The Rest Is History - 63. Hitler, with Ian Kershaw - part 1

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

He was “the embodiment of modern political evil” according to historian Sir Ian Kershaw. In this first episode of a two-part investigation of the Nazi dictator, Sir Ian joins Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland to discuss Adolf Hitler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. It is an infallible law of the internet that anyone who gets into an argument on social media in due course will end up being accused of being Adolf Hitler. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History with me, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Dominic, you must have been accused of being Hitler a fair number of times over the course of your career, have you? Many times.

I think you can't say anything in public now without people at some point saying you're a Nazi. No matter what position you hold, that sort of accusation hangs over you like a sword of Damocles, doesn't it? So in a sense, today's episode is on Adolf Hitler. And there's a sense in which this is a subject that this entire series of podcasts has been building up to because our very first episode was around the issue of of what role does great men play when set against the kind of sweep of vast forces and that is a

theme that we have explored several times. And another theme that we've explored is the nature of morality, whether we can talk about topics such as evil in the context of historical inquiry, where our ideas of evil come from. So it does feel that today we are drawing together quite a lot of strands, aren't we? Yes, because I think Hitler is one of the, I mean, we had a podcast about Mohammed, obviously, some listeners will know, we've talked about figures such as Nero that, you know, are sort of entrenched in our imagination, but Hitler probably dwarfs them all, doesn't he? He's the most familiar non-religious, well, we can talk later on about whether he is, has almost become a kind of quasi-religious figure, but he's the most familiar non-religious figure, I think, in all

human history, and one with, you know, that he has become a benchmark, I guess, hasn't he, for morality, for a particular kind of political leadership. And he is the lens through which we view the last hundred years of history, right? Absolutely. I absolutely agree. And I think that a topic this massive and this well-known needs a great historian to hold our hands as we tip to across the minefield that is this subject. And Dominic, by great good fortune, I think you got your first job from our greatest living biographer of Hitler, didn't you? I did. Well, I did. So in 2001, I went for a job interview at the University of Sheffield. And the terrifying thing was that the chair of the panel was our guest today,

Sir Ian Kershaw, as he became a couple of years later. And I can remember sort of going into the interview, quaking in my boots, knowing that you're going into an interview with somebody who, for many people, is the sort of acme of historical scholarship, which is why it's astounding to me that having offered me the job, Ian, you know, his credibility remained unimpaired. And it's great. It's really great to have him on the podcast. Ian, thank you so much for doing this. It's a real pleasure for us to have you. Of course, pleasure. So, Tom, do you want to kick off because

you and ian have something in common um in terms of what you've written about and it's not hitler well one of the things that that fascinates me about biographers of hitler and people who are famous for studying hitler is that lots of them didn't begin as specialists in the field of nazi germany so alan bullock began as a classicist. Hugh Trevor Roper, I think, studied classics, didn't he? And his first book was on 17th century politics. And Ian, you began as a specialist in medieval abbeys, I think. Is that right? Before going on to write about Hitler. So how was it that you ended up writing about Hitler when your background was in medieval history? Well, I was an absolutely committed medievalist,

passionate medievalist, and it came about very gradually and came about through the German language, really, that I never anticipated in a million years ever coming to be preoccupied with Hitler or Nazi Germany. But I had a very, I went to start just by chance, learning German at the Goethe-Institut in Manchester, by the time that I began as a lecturer in medieval history at Manchester University. They just opened a branch in Manchester, the Goethe Institute, and we had an inspired, a wonderful teacher there who enthused us with everything to do with Germany, which was, and I became interested in all sorts of things, not just history of Germany. The learning German, which I was unable to do while learning any other language, modern language,

other than French at school and university, was just something which was a hobby for me. I had no intention of using it for any particular reason until 1972, when I got the option to go on a scholarship to Germany from the Goethe-Institut. I spent two months there, improved my German very rapidly by this time. And I took numerous books with me on medieval history and found myself reading stuff on Nazi Germany. And in that period, I then convinced myself that I wanted really to start investigating a very obvious question, why a country like that with all its rich cultural history

then should descend into Nazism. And that took off from there onwards. It was a very long conversion, a long story, but that's when it began, really. And isn't there some story, Ian, that you spoke to somebody in the 70s or a German, a member of the public, who said to you,

oh, you're British, you fought on the wrong side, you should have fought with us or something like that? Yes, well, that was just during that two-month stay in a very small town about 20 miles from Munich in 1972. And I was just winding away the time on wet Sunday and sitting in a cafe reading a paper, and this chap got talking to me. And it was just a banal conversation initially.

