Adolf Hitler: What makes a malevolent mind?

Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi party, dictator in Germany from 1933-1945, initiator of world war II, perpetrator of the Holocaust and widely considered one of the most evil leaders in all of history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Adolf Hitler
was a German politician, leader of the Nazi Party, dictator
in Germany from nineteen thirty three to ninety, initiator of

(00:20):
World War Two, perpetrator of the Holocaust, and widely considered
one of the most evil leaders in all of history.
Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gail Songs, and my guest
today is Dr Benjamin Carter, author of the Death of Democracy,

(00:45):
Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,
and professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate
Center of the City of New York. One of the
most tyrannical monsters of the last century. Adolf Hitler was
born in eighteen eighty nine to Aloise and Clara Hitler.

(01:07):
His father, Aloise, was much older than his mother, and
it was his third marriage. Aloise was an extremely severe man,
but intelligent and ambitious, having been born into a lower
social class and then raising himself up to the middle class.

(01:28):
Alouise was a very authoritarian, tyrannical father that was not
in any way unusual in late nineteenth century Austria or
Germany or many other places. There does seem to have
been a difference of degree. Though Aloise had a drinking problem,
he was often very violent, very brutal, both towards Hitler's mother, Clara,

(01:49):
and towards Hitler himself and occasionally his siblings. So we
know that he was raised in this environment where he's
dealing with this very, very difficult father and their relationship
was never good. I think a key element here is
to understand that parents did hit their children, but Aloise
really beat his son, and Paula, the younger sister, reports
some severe beatings where he was almost left for dead.

(02:11):
Let's talk about his relationship with his mother, because of
course we don't know. A psychoanalyst said, the relationship with
mom is hugely important. So he loved his father, and
he hated his father, and he had difficult to get
along with him, but he loved his mother. And his mother,
who was younger, was a very attentive mother in the
sense that children that were born to the marriage before
out off died in infancy or really even at birth,

(02:34):
and so he was the first surviving child in that sense.
She had a kind of miserable life with this alcoholic,
authoritative husband and also the loss of multiple children before
out off, but she did focus a lot of attention
on him, so she's reported as loving, but he didn't
really get enough, not enough love, because she didn't protect

(02:55):
him against the father. Yes, that's absolutely right. He wrote
in Mindkom of his infamous partial autobiography, that he had
respected his father and loved his mother. There's no doubt
about his really close bonds of affection to his mother.
Other people who knew him when he was young testified
to this. It is widely believed by scholars of Hitler
that if he ever loved, really loved one human being,

(03:17):
it was his mother. He was always very indirect in
the way that he wrote about his childhood. He never
wrote or spoke really directly harshly about his father, But
there is a fascinating kind of indirect reference. In Mind Comfort.
He describes a working class family in Vienna where the
father drinks and beasts the children, and a son turns
to juvenile delinquency, and most scholars of Hitler think this

(03:40):
is actually a rather indirect reflection of personal experience, which
gives us a bit of a sketch of what the
reality was like in the Hitler household and as a
young boy he went to elementary school in the town.
By all reports, he was actually a great student, a
very accomplished elementary school student, and so people thought or Hitlers.
His family thought that he was intelligent and his father

(04:01):
had aspirations for him. His father, of course, had socially
risen quite a long way from a poor peasant background
up to being a customs official in the Austro Hungarian government.
By the standards of that time and place, that was
a highly prestigious job. To be in state service in
Central Europe in those days was to have really the
most honored kind of job that there was, So that
was a big deal that he got there. And of course,
as typically happens in these kinds of family patterns, he

(04:24):
wants his son to carry on the rise. So he
has aspirations for his son to get a good education
and to rise higher in the civil service. Now, this
was something that Adolf Hitler was absolutely the farthest thing
possible from anything he wanted to do. He had this
vision of himself as a kind of great romantic Bohemian
artist and a kind of Nietzschean mold, which was a

(04:44):
very common way for young people to think about how
they're sort of romantic future might expand in the late
nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. So that was another kind
of arena of father's son conflict, and the conflict became
were pronounced as he moved into what we call middle
school and high schoo where he started performing very poorly
in pretty much every subject. When they look at the

(05:05):
rankings of the subjects, either he either did barely scraping
by or he failed. He had to repeat grades. And
about the only thing that he performed quote well and
was essentially physical education and art and history. Actually he
was always very interested in history, but yes, as he
got older, he became a much more indifferent student. This too,
i think reflects his kind of growing sense of himself

(05:26):
as somebody a bit apart, somebody who's not going to
advance through the kind of conventional channels, with the conventional
education and the conventional aspiration that his father wants him
to have. His father decides to quote retire, and he
spends much of his day in the pub because he's
not actually very happy being retired, and so it is
presumed that he had really an alcohol problem, and then
he would come home and be angry and particularly angry

(05:49):
at his son who was doing poorly, and yet out
Off maintained this line. He sort of didn't dig in
hard to know whether he was lazy, couldn't do, didn't
want to do. This was his form of Protestation and
you know, resistance towards his father. But he really didn't
do much except draw, essentially, and he started to have
these aspirations of being an art student and being an artist,

(06:11):
which made his father very unhappy. Also at the same time, right,
he's entering puberty, and this is a time when most
boys of that age are becoming sexually interested, meeting girls,
dating girls, and as they age, perhaps even you know,
sleeping with girls, sleeping with prostitutes. And Hitler took the
really opposite stance. He was seemed incredibly inhibited. He admired girls,

(06:36):
or a girl from Afar. Actually there was a young woman, Stephanie,
who his friend reports he had a crush on for
three years, never spoke to her, became immensely jealous of
anyone who did speak to her, but never spoke to her,
and maintain this sort of puritanical stance right that one
should not sexually partake. Yes, he seems to have been
terrified at funereal disease. And as you mentioned, it was

(06:58):
quite common for young men in that era to get
their first sexual experience by going to a brothel. He
absolutely wouldn't do that because of his terror of syphilis
or something similar. And yes, he had a fixation on
this young woman in his hometown named Stephanie, but never
seems to have approached her. He does seem to have
been very, very worried about his own physicality, his own body.

