturesque capital of empire, the jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty... which he hated, and where he was equally miserable. Although it offered decent citizens willing to work for an honest day's wage an astounding quality of life attainable in few other places in Europe at the time, replete with beautiful music, great food, good fellowship, often over pastries and coffee at one of the city's stunningly elaborate coffee houses, and ample economic opportunity, H. would have none of it.
For an envious and entitled slacker who preferred to subsist on odd jobs to avoid any hint of real work which carried with it so much as a modicum of responsibility or the possibility that he would have someone telling him what to do, H. lived like a vagabond, cycling in and out of flophouses, becoming ever more despondent... and jealous.
Still without a steady job or any semblance of a routine to take his mind off his machinations, H. continued to read extensively. And what did he learn from all the books he was admittedly devouring? A warped and twisted world view that idolized conquest and conquerors. In the minds of these perpetual belligerents, war was good, not something to be avoided, because, in their view, peace had made men "soft" and weak. To the victor go the spoils, so, even mass slaughter was preferable to peace and prosperity. Great.
H. also realized from his readings the tremendous power of oratory. He wrote, in fact that "the power that has always started the great religions and political avalanches... has been the magic of the spoken word, and that alone." He also learned of the power of propaganda, specifically that the bigger the lie, the more readily people are willing to believe it. To that end, he also realized how the use of terror was effective in keeping the sheeple in line and submissive.
These writings also further solidified H.'s view that Germans were superior to all other people, although most Germans would have likely crossed the street to avoid the likes of him. Shabbily dressed, hair long, unkempt and unwashed, a man no doubt seriously lacking in personal hygiene, living in and out of flophouses, H. probably resembled nothing so much as a bum.
It was during this time that H. also reportedly developed an ardent hatred of Jews, probably because they were often wealthy and he was dirt poor. He had also long displayed another narcissistic trait - rampant entitlement. Because he thought he was better than they were by virtue of his "superior" birth, he believed that he deserved to just take whatever he wanted from those he considered inferior, which was everyone.
H. made the fateful decision to move to Munich at age 24. He claimed that the primary reason was that he could no longer abide what we would term "miscegenation," race-mixing, which was apparently fairly common in cosmopolitan Vienna, and preferred instead to mix in the company of conservative Germans in Bavaria. In truth, he probably just couldn't stand to see those he considered inferior doing better than him.
Enter the Great War: H. was a decent soldier, but even here there were notable problems. It's significant that his path to promotion in the army was slow, as the author notes: in four years he was only promoted from private to corporal. Something was clearly off, like cops who can't get promoted - either his temper, the fact that everyone hated him, his probable insubordination, or that his superiors realized that he was a loose cannon who couldn't be trusted with authority led to his being denied advancement for much of the time he served in the army.
Of course, he blamed his superiors for not acknowledging his military genius. Nor was it Germany's fault that they lost the war, which they didn't actually lose, he said: Germany was instead sabotaged by Jews and Communist infiltrators.
H.'s incessant finger-pointing and constant deflection of blame (after all, he was a soldier on the losing side) is an early signpost as to why HE eventually lost. In short, like many afflicted with what was almost certainly narcissistic personality disorder, he was utterly delusional, to the point of his own destruction. All his life, he was living in a world essentially of his own creation, one which existed only in his own mind. Acknowledging the mistakes of the past would have stood him in better stead in terms of not repeating them, but a classic narcissist will never admit their own failings.
This set H. on a collision course with the powers that be: after the war, he decided to go into politics to fix things. He still had a problem, however... several, in fact. Even after his stint in the army, where he could have used the opportunity to acquire some much-needed discipline, self-regulation and some usable skills, he remained a lazy, unskilled, ill-educated vagrant with no training, real education, family connections, or probable prospects.
Not a fitting start to diving into the shark tank that is politics.
His unlikely success does speak to his resolve to get what he wanted, by whatever means possible, legitimate or otherwise. To everyone's astonishment, H. proved that he could actually rally support, particularly by means of his admittedly electric oratory, which he essentially learned by accident. The author reports, in fact, that he heard some of these speeches firsthand, which took on the tenor of a religious revival (but not in a good way: think Jim Jones or David Koresh).
