In Our Time - Hitler in History

Episode Date: October 5, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how history has struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler: we have had theories of ‘totalitarianism’, and of ‘distorted modernity’, debates between ‘intentionalists’ and their opponents the ‘structuralists’. The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt said, “Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think”. But somehow none of these explanations has seemed quite enough to explain how a democratic country in the heart of modern Europe was mobilised to commit genocide, and to fight a bitter war to the end against the world’s most powerful nations.With Ian Kershaw, historian and biographer of Hitler; Niall Ferguson, fellow and tutor in Modern History at Jesus College Oxford; Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, historians have struggled to explain the enormity of the crimes committed in Germany under Adolf Hitler. We've had theories of totalitarianism and of distorted modernity, debates between intentionalists and their opponents, as it were,

the structuralists, the great political philosopher Hannah Arndt said, under conditions of tyranny, it's far easy to act than to think. But somehow none of these explanations have seemed quite enough to explain how an apparently democratic country in the heart of modern Europe was mobilised to commit genocide and to fight a bitter war to the end against the world's most powerful nations. With me to discuss Hitler and history's struggles to explain him are three brilliant British historians.

Ian Kershaw, who's just published the much-anticipated second part of his highly-aclaimed biography of the Nazi leader, Volume 2 is called Hitler, 1936 to 45, Nemesis. Also with Ms. Neil Ferguson, fellow and tutor in modern history, Jesus College, Oxford, and Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History at University College London. Ian Kershaw, Mussolini first coined the phrase totalitario in the early 20s, and he described his ideal society as all within the state,

non outside the state, none against the state. How far do you think this helps to explain as Hannah Arendt thought it did, dictators like Hitler and Stalin. Let's stick to Hitler. I think the term totalitarianism is one that I wouldn't want to see struck from the dictionary, but I think it has a limited value. It applies to a number of systems in a phase of rule, I think, which is that of a revolutionary phase where the entire system is being upturned

and where the state or a political movement, a party, stakes a total claim to control over that society. In reality, that claim can't be fully realized, but the claim is made to control a society, to control not just the body, so to say, of the individual, but the mind as well. As I say, it can't be completely realized, but I think it's something where you can use the term totalitarianism

then to describe systems of rule in their revolutionary phase where they're staking this total. claim. The idea of totalitarian reaches quite a long way back in European history, doesn't it? Not with that word, but with the idea of that's the best way to run a state, the all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state. Well, I think it's something which only makes sense in the, really, in the first half of the 20th century. And as you said, Mussolini, I think it was actually the enemies of Mussolini who first coined the phrase, but Mussolini rapidly took it over and turned it into a positive term.

Of course, just to say the state is a bit limited when you're looking at the Stalinist and the Nazi systems where it wasn't so much the state itself which carried the totalitarian claim, but the state allied to a revolutionary party, and the claim was carried, therefore, in a way, by the movement more than it was by the state. In Nazi Germany quite especially so, I think.

Mary Fulberg, do you think the totalitarian is a useful way to understand these regimes? it perhaps just a convenient way for Cold War theorists to group the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany? Well, I think Ian has just provided a very nice, clear, interesting historical definition of the way he'd like to use the term. I think the real problem with the term is that so many people use it in so many different ways. I'm quite happy with Ian's definition, but there have been very, very different definitions over time. And particularly in the 1950s, it was used simply as a political empathet to lump communism with Nazism. and it was a very convenient political epithet

because it allowed West Germans in particular to say we're anti-communists, therefore we're anti-totelitarian, therefore we must have been anti-Nazi. It was a very nice little term from that point of view. I think also what's worth pointing out in terms of the academic use of the term is that not everyone would share Ian's definition.

Friedrichin Brzynski, for example, political scientists have a very different definition of it and a number of political... What would those be? In terms of a very streamlined state, one leader, one ideology, one party, monopoly over the use of force and over newspapers, the economy and so on. And on that very formal definition, you can say the Nazi state was not totalitarian at all, or barely, only to a limited extent. Neil Ferguson, just to round up the introductory notion of totalitarianism, how much purchase do you think it has in Germany under Hitler?