(07:20):
Even later on, far into his adult life. He would
never go to the beach or go swimming because he
didn't want to be seen in swim trunks. He never
wanted to be seen in anything but either full formal
dress or a uniform. He was very conscious about sort
of preserving a certain amount of dignity, and he didn't
want his body showing at all. He didn't want to
be seen playing any kind of sports where he might

(07:41):
flub something. He was really sort of physically closed down
in all kinds of ways when we try to understand
what what is that about. Syphilis was a big problem
in that era, and people suffered and people died of syphilis.
He had an idea that his father might have had syphilis,
and he also had an idea, even though this is
very strange because it was understood at the time that
syphilis was a contagious disease and not a hereditary disease.

(08:04):
But nonetheless he had the idea syphilis maybe hereditary, and
in fact has concerns that perhaps he got this from
his father, even though there was no evidence that he
ever had syphilis, not clear evidence that his father ever
has syphi with but he is very concerned about this
idea of being infected, of being degenerate. This is important

(08:25):
because later we'll talk about the path that he took
in terms of needing to cleanse the world as it were.
That he has great concerns about degeneracy, and one of
those is about syphilis or sexually transmitted disease, which seems
to roll over to sex in general, and that he
maintained this very inhibited way of behaving, particularly with women,

(08:46):
which really lasts his entire life. We have no evidence
whether he ever actually consummated via sexual intercourse any relationship
actually with a woman, though he had some romantic interactions
with women, but we're not clear how much beyond that
it actually went. Yeah, all of the reports that we
have about his sex life, pretty much naturally, are sort

(09:09):
of hearsay or speculation, and in many cases come from
people who are inherently rather unreliable. I think it is
generally believed that later on, when he was in power
and his mistress was the woman Ava Brown, who he
always kept secret from the German people at large. But
I think it is generally believed they had a more
or less normal sex life. But Hitler definitely had a

(09:30):
certain fixation about purity of blood, and some of it,
as you said, has to do with the possibility of
his father having had syphilis. But the other big part
of it is that he was terribly afraid that he
himself might have some Jewish ancestry. And this is an
interesting story because it has been pretty effectively debunked actually
by modern historical research. The issue here is that his father, Alois,

(09:52):
was born out of wedlock, and we don't know who
his father was exactly. It was speculated for a long
time that Hitler's grandmother might have been a domestic servant
in the home of a Jewish family and might have
had relations with perhaps an elder son or the father
of that family, and that might have been Autolf's grandfather.
That has been pretty effectively debunked as really not even possible. However,

(10:15):
the really important thing for sort of historical evolution is
that it seems that Hitler really believed it, or at
least was very afraid that that was actually true. And
there's a couple of interesting consequences the flow from this.
Later on, when he was in power, when the Germans
got control of Austria, in Hitler turned over the village
where his grandmother had lived to the German army to

(10:36):
serve as an artillery range. All the people who lived
there were evacuated, and the German army obliterated the town
by practicing artillery fire, including the cemetery where his grandmother
was buried, which, you know, to put it mildly, speaks
of no very great reverence for his grandmother's grave. The
other thing that's a little striking is that in as
part of the famous Nuremberg Laws, which notoriously stripped Germans

(10:59):
Jews of full citizenship and made sexual relations between Jews
and non Jews of criminal offense forbid marriage between Jews
and non Jews. One other little thing that those laws
did was prohibit a non Jewish woman from working as
a domestic servant in a Jewish household until a woman
had reached the age of forty five. So the fact
that that gets inserted into this law speaks again probably

(11:23):
at least inferentially to this fear that Hitler had, that
that's actually where his father had come from. So we
can start to look at these threads which really started
very early on of his own feelings about potentially being
infected in some way or degenerate in some way, and
of course the thoughts about being Jewish. Even at that
time in the culture, there was a tremendous amount of

(11:45):
anti Semitism. Yeah, European anti semitism is of course a
huge and complex theme, and one of the ironies of
history is that in Germany before the First World War,
in any way that we can sort of measure, this
anti Semitism was probably less prevalent than in some other countries,
notably the Russian Empire, also possibly even France. In Austria

(12:06):
it probably was more prevalent, and Hitler's certainly picked up
some of that, some of the increasingly virulent anti semitism
of pre World War One Vienna. So that's definitely something
that was in the air. However, the other intriguing thing
is that from all evidence that we have of Hitler
prior to the end of World War One, so in
the first thirty years more or less of his life,
there is no evidence of his having made anti Semitic

(12:27):
statements or having anti Semitic views. If anything, quite the contrary.
He had Jewish friends and associates in his younger days,
he had a live respect for Jewish culture, Jewish artists,
and which he expressed, and so there's not only is
there no evidence of any real anti Semitism on his part,
there's even a little evidence rather to the contrary. Now,

(12:48):
he spun that story himself differently. Later in his autobiography
Mind comp he described a process whereby he became anti
Semitic living in Vienna in nineteen o seven and eight.
That is considered by Skull there's to be expost facto construction.
There's really no evidence of that at the time. So
important other formation issues in his young life. So he's

(13:09):
already actually starting to express some difficulty and conflict around aggression.
He unlike many people that we later think, oh, this
person actually was a sociopath from the get go, he
doesn't do things like kill animals or pluck the wings
off insects, etcetera. But he does have tremendous temper tantrums,
tantrums that last through his adolescence, which is unusual. And

(13:30):
so he struggles with that emotional control and these emotional outbursts.
And we also see the beginnings of paranoia. So he
already sort of frames his world often as who is
against me? I believe that people are against me, And
in fact his father was one of the primary people,
but other people in his mind become, let's say, against him.

(13:50):
And then he has essentially these two major losses. So
his parents not only die young, but die when he
is young. So his father first dies and he's fourteen,
of what we presume is probably complications of alcoholism essentially,
and then shortly thereafter a couple of years later, his
mother develops breast cancer and she dies, which he really

(14:11):
describes as the greatest loss, maybe of his whole life later,
even in retrospect that he is completely mournful and distressed
about this. But there's an important element too, and who
took care of his mother? Yeah, the doctor who treated
his mother was a local doctor named Dr Bloch and
Dr Bloch was Jewish, and this actually is another interesting

(14:33):
little strand in, you know, the evidence that we have
of the development of Hitler's anti Semitism, because he was very,
very respectful to Dr Block and very grateful for the
treatment that Dr Block had given his mother. Bloch said
later he had never seen a young man who loved
his mother so much and was so devoted to her.
Hitler took really good care of his mother when she
was sick. He was at her bedside all the time.