And then he then said to me, what's you as an Englishman doing in a small place like this? And I told him and then he began and I became fascinated by the conversation. I said, oh, you English, of course, he didn't say British, you English, you're so stupid. You should have come into the war with us and we could have divided up the world. And I was absolutely gripped by the conversation at this point. But there was one sentence or phrase which I never forgot. And that was very telling for me, where at one point he said in the conversation, the Jew is a louse. And I've never come across anything remotely like that at all and I was so

shocked but fascinated at the same time by this comment and I just wondered what had gone on in a small town like this during the Nazi era and that was one trigger that pushed me on the way that I was already thinking of going and then you know a few years later I found myself reading the the police reports for that very town in that small town in the 1930s amazing really but it was one it was one pointer on the way to this conversion which took as I said some while and it wasn't until I eventually got a job in modern history at Manchester University in 1975 I think it was that I that I then became a fully-fledged modernist. And even then, the first year, I had one fairly crazy year where I never knew whether the students outside the door

were coming in to learn about the origins of the open fuel system or the rise of the Nazis. After that, it settled down. And in due course, you end up writing a biography of Hitler. And I suppose it's the obvious question, and it's the question that we'll probably be fencing around over the course of our entire conversation. But to what extent is the study of Nazi Germany, the study of Hitler? Well, it's obvious that Hitler is the central point, central focus of that study of Nazi Germany. Yet, of course, he's not the whole story. And, of course, I should add that I came to write a biography of Hitler almost by chance.

I mean, through the route to through German social history, because initially I wasn't interested in Hitler as a person at all. I was interested in why the German people fell for Nazism, really, putting it very crudely. And obviously Hitler figures in that, but there was no thought of writing a biography of Hitler. And I was approached by Penguin, the eventual publisher of my biography initially, and I turned it down because I said, I've no wish to write a biography of Hitler.

And then I thought it through again and reread Bullock and reread the leading German biography of Hitler by Joachim Fest and decided I would write one after all. So Hitler is the central figure, but he's by no means the entire history of Nazism and much German historiography until the 1980s really, if not later, actually turned away from Hitler because they thought Hitler was, focusing on Hitler was like an apologia, that it was really detracting from the key questions about Nazism and focusing upon one individual was misleading and was actually to centralise history too much in the case of one individual, however important that individual was. And did you find when you were writing your biography that Hitler's fame was almost oppressive,

that you could see him as a character like any other? Or was the consciousness of Hitler as this kind of demonic icon? Did that sometimes become almost overwhelming? No, I shut out the demonic icon right from the very beginning, because I didn't see that was helpful at all. The fame or the notoriety was a different issue in a sense that whatever you read or read about Hitler, particularly from his contemporaries, was either extremely for or extremely against. So there was no neutrality in contemporaries viewing Hitler. And that was quite, in terms of source material that you're dealing with, that's quite hard to cope with because you're

dealing with stuff which is either propaganda material or aimed at building up a legendary image of Hitler, or else it's decrying him in every conceivable fashion and inventing negative stories about him which are very difficult to prove or disprove. So that was the difficulty in terms of Reichsmarting, not the demonic image which I discarded. So in terms of the relationship of Hitler to the broader trend of the development of Nazism, we've got two questions. We've got a question from somebody called The Short One.

Would Nazism have happened without the figure of Hitler? Could any other of the leading Nazis have done what he did? And one from 50-something Gardner, another splendid name. Great man theory, how much of what happened in Germany in the late 20s through to late 30s would have happened anyway without Hitler? So I guess those questions focus the issue. How central is Hitler to the story of Nazism? Yes. And it's an important question and it's one that's not easy to answer. But if you look back at the prehistory of Nazism, you see then that what Hitler was articulating when he when he says when he arrives to power, particularly in the early 1920s, came from a rich background of similar racist nationalist thinking of which he was only one amongst many exponents. So at that point, Hitler was reflecting ideas which had a wider currency

on the extreme radical racialist right. Of course, it's only one stream in German politics, not the key theme even, but it became much more popular after the First World War. So Hitler's one exponent of that. And later on, and I'd say the re-founding of the Nazi party in 1925 was one of those moments, Hitler becomes then an irreplaceable element because the Nazi movement, like practically all fascist movements, actually, wherever you look at them, is susceptible, was susceptible to a lot of factionalism and breakaways. And you saw this when Hitler was for several months imprisoned in 1924, that the Nazi movement, which had been banned, just broke apart into various factions, sometimes warring factions. What Hitler did was to bring these together again, to cement them.

