320 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0192802064
Oh, look: another book about Hitler…an academic book, no less. Y’all know what that means: lots of detail; lots of verbiage; and, oh yes, lots of redundancy. Ian Kershaw is perhaps the modern-day expert on Hitler and the Nazis. His two-volume biography on the son-of-a-bitch is perhaps the standard on Hitler bios in the English language (those would be Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, reviewed by me on March 5th, 2014, and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, reviewed by me on March 6th, 2014; although I, for one, think that Hitler by Joachim C. Fest – reviewed by me on March 30th, 2017 – was far superior). But one thing that Kershaw brings to any of his Nazi investigatory ways is a certain frame of reference that affects both the material he includes and excludes, and the conclusions that he presents, i.e. an apparent requirement that every action by Hitler must have a known reason – I mean, Kershaw would lead you to believe that we (or at least he) knows why Hitler did most everything he did. So for example, once becoming Chancellor in 1933, Kershaw says that Hitler wanted to do nothing, just like he did in his wastrel Vienna years earlier as a starving artist, and so he just watched movies, chatted with his friends, had long meals and teas, and so on; to summarize the author’s position, all the bad stuff was done by his staff. Bad stuff that does come up at Hitler’s hand – like, oh I don’t know, the Night of the Long Knives – is made to appear almost a necessity so as to maintain order and forestall a disaster.
No mention that it was at this pre-territorial-grabbing time that Hitler took Guderian’s suggestion and created the wholly self-sufficient mobile armored units over the strong objections of the Army; nor is there mention that while the Nazis were out of power they has formed a kind of “shadow cabinet”, ready to take over if the government in power should fall – political institutions, educational institutions, churches, labor unions, etc. – thus, when Hitler took power, they were able to almost instantly take control of every part of German society. And no mention that, based on his WWI experience, Hitler demanded that Germany focus on building only offensive weapons, but also no mention of him stunning von Braun and his rocket scientists by telling them why their V-2 superweapon would not work, or telling the Army how to take Fort Eben-Emael when they were stumped. Or when Kershaw claims with certainty that Hitler invaded the USSR because he wanted to force Britain to negotiate a peace treaty; I think the consensus is that the USSR invasion was a piece of Hitler’s Mein Kampf/Lebensraum core belief structure, and that having Britain cave in was just fluff tossed out by Ribbentrop that would have been a welcome side benefit to Hitler, but not a prime cause. The author gives Hitler a “logical” reason for invading the USSR rather than an ideological one.
The point is, this is not the track record of an uninvolved, idle, tea-with-Der-Führer personality, and the carrot that keeps any totalitarian state together is a belief in the god-like set of miracles that the leader of the state – and only the leader – has brought and will continue to bring; the stick is the terror, the almost incapacitating fear that any perceived inappropriate action on your part will be informed upon by your neighbor, workmate, patron at an event, or your own child, and you and maybe your family will be whisked off to the concentration camp, possibly never to return. To read this book, few of these carrots, none of the sticks, or the totalitarian state itself, existed under Hitler.
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