(14:55):
He was a good son in that regard, and the
relationship with Dr Bloch was an interesting one because he
retained a kind of gratitude and reverence for the doctor
for decades after, to the point that in when again
Hitler had gotten control of Austria, he made a point
of sending a squad of soldiers to Dr blosh house
to protect him, to keep him safe from other Nazi marauders,

(15:17):
who were of course inflicting terrible violence on Jews at
that moment. He made sure Dr Blosh was kept safe,
and he went so far as to facilitate Dr bloss
immigration to the United States at a time when it
was getting very very difficult for Jewish people to leave
Central Europe, and Dr Bloch made it to the United
States and survived. Hitler probably the only Jewish person whom
Hitler would dream of helping in that way, and so

(15:38):
that was a rather odd relationship, but an odd insight
into the way his anti Semitism developed. Let's take a
quick break here, we'll be back in a moment. After
the death of his mother, he essentially leads kind of
a wandering, failed life. He fails on two occasions to
get into art school, which is actually quite devastating. He

(16:00):
lives in hostels and men's homes. He financially can barely
or not make it. He literally paints postcards to try
to sell to make money to eat. We would kind
of today define him essentially as a loser up until
about the age of thirty that he really is completely unaccomplished.
And it is really when World War One breaks out

(16:21):
that he develops a role for himself. The outbreak of
World War One clearly is the kind of providential turning
point in his life, which he himself said he had
failed twice to get admitted to the Vienna Academy of Arts.
The take that the professors there had on his artwork
was that it was rather skillful in terms of its draftsmanship,
but it was sterile. And if you see his paintings,

(16:42):
it's true. It has been pointed out that he could
paint or draw buildings really quite well, but not people,
which is maybe a bit revealing. So he drifted for
a few years. He lived in Vienna, painting postcards mainly
for tourists for a few years. He moved to Munich,
Germany in nineteen thirteen, effectively as a draft dodger, because
he did not want to or in the army of
the Austro Hungarian Empire, because he's strongly disapproved of the

(17:04):
ethnic and racial diversity of that empire. He wanted to
be in a German country, so he fled to Germany
and he was living the same kind of life in
Munich in nineteen thirteen, and then, of course, in August
nineteen fourteen, there comes the war. There's a famous photograph
that shows Hitler with an ecstatic look of joy on
his face in a crowd of people in Munich Odeon's
Plats as war is being declared. This is the greatest

(17:26):
thing that's ever happened to him, he said in mind
con I fell down on my knees and gave thanks
that I could be alive in this hour. And he
volunteered right away for the Bavarian Army, which was administratively
separate from the main German army, and went through a
very quick training was at the front already in the
fall of nineteen fourteen. At the front, he manages to
do something that actually is quite a feat and let's
not get killed. History might have been very different in

(17:48):
a good way had he been killed. But he manages
to be one of the few that does not get shot,
and to some degree that may have been partially of
his own doing, and that he manages to get assignments
that have more to do with hurrying information back and forth.
But he occasionally does have some very dangerous and risky
maneuvering to do, and he does seem to pride himself
on having been very brave and not being afraid to

(18:11):
do whatever he was asked to do. But ultimately he
has a mustard gas injury and this causes him nothing permanent,
a conjunctivitis what we call bluff rightis, but you know, painful.
He sent to the hospital, he's treated, he gets better.
But then something fascinating happens while he's in the hospital.
Germany surrenders, and Hitler has a really devastating reaction to this.

(18:35):
This is the other and possibly the most important turning
point in his life, because although he liked being in
the army, his wartime record is strange. On paper, on
one level, looks quite good. He was awarded the Iron
Cross first as well as second class. An Iron Cross
first class was as high an award as someone at
his rank could earn, so that speaks to a certain courage. However,

(18:57):
it has been pointed out by the story and Thomas
ab who has written really effectively about this, that because
of the job he had as a regimental courier, not
as a rifleman in the front line trench, officers tended
to give awards to soldiers they knew, and they knew
the regimental couriers because they're at the base with the officers,
not like the men who were in the front line trench.
So that's partially explains Hitler's decoration. The other thing is

(19:18):
he never got promoted beyond the rank of the equivalent
in u S terms would be private first class are
in German and this is really strange. I mean, the
two things that are really strange about his wartime service,
as he said, is that he didn't get killed. He
was at the front basically for the entire war and
didn't get killed, which is a statistical fluke of the
highest order given World War One casualties. But also in
any army in World War One, anyone who was serving

(19:40):
at the front in nineteen fourteen, by nineteen eighteen was
either dead or an officer, because the promotion, especially with
the casualties, was quite rapid, and so the fact that
Hitler ended up only as a private first class is
very strange. Much later, testifying after World War Two, one
of his officers said, this is one of my favorite
Hitler facts. We didn't promote him because we thought he
lacked the leadership qualities to be a sergeant. This is

(20:03):
a remarkable reflection on Hitler. So in a certain sense,
he's maintaining that kind of loser pattern that he had
before the war. That's what changes with the armistice and
with the German surrender of the Fall of nineteen eighteen.
This hits him like a proverbial ton of bricks. And
this is one of the things he says in mind
conf which I think we can probably believe, when he
describes the anguish that he had when he learned of

(20:25):
the armistice, and he actually wrote there that he had
not wept since the death of his mother in nineteen
o seven, but now he wept again. So he's drawing
up parallel probably between these two most painful moments of
his life. In the defeat of Germany hits him in
the same way that his mother's death had done, and
not only did he weep, but psychologically what's fascinating is

(20:47):
that after his eye situation was completely healed, upon hearing
this news and having this emotional reaction, he says that
he's blind again, and he has several days of quote blindness,
which of course have no medical explanation and are believed
to be what is called in psychiatry a conversion reaction. Basically,
this is psychological blindness, which is a symptom experience because

(21:10):
of being so emotionally overwhelmed. And the nature of this
emotional overwhelming is important. It's not just that he's sad
and upset, it is that he is completely humiliated, that
he feels totally shamed by the surrender of Germany, and
in a way that is overwhelmingly intolerable. So the physical

(21:30):
manifestation of this is this conversion blindness, which after a
few days resolved. But how does he psychically grapple with
feeling this humiliation and shame which is intolerable, absolutely intolerable
pain that he feels on the signing of the armistice means,
I think if I can camp on your territory for
a moment, I think it's psychologically unsustainable that that could

(21:53):
somehow be the fault of himself or Germany at large.
It has to be transferred somewhere else. We call that projection.
So he projects out those horrible feelings that he can't own.
He projects it onto Jews and socialists, which for Hitler
are probably one category. Really, this is something else that
he says in mind, which probably does come with some sincerity.