And from then onwards, the notion of this as a leader party bound to Hitler was a crucial factor. And from there onwards, Hitler's role becomes more and more central. And to answer the second, I think, question that you posed there, what is to happen without Hitler? Well, certain things would have done, the tendency towards extreme nationalism and once you're into the 1930s, then towards a revision of Versailles. Those sort of things would have happened with any nationalist government.

But other things would not have happened without Hitler. And I think you can therefore say that in the context as it developed from the mid-1920s onwards, Hitler's role was absolutely central and became even more central. So the role of the individual then becomes crucial because of you then said without Hitler would there have been such a rapid descent into a police state in which the rules of law were completely discarded, such a a major European war without Hitler? Potentially, but probably not. Even Hermann Goering, the second man in the Third Reich, then wanted to prevent that by 1939, wanted to head Hitler off from the risk he was taking. And thirdly, would we have had the Holocaust without Hitler?

There would have been anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic legislation, unquestionably. But without Hitler, would we have had a Holocaust? I would say no. So no Hitler, no Holocaust. So Hitler does become central to these developments, yet he's nonetheless initially in the first years, in particular,

just an exponent of wider trends which were prevalent on the German extreme right. Ian, I know Tom wants to come back about the Holocaust in a second, but just before we do that, Hitler obviously had a sense of himself as a great man. He read Thomas Carlyle, or he had Thomas Carlyle's book on Frederick the Great, I think, didn't he? And is Hitler, to some extent, one of the last redoubts of great man history, an individual shaping the course of nations, the lives of millions, depending on the decisions taken by this one man in his kind of lair? Or is it more complicated than that? As you might imagine, it it more complicated than that as you might imagine it's more complicated

than that um but it it's uh first of all the great man theory i i i think that's that takes us nowhere really um as a theory of history it's best discarded in fact i would discard the notion of greatness historical greatness of great individuals so I think there's not much point in in suggesting that x y or z was great um because there's no there are no criteria for that we might say uh because we have some aesthetic measurements that Mozart was a great composer um we might say that Bradman was a great batsman but But I think when you come to politicians, it has the term great rapidly disintegrates and you can't define it properly. So if you say great meaning morally acceptable,

then there's no political leader who is entirely morally acceptable. But obviously many of them are morally unacceptable, but they have an enormous impact. So I think it's the work that we're looking for here is the impact of an individual, not personal greatness. And Hitler certainly had a colossal impact. And that's what we need to be assessing. And then we have to look at the context within which any individual, not just Hitler, can play such a significant role. And that you then into the forces which which go beyond that individual that enable that individual to come to power in

the first place and then condition the capability of that individual to have such an enormous impact and those are the key questions that we have to ask actually the framework of power which brings somebody to power in the first place, whether it's Hitler or whether it's Lenin or whoever it might be, and then the conditions with which they're able to exercise that power. Those are the key questions, not the greatness of the individual. But I guess a contrast between Hitler and Lenin or Hitler and Stalin, is that for Lenin and Stalin, they cast themselves as agents of vast forces. And in a sense, it's the proletariat who are the heroes of their story. Whereas Hitler is absolutely foregrounding the idea that heroic individuals step forward and shape the destiny of

nations. And do you think that Hitler's belief in that kind of understanding of history and the role that great men play impacted on the role that he did indeed end up playing, this kind of monstrous, titanic shadow that he ended up casting over the whole world? Yes, I do. I think that's a very good and fair point. It gradually frames him, I do. I think that's a very good and fair point. It gradually frames him, I think, as a powerful leader,

because initially he doesn't see himself as that at all, but he sees himself as paving the way for Germany's leader to come. But after the failure of the putsch at the end of 1923, he does start to see himself in that role as germany's great leader in waiting and the the sense of personal uh personal destiny of being of greatness then does play a part in in his uh in his ascendance in particular when he's in power and when i wrote a book many years ago called the hitler myth i seized upon the point uh of the uh the um military remilitarization of the rhineland in 1936 where hitler then starts to believe in his own myth somehow then and he says i go my way with the with the certainty

of a sleepwalker and that seemed to me to be the one moment where he starts believing in his own infallibility and that the sense of greatness and destiny then does play a part. And he says that in 1939, that when he is explained to his generals, the need to go to war then. And he says that any moment I could be assassinated. And my role in this is indispensable. And to a certain extent, he was right in that by 1939. But there's one wider

point on this is Hitler wasn't the only one at the time who believed in the sense of destiny for himself. Mussolini did too. Churchill did. de Gaulle did. So for these people who were products of the late 19th century, the notion of personal destiny was something which affected all of them. But Hitler in quite an extreme fashion, as you say. You've talked about how kind of difficult and how thorny, and in your view, sort of useless, I guess, the idea of greatness is. But what about the other thing that people, I mean, the thing that people apply to Hitler more than anything else?