Not all was wine and roses, however: it seemed that, at least initially, all H. could attract were what many considered to be a rag-tag group of perennial ne'er-do-wells, including some of those whom Walter Cronkite, the famous American news anchor and war correspondent who was present at the Nuremberg trials, would go on to describe as "the architects of the Holocaust."
Even in the early '20s, well before his rise to power, these early supporters included Hermann Goering, a fairly accomplished fighter pilot during WWI, but also a notorious drug addict; Dietrich Eckart, another drunk, sometimes-poet, who had once been confined to a mental institution; Alfred Rosenberg, a former student at the University of Moscow, whose ostensible coin toss led him to become a Nazi rather than a Bolshevik (for obvious reason, he didn't last long in H.'s inner circle); and a "bespectacled chicken farmer" Heinrich Himmler.
That's a line-up one could be proud of! (!)
There were certainly others. The author knew some of them personally, which lends tremendous value to this volume. For example, the infamous Julius Streicher, a former school teacher, became known as the Jew-Baiter of Nuremberg, where he was eventually famously faced trial along with other war criminals after the war. The author notes, "I used to see him striding the streets of that ancient town brandishing a whip, which he used freely on Jews." Probably a riding crop, with which some of them are seen in photos.
Modern-day fasces? Pretty weird.
Some additional events described herein include the famous Beer Hall Putsch, where H. cornered three opposition leaders and forced them at gunpoint to join his "revolution," which led to a failed attempt to overthrow the government, and H.'s speedy retreat from the actual fighting.
His involvement in the affair, however, which entailed the rather dramatic act of jumping on top of a table at a beer hall and firing his pistol in the air, was still sufficient to earn him imprisonment for treason. It was widely whispered that even his prosecutors agreed with his views, however, which is the only reason H. escaped execution for treason, and why he was only issued a five-year prison sentence, of which he actually served only a year.
It was during his imprisonment that H. wrote his famous magnum opus, so-called, "Mein Kampf" (meaning "My Struggle" - ever the braggart), which solidified his views and served as a self-aggrandizing propaganda piece, bringing his warped ideology to a much larger audience. For the first time in his life, H. actually acquired some financial security: the book also made him a millionaire. It is likely, however, that much of it was dictated to him, at least informally, by far more intelligent members of his inner circle, most notably Goebbels, his propaganda minister.
Another seriously twisted episode in his demonic life followed when his half-sister brought her two daughters to Munich, where they lived at H.'s residence after she became his housekeeper in 1925. Then-39-year-old H. fell in love, if you can call it that, with his niece, Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal, nineteen years his junior.
HIS NIECE.
What's also significant here is that, at nearly forty years old, H. quite possibly, at that point, had never had a relationship with a woman. H. was almost certainly a forty-year-old virgin. The relationship with his niece, which was apparently mutually affectionate at least at the outset, was widely criticized by even his closest advisors and confidants, however.
As for poor Geli: not surprisingly, on account of all his psychopathology, things went south pretty quickly. H. began exercising ever more strict control over her life, to the degree that she became in effect a prisoner in his home, subject to his every whim. H. was insanely jealous, controlling, and suspicious of his 20-year-old niece. Not surprisingly, his behavior quickly escalated to physical violence.
The exact nature of their relationship still remains uncertain, but it has been the topic of much debate for the better part of a century. It's sometimes implied that he was intimate with her, which may have been the case, but either way, it's never been substantiated.
The fact that she killed herself in his apartment with his own gun, however, says a hell of a lot.
Her mother later informed interrogators after the end of the war that H. had prohibited Geli from pursuing a relationship with a man from Linz whom she was hoping to marry. When she had had enough of the abuse, and wished to return to Vienna to resume her vocal instruction, as she had aspirations of becoming an opera singer, H. refused to let her go, essentially imprisoning her in his Munich apartment. This culminated in a violent argument in Sept., 1931 when H. refused to allow her to travel to Vienna. A day after they were seen shouting from the street, she was found dead in his apartment, shot through the heart with his own pistol.