(22:14):
He writes of this feeling he had at the signing
of the armistice, he found it intolerable that a gang
of criminals could have taken control of the fatherland. And
that's what he makes of the regime change that happens
at that time, when the Emperor Kaiser Vilhelm abdicates and
flees to Holland and is replaced by a left of
center social democratic government in Germany becomes a democracy, and
for Hitler, that's criminals getting ahold of the fatherland and

(22:37):
betraying the fatherland. He's someone who just intuitively believes what
later is called the stab in the back idea that
the German army had not been defeated, it was betrayed
by these quote unquote criminals that he thinks have sees
power in Berlin and signed the armistice. And this is
a further evidence of these paranoid thoughts that he has,
because basically what he's saying is it's the enemy within.

(22:58):
It's not circumstance, it's not someone was more powerful. We
have been attacked from inside, which is almost a paranoid
delusion if you think about it, because of course there's
no evidence that that was the case at all. The plain,
unromantic fact is that, as it would in World War Two,
Germany was overwhelmed by a coalition that was just economically
in terms of resources, in terms of manpower, just too strong,

(23:20):
and Germany ultimately cracked under the pressure of that strong coalition.
But that's exactly what Hitler can't take on board. It
has to come from betrayal. Following this period, he essentially
has nowhere to return. Unlike some soldiers who had built
some sort of life, had gone to school, had a degree,
he had nothing, and he didn't want to return to
that life. So he was basically a person in search

(23:42):
of a role and identity, and this is what essentially
led him to a political life. Yeah, the army had
become in a sense, his home, and he had no
life of any kind to return to. So he desperately
wants to stay in the army. But of course, following
the armistist the army is largely being demobilized and ski down.
So it's a real trick for him to figure out
a way he can stay in the army, which he

(24:04):
desperately wants to do. What he ultimately finds is that
he has really one skill, which is speaking. An alert
officer puts him in charge of a political education program
that the army is running for soldiers. Really in an
effort to insulate the army against spreading socialism or communism
in that era, they want soldiers to be educated in

(24:24):
kind of conservative nationalism, and so they send Hitler out
to give lectures to soldiers, and as he writes in
mind comf again, I think we can take this is
more or less valid. As he wrote, I found that
I could speak, you know, with a capital lest he
puts that he could speaking. He turned out to be
a gifted speaker. And his officers are alert to this,

(24:45):
and they realized this is a guy with a speaking town.
Then they start using him as sort of a political spy.
If there are many fringe political groups of all kinds
springing up in Munich at that time. Munich is where
Hitler is at this moment, and so his officers start
sending him out just sort of witness and take notes
on political meetings being held by these friends groups. Later
in he goes to a meeting being put on by

(25:07):
a small fringe group called the German Workers Party or
d a P. And he's supposed to just sit and listen.
But what happens is a speaker at this meeting gives
a speech arguing in favor of Bavarian independence, of Bavaria
breaking away from Germany. The various kind of German Texas
it always has its own sort of ideas of its
own sovereignty. It did then it still does so, this

(25:30):
which Hitler views his treason. This argument for Bavarian sovereignty
provokes Hitler into one of those temper tantrums, and he
rises in absolute rage. And you know, probably many people
have seen sort of film clips or even the movie Downfall,
which illustrates Hitler's temper. It could be formidable. This is
what happens. Now. He pours out this stream of Hitlarian
rage and invective over this man who had given this speech.

(25:54):
And the leaders of the d a P are sitting
around watching this, and the one who was the founder
of it, Anton Drexler, watches Hitler with awe and then
he says to her friend more or less that guy's
got a mouth on him. We could use him. And
in fact that's what happens. Hit that gets drawn into
this circle of the d a P. He gradually becomes
their more effective speaker. After about six months of this,
early in n they reformulate the party with Hitler as

(26:16):
now sort of de facto leader, and they give the
party a new name. Instead of d a P, they
changed it to n S d a P. The n
S part is National Socialist and so now the Nazi Party,
as we call it is in existence. At this juncture
in his life, he still has these uncontrollable aggressive feelings.
He's now realized that he can utilize them and even

(26:39):
manufacture them, and they work for him. He continues to
have these paranoid thoughts and this sort of drives him
further towards needing to be the one in power, be
the one in control. And he has at this point
a very good dollop of narcissism, mean that this is
about him, and he personally wants to gain control, and
this leads him essentially to a premature attempt to take over. Yes,

(27:03):
after a few years of building up the n s
D A p of speaking mostly in beer halls in Munich,
he's made a bit of a name for himself regionally,
not yet nationally, he decides that what he and his
movement need to do is emulate Benito Mussolini in Italy,
who the year before had staged actually mostly faked, but
it was believed to be legit the idea of a

(27:24):
march on Rome. Mussolini put out this idea that his
fascist basically storm trippers had marched on Roman, seized power,
and then created the first fascist dictatorship. Hitler wants to
do the same thing. He wants to march on Berlin,
starting in Munich, a bit of an odd idea given
how far away it is. Nonetheless, this is the idea.
He'll launch a couda taught from a Munich beer hall
and see his power in Germany. This goes very badly,

(27:46):
more or less from the start, because the sort of
mainstream conservatives that he thinks are working with him peel
away from him as soon as they can. The army
and the police stay more or less and somewhat grudgingly
loyal to the existing democratic state, and so they intervene
and they crush his revolt in a shooting match which
leaves twenty three Nazis dead. Hitler himself kind of scuttles
away and is arrested the next day. That's the end