A lot. And precisely because it does allow us to make comparisons between the Third Reich and Stavis. and Soviet Union. Of course, it's an aspiration. And in Mussolini's case, and I think this is true of most of the fascist regimes, it's not anything like realized. But I think in those two states, Hitler's Germany and Stalin Soviet Union, something like a totalitarian regime is achieved, by which I mean the complete destruction of any autonomous sphere of private life or civil society. The almost complete elimination of that, to the point when even when you dream, you find yourself. dreaming about the furor. I think it's a tremendously useful term.

I think the argument that it was somehow bogus cold war devices is itself bogus, and I think we need to rehabilitate it in order to allow what was, for many years, more or less prohibited, namely systematic comparison between these two, I think, quite distinctive regimes. But do you think that it was, as Marius pointed out, something that was very convenient for the West to use? that its convenience still lingers and rather undermines the emphatic effectiveness you give to it? Well, I think whether it was instrumentalised or not in the Cold War,

it seems to me is neither here nor there. These days are gone. The real question seems to me now to be, can you think of a better term, a better framework, within which to identify the many similarities between these two regimes? And there do seem to be many. Not that there aren't differences too,

but it seems to me the whole point of comparative history and comparing these two dictatorships, which end up being locked in mortal combat, is precisely to recognise that they have a great deal in common. I said earlier to Ian Kershaw, and I got short shrift from him, well, he put it very politely, that this idea of totalitarianism wasn't particularly new in Europe to the 20th century, that you could reach back in certain ways.

Do you think there's anything in that, or was he right just a sort of broider-de-asar? Well, I think that the idea has its roots in late-19th century nationalism, and the aspirations of Italian, nationalists like Crispi, for example, sound remarkably like the aspirations of Mussolini, the notion that there has to be a completely unrivaled claim on the loyalties of the individual made by the state.

But coming here further back in the political philosophers of Europe, if you can find the seeds of this, the idea of the total state, all within the state, not earlier on. I mean, is that a dead end? It's hard to do it in the 19th century when the state is, in most countries, a relatively small entity, which simply doesn't have the capability.

to control the lives of ordinary citizens. And Ian's right in one respect, I think, that's very important, namely in the first half of the 20th century, you have the technology, the bureaucracy, the monopoly on communications, all the things which have gone, actually, in the early 21st century, which allow that kind of rule,

and they only really existed then. So this sort of totalitarian, as we were saying, is late 90th century or early 20th century, new to that, and technology is one of the reason. Is that the main reason why it enables it to get a grippy and cashier? Is it just one of the reasons why, as it were, the early 20th century was ready for it? I think the First World War is absolutely decisive in this. So whatever the ideas that were milling around, in particular,

on the nationalist right in the era before the First World War, the First World War itself brought a different kind of war, and within that kind of war, new ideas already emerging about not just about total war, but about the total state and about the total society, which would follow it. And I think divorce from the First World War, the totalitarianism idea is really not thinkable.

I just add one thing to what Neil was saying, though, that, of course, we're all in favour of comparative history and comparative concepts, and totalitarianism is one of those concepts. It only makes sense if you are comparing. So if you're just talking about Nazi German, label it a totalitarian state, is not necessarily a useful term.

That implies then a comparison with the one other state or other regime, which comes to mind, which is that of Stalinism. When you do compare them then, it's not just that we're looking at similarities, but actually the differences stand out in many ways more starkly than do the similarities. But that is the use of comparative terms anyway. Trying to come in now towards Hitler and to spend the rest of the discussion, talking about the place of Hitler in this,

Mary Fulbrook, I said at the top about the debate between the intentionalists who see a strong leader as the key and the structuralists who elevate social processes above attentions. Could you just tell listeners about that, as succinctly as you can? I know it's very difficult about that, about the tensions in that argument. This was one of the big debates that really took off in the 1980s, and essentially on one side of the argument, there are historians who explain the origins of genocide

in Hitler's intentions, Hitler's motives, Hitler's own undoubted, Semitism, his fanatic anti-Semitism. On the other side, there were historians such as Hans Momsen and Martin Bruchart, who came up with the view that, okay, you can get fanatic anti-Semites anywhere. You've had them in many places before and elsewhere at other times. But what explains the origins of genocide in Germany in particular in the early 1940s, late 30s, early 40s, are peculiarities of the way in which the regime was structured and the way in which it functioned, hence the sort of double- notion of structuralist or functionalist. I think what's brilliant about Ian's work, if I may just say that here, is that I think he has beautifully brought together the two sides of the debate because many people accuse the structuralists of just writing Hitler out of it entirely. And I think what Ian has done is to bring together the notion of a charismatic leader who could only operate within certain structures

and where those structures then, in a sense, the people within the political structure, working towards the Fuhrer, Ian's big notion of working towards the furor, actually brought about outcomes that were intended by the furor but not actually explicitly ordered by him. You know, Ferguson, do you think this is a real opposition, the intentionalist and the structureist? I mean, what do you get out of this?