And she wasn't the only one.
It's generally accepted by most that she committed suicide, but not all: some claim that he had her killed because she had defied him, and he knew that there was no way to keep her imprisoned and under his control forever. Thus, he preferred her dead to the thought that he could not possess her, or that someone else eventually would.
On the surface, at least, it makes sense, but his surprising behavior after the fact casts doubt that he actually ordered it. Narcissists and psychopaths are physically incapable of experiencing guilt, but H. became utterly despondent, reportedly beyond consoling, and went into deep mourning after her death, which remained a source of pain throughout his life.
However, it's perhaps not surprising that his other relationships didn't typically end well, either. At least two of his other affairs ended in suicide, with a third reportedly dying of complications eight years after a suicide attempt, and a fourth also attempting suicide.
Damn.
It has been noted that at least early in his career, H. created a (possibly false) public image of celibacy, to bolster his persona as one completely devoted to his political mission, but that almost certainly wasn't the case. His relationship with Eva Braun lasted 14 years, but there's also evidence that he eventually had others in addition.
Perhaps it's a good thing that for most of his young life, at least, H. reportedly eschewed any physical contact with women as a young man, especially while living in Vienna, as he was fearful of contracting an STD - germophobia being yet another typical characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder. It represents a lack of control over one's own body or that of the partner.
Even when he was a soldier during the war, when the frequent topic of sex came up among his comrades, he reportedly stated when asked if he had ever "loved" a girl, he replied that he "never had time for anything like that, and I'll never get around to it." Even later in life, he avoided female company, to the degree that the wife of his propaganda chief, Gobbels, would invite him to parties so that he could meet women, but he reportedly showed no interest.
It was later claimed by even close associates that when he DID get around to it, he preferred dumb bimbos, essentially, who didn't have the mental capacity to challenge or even question him, or have the courage to prevent him from doing basically whatever he wanted, in or outside the relationship.
When asked by his secretary why he had never married, he reportedly stated, as to his wartime comrades, "I wouldn't have been able to give enough time to a wife." When asked why he never wanted children, he told her that they would have had a very difficult time, being the children of a figure as grandiose as he, as they would have been expected to "possess the same gifts as their famous parents, and they can't be forgiven for being mediocre."
Well, then.
I don't want to rehash this guy's whole life story, as I think the events surrounding his rise to power are the most interesting and revealing about his deviant life. What makes this volume unique, and definitely worth reading, are the eyewitness accounts of the author, who was a reporter and was on hand for many of the events he describes.
WWII is without doubt one of the most tragic episodes in human history, and, as despicable as the various figures are who were responsible for its innumerable atrocities, it's important to know about and, God forbid, recognize them, should any similar figures come onto the world scene, in order to avoid such events happening again in the wake of the rise of another charismatic but thoroughly evil figurehead bent on world domination.
This has been the case for several of the last few in this series I have read, and it makes all the difference. Not only does it cover the material in a detailed and engaging manner, it also humanizes the often-tragic events on a personal level in a way that is difficult for someone who didn't experience them firsthand.
Speaking of human: the subject of this very capable history/biography lacked pretty much everything that makes one human; think on the order of clinical psychopathy. I'm not even going to use his name herein, opting instead to refer to him simply as H. The story of his degenerate life illustrates a case where everything that could go wrong with someone did go wrong. Unfortunately, whether the cause of his malevolence was genetics, environment, abuse, disease, or something else entirely, will never be known.
Somewhat surprisingly, the book doesn't include much content about his early life. H.'s father, Alois H., was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. H.'s father initially bore her surname, but he later took the name of his stepfather, surname HEIDLER, who throughout his life used many alternate spellings, including Hiedler, Huttler, or Huettler, which is based on the German term Hutte, meaning "one who lives in a hut."
The identity of Alois's father is entirely unknown. One German official, Hans Frank, claimed that Alois's mother was employed by a wealthy Jewish family in Graz at the time, and suggested that their nineteen year old son may have fathered him, but for a variety of reasons, historians discount this theory. First and foremost, there is no record of the family that Frank claimed that H.'s mother worked for. The truth is: no one knows what Alois's father's ancestry was, so claims that H. was of Jewish ancestry are at present, at least, unfounded.