(28:08):
of his coup. He's put on trial for treason. But
the courts in Germany and that era tended to be
staffed by judges who were highly conservative, highly nationalist, and
the court turns out to be very sympathetic to this
young ex soldier who's only driven by his patriotism for Germany.
In the courtroom, when Hitler and a number of others
who were with him were on trial for treason. Hitler

(28:30):
breaks into another of his nationalist tirades, and instead of
condemning him, the judges listen with the same sort of
odd respect that Anton Drexler had earlier. The presiding judges
heard to say, what a splendid chap this Hitler. So
you can imagine that that court is not going to
go very hard on this young ex soldier. He is convicted,

(28:51):
but he's given an extremely light sentence of five years,
everybody knowing he'll be out on parole much much sooner
than that. And very importantly, Hitler was not yet a
Hman citizen. He was still an Austrian citizen despite his
war service, and the law is very clear that following
conviction for treason, a non citizen must be deported. So
Hitler should have been deported after this back to Austria,

(29:12):
but the court expressly refused to do that, citing his
war service and his evident patriotism. The court ruled that
it would be wrong to support such a glowing German
patriot back to Austria, and so they did not deport him,
a clearer violation of the law. But that's the thing
which allowed Hitler to go on to have a political career.
He gets out of jail, only serving after six months
of his sentence. He gets out in December, and he's

(29:34):
the way is clear for him to revive the Nazi
Party and to go on his way politically. So psychologically
there's almost a feedback loop going on here where the
culture and the psyche of the culture essentially is promoting
Hitler because there is anti Semitism and there is a
wish for nationalism, and there is an anger about the
Treaty of Versailles, limitations, the need for reparations, the fact

(29:58):
that employment is ropping and that people are starting to starve,
and there's tremendous anger and resentment. And he is a
great mouthpiece for this. So he is spurred on by
the culture psychologically speaking, and the culture is spurred on
by him. He by being able to articulate angrily the
same feelings that many people are having, they rise him up.

(30:19):
But he is also incredibly seductive to them. Yes, they
want someone who will say the things that they are
feeling in a temper tantrum form um and express the
anger that they cannot. Yes, that's that's right, although there
are a couple of interesting factors here. One is time
and one is basically region and demographics. On the whole,
the whole period from eighteen from the end of the

(30:40):
war until they're coming to power in three is a
time of crisis on many levels in Germany, which I
think it's important to remember just the scale of crisis.
There's the war dead Germany lost one point seven million
in the First World War, followed by revolution, regime changed,
the new regime is not universally popular. There's ongoing civil
war for several years, the famous hyper inflation, so currency

(31:02):
becomes completely worthless. That all lasts up until about up
until hit there's COO attempt. But then things turn a
little bit and for a few years the economy starts
to get better, and as the economy gets better, the
democratic system somewhat consolidates, and Hitler struggles a bit in
this environment because he really only has one mode as
a politician. As you said, he can channel rage at

(31:22):
conditions which many Germans feel to be profoundly unjust. He
can channel rage, but he can't navigate a political environment
where there isn't crisis. So it's not altogether a coincidence
that it's when crisis returns to Germany after this brief
four or five year interval, when the Great Depression hits
in nine, the German economy again goes into free fall.

(31:42):
By two unemployment is at Since welfare payments were very
limited for people who are unemployed, this basically meant that
families whose breadwinner was unemployed were kind of slowly starving
to death. There was a kind of creeping famine. Uh.
And so the crisis is back, and in this atmosphere
there can channel the rage that many people feel with

(32:03):
the other important qualification of region and demographics. So it's
even then, even in ninety two, when Hitler's starting to
get significant electoral support, it's not everybody's rage he's channeling.
There are constituencies within Germany that even then he doesn't
appeal to. Working class urban people generally stay with their
traditional parties, which basically means the left of center social

(32:23):
Democrats and to some extent, especially people who are unemployed,
the more radical communists. Catholic Germans, which is about one
third of the population, basically stay with the one political
party that is expressly for Catholics. So Hitler makes relatively
few inrows into those groups. The rage they is really
channeling is the rage of people who are religiously Protestant
and generally rural. That's where the Nazis really have their

(32:45):
strengths in northern and eastern Germany, largely rural regions, largely Protestant.
By the early nineteen thirties, the Nazis in some areas
are getting six of the vote. That's their bastion. They
never do very well in Berlin, they never do very
well in humb Or. These kind of relatively cosmopolitan big
cities are not Nazi territory. It's really a kind of
blues day rest day thing, and and that maps rather

(33:07):
closely onto the Germany of the early thirties. Let's talk
for a minute about his grandiosity, which is initially perhaps
a function of some narcissism, which is really an insecurity
right that he wasn't doing anything and he needs to
be super special, the most important, the best to counter
those fears. But as he moves along and takes on
the title of Feor or the leader, he starts to
evolve this concept of himself which he projects to everyone

(33:31):
that he really essentially is the chosen one that he
is a demigogue of sorts, and he does things from
a pr perspective to maintain this image, which something that
wasn't done at the time, but flying on a plane
from place to place, only being seen in these speaking modes,
otherwise his private life not being seen at all. Part
of that actually was to uh not marry, he said

(33:53):
he did. He would never take a wife anyway, because
he had to be married to Germany. It was important
to him. He was aware that women you know, would
write him letters love letters of please be with me, etcetera.
That he had a seductive ability, and he wanted to
keep that role. That he should be available and people
should love him, and he couldn't therefore belong to anybody else.
But more than that, he started to, let's say, drink

(34:17):
his own kool aid. He was very very conscious of
his image and the importance of his image as the leader,
and he was very careful and very clever at maintaining
this image of the leader a bit apart, a bit
aloof He never wanted it known that he had any
relations with women. For most of the time he was
in power. He had an unofficial mistress, if a Brown,

(34:39):
but he kept her very secret, because he said he
was married to Germany. The other thing, especially up to
thirty three, when he had to win elections, he understood
that he had what we would today call a kind
of Kissinger effect on German women. Personally, I find this
very hard to grasp, but we know that it happened.
He said to one of his associates, ones, if Germans
knew that I had, you know, a woman, and why

(35:00):
for mistress whatever, I would lose on my women's supporters.
And we need the women voters now. That may have
also partially been an excuse for his great inhibition, because
he did often choose to be infatuated with women who
were unavailable, right the wives of colleagues of his, and
you know, but I can't have you because you are
already taken. And the other women that we know that