I think it was always a false dichotomy, and I think Ian's book shows that, that Hitler decides a great many crucial things. And this is especially clear in the second volume, the nemesis volume, because it's, I think, astonishing how many of the critical foreign policy and military decisions are taken by Hitler.

And I think Hitler decides is the key phrase of that book. Some examples. Well, I mean, almost every foreign policy decision from Munich, indeed even intervention in Spanish Civil War, right the way through to the decision to launch war against the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa. I mean, there's no question that it's Hitler who takes these decisions. Now, why can you reconcile that very intentionalist reading

with the notion that, that there is some kind of unstable dynamic within the state structures that in a sense propels policy forward without Hitler's direct intervention. It seems to me that that model, the working towards the Fuhrer model in which small apparatchiks in the bureaucracy make the running, that really does apply in racial policy. And the really startling thing about Ian's brilliant second volume is the realization that whereas Hitler had no difficulty at all

about stamping his views on paper on foreign policy and military matters, matters. When it came to the implementation of anti-Semitic policy, he was very, very leery of committing himself on paper. And it's very puzzling why that should be so, but it does seem to me to explain why, in a sense, both theories are right. But can we just go into this structural thing for a functional thing for another moment or two? What Mary intimated that very good historians, from I'm sure you all respect to a previous generation, said, look, in something else was going on, it wasn't just the man, it was inside the structure of Germany, and the way it functioned as a state, which meant

that this happened, where it did not happen elsewhere, on a scale of which it didn't happen elsewhere. Now, is there anything in that, as far as you're concerned? Yes, there is. And if I could just take us back for one second or two to how this debate came about, how this polarisation of views came about. I think it was because in the 1950s,

or anyway, between the end of the war and the early 1960s, the dominant view in this early post-war era was basically that Hitler did everything, that Hitler was the one person to blame in the system. And there was, therefore, in a way, a type of apologetic input into this focusing squarely on Hitler. And that's why people such as Hans Momsen, whom Mayer just mentioned, in the 1960s began

by posing a complete alternative to this, was that actually the system functioned with Hitler having to do relatively little, if anything at all. So the danger of that is writing Hitler out of the script, but Monson came up this notion that Hitler was a weak dictator and the structures of the regime pushed it forward. We've moved on an awful lot from that, but I was at this conference in the end of 19709 in Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park

where all the leading German historians were there, and they were slugging it out as of this was a battleground. And in a way there was a division of labour between those people who focused on foreign policy and those people who worked on the internal dynamics of the regime. And the dichotomy has a simple route as that, but the German historians wanted to find, of course, as always, a fundamentalist answer to this query.

Now, if you look at the way that I've approached this, it's actually by trying to say that in the 1930s, lots of different pressures of pushing in much the same direction. There's no incompatibility at all between Hitler's ideological goals and the interests of most of the big battalions, the main pressure groups and powerful groups, in German society and German politics, it's only gradually that those ideas that Hitler represents

come to the fore and working towards the Fura pushes the dynamic along where those utopian goals become then realisable policy objectives and of course in foreign policy as Neil was saying later on in particular in the war issue Hitler decides on every crucial occasion

Does this mean Mary Fulbrook that we're pushing back to the idea of the great man theory which just about his last gasp when I was thought history it's cool but by the time I got to university we were saying on just a second just a second, it isn't like that at all.

Is this what Neil Ferguson is saying, and is what great deal of Ian Kershaw is saying, going back to that, that Hitler pressed so many buttons that mattered so much in the Second World War, although we are talking about, because that has huge consequences for not only interpretation, but as it were, blame and so on and so forth. If I can just link up for a moment our discussion now

with the discussion of totalitarianism a while back, I think when Ian was saying in the 1950s and early 60s, people focused very much on Hitler, the man. They also focused on Hitler and his evil gang of henchmen, and I'm afraid that was bundled up with the idea of totalitarianism in the 50s, that this was very much a top-down regime where you had a great man, where you had a gang of very nasty SS people and a few others around Hitler who were actually doing it all, and it did tend to exculpate the great mass of the German people. I don't think myself that Ian's book is bringing us back to a great man theory of history.