H. was born into a fairly large family, in Braunau am Inn, an Austrian town on the German border in the then-Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1889. He was the fourth child of Alois and his third wife Klara. Three of his six siblings died in infancy, but Alois also had two children from a previous marriage living with them. The family moved around quite a lot, eventually settling in Austria, near Linz, where H. attended a local public primary school.
Famously a poor student and a discipline problem from early childhood, H.'s constant misbehavior led to serious conflict with his father, who reportedly beat him on the regular, on account of his refusal to conform to the school's rigid discipline standards. H. reportedly fell into a deeper depression after the death of a younger brother, when he became even more withdrawn and quarrelsome, with both his teachers and his father.
Another bone of contention between the two, as the author notes, was H.'s desire to become an artist, which his father vehemently opposed. H. self-reported that he intentionally did poorly in school (which is questionable, as these claims may just be an attempt to account for his longstanding poor academic performance), hoping that his father would give up on aspirations for his son to follow in his footsteps. Alois made a fairly decent living working in the customs bureau, so he had at least some expectation that his son would likewise become a civil servant.
However, Alois died in 1903, when H. was only thirteen. Now there was no one to keep him in check, with predictable results. His mother allowed him to drop out of his long-hated public school, but he later enrolled in another. He did actually pass the final exam in 1905, but had to repeat it, so he wasn't technically a dropout, as some have claimed.
H.'s early life clearly demonstrates that he displayed at an early age psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies, which would lead to one of the greatest travesties in human history. H. chose to drop out of school because he couldn't abide anyone telling him what to do, but instead of acknowledging his own flaws and shortcomings, he blamed his teachers for his failings even then, calling them mad and claiming that many "ended their lives as lunatics."
As the eyewitness author notes, correctly as far as history can determine, H. was "always looking for a scapegoat," even in childhood, which is a trait highly indicative of narcissism, quite possibly narcissistic personality disorder, which prodigiously manifested in his early childhood. Whatever the cause, it set the stage for what was to come.
Another highly narcissistic trait that H. displayed to a superlative degree was that he believed himself to be superior to everyone around him. In particular, he thought he was too good for menial work, never wanting to start at the bottom where others would be in a superior position. As a result, he could never hold down a steady job, as he was unwilling to work his way up.
As a result, which is all too common in the present-day, he displayed yet another narcissistic trait: he lived off of his widowed mother like a parasite for three years after dropping out of school, and expected her to foot the bill for his support. Rather than work at even a part-time job, he chose to spend his evenings at the opera and his days aimlessly wandering the streets, all the while developing a deep-seated resentment for the self-made, successful people around him.
Despite his abject laziness, it is clear that H. was NOT stupid: quite the opposite. He was self-taught in the areas in which he excelled and didn't have to work very hard, especially history, classical mythology, and, in particular, politics. He became almost singularly obsessed with the writings of those who saw the Germans as some kind of master race who should rule the world.
This view was not H.'s own invention, as many often assume. It was actually a commonly-held belief at the time, promulgated especially by those who chafed at the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, which wrought harsh punishment on Germany at the close of WWI. H. devoured books on ancient history and political thought, which heavily influenced him, as he later modeled much of his visual propaganda on ancient Roman precedents.
His probable personality disorder and psychopathology manifested to an even greater extent in his mid-teens, according to acquaintances. They often reported that H. was singularly intense, and never took anything "lightly." He had NO sense of humor, and reportedly flew into "sudden bursts of hysterical anger" when anyone dared to disagree with him or point out errors or flaws in his arguments.
At odds with the world, resentful and envious of anyone doing better than him, H. resembled a psychologically unstable "emo kid" (I could make a crack about his hair, here, but I'm trying not to) who bore all the hallmarks we see in school shooters in the present-day. He was a bad-tempered loner, not unintelligent, but someone who clearly thought even in his formative years that he was being wronged by the world and everyone in it. As he could never take responsibility for his own actions or failures, he always needed a scapegoat: someone else always needed to be blamed for his own mistakes and shortcomings.