(35:20):
he had some interactions with. One was his niece, something
that could never get out because it would look terrible
for him. But in fact he did keep her in
an apartment, didn't want her to see other men. Something
clearly went on there, and she, like several other women
that he became involved in, ultimately killed herself, clearly having
something to do with whatever went on with him, and

(35:41):
he continued on this sort of build up of feeling
that he was godlike, which emboldened him as he moved
through World War two to lay out all kinds of plans,
including the Holocaust, which is something that perhaps the people
around him would not have necessarily supported, but he was,
you know, I laid down the law. Most people who

(36:04):
have studied to other very closely see a sort of
progression in his ego and sense of mission. It seems
that early on in the twenties and probably into the thirties,
he saw himself as what they called in those days
the drummer, meaning basically a salesman. That he was someone
who was going to mobilize Germans for the tasks that

(36:24):
he thought they had to do, which basically was conquering
a huge empire in Eastern Europe so that the country
could expand and have a big enough food supply and
be strong enough to compete globally with other great powers.
He saw himself as sort of mobilizing Germans for that
and creating the state that could facilitate that project. But
it seems he did not see himself initially as the
leader who would be called upon to actually carry that out,

(36:45):
and at some point he's thinking on that seems to
have changed. He clearly does get to a point where
he thinks, no, I'm going to be the one who's
going to have to launch this war that he thought
Germany needed to conquer a huge empire. And there were
a couple of factors here, one of them being that
he recognized eised that he probably was the only leader,
at least inside at that time, who would have the
combination of as he saw it, vision and as we

(37:08):
might see it, recklessness and evil for one of a
better word, to carry out this mission. He recognized that
his associates would never do that, and he was almost
certainly right about that. The other thing was his fear
of his own mortality. As you mentioned, both of his
parents had died young. He was therefore convinced that he
would too, and he felt he had very limited time,
and as he approached his fiftieth birthday in nineteen thirty nine,
he felt times running out. Also, he was aware by

(37:32):
that some of the democratic powers, notably Britain, were starting
to rearm in recognition of the threat that he post
and that would close the window eventually. So as the
thirties go on. You can really see it quite clearly.
Thirty seven, thirty eight, he's in more and more of
a hurry, and he's pushing the people around him towards war.
Many of the people around him, particularly his military officers,

(37:53):
his diplomatic people, his intelligence people. There's a kind of
adults in the room thing going on here, because really
none of them why to the war that Hitler was
driving them too, not because they were great humanitarians or
democrats or anything. They were pragmatic people who didn't want
to be driven into a war that they were convinced
they would lose. There's a kind of string of attempts
of these people to try and tie Hitler down and

(38:14):
keep him from doing the crazy things that he's doing.
But Hitler, with his ruthlessness and skill, one by one
gets rid of them all, as he had earlier gotten
rid of rivals in his rise to power, and of
course we know the outcome. They failed to restrain him,
but that effort was there, in this sort of self
consciousness of being the season skillful professionals dealing with this
sort of crazy, reckless demagogue. That was very much the

(38:35):
consciousness that his senior national security people had Let's take
a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.
So Hitler is clearly laid out, actually in mind camp
his plans for the Holocaust. That he feels Jews need
to be exterminated, and that other groups need to be exterminated,

(38:56):
the mentally ill, Gypsies, anyone who is other that it
is important to have only the as he calls it,
the Aryan race. And so he has already in his
mind laid out this idea for the Holocaust, but he
doesn't really embark on this until the early nineteen forties. Yes,
and there's a really interesting and important moment. In January nine,

(39:17):
Hitler gives a speech on the occasion of his sixth
anniversary coming to power, and he delivers what he calls
his prophecy. And his prophecy basically is that if international
jury drives the world into another World War in an
effort to benefit both communism in the Soviet Union and
finance capital in the Western democracies, then he says, the
result will not be the defeat of Germany and the

(39:39):
triumph of jury. The result will be the annihilation of
the Jewish race in Europe. So what's important here is
He's got an idea of a Jewish conspiracy which actually
encapsulates both Soviet communism and Anglo American capitalist democracy. He
sees that as two sides of the same coin, which
is a Jewish conspiracy directed at Germany. His understanding of
what a world war would be is a war in

(40:01):
which Germany is at war with both sides of that conspiracy,
with the Anglo American democracies and with the Soviet Union.
So if we fast forward to August ninety one, at
this point, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union is about
a month and a half in progress, and in early August,
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin DONLANDA. Roosevelt meet
off the coast of Newfoundland in the famous Atlantic Conference,

(40:22):
and the issue a document called the Atlantic Charter which
expressly calls for the abolition of Nazi tyranny and calls
for a post war world of democracy and international trade
and freedom and so on. Hitler reads this as the
sign that that world war is at hand. He takes
this as basically an American declaration of war. Of course,
this is months before Pearl Harbord still, but Hitler reads

(40:43):
this as being the United States is now in the war.
So the United States alongside Great Britain, is in the
war against Germany, as he's fighting the Soviet Union, and
so in Hitler's mind, the logical consequence is that the
full on war of the Jewish conspiracy against him is there,
so he must strike out against Jews and that and
I elation of Jews that he had spoken about in
nineteen nine is now at hand. And so it is

(41:04):
I think not at all a coincidence that it's at
that moment that we start to see the steps ramping
up towards what's going to become the Holocaust, the systematic
murder of European Jews in a very planned way, carried
out after late ninety one in the camps that we've
all heard about, Alschwitz, ander Blick and so on. The
real point of origin for that is this realization in
August that the war that Hitler thinks it's going to

(41:26):
be a world war is coming, and really pushed forward
by this paranoid delusion which he's really had for a
long time about the Jews, he does something that essentially
you believe would never have happened without Hitler that while
there was great anti Semitism, and certainly they would have
removed the rights of the Jews or done things essentially
make them second class citizens and limit them. That it

(41:48):
really is Adolf Hitler the man who ultimately drives this Holocaust. Yeah,
that's absolutely right. I think this is something on which
versuly all historians agree. Without Adolf Hitler, you would not
have the Second World War, at least in the form
that it came, and you would not have the Holocaust.
It's very likely that any kind of right wing perhaps
military government in Germany would have restricted the rights of

(42:10):
Jews in some ways, but would not have proceeded to
anything like full on genocide. It's possible that our right
wing military government of some kind might have launched a
war against Poland to reclaim territory that Germany had lost
in World War One, but they would never have at
least wanted to go to war against Britain or France,
and certainly not the USA. So without Hitler you don't
have that. It's one of these remarkable things in history.

