BOOK: Volker Ullrich, "Hitler: Downfall"

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: A Biography. Volume 2: Downfall 1939–45. Translated by Jefferson Chase. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. 9781847922885. x + 838 pp.

I read volume 1 of Ullrich's biography of Hitler a few years ago (see my post from back then), and liked it quite a bit, so when I now saw volume 2 in a bookstore (my first visit to a bookstore after keeping away for more than a year due to the coronavirus epidemic :)) I bought it at once and started reading it. The first thing I noticed is that although both of my volumes are paperback editions, vol. 2 is in a slightly larger format than volume 1, and the type is perhaps also a tiny bit larger. Annoying — I wish the publishers were more consistent about these things. But looking at the ISBNs, it seems that what I got is a bizarre chimera of an edition: if I search for the ISBN from my copy of the book on amazon, it finds the *hardcover* edition, while the paperback edition shown on amazon has a different ISBN (9780099590248). So I guess that my copy uses the format of the hardcover edition but is bound as a paperback, with a different RRP (£20 for my copy, £30 for the hardcover as shown on amazon and £18.99 for the paperback as shown on amazon) and a different imprint (my copy has Bodley Head as the imprint, same as the hardcover on amazon, while the paperback on amazon has Virago as the imprint — same, incidentally, as my copy of volume 1).

Vol. 2 picks up where vol. 1 left off, just before the outbreak of WW2. As the author says in the introduction (p. 2), Hitler was very closely involved in controlling German military operations during the WW2, so a biography of this part of his life is inevitably also something of a history of the war, at least of its European and Middle-Eastern aspects (as opposed to the East Asian and Pacific ones). I was a bit worried about this since I'm not really interested in military history, but now having read the book, it wasn't too bad at all. Although we do hear a good deal about military operations, the narrative nevertheless keeps coming back to Hitler and his various other activities, so I never really had the time to get bored with the military stuff. Besides, there are a lot of things to cover in a book like this, so it can never stay on one subject for too long, and there's no risk of it getting boring.

Much as with vol. 1, one thing I really liked about Ullrich's approach is that he also describes Hitler as a person and not only as a political actor. Here in volume 2, this means that we witness his constant physical and psychological decline. Partly that was probably due to the stress of knowing that the war was lost, which he must surely have realized somewhere around 1942 at the latest (p. 626), though we see him constantly faking optimism when talking to other people well into 1945 (and often enough managing to convince them that not all is lost yet; pp. 381, 398, 531, 768 n. 65); but partly his decline must have been due to overwork and an irregular lifestyle (p. 534). He took on a lot of work in running the military campaigns that a normal political leader would have left to the generals; therefore he routinely stayed up all night and then slept until noon (pp. 192–3, 227, 439, 547).

As the war went on, he increasingly gave up all semblance of social life, all forms of exercise and entertainment (e.g. previously he had enjoyed watching movies, but then gave it up supposedly because it would be unseemly to have this sort of fun while the war is going on), and mostly just stayed cooped up inside his various bunkers and field headquarters (p. 528). He lost his zest for public appearances and speeches, and even his ever-loyal propaganda minister Goebbels had the hardest time persuading him to make the occasional radio address (pp. 516, 526, 543).

In March 1943, Göring remarked that Hitler had aged 15 years in the span of 3.5 years. (P. 345. I couldn't help being reminded of how you often hear similar things about American presidents, with photos to prove it; a president's term lasts four years but when you compare the photos before and after it, you see he has aged by more like eight. And that's even without fighting on the losing side of a total war.) By the last year or so of the war, we see Hitler shuffling around as a frail husk of a person, prematurely geriatric at the age of 55, his hand trembling violently, his eyesight failing so that they had to use special typewriters with extra large letters to write documents for him to read, etc. (pp. 443, 474, 546). We see his physician, Theodor Morell, constantly having to administer pills and “pick-me-up injections” (pp. 512, 533) just to get him on his feet and keep him working. [“Dr Köster's Anti-Gas Pills contained strychnine”, p. 498 :))]

