A Hitler we have not seen before
The big book at the moment is Hitler: Downfall 1939-45 (Bodley Head), the concluding second volume in Volker Ullrich’s magisterial biography of the German dictator. (The first, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, appeared in 2016.)
The big question, of course, is what is new and fresh here?
Several critics have made the point, as David Aaronovitch did in The Times of London: “[There is] one problem of writing a book about Hitler at this time, which is that every page will be a summary of an action or theme about which other historians have written a dozen books.”
What’s striking for
Aaronovitch, though, is Ullrich’s nationality and roots: he’ sa German born in Saxony during the war, and his hometown, Celle, was destroyed in a single bombing raid in April 1945. Yet there is no revisionist attempt here to absolve the German people of responsibility for Nazi war crimes. Soldiers and civilians were complicit, Ullrich makes clear. “Broadly,” says Aaronovitch, “they were nervous about the war, happy when it led to victory, unhappy as the war dragged on, very unhappy as defeat loomed.”
And there is little doubt, as far as Ullrich is concerned, “that Hitler’s most significant contribution to history was racist mass murder, of which the Holocaust was a large part”. Aaronovitch writes: “This is in no way mitigated by the absence of a direct order from the Führer. Hitler’s way was the Henry II way — he expressed the sentiment and his supporters went off and did their enthusiastic best to realise it. And the Führer’s officious enthusiasm for racial murder is unquestionable.
“In March 1944, ordering a pre-emptive invasion of his erstwhile ally Hungary, Hitler told his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels: ‘Hungary has 700,000 Jews. We will make sure that they do not slip through our hands.’ So in with the invasion went Adolf Eichmann to ensure they didn’t. In weeks, 430,000 Hungarian Jews went to AuschwitzBirkenau to be murdered. This is roughly the number of total casualties, killed and wounded, UK and empire, that Britain suffered during the whole war.”
For all that, the historian and author Dominic Sandbrook, writing in The Sunday Times, suggests the scariest thing about Ullrich’s study is that it revealed Hitler as “horribly” ordinary. He rarely behaved like a “freak or a lunatic”. His secretaries thought him polite and affable, visitors found him entertaining and hospitable, and there was nothing odd about his relationship with Eva Braun, who felt free enough to disagree with him in front of others, and would pointedly ask the time whenever he launched into another boring monologue.
Ullrich’s interest here, then, is in Hitler the man. This may make for uncomfortable reading since, as Sandbrook suggests, we are accustomed to regarding him as “inhuman, even subhuman, a madman or a beast”. So close attention is paid to the daily routines: Hitler would rise at 11am, breakfast at noon, lunch with his entourage, go for walks, then have meetings, dinner, more meetings, followed by a newsreel and the late-night monologues. The Führer’s deteriorating health is closely detailed: the greying hair, the bags under his eyes, the stooped shoulders and the onset of what was almost certainly Parkinson’s disease.
Some of this is familiar: the rages, the assassination bids, the final scenes in the bunker. “So,” Sandbrook asks, “if you know the story, do you need to bother? The answer is yes.
Ullrich’s book gives us a Hitler we have not seen before, at once cold-blooded and idealistic, chillingly narcissistic and cloyingly sentimental.
“And precisely because he seems so much like the rest of us, it is probably the most disturbing portrait of Hitler I have ever read.”