(42:32):
He statistically so should have been killed in the First
World War. Maybe statistically he should have died in infancy,
as what's so common has happened to some of what
would have been his siblings. This man survived again and
again and again and again against all odds, and without him,
these historical events of the twentieth century would not have happened.
He became increasingly a bigger and bigger risk taker, which

(42:53):
actually being a risk taker can be a good quality
of a leader. Many leaders who are wonderful leaders are
risk takers, are in our cystic, meaning they have trend's
confidence in themselves and they're willing to take the risk,
but for the furthering of the people that they're leading.
In his case, it was for the furthering of himself.
The problem became that ultimately, and we have to wonder

(43:13):
why he made decisions later that were unreasonable risks that
ultimately led to his downfall, the invasion of Russia, which
seems in retrospect like a very very poor decision. Why
is that so? One hypothesis is that Hitler suffered from
Parkinson's disease. Many diagnosticians have looked at films of Hitler,

(43:36):
and it is evident that he had a pill rolling tremor,
that he had a shuffling gait, that he had what's
called masked faces or very blunt expression that had grown
as he aged. He had typhosis of the back. He
had numerous symptoms that really define Parkinson's disease, and it's
possible that he either developed early Parkinson's or that he
developed what's called posts encephalopathic Parkinson's, which was due to

(43:58):
viral illnesses that occurred in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty.
But the mental effects essentially of Parkinson's are this increase
in grandiosity, increase in paranoia, and a decrease in judgment
and the ability to look at consequences. So whether this
fueled some poorer decisions later, or whether his narcissism and

(44:24):
his belief in himself, this demagoguery got the better of him,
or politically, whether he was being pushed in certain directions. Actually,
I would argue that probably by certainly in the last
year of the war, maybe in the last two or
three years of the war, he is making decisions where
his grip on reality is clearly weak. The interesting thing, though,

(44:48):
is that as a former trial lawyer, I think I
would have a great deal of trouble making out, you know,
an insanity defense for him there for any time prior
to about ninety two, because the interesting thing about his
decisions up to that point, including the decision to invade
the Soviet Union, is that although they didn't turn out
well for him, clearly there was a kind of rationality

(45:10):
to his thought process, certainly an evil rationality, no question
about that. If you accept his premise, you have to
accept his premise. His premise is Germany must expand, must
conquer territory in Eastern Europe, or won't be able to survive.
If it doesn't do that, Germany will be overwhelmed eventually
by Britain and particularly by the United States. So if
you accept that premise, the way he's operating in nineteen

(45:32):
forty one is actually rational. The initial motive for the
invasion of the Soviet Union, and this is something that
Hitler basically decides in July of nineteen forty. It's a
very important moment because at that moment he has defeated
France in a campaign that has swift and has shocked
the world. Britain is, as Hitler see is a stubbornly
and crazily refusing to accept reality and surrender. Winston Churchill

(45:54):
has become Prime Minister and is spouting defiance from Britain.
The Germans are dealing with the fact that they think
they will probably have to invade Great Britain. But that's
going to be a very difficult operation, and Hiller and
his generals are a bit afraid of that. But they're
pondering what to do. But that issue is entirely unresolved,
and even with the British issue unresolved, and even with
the famous air battle Battle of Britain not even having
been fought yet, which the Germans will eventually lose, but

(46:16):
they don't know that. In July, right then he starts
to think about invading the Soviet Union. The reason is
he thinks the British are hanging on only because they
think the Soviets are out. There is a potential ally
and if they could knock out the Soviets, that will
be a roundabout way of knocking out the British. So
that is actually rational if you accept his premise. Also
the military advice he was getting. Surprisingly, it wasn't just

(46:37):
his delusion. All of his senior military commanders were confident
that Germany could beat the Soviet Union and beat it quickly.
They were not confident that they could beat Great Britain.
They were terribly afraid of trying to land troops on
Great Britain, but they thought the Soviet Union would be
a quick campaign. Everybody shared that delusion, and you know,
we know what happened after that, of course, the invasion,
Although it went initially very well for the Germans, it

(46:58):
ends up being the thing that military early really brings
Hitler down. But his thought process to get there was actually,
you know, not yet I think disturbed by any kind
of clinical mental illness. Well, I think clinically we can
say that the degree to which he believed that Jews
were dangerous and would infest, as it were, the Aryan

(47:19):
race is supported by no evidence, even by those around him.
It's a paranoia that reaches a delusional level, and that
really was a sort of a fixed delusion for much
of the rest of his life, you know, for his
later life, and he he really maintained that. I think
we could also say that in that late period his
narcissism and his cruelty, or let's say, his sociopathy. He

(47:42):
he is known to say, for example, that if we
can't invade Russia, if we can't have everything, if the
German people won't get behind this. On this point, I
am ice cold. They don't deserve to live. He was
willing to jettison anybody, including his own people, if they
would not follow him. So that degree of let's say,

(48:05):
a lack of empathy of any sort, you know, we
would have to say is sociopathic. His lack of empathy
actually is really interesting because the historian Timothy Snyder has
a clever term for this. He writes that Hitler was
not even really a nationalist. He was a zoological anarchist,
and precisely because he thought, well, if the Germans aren't
up to this sort of Darwinian struggle, then they deserved

(48:25):
to all be exterminated. Fine. There's a sort of famous
story of how during the war, his special train was
parked at a siding alongside a train of wounded soldiers
and he just pulled the blinds down. He just didn't
want to deal with their being wounded soldiers. A different
kind of political operator would probably have gone into the
train and shaking some hands and you know, sort of
been a politician. But that was not Hitler's thing. He

(48:45):
had zero concern. He was apparently once handed a casualty
report that was very high about Germans on the Eastern Front,
and his officers expected him to be horrified, and Hitler
strugs and said, that's what the young men are there for.
So empathy even for people he would have regarded as
zone is utterly lacking, completely absent. So we know that
as they closed in on him and it was the