If you're in conversation, as it were, sort of public discourse, the word that hangs over Hitler is evil. As a historian, is that at all... Well, I can see that it's not necessarily useful, but can you escape from it? Can you write a book about Hitler without this sort of overpowering consciousness that he has come to represent sort of human wickedness in its most distilled form?

Well, I think all historians, we all have to use language, and the language itself betrays many of our thoughts. That's inescapable. We can't do that. We can't avoid that. But the term evil, as you're implying in your question there, is something which if you're in a conversation about Hitler, of course, you would say is possibly one of the most evil men of the 20th century, or evil comes rapidly to mind in talking about him anyway. But when I was writing the biography, I decided right at the beginning to discard that term as well as discard any sort of notion of greatness, because it's not a useful analytical term. I mean, if you say, well, Hitler was the epitome of evil, does it actually explain very much?

I mean, explain why millions of Germans actually were ready to support him and cheer for him and vote for him and things. And does it explain the decisions that he was making? It's just not a useful analytical term. It's a metaphysical term, not a historical analytical term. But, of course, we are, as I said, in writing, we can't, thinking about an individual, you can't actually escape it. And you look at something like, I know we're going to come back

to the Holocaust, but if you're talking about the Holocaust, then it's difficult to escape the notion that this is the greatest crime of the 20th century. And the man who was more than any other responsible for that was Hitler. So the sense of great evil then obviously is in one way inescapable from Hitler. But just in analysing what he did, it's not very useful it will dominate i mean i said at the the top of the show that um when you do an episode on hitler you're also kind of doing an episode on how you write history yeah the whole process is it required i mean do you feel the same about that i mean this is kind of you have your well i know that you have your personal prejudices and instincts and uh attitudes but um i mean you have to keep them you have to kind of winnow them when you write.

You do. I suppose you – it's an interesting one, isn't it, listening to Sir Ian talking about Hitler, because when I'm writing about, you know, people have – Thatcher. Yeah, incredibly strong opinions about – Almost as evil. I mean, not people, so –

Well, some people would. I mean, that's the weird thing, isn't it? But you're right, Tom. I think to some extent you have to be very aware of your own prejudice, I think, and your own feelings. But you have to try and transcend them. I mean, that's what historical scholarship and historical training is meant to be all about, that you can sometimes step outside your own predilections and your own preconceptions. But also, surely, let me turn it back to you. When you're writing about atrocities in the classical world or the medieval period or something, do you have to sort of bite back your own personal revulsion or whatever? I mean, if it's just a kind of constant lament, that'd be a very boring book, wouldn't it?

I think it's an interesting question, and I'm sure it's one we'll come on to later in the show that um hitler is so is so close to us whereas things that happened in in the distant past it can seem distant so almost it's the opposite almost when you're writing about caesar and the ghouls or say nero and sporus you know we've talked about before. You have to remind yourselves that these are not just figures of myth. These are figures, you know, these things happen to real people, you know. But that's never, you know, that's obviously not an issue with Hitler. And we will be coming back and we will be talking about, well, really how Hitler became Hitler. We'll be talking about his early years after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. well, really how Hitler became Hitler. We'll be talking about his early years after the break. launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com

welcome back to the rest is history we are with sir ian kershaw one of britain's greatest living historians and we are talking about um his great subject, Hitler. And Tom, I think you wanted to ask about the difficulty of writing about Hitler's life before Nazism, didn't you? Yeah. So if we look at some of the biography of Hitler, but when you write a biography, in a sense, it's a teleological process. You have a sense of the end, where this life is going to lead to, what it's going to result in. And if you're saying, no Hitler, no Holocaust, then this shadow of 6 million people dead because of this one man, essentially, hangs over the life that you're going to write. So again, I'm sure it's a naive question, but it's one that I can't help but ask. So when you look at the beginnings of Hitler,

his ancestry, his grandfather, his grandparents, his parents, his childhood, is there anything there that serves as a warning flag, raises alarms about where it's going to end up? Or is it naive even to ask that question? No, your questions are never naive, Tom. But they are questions that, as a historian, one has to put at the back of one's mind when writing the life summary. Obviously, we know the end point of this story, the death in the bunker. We know about the Holocaust and so on. But in actually writing a worthwhile biography, whether it's of Hitler or anybody else,