A recurring theme in this book is his unwillingness to delegate, or to trust the people to whom he had delegated something; he kept expecting impossible things from his generals and then firing them when they invariably failed to do what he wanted (pp. 228, 317–19, 522, 540). [“Yes, we produce a great many field marshals, but we also use them up quite swiftly.” — Helmuth Greiner to his wife, 27 Sept. 1942 (p. 766, n. 13).] His tendency to take big risks paid off well in the first years of the war, with unexpectedly easy successes in 1939 and 1940, where his generals had wanted to be more cautious; this got Hitler used to the idea that he was a military genius (p. 113) while his generals were incompetents who lacked the ‘indomitable will’ and ideological commitment on which, in his view, such military successes depended (pp. 235, 428). As the war began to turn against Germany, he increasingly blamed his generals for all the failures, and his relations with them kept on deteriorating. I don't doubt that Germany would have lost the war in any case, but his meddling in military matters seemed to often just make things worse for them, e.g. when he insisted on never retreating (pp. 316, 331, 432, 625), even if that meant that large numbers of German soldiers would end up surrounded and captured by the enemy.

Speaking of delegation, it's almost funny when, late in the war, he pretty much ran out of generals to fire and replace, so he appointed Himmler, one of his most loyal henchmen, as the commander of one of the army groups. Unsurprisingly, leading the defense against the Red Army turned out to be a bit more difficult than herding helpless Jews into cattle cars and gas chambers, and Himmler proved an embarrassing failure in his new position (pp. 553, 555).

And speaking of the holocaust, there's an interesting chapter about it, in which I was particularly struck by how gradually the Nazi policies on that subject got worse. The idea of outright killing all Jews they could get their hands on came comparatively late (p. 248). Before the war their idea of getting rid of the Jews was to have them emigrate from Germany. This began to change in 1941, when they forbade any further Jewish emigration (p. 239); this surprised me, but unfortunately the book doesn't go into any details as to why they made that change. In any case, the war also brought a move towards more aggressive anti-Jewish policies; partly the Nazis believed, in accordance with their ideology, that the Jews were a dangerous internal enemy and must be removed before the war could be won, and partly they now had so many more Jews under their control due to the occupation first of Poland and then of Soviet territories (pp. 246, 252), that waiting for them to emigrate would be impracticable. They toyed with the infamous Madagascar plan for a while (pp. 250–1), but that had to be abandoned as Germany never achieved the sort of naval and air supremacy (especially over Britain) that would allow them to transport such masses of Jews there (p. 253). The next idea, deporting Jews somewhere into occupied Soviet territories (pp. 256, 267), was blocked by the German failure to defeat the Soviet Union. Killing the Jews outright was a natural next step, and the Nazis soon moved towards it, at the end of 1941 (p. 291).

[On a semi-related note: it is of course well known that the euthanasia programme against the mentally ill was a sort of prelude to the holocaust, involving many of the same people and some of the same techniques. What was new to me is that William Shirer, the American journalist who reported from Germany until late 1940, managed to actually carry out some investigative journalism on this subject and found that the disabled and mentally ill were being systematically killed; “[u]sing death notices taken out in local papers by the victims' relatives, Shirer was able to name three of the killing centers” (p. 246). He wrote about this in his Berlin Diary, published after his return to America.]

While reading about this, I couldn't help feeling how tragic it is that they were in such a damnable hurry about everything. To be sure, genocide is morally wrong no matter what method you use to do it, but it could nevertheless be done so much more humanely than with mass killings, if only they hadn't been in such a hurry. Emigration would have been sufficient, especially if coupled with a Chinese-style one-child policy for those who did not wish to emigrate; and to make emigration easier, the Nazis should of course have refrained from ruining the Jews economically. It wouldn't have required any violence or murder, and could all have been over in a few decades. For people who claimed they were building a thousand-year Reich, the Nazis were surprisingly impatient.

Hitler's role in the holocaust is an illustrative example of his style of leadership. He didn't need to issue any explicit orders or anything of that sort; it was enough for him to ‘make his wishes known’ to his henchmen (pp. 276, 278, 290–1), and they would then practically vie with each other to implement them. In fact this would strike me as a very good approach to leadership if it were applied to some good cause: surround yourself with people who believe in the same goals as you do, and who will work towards those same goals without you having to give them orders for every little thing.

Of course, there are other things about Hitler's style of leadership that are less commendable. We see numerous examples of his manipulative, divide-and-conquer approach: he would give his minions overlapping spheres of responsibility, thereby making sure they would regard each other as rivals and expend their energies on the inevitable squabbles that ensued; this in turn made Hitler's position unassailable and indispensable, as he was the only source of authority that could resolve such disputes (p. 610).