(49:06):
end um, he actually expressed oft and then he was
not afraid of death and if you couldn't accomplish this mission,
then it was over for him, and he committed suicide
Eva Bron. He killed his dog beforehand, which was one
of the few things he actually apparently loved. So we
know how it ends. What I think is fascinating and
I want to take a moment for you to reflect on,
is there are a lot of things about this time

(49:27):
period building up to the war, otherism, populism that are
very reminiscent for many people of what is happening right
now in the United States. And so there is great
concern and we have a certain kind of leader right now,
We have a certain kind of cultural concern about unemployment,
about the economy, and what can we do about that

(49:50):
that maybe takes precedence. So things that are frighteningly reminiscent.
How do you see the similarities and differences between that
time period in Germany and what we're experiencing today. The
way I would put it is it's a bit of
a good news bad news situation. I'm not going to
try and tell you that Donald Trump is out off Hitler.
He's a different person in many, many, many ways. In

(50:10):
my view, perhaps fortunately, he lacks Hitler's cunning and ruthlessness.
He's actually much less politically talented than Hitler, which as
far as I'm concerned, is fine. There are, at a
deeper level, though, some structural similarities that I think are
really worrying. There. Maybe about three. One is that we
are living in a time we're much like the nineties

(50:32):
and nineteen thirties. There is a surge of nationalism around
the world, linked to a surge in support of authoritarian
politics around the world, linked to a surge in demogogic
politics around the world, and linked to a kind of
anti globalist rejection of international ties of all kind, whether
those ties be ties of migration, ties of economic trade,

(50:52):
ties of security alliances. Donald Trump stands against all of
those things. He's for protectionism and trade he doesn't like NATO,
he doesn't really any of our democratic allies. He certainly
doesn't like immigrants. In this sense, he's very typical of
this kind of nationalist, anti internationalist feeling, which was absolutely
oxygen for the Nazis. This is really what the Nazis
were about when they were a political movement in the

(51:13):
sense that they needed to get elected. Their campaign was
Germany First, make Germany great again. Closed Germany off from
the world, make it autonomous, close it off from margaint flows,
close it off from international finance, close it off from trade.
That is a parallel that is worrying. The second one
that worries me is the dynamic between Hitler and conventional

(51:33):
German conservatives, uh sort of mainstream conservatives in the early
nineteen thirties really maps onto the relationship between Donald Trump
and his followers and kind of mainstream Republicans. The dynamic
is that in Germany back then, mainstream conservatives looked at
Hitler and they saw a guy who they didn't really
like much or respect. They thought he was crude, they

(51:54):
didn't like his demagoguery all of this, But they thought,
here's a guy who is clearly nationalist. He's clearly militarist,
he's clearly anti socialist. So from the standpoint of politicians
who represent big business or the armed forces, this seems
like a guy whose constituency could provide electoral support, electoral
clout for an agenda of building up the armed forces

(52:15):
and of scaling back the social welfare policies of democratic
bymar republic, scaling back other sort of state interventions in
business life which conservatives really disliked. So for a few
years there's a kind of dance between these conventional conservatives
and Hitler, each trying to use the other, each confident
they can use the other. And of course the dance
ends with the discovery that the mainstream conservatives have very

(52:38):
much underestimated Hitler. He's the one who's more cunning and
more ruthless. He's the one who succeeds in using them.
I think we are in many ways replicating that right
now with the relationship between mainstream Republicans and Donald Trump
and his more core followers. And the last one I
would say is deliberate, conscious exploitation of dishonesty for political purposes,
what Hitler himself called the Big I, and Hitler sort

(53:01):
of extolled the idea of using the big lie as
an effective political tool. He had a highly talented propagandist,
Joseph Gibbel's, working for him, who was very skillful at
manipulating lies for political gain. This is obviously and certainly
something that we're seeing today. I understand that Donald Trump
has clocked in at somewhere over ten thousand lies since
taking the oath of office, and he has a media

(53:23):
environment to some extent which channels this for him and
perpetuates it, as unfortunately do many of the people of
his party in Congress. And so we are living in
a time where the very possibility of truth. Of course,
Ms Conway famously said there are alternative facts, apparently considering
this to be a legitimate argument. So we're living at

(53:44):
a time where the respect for truth is at a
low in some corners of our political environment. Again in
much the same way that Hitler and the Nazis did this.
I guess on the flip side of this, the thing
that I would say makes us a bit different from then,
perhaps two main points. One is I think there is
a found individualism in American culture which makes us very
hard to regiment. That is not a bad cultural defense

(54:06):
against the return of something like the fascism of the
early in mid twentieth century, and the other is the
federal system. It's striking that one of the first things
the Nazis did when they got power. Germany is also
then and now a federal state. One of the first
things they did is make sure they could knock out
the state governments and centralized power in Berlin. At least
as of right now, we still have a working federal system,

(54:29):
and we have state governments that often are of a
different political complexion than the national administration. Means that that
is a check and balance, even if other checks and
balances seem to be failing in Washington at the moment,
that is an effective one, and we've seen it in
many ways. How some state governments, in various ways are
able to push back against some of what the federal
government is doing, hopefully supported by the fact that we
have been a democracy for a long long time, absolutely,

(54:52):
and Nazi Germany had prior to that, only been a
democracy for fifteen years. It had been a full on
democracy for fifteen years. It had been a somewhat partial
democracy for a few decades before that. Pre World War One,
Germany was not entirely not a democracy. It had democratic elements.
But yes, compared to the United States, the roots of
democratic culture we're much more shallow than they are for

(55:12):
us today. A little frightening is the ending. But thank
you so much, Ben. That wraps things up for this episode.
A huge thanks to Dr Benjamin carter Head. For more
on the life of Adolf Hitler, check out his book
The Death of Democracy, Hitler's rise to power and the
Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Also, if you're interested in

(55:35):
more information about the people we discussed in this series,
you can check out my book The Power of Different
and make sure to follow me on Twitter at doctor
Gayl Salts or at Personalogy m D to follow along
with all the latest news about the show. Personalogy is
a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are
Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is

(55:57):
Dylan Fagan. The associate producer is Loll bur Lanti. Editing
music and mixing by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from
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