one has to go back to the beginning and try to explain how these things take place without actually using the end point as an explanation in itself. So looking at Hitler's childhood, for example, we have to escape from the notion that this was a man who did terrible things later on. And in fact, even in the biography, at some point, as I recall, I did say that if you look at Hitler's childhood, you might actually even say, well, here's somebody from a very disturbed family background. You might even have some sympathy for him. Certainly, you don't see in the child, the later monster that we're dealing with, if that's the right way to put

it, in the 1940s. And as regards the Holocaust, made a particular point in the book, as in other writings of mine, of trying to explain the process, the lengthy process by which this came about, rather than seeing it through just through some Hitler paranoia, which then inevitably leads to the Holocaust as the final point. So we have to avoid that teleology, whether it's personal or it's social in its processes. Because it becomes almost a kind of comfort, doesn't it? The idea that you can explain what Hitler does, say, you come across some core psychological flaw. So people often talk about, was Hitler's grandfather a Jew? Was this something that he worried about or something like that? That's easy. No, he wasn't. Yeah.

Okay. So the answer to that is that the grandfather wasn't Jewish and Hitler didn't worry about that. So that as an idea is a nonsense. That's right i think these these psychological theories are best treated in a very critical and conservative fashion that is to say that again um it's it's an easy uh operation for any biographer to take up psychological theories which are usually non-provable because the subject has never been on a psychologist's couch even. And then read into that an entire intricate and complex historical development.

And I tried my best in the biography to avoid that and discarded the various psycho theories of Hitler, mainly in footnotes rather than in the text itself. And I've never had very much trouble with those ideas, whether it's Hitler or anybody else for that matter. So I think what we have to deal with are political processes that explain these things rather than psychological hang-ups. Ian, can I ask sort of what might sound a very mundane question?

At what point would you say Hitler became Hitler? So Adolf Hitler, at what point did Adolf Hitler the man become what we would now see as this, I don't know what the right words are, damaged, emotionally sort of, not just insensitive, but violent and destructive. At what point does, you know,, when he's sort of poor and miserable before the First World War, and then when he's the artist, they call him the artist, don't they, or something in the trenches, he doesn't seem to be the sort of demonic figure of the 1920s and 1930s.

At what point do you think he did sort of shift? Or was there not a point when he shifted in that way i think the key point the key um period at any rate it's not an absolute precise point but the key period is um in munich in the period immediately following the first world war and that's i think where as one historian German historian put it at the time, where politics came to Hitler, Hitler didn't come to politics. And we're in the conditions that follow the First War in Munich. Hitler then becomes visibly the sort of Hitler that we know subsequently. So I think it's in those months of 1919 that we really recognize and that's a an intriguing thing about him biographically of course that for the um as born in 1889 so between 1889 and 1919 he's he's somebody who is completely

inconsequential anonymous we hardly know anything about him really he's totally unimportant nothing he says is taken of any interest by anybody around him, seen as any interest by anybody around him. And then from 1919 onwards, he's somebody who helps to bring about world war, genocide and destroy his own country. So it's a phenomenal trajectory, but it really, the key period,

I think is between 1919 and 1923. And the months of 1919 are the period where I think, if we want to be precise, we can say that's when Hitler becomes Hitler. And what is it that happens then? What is it? What is the spark? What happens then is that he, and incidentally, Hitler is very quiet in Mein Kampf and anything else that he wrote or said about these precise months. But between the revolution in Germany in 1918 and the spring of 1919, Hitler was living in Munich, experiencing a socialist revolution, then experiencing the key moment probably in March and April 1919, the so-called Councils Republic, where Munich was taken over by extreme left-wing revolutionary movement, which attempted to build up councils in the way that Soviets, the German words, Russian words, Soviets, just another word for council.

So Russian-style Soviets, which, and there are a large number in the leadership of the Soviets in Munich in April 1919, were a considerable number of Jews, some of them of foreign origin. And Hitler was at that time in the barracks in Munich, and he was even elected to be a representative of the barracks. And therefore, in a way, he had to be then somebody on the left or seen to be on the left at that time to be elected as a council, as a representative of these barracks in this time. But immediately after the collapse of this, when it was destroyed by right-wing troops coming in

and pulling it down with great ferocity, Hitler then, within his own barracks then, becomes a figure who is like