I think he is showing how under very specific historical circumstances, after the First World War, through the Vimar Republic, a particular kind of person could lead a particular kind of mass movement and bring it into power with the assistance of old elites who had lost their control over the situation and how then under further very specific historical circumstances these things could come about. The beauty of Ian's work is that he just shows us historically how at each stage it came about the way it did and not in other ways but it could have come out differently. I think there are two problems. One is that the last word you could.

possibly use about Hitler is great. He is loathsome, lazy, in many ways a degenerate. Great in the sense of being extraordinarily effective. Right. But I think that's, if you use it in the sense of powerful and having really the decisive say in what happens, then it does seem to me to be true. And I recognise in what Mary says,

a certain lack of comfort with this, but you only have to ask yourself the counterfactual question. What if Hitler is killed? and he comes very close to being assassinated or killed in road accidents and a number of occasions. You ask yourself, what if Hitler gets killed in 23, in 39, in 44? It's impossible, impossible it seems to me to imagine the story unfolding in the same way. When he leaves the scene, everything changes because at the very most senior level, if you talk about the people who really have power in the old Germany,

the most powerful elite in the old historiography was the military, Juncker, conservative, Prussian elite. And they're the people he constantly overrules every time on a foreign policy issue. They lose. And that seems to me to start very early, actually, not just in the war. Can we go back to another thing that was talked about earlier in this discussion? Mary Fulbrook, what were the conditions in Germany that enabled Hitler to come to power and stay there? Can you just remind us of a few of the conditions of the country at the time?

And why Germany rather than anywhere else? Well, there are a number of features that different historians can point to, and to some extent historians differ over which are the most important, but I think one would have to put into the equation defeat in the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and particularly the way that was represented and treated in Germany in the 1920s, the fragile and peculiar character of the democracy and the political culture of the 1920s, the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the way in which the German economy plunged further and faster into depression than other European economies at the time. a number of things like that. Now, don't get me wrong, Ian. I'm not trying to argue individuals out of history in any way, shape or form. I mean, I think one could point the finger at Chancellor

Bruning, for example, for political decisions taken about allowing unemployment to rise and therefore feeding into the chaotic conditions that allowed the Nazi party to gain in popularity. I'm quite certain that if Gail Gelzer had managed to kill Hitler with his nice little bomb in the beerhole cellar, then things would have been very, very different from 1939 onwards. What I am trying to say is that you can't have a history that is purely written in terms of a great man has certain motives and intentions and has the power of will to bring them about come what may. That's only possible within certain conditions where other people are prepared to make alliances and indeed are not prepared to stand up against that person.

And when you're trying to sort of say, well, these authoritarian conservative nationalist elites would have done things differently, they actually didn't get rid of Hitler. Can you just talk a little bit? You're talking slightly off mic there, might as well say it, because that's what's happening. Neil, can we talk about how Hitler mobilised this popular support that Mary is referring to, that how he managed to get the people to work for the furor? At the risk of slightly stealing Ian's thunder, I'd like to mention another historian who's not here, Michael Burley,

whose new book, The Third Reich, a new history, makes the argument that we need to understand Nazism as an almost religious movement, a revivalist movement, which mobilizes people through all kinds of appeals to a kind of pseudo-religion. Hitler's a messianic prophetic figure. Nazi election successes are built on almost religious rallies and the fervor that underpins the great election victories of 1932 has more in common, he suggests, in I think a very brilliant argument,

has more in common with a religious movement than with a, as it were, a secular political movement. And we have to interpret the rise of national socialism as the product of a massive cultural crisis, as well as an economic or social crisis. I mean, I'm increasingly sceptical about the idea that actually the Great Depression was the key. One of the most obvious Niger responses

to explaining the rise of Hitler is to say the Great Depression caused massive unemployment and brought the Nazis to power. I'm increasingly doubtful that this really explains anything about Hitler. I don't think Hitler is just a response to economic crisis. I think he's a response to a profound cultural crisis. And his appeal is that of a kind of Anabaptist, messianic figure, a completely evil one,

a kind of Antichrist figure. But that's really what's going on, and that's why all the established parties are just swept away, because they're playing a quite different game. I must say a lot of the personal reports from those rallies are due tie in with sort of and I was converted personal reports you get through the centuries at religious meetings. Ian Kershaw.