Two terrible blows seemed to herald a turning point in his young life. First and foremost - which probably shaped the course of history - H. flunked the entrance exam at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, TWICE, ending his aspirations of becoming a professional artist. His sub-par drawings apparently didn't pass muster and he was rejected... which essentially proved his father right.
That harsh blow almost certainly inflicted a devastating narcissistic injury, which was then shortly followed by a second event, a personal tragedy: the death of his mother from cancer. It's unclear how much H. actually cared about her death, but she had been the person on whom he had been living his parasitic lifestyle for years. Her untimely demise thus meant that for the first time in his life, H. was on his own, and, like it or not, he was going to have to fend for himself.
There is some inkling, however, at how little he actually cared about his own mother as a human being. He once wrote, in fact: "her death meant an end to all my high-flown plans." This pretty much illustrates just how little he thought of even his own mother as a person rather than just a means of material support. In short, again with the scapegoating, he blamed the death of his own mother, who had been supporting her ne'er-do-well son for years, for derailing his life's ambitions.
Dead mom's to blame... it's her fault. Just... wow.
This dude was a ticking time bomb, and it was thermonuclear.
For some reason, after her death, H. decided to move to Vienna, a stunning, picturesque capital of empire, the jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty... which he hated, and where he was equally miserable. Although it offered decent citizens willing to work for an honest day's wage an astounding quality of life attainable in few other places in Europe at the time, replete with beautiful music, great food, good fellowship, often over pastries and coffee at one of the city's stunningly elaborate coffee houses, and ample economic opportunity, H. would have none of it.
For an envious and entitled slacker who preferred to subsist on odd jobs to avoid any hint of real work which carried with it so much as a modicum of responsibility or the possibility that he would have someone telling him what to do, H. lived like a vagabond, cycling in and out of flophouses, becoming ever more despondent... and jealous.
Still without a steady job or any semblance of a routine to take his mind off his machinations, H. continued to read extensively. And what did he learn from all the books he was admittedly devouring? A warped and twisted world view that idolized conquest and conquerors. In the minds of these perpetual belligerents, war was good, not something to be avoided, because, in their view, peace had made men "soft" and weak. To the victor go the spoils, so, even mass slaughter was preferable to peace and prosperity. Great.
H. also realized from his readings the tremendous power of oratory. He wrote, in fact that "the power that has always started the great religions and political avalanches... has been the magic of the spoken word, and that alone." He also learned of the power of propaganda, specifically that the bigger the lie, the more readily people are willing to believe it. To that end, he also realized how the use of terror was effective in keeping the sheeple in line and submissive.
These writings also further solidified H.'s view that Germans were superior to all other people, although most Germans would have likely crossed the street to avoid the likes of him. Shabbily dressed, hair long, unkempt and unwashed, a man no doubt seriously lacking in personal hygiene, living in and out of flophouses, H. probably resembled nothing so much as a bum.
It was during this time that H. also reportedly developed an ardent hatred of Jews, probably because they were often wealthy and he was dirt poor. He had also long displayed another narcissistic trait - rampant entitlement. Because he thought he was better than they were by virtue of his "superior" birth, he believed that he deserved to just take whatever he wanted from those he considered inferior, which was everyone.
H. made the fateful decision to move to Munich at age 24. He claimed that the primary reason was that he could no longer abide what we would term "miscegenation," race-mixing, which was apparently fairly common in cosmopolitan Vienna, and preferred instead to mix in the company of conservative Germans in Bavaria. In truth, he probably just couldn't stand to see those he considered inferior doing better than him.
Enter the Great War: H. was a decent soldier, but even here there were notable problems. It's significant that his path to promotion in the army was slow, as the author notes: in four years he was only promoted from private to corporal. Something was clearly off, like cops who can't get promoted - either his temper, the fact that everyone hated him, his probable insubordination, or that his superiors realized that he was a loose cannon who couldn't be trusted with authority led to his being denied advancement for much of the time he served in the army.
