“Had Adolf Hitler never lived, the shape of today’s world would certainly look very different”
Nigel Jones on Frank McDonough’s The Hitler Years
The decisive role of the individual in making history is an unfashionable concept for many modern historians, but Professor Frank McDonough is not among them. For, as he argues in this second volume of his vast history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, had Hitler never lived, the Second World War would not have happened, and the shape of today’s world would look very different.
It was Hitler’s powerfully amoral will, mesmerising charisma, and above all his insanely obsessive mania to eliminate the Jews, vanquish Bolshevism, and win Germany Lebensraum (living space) in the east that made him ruler of much of Europe, but eventually destroyed him and his evil regime and left the continent in ruins.
The book opens with the führer master of all he surveyed. Having destroyed Poland and divvied the conquered country up with his partner in crime, Stalin, the dictator occupied western Europe in a short Blitzkrieg campaign, leaving Britain alone in defying him. It was then, writes McDonough, that his racist ideology led him to make the fatal error that would undo him.
Instead of invading and completely crushing the island, he launched his surprise attack on his Soviet ally with inadequate resources, drawing Germany into an unwinnable struggle that would sap and finally break his formidable military might. McDonough repeatedly reminds us that it was the Soviets that “won” the war – albeit at the price of around 26–27 million lives. Compared to that blood sacrifice, the losses of the western allies were negligible.
Hitler’s own allies also hastened his doom. Japan drew the US into the war, making its final outcome inevitable, while he was continually distracted by having to rescue his Fascist friend Mussolini from defeat in the
Balkans, north Africa and finally Italy itself. Given the odds against Endsieg – or “ultimate victory” – it is astonishing that Germany held out for as long as it did. A major reason for that being, as McDonough also emphasises, that Hitler enjoyed the support of most Germans until the bitter end. McDonough states that, according to Gestapo files, those who resisted Nazism were a tiny minority of 1 per cent.
Foremost among the many crimes committed by this man and the regime he created, of course, was the Holocaust: the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish
It is the destruction wreaked by this one man’s demonic drive that most appals: lives lost and ruined, cities razed, nations ravaged
people in Europe. McDonough pulls no punches in attributing guilt for this unprecedented atrocity beyond solely Hitler himself. He initiated the crime, but it needed the help of the SS, SD, Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and behind them the overt or tacit support of millions of ordinary Germans to accomplish it. It is the destruction wreaked by this one man’s demonic drive that most appals: lives lost and ruined, cities razed, nations ravaged, all for nothing.
Considering the enormous canvas that McDonough covers in this exemplary book, there is little left out. His narrative includes economics, battle statistics, anecdotes and authorial opinions without ever losing its pace or coherence. Fact-paced, lucidly and clearly written in a style appealing to fellow academics, students and general readers alike, it makes for grim but necessary reading. His publishers have done their author proud: copiously illustrated and beautifully designed, the book presents an awful subject in an uncommonly attractive package.
Nigel Jones’ books include Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assassinate Hitler (Frontline, 2009)