It's not actually a very new sort of argument that it's gone back a long way, and there's a lot to be said for it. What you have, I think, is in the 19, in the 20s and only 1930s, in a way, as Neil was saying there, a profound cultural crisis. I'd say, actually, building on top of a really deep-seated sense of national humiliation, you have a comprehensive crisis of state and society, which comes out to the fore in the Depression years. So it's not just an economic crisis. It's not just a crisis of government.

Systems can override those. But it's a crisis of the entire system. and it's at a time where democratic system of government has scant support either from the masses or more importantly from the power elites. It's in that context then that Hitler is able to gain increasing support through this vision which he's putting forward. It's not a political program in a conventional sense,

but it is in a sense a utopian vision which the notion of political religion helps in a sense to get at. What you have then in 1933 is something which is crucial and perhaps unique, which is the blending together of what you might call, the politics or an ideology of national redemption,

the ideology of national redemption with the instruments of the most modern state on the continent of Europe. And it's these two things that come together that make the dynamic of Nazism, I think, after 1930s, so unstoppable. Can I just prod away at the Hitler thing? though at his personality, Mary Paul Brock.

Max Weber said there were three types of polarity, rational, legal, traditional and charismatic. And he said that charismatic authority exists where an exceptional ability is perceived conferring a right to lead. Now, one of the things that's extraordinary about it, is that towards the end, he led an enormous number of very intelligent people straight into the jaws of death.

They knew they'd had it. They still, they wouldn't give up, is a very nice sort of rather British pluckish way to put. but they followed. Everything was torn down and they followed it. This extraordinary debate, I heard from women as well as men and children, a terrible film of him going patting little boys on their head who are going to go and get slaughtered.

So can you explain that devotion outside personality or is it all to do with this Weber idea of the charismatic personality? Well, I think it's worth pointing out that Weber's notion of charisma doesn't only focus on personality but also focuses on following, and Weber's concept of charisma is very, very explicit about this, that you cannot have just personality without following, and you can't have following without the conditions in which people are prepared to listen to that kind of message. So, I mean, going back to Neil's point, there is no way that without certain social and economic and political crises,

people would have gone in such droves into this kind of cultural, religious, messianic movement. Turning to Faber's notion of charisma with respect to Hitler and the closing stages, The other thing VABA makes quite clear is that this is an extremely, it's a concept which has built into it and in a dynamic. It is not a concept, it is not a kind of authority which can last forever. Charismatic leadership requires victory and repeated victory, and it either tends to totally self-destruct, or it has to be routinised.

Weber is quite clear about this. And I think the interesting thing about the Third Reich is that there was never any routinisation of charisma. There were no stable bureaucratic structures, which could sustain it after the death of the leader, and it went to the total self-destruct mode, indeed personified in Hitler himself. Neil Ferguson, what do you think about this notion

which has been constant in the, was constant throughout the second half of the 20th century, and still with us that Hitler was an evil figure and that he was quintessentially evil and more evil than anyone else? Where does that take us? Well, if you're giving marks for evil, I mean, Stalin runs them very close.

I mean, if you measure evil in terms of the number of innocent people you kill, it's a close thing. Hitler maybe just shades it. And I do think one has to invoke moral yardsticks. This is a question of values, and one can't study the history of the Third Reich and the life of Hitler without being conscious of something reminiscent of Bulgakov's master and margarita. I mean, that's an allegory of Stalinism in which the devil come. to Russia with his familiars and wreaks completely grotesque violence, pointless violence on people. And I think in many ways Hitler with Goebbels puts me in mind of that.

Ian's book brilliantly uses the Goebbels' diaries to provide a kind of running commentary on Hitler. And Goebbels is a diabolical figure completely and self-consciously post-Christian in his morality. I think this is an important point. The Nazis saw the idea that we will see the end of morality. And they see themselves, certainly the most radical Nazis, as making a new morality in which the murder of the racially inferior is entirely legitimate. So of course, if that isn't evil, what is? Yes, one of the interesting things to me when I was researching for this programme

is included was a quotation from Alexandria Soljnitsyn about evil, which shook me, really, in the Gulagarchipelago, he put, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, this is Solzhenitsyn. It is, after all, only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we were. I find that completely chilling. I mean, Primo Livy replied to it in a way

by saying he couldn't understand it, it was distasteful, he knew in his heart, he was not a murderer and so on. But where does that come in? The idea that Hitler represented only part of what is in all of us. I mean, do you agree with Solzionitz in there? Well, if you were saying that the potential for good and evil is in most individuals, if not all individuals, I'd say, I think I would.