Of course, he blamed his superiors for not acknowledging his military genius. Nor was it Germany's fault that they lost the war, which they didn't actually lose, he said: Germany was instead sabotaged by Jews and Communist infiltrators.
H.'s incessant finger-pointing and constant deflection of blame (after all, he was a soldier on the losing side) is an early signpost as to why HE eventually lost. In short, like many afflicted with what was almost certainly narcissistic personality disorder, he was utterly delusional, to the point of his own destruction. All his life, he was living in a world essentially of his own creation, one which existed only in his own mind. Acknowledging the mistakes of the past would have stood him in better stead in terms of not repeating them, but a classic narcissist will never admit their own failings.
This set H. on a collision course with the powers that be: after the war, he decided to go into politics to fix things. He still had a problem, however... several, in fact. Even after his stint in the army, where he could have used the opportunity to acquire some much-needed discipline, self-regulation and some usable skills, he remained a lazy, unskilled, ill-educated vagrant with no training, real education, family connections, or probable prospects.
Not a fitting start to diving into the shark tank that is politics.
His unlikely success does speak to his resolve to get what he wanted, by whatever means possible, legitimate or otherwise. To everyone's astonishment, H. proved that he could actually rally support, particularly by means of his admittedly electric oratory, which he essentially learned by accident. The author reports, in fact, that he heard some of these speeches firsthand, which took on the tenor of a religious revival (but not in a good way: think Jim Jones or David Koresh).
Not all was wine and roses, however: it seemed that, at least initially, all H. could attract were what many considered to be a rag-tag group of perennial ne'er-do-wells, including some of those whom Walter Cronkite, the famous American news anchor and war correspondent who was present at the Nuremberg trials, would go on to describe as "the architects of the Holocaust."
Even in the early '20s, well before his rise to power, these early supporters included Hermann Goering, a fairly accomplished fighter pilot during WWI, but also a notorious drug addict; Dietrich Eckart, another drunk, sometimes-poet, who had once been confined to a mental institution; Alfred Rosenberg, a former student at the University of Moscow, whose ostensible coin toss led him to become a Nazi rather than a Bolshevik (for obvious reason, he didn't last long in H.'s inner circle); and a "bespectacled chicken farmer" Heinrich Himmler.
That's a line-up one could be proud of! (!)
There were certainly others. The author knew some of them personally, which lends tremendous value to this volume. For example, the infamous Julius Streicher, a former school teacher, became known as the Jew-Baiter of Nuremberg, where he was eventually famously faced trial along with other war criminals after the war. The author notes, "I used to see him striding the streets of that ancient town brandishing a whip, which he used freely on Jews." Probably a riding crop, with which some of them are seen in photos.
Modern-day fasces? Pretty weird.
Some additional events described herein include the famous Beer Hall Putsch, where H. cornered three opposition leaders and forced them at gunpoint to join his "revolution," which led to a failed attempt to overthrow the government, and H.'s speedy retreat from the actual fighting.
His involvement in the affair, however, which entailed the rather dramatic act of jumping on top of a table at a beer hall and firing his pistol in the air, was still sufficient to earn him imprisonment for treason. It was widely whispered that even his prosecutors agreed with his views, however, which is the only reason H. escaped execution for treason, and why he was only issued a five-year prison sentence, of which he actually served only a year.
It was during his imprisonment that H. wrote his famous magnum opus, so-called, "Mein Kampf" (meaning "My Struggle" - ever the braggart), which solidified his views and served as a self-aggrandizing propaganda piece, bringing his warped ideology to a much larger audience. For the first time in his life, H. actually acquired some financial security: the book also made him a millionaire. It is likely, however, that much of it was dictated to him, at least informally, by far more intelligent members of his inner circle, most notably Goebbels, his propaganda minister.
Another seriously twisted episode in his demonic life followed when his half-sister brought her two daughters to Munich, where they lived at H.'s residence after she became his housekeeper in 1925. Then-39-year-old H. fell in love, if you can call it that, with his niece, Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal, nineteen years his junior.
HIS NIECE.
