The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939, by Frank Mcdonough

The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 By Frank Mcdonough Head of Zeus £30

In the 1930s, my grandmother (Irish, South African and later Australian) lived for a few years in the east of Germany, as a language assistant/housemistress in a boarding school. Her one recorded comment about Hitler’s accession to power was that he put an end to the suffering of an awful lot of German people.

I strongly doubt that she hated Jews, or was a reckless warmonger. She simply recognised that the country was in an absolute mess – politically incontinent and almost bankrupt, with starvation looming in the rural areas. Strong solutions were called for – by both left wing and right – and Adolf Hitler seemed to be providing them.

She was not alone in these straightforward views.

The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 (part one of Frank Mcdonough’s two-book project on the disgruntled former corporal’s time as Führer) makes it abundantly clear that, ‘even if Hitler had never come to power, Germany would probably have had a right-wing nationalist coalition during this period’.

This coalition would have had the backing of the humiliated German military, would almost certainly have demanded to renegotiate the Treaty of Versailles and would probably have gained the sympathy of the political classes in England and France, particularly when they were threatened with the alternative of Communism.

Hitler did not create the conditions that enabled his rise; he fed, however cynically, on genuine – even legitimate – national grievances. He was appointed to the Chancellorship quite constitutionally. Local and foreign pundits didn’t see this as any kind of fundamental moment. His rule began as, and for a long while remained, a

necessary and supportive coalition of the Nazi party, upper-class politicos, the army, the civil service and big business.

The reality is that he successfully won over most of the German population to his major public plans. So as all the now-familiar hallmarks of Nazi rule (book-burning, purges, camps and violent anti-semitism) emerged, in some form, the German people had – at best – already capitulated. As Hitler himself said in a 1937 interview, ‘A government like ours could never stay in power without the will of the people to support it.’

But Triumph is the more interesting for pushing back against the cartoon of Hitler as all-conquering monstersupermensch. Instead it demonstrates the slow creep of the Nazi state takeover, the caution with which Hitler had to move, the resistance that he often faced and his surprising, instinctive flexibility.

Challenges to his outright authority came from his own ranks (Ernst Röhm), political superiors (von Papen), economic circumstances and the church (Lutheran as well as Catholic). Criticism was neither unheard of nor unheard. In 1935, the party was complaining that Hitler seemed to have relaxed his persecution of the Jews (he had, for diplomatic reasons), and his generals were outspoken about the country’s unpreparedness for war. As late as 1939, some of the high command were even plotting to arrest him.

So Hitler was also lucky. From the German/nazi/hitlerian viewpoint, almost nothing went wrong from 1933 to 1939. (The rest is in volume two: Catastrophe).

With its no-nonsense, chronological account and parade of fascinating details, Triumph is essentially a 450-page undergraduate primer on pre-war Germany, albeit handsomely decked out in appropriately ominous black and red – and nicely illustrated.

Ostensibly aimed at the general reader, the book has only a six-page introduction to cover everything that’s relevant before 1933. Thereafter, Mcdonough cannot seem to decide whether this is the first book his reader will have read on Nazi Germany (‘Hitler, who had been an artist in his youth…’ ) or if the reader should already know the details of the Locarno Pact.

Did we really need another book about the Nazis? This contains no important new material, but that doesn’t stop its publisher boasting that the completed, two-volume publication will constitute ‘a definitive history of the Third Reich’. At this point, that seems optimistic.