It is a chilling thought, but I think I would go along with that. I just disagree in a way, in the case of dealing with these figures such as Stalin and Hitler, disagree a little bit with Neil, and only in one sense that I just think that evil is not a very useful concept to work with when you're trying to understand these things historically. I mean, if you say Hitler was the epitome of modern evil, I think I wouldn't disagree with that. as a human being. But in terms of understanding how this epitome of modern evil can come to being and come to power and so on,

I find it not a very useful term to use the notion of evil. But except the idea of morality, which is why I hold in the Soljanitsyn is central to the discussion, and I did hold it in rather clumsily, I admit, but I wonder if it would be nicer to talk about this. I think it wasn't clumsy at all. I mean, Sorgen-Nitsyn is crucial here, and prima-relivian-Nitsen are the two texts

I get my students to begin with when they're working, on this period. And I think he's right. A lot of the research that's been done recently on the quote, ordinary Germans or ordinary men who were the executioners, the people who carried out racial policy, has revealed that it clearly was possible for the regime to unleash extraordinary act of evil from ordinary individuals. And that, I think, has been the other really important trend in recent historiography to expose the complicity of more and more. individuals in German society and to zoom in on their motives, how they rationalise killing children and women. And I think that's a terribly important part of the story.

It's in, in that sense, I think we are looking at something much more than a kind of individual despotism. We're looking at something which actually corrupts and demoralizes literally hundreds of thousands of people so that they became capable of killing women and children, something that they wouldn't have thought of doing, maybe even just 15 years before. This is, I think, one of the great puzzles. And Soljohn-Nitson's right. And I think he was very honest about this to recognise that there was something arbitrary about who became victims,

certainly in the Soviet system and who didn't. Do you think that is in everyone that there is this capability of being a sort of in every single person? Yes, but I have a very pessimistic view of human nature. That seems to be a hopeless view of human nature, a hopeless view. Perhaps. Really? What do you think I like, Mary?

I think that every individual human being has a duty in a sense to be a moral human being. I mean, I'm putting very personal views here. I'm not putting these views as a historian, but as a human being. And I think what's remarkable about Nazi Germany is that not everybody was corrupted, not everybody was taken in. Not everybody could later hide behind the, oh, we never knew, or he was such a charismatic figure that we were all taken in under his spell

that many people tried to put about as a myth. I think there were remarkable people in Nazi Germany. Dietrich Bonhofer, for example, Goag Elza, the Swabin Carpenter, who tried to single-handedly kill him off by this bomb. Many, many people in the confessing church. There were a lot of very strong individuals who thought, well, there is a struggle between good and evil. There is good and bad within every human being. There are very difficult circumstances in which we live, but we have to make a stand.

Couldn't you look at it on a national way too, Neil? I mean, couldn't you say that in Europe, in the 30s, different countries went towards fascism, towards different degrees, and we constantly underrate, it seems to me, the way that this country, compared to the rest, didn't, or did very, very, very little compared to everything else, and resisted it and did not follow, as it were, the Solzhenits in modernly decided, no, we'll not go down that road. Arguably only because the germs lacked the air power

to impose their rule on the British Isles. I mean, they imposed their very few countries which don't go about. In the 30s, we didn't go down the way that Italy went, that Spain went, that Germany went, that we know Sweden went to some extent, and Greece went. We weren't doing that. But look at occupied Europe. That is analogous to human beings, and that would seem to deny Soljernitsyn. But the incredible thing is that everywhere that the Nazis

impose their rule, they find willing collaborators. There are very few areas of Nazi occupation which don't comply with the anti-Jewish policy. In the case of a country like Romania, they actually forge ahead so that by the time the Germans turn up, but most of the Jews are already dead. And I think this is, it's a dangerous road to go down to say, ah, but we British are special, we didn't go that way. I mean, I think that has a lot to do with circumstances. We didn't go that way and you've ducked my argument because we didn't go that way in the 30, it's a different argument, I'll get off it now, we're talking about it.