What's also significant here is that, at nearly forty years old, H. quite possibly, at that point, had never had a relationship with a woman. H. was almost certainly a forty-year-old virgin. The relationship with his niece, which was apparently mutually affectionate at least at the outset, was widely criticized by even his closest advisors and confidants, however.
As for poor Geli: not surprisingly, on account of all his psychopathology, things went south pretty quickly. H. began exercising ever more strict control over her life, to the degree that she became in effect a prisoner in his home, subject to his every whim. H. was insanely jealous, controlling, and suspicious of his 20-year-old niece. Not surprisingly, his behavior quickly escalated to physical violence.
The exact nature of their relationship still remains uncertain, but it has been the topic of much debate for the better part of a century. It's sometimes implied that he was intimate with her, which may have been the case, but either way, it's never been substantiated.
The fact that she killed herself in his apartment with his own gun, however, says a hell of a lot.
Her mother later informed interrogators after the end of the war that H. had prohibited Geli from pursuing a relationship with a man from Linz whom she was hoping to marry. When she had had enough of the abuse, and wished to return to Vienna to resume her vocal instruction, as she had aspirations of becoming an opera singer, H. refused to let her go, essentially imprisoning her in his Munich apartment. This culminated in a violent argument in Sept., 1931 when H. refused to allow her to travel to Vienna. A day after they were seen shouting from the street, she was found dead in his apartment, shot through the heart with his own pistol.
And she wasn't the only one.
It's generally accepted by most that she committed suicide, but not all: some claim that he had her killed because she had defied him, and he knew that there was no way to keep her imprisoned and under his control forever. Thus, he preferred her dead to the thought that he could not possess her, or that someone else eventually would.
On the surface, at least, it makes sense, but his surprising behavior after the fact casts doubt that he actually ordered it. Narcissists and psychopaths are physically incapable of experiencing guilt, but H. became utterly despondent, reportedly beyond consoling, and went into deep mourning after her death, which remained a source of pain throughout his life.
However, it's perhaps not surprising that his other relationships didn't typically end well, either. At least two of his other affairs ended in suicide, with a third reportedly dying of complications eight years after a suicide attempt, and a fourth also attempting suicide.
Damn.
It has been noted that at least early in his career, H. created a (possibly false) public image of celibacy, to bolster his persona as one completely devoted to his political mission, but that almost certainly wasn't the case. His relationship with Eva Braun lasted 14 years, but there's also evidence that he eventually had others in addition.
Perhaps it's a good thing that for most of his young life, at least, H. reportedly eschewed any physical contact with women as a young man, especially while living in Vienna, as he was fearful of contracting an STD - germophobia being yet another typical characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder. It represents a lack of control over one's own body or that of the partner.
Even when he was a soldier during the war, when the frequent topic of sex came up among his comrades, he reportedly stated when asked if he had ever "loved" a girl, he replied that he "never had time for anything like that, and I'll never get around to it." Even later in life, he avoided female company, to the degree that the wife of his propaganda chief, Gobbels, would invite him to parties so that he could meet women, but he reportedly showed no interest.
It was later claimed by even close associates that when he DID get around to it, he preferred dumb bimbos, essentially, who didn't have the mental capacity to challenge or even question him, or have the courage to prevent him from doing basically whatever he wanted, in or outside the relationship.
When asked by his secretary why he had never married, he reportedly stated, as to his wartime comrades, "I wouldn't have been able to give enough time to a wife." When asked why he never wanted children, he told her that they would have had a very difficult time, being the children of a figure as grandiose as he, as they would have been expected to "possess the same gifts as their famous parents, and they can't be forgiven for being mediocre."
Well, then.
I don't want to rehash this guy's whole life story, as I think the events surrounding his rise to power are the most interesting and revealing about his deviant life. What makes this volume unique, and definitely worth reading, are the eyewitness accounts of the author, who was a reporter and was on hand for many of the events he describes.
WWII is without doubt one of the most tragic episodes in human history, and, as despicable as the various figures are who were responsible for its innumerable atrocities, it's important to know about and, God forbid, recognize them, should any similar figures come onto the world scene, in order to avoid such events happening again in the wake of the rise of another charismatic but thoroughly evil figurehead bent on world domination.
