Adolf Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich
Bodley Head, £25
‘It is the miracle of our age that you found me among so many millions.” So Adolf Hitler once told the German people. While the religious language is misplaced, he had a point. His journey from being a “stray dog” in Vienna to deciding the fate of Europe remains a staggering tale. As if to emphasise this, in the first volume of his mammoth new biography of Hitler, Volker Ullrich reproduces a photograph of a rally in Munich in the run-up to World War I. And there he is – a face in the crowd: the firmly parted lock overhanging his forehead, the moustache, a look of giddy excitement.
There were other fervent nationalists, and Jew haters, and even perhaps latent megalomaniacs, rubbing shoulders with Hitler on the streets of Munich before and after the war. He was a failed artist, an intermittent drifter, a soldier from the lower ranks: how on earth did he detach himself from the masses and become their Führer, leading them to shame and destruction? Ullrich helps to answer this question because he focuses resolutely on Hitler the person.
While Hitler was no great shakes at his chosen profession of artist, he was a talented man, as Ulrich shows. He was a great actor and a consummate liar. He had a gift for outrageous political brinkmanship and, once he was up and running, his self-belief was limitless. He could tap into the collective psyche and sold National Socialism as a liberation movement. And he was often very lucky. Yet none of these things explain how Hitler first wedged his way into the destiny of his country and the world.
Again, Ullrich provides us with a clue. What Hitler brought to that tiny, no-hope group of political cranks he joined in 1919 was his gift for oratory. Some found him boring or irritating, but plenty didn’t. They found him electrifying.
Hitler’s first sally into public speaking was in his late teens, delivered to an audience of one: the friend of his youth, August Kubizek. It took place on a hilltop in Linz after a Wagner concert. Kubizek claimed that Hitler spoke, in a tone of otherworldly rapture, of a special mission that would one day be his. We see him again in Munich after the war. First, he transfixes a group hanging around after a lecture on German political history. Shortly after, he speaks out during a meeting of his tiny new party to rebuff one of the podium speakers. And then, for the first time, he assumes the podium himself in October 1919 in front of around a hundred people.
In Mein Kampf, he wrote: “What I used to sense internally without really knowing it was now confirmed by reality: I could speak well.”
If he didn’t get them with his voice, there were his eyes: “He looked simple and chivalrous, and his eyes were bright,” gushed one upper-class lady. “Those large, blue eyes. Like stars,” swooned Goebbels.
Ullrich assiduously traces each and every milestone and turning point through to 1939. He lays bare the anti-Semitism in all its depravity. He intersperses his text with countless telling quotations: Goebbels’s diary, in particular, is used to provide a running commentary on the state of mind of his Führer and the progress of their terrifying cause. In a chapter devoted to “Hitler as Human Being”, Ullrich does a particularly good job in assembling testimonies of enemies, friends and neutrals who entered Hitler’s orbit and tried to pin the man down in words. Almost all admit failure. They could not in the end resolve the contradictions into a plausible, coherent picture. Hitler remained a mystery to them.
Here is one last quote from Goebbels, perhaps the most disturbing of the lot, describing Hitler breaking up a car journey for a picnic under the pines with his entourage: “Hitler very happy. A normal person among normal people.”
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.