We didn't go that way in the 30s. It's a different argument that when you're conquered by the Nazis, the Hungarians become better at wiping out the Jews than the Germans did, and so on and so forth. But that's not what I was saying. I was saying that there are ways to resist, which nations did in the 30s, we did, which is analogous to where human beings resist being evil. Primo Levy insists that he was not a murder and he resisted the soldier-in-iting thing that he could have been an evil character. Ian Kersh. Yeah, just a couple of senses on that. I'm more inclined to your position on this and to Niels, I think, in the sense that I do think that the structures of liberal democracy

pose something of a barrier to the onset of fascism. If these structures are firmly consolidated, in the case of the British structures in the 1920s and the 30s, they were firmly structured. There was no challenge from anybody of any note within to the system of government or society that we had, to the state system that we had. In Germany, that was quite different.

So these structures did pose a barrier then, given the fact we'd won the First World War, and given the fact that the system wasn't under threat, they did pose a barrier then to the inroads of Fessler's. So put it in other way, there was absolutely no political space in Britain for Oswald Moseley to mobilize, the Conservatives that effectively won the election in 1931. There was actually no market for Oswald Moseley. It was totally different in Germany and also in Italy and in some other countries. Going back to the point about morality there,

the key thing is surely then that structures, including, say, church structures or religious structures and so on, also create moral platforms, which prevent people, pose some barriers for people descending into the depths of inhumanity, such as happened in Nazi Germany. But if you remove those structures, then, of course, challenge them or undermine them, then, of course, Solzionitzin's point comes into play, that people are capable of doing these things,

and the key thing about Nazi Germany is that it shows the extent to which many ordinary people were capable of being complicit in the most horrific forms of inhumanity. Okay, I just want to turn to Nemesis for the last ten minutes that we've got. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, she extracts the punishment of the gods for the human folio hubris. And you subtitle this, second volume, Nemesis. The suggestion there, though, I come to Neil Ferguson on this first, is this a sort of inevitability that this, do you see that working into the pattern of history, the pattern of the individual

inevitability of fall after the hubris of Hitler. Should we come clean about this, Ian? It was actually my idea. Now it can be revealed. I suggest it. It was a revealed in the preface to volume of all. He generously acknowledged it.

That's my sole contribution for this brilliant book. But, of course, it raises extremely important questions about how inevitable the complete failure of Hitler's project is. If you call something hubris nemesis, if you invoke classical tragedy, then I think you are implying that there is an inevitable nemesis. And I sometimes have my doubts about this.

I know Ian doesn't. I mean, he sees the project as for doomed to fail. And to be honest, reading volume two has really moved me in this. I mean, I think where previously I was inclined to argue that the Third Reich came dangerously close to victory in the Second World War, could have won had the British government had a different complexion of Churchill,

hadn't become prime minister, or could have won if the Red Army had simply collapsed in 41, 42. reading volume 2 of Ian's biography has made me realize something very, very important. And that is that Hitler, in his heart of hearts, wanted nemesis. There's a death wish about the project. There's a morbid quality to Hitler's ambition. And I don't think he really wanted the end Zieg, the final victory.

I think what he really wanted was to go down in a blaze of what he would regard as, would have regarded as glory. And that's a tremendously important insight. So he didn't one thousand years of the Reich then? I think not. I think to understand Hitler, and this is the key insight, I think, of the nemesis volume, you have to see that his real concern is to expunge the shame of November 1918, of the defeat in the First World War and the November Revolution, the internal revolution, which he blamed for that defeat.

So for Hitler, the crucial thing wasn't to win, but it was not to surrender, not to capitulate, so that unconditional surrender was something when the Allies demanded it, that in a sense Hitler accepts as a desirable outcome. Ian's got to have his word on it, but first, Mary Fulbroke, what's your view on this? This view that there was, you see, hubris and nemesis suggested an inevitability about the pattern of history which comes out of the centre of Hitler's emotional character.