Another recurring subject in this book is how crappy Hitler's allies and potential allies were, with the exception of Japan (but that was far away) and possibly Finland. At one point he had some talks with Franco about Spain maybe joining the Axis, but Franco demanded huge parts of French colonial territory as a reward while avoiding making any concrete promises of his own. Hitler apparently said later that “he would ‘rather get three or four teeth pulled than go through that again’ ” (p. 136) :))

Speaking of the personal side of Hitler's life, I couldn't help being impressed with what we see of Eva Braun here. She comes across as a rather sympathetic character, and you can't help wishing that she had fallen in love with some decent man rather than with Hitler. In the last year or so of the war, she seems to have been pretty much the only one to bring some cheerful mood into the eternally depressed atmosphere of Hitler's bunker (pp. 445, 573); and at the end, she didn't *have* to stay with him and commit suicide, but she chose to anyway (pp. 510, 545, 584): “I owe him everything nice in my life, and the only thing I can do for him is to stay by his side.” (P. 771, n. 46.)

The book ends with a very interesting chapter on ‘Hitler's place in history’. There is some not-very-productive discussion about whether he counts as a “great man” (p. 627) — which surely depends a lot more on what exactly we mean by “great” in this context than about any inherent characteristics of Hitler himself — but the author strikes what seemed to me as very commendable middle ground. On the one hand, Hitler would not have been able to become what he was, and accomplish what he did, if the political, social, economic etc. conditions in Weimar Germany had not been what they were (pp. 613–14). (For instance, if the old elites concentrated around Hindenburg hadn't been so insanely hostile to democracy and the labour movement, they might not have had Hindenburg appoint Hitler as chancellor, but someone else.) This speaks against the ‘great man’ theory. But on the other hand, Hitler would also not have been able to accomplish what he did without a number of individual, personal characteristics and abilities (pp. 608–9). There were plenty of nationalist agitators in early Weimar Germany, but none who could move the masses with his oratory the way Hitler did. He was also very good at adapting his message to the audience (e.g. saying different things to rich industrialists than to a beer hall full of lower-middle-class people), and he was a very capable organizer, as can be seen from the fact that the Nazi party almost fell apart while he was in prison. So, in the end, it took both personal characteristics and the right environment to make Hitler what he was.

Now that I've read the second volume of Ullrich's biography, I think I like it even better than after the first volume, and if someone asked me which biography of Hitler he should read, I think I would recommend Ullrich's rather than Kershaw's. But that might be just a biased opinion because it's been a long time since I've read Kershaw's book. They are both excellent, but I do think that Ullrich's is a little more well-rounded.

P.S. I noticed a small translation error: on p. 329 Laval is described as the “French chief of state”. This attracted my attention because surely the chief of state was Pétain; but it turns out that the German edition has it right: “Regierungschef” = head of government, i.e. the prime minister, which is exactly what Laval was.

P.P.S. A fine contribution to my collection of anti-lawyer quotes: “Today Hitler states clearly and unambiguously that everyone who was a lawyer was in his eyes either born defective or would become so.” :)) (A remark from 29 March 1942, quoted here on p. 718, n. 33.)

ToRead:

• Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Mentioned here on p. 594.
• Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 645 (n. 14) and elsewhere.
• Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937–1939 (Munich, 1980). Mentioned here on p. 646, n. 62. Burckhardt was the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig in the last few years before the outbreak of the WW2, at which point the Nazis annexed Danzig to Germany and kicked him out. He was from the same prominent Basel family as the famous Jacob Burckhardt, author of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
• William L. Shirer, This is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany, 1938–40 (London, 1999). Mentioned here on p. 654, n. 5 and elsewhere. A posthumous collection of his radio broadcasts.
• Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin: An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War (1942). Smith was an American journalist who reported from Germany in 1940 and 1941. Ullrich mentions the German edition of his book, Feind schreibt mit: Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent erlebt Nazi-Deutschland (Berlin, 1982), on p. 689, n. 221.
• Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 773, n. 81. Among other things he was very interested in Frederick the Great (in whose footsteps he imagined himself to have been following), and he particularly liked Thomas Carlyle's 19th-century biography of Frederick. This rather surprised me; wasn't there anything suitable by some German biographer?