I love the way Ian has actually implotted, to use the postmodernist term, these volumes, the choice of Greek tragedy as the sort of very obvious novelistic mode of employment, but I don't subscribe to the notion of inevitability in history ever, and I think it does go back to that issue of morality that we were just discussing and how one can actually constantly foster the conditions under which

the voice of conscience can stand up and say we must stop this before it turns into what it does. I mean, to go back to something that Neil seems to have abandoned, do you think Hitler could have, it is possible to think, funny word to use, but he could have won, I mean, had, been it, had Churchill, had, as he said, the Red Army

collapsed, had America not come in, all these a possibility. I wouldn't want to go into the military details of the Second World War and try and weigh up all those things because I think it is a matter of different combinations of forces of power, of luck, of accident. I mean, I think there are a lot of things one could argue about there. But what I do think it's important to remember is that there are many stages before the Second World War when Hitler should and could have been prevented from being in a position where he could have preceded it. If we agree there's no inevitability, it must also not only could have been a stop but he could have gone further. He could have conquered even more. Yes and no. I mean I wouldn't wish to argue with Ian and Neil on this one, but I think that what was built into the regime was to a considerable extent a degree of economic and military self-destruction. I think it had a dynamic of overreaching itself. One more from Neil and then I'll come to you, Ian. Well, I completely disagree with that. And that's the great German fallacy to imagine that the Germans defeated themselves. I mean, I think they had to be destroyed with a massive force from outside. I'm not disputing that for one minute.

But it was Hitler who decided to go to war with the United States. States to go to war with the Soviet Union to have a two-front war. In a sense, Hitler takes strategic decisions which constantly increased the likelihood of defeat. Which is precisely what I was trying to say, Neil. It's precisely what I was trying to say. So I think it's, the point is that Hitler should have been removed at an earlier stage. Ian Kershaw, you've been extremely patient. Well, the inevitability issue is separate from, I think, from the question of hubris nemesis. They say, if Hitler had been assassinated in 1939, things are indifferent.

So I've argued throughout these two volumes that all. although there were structural determinants that were pushing towards shaping Hitler's policies, and all this, unless, Hitler was indispensable to this entire operation. If Hitler had been removed in 1939, things would have been different. But that is not to say, as long as Hitler was there, the nemesis was built into it. It had to come. That regime could never settle down. It could never come to a staging point where it said, right, enough is enough.

There would have been continued war. It could not have won the final victory in the sense that we like to think a clean final victory, enough the end of it. The colossal gamble was such that Hitler was inviting precisely what came along. So the so-called good times of the 1930s were inextricably linked to the catastrophe of the mid-1940s. The last point about Neil's comment there that Hitler had this death wish anyway, there was a suicidal component to Hitler, but the death wish for the regime, I think we have to see as a change in Hitler himself at the time. The final victory, as he, foresaw it would have been the expunging of the humiliation and the shame of 1918 and who were to blame,

who were the people to blame for this capitulation in 1918 for the shame, the Jews. So consequently for Hitler, the war was a war implicitly had to be a war also against the Jews. When the war was then going wrong and could no longer be won on any negotiations could only be carried in his view from a position of strength, not weakness. So he closed off every, exit route. And at this point then, Neil's argument comes into force that the expunging of the capitulation of 1918 was more important by that stage than entering to any type of political solution to the, to Germany's plight. So at that point then, it's a death wish for Hitler, it's a death wish for the regime itself, really a nemesis that followed the humorous

inextricably. Neil? Yes, and Hitler's prophecy of revenge for November 1918 is also a implicitly, I think, a prophecy of self-destruction. I mean, there is a Vagnerian element to all this, and I think it was a vice-president of the Reichsbank who told the Japanese ambassador of Hitler's plan to take a plane up above the Baltic and explode it in 1945, and the sort of Goethedemand dimension

seems to me to be absolutely willed by the ardent Vagnerian that Hitler was. Do you see you go along with that as well, Mary Fulmer? That this end was willed by Hitler in this Vagnerian sense? Well, to some extent, I think when one reads those incredible, closing pages of Ian's book and one sees the way in which Hitler was

descending into the bunker and trembling and so on. I think that was the only way this could end in ruins and catastrophe for so many millions and fatal of himself. Why did you bring in Wagner in? It's impossible to leave Wagner out of a biography of Hitler. After all, he was one of the chief Wagner fans and he saw his entire life somehow as a Wagnerian tragedy. And at the end, of course, the bringing down of Valhalla, it's just implicit to think about us, Goetodemarung, in the sense that Hitler says,

according to his Lufapha, Adjutant from Beelho, we'll never capitulate, we will go down and take down a world in flames with us. Well, thank you all very much, Ian Kershaw, Neil Ferguson, Mary Fulbrook, we'll be talking about the Romantics next week. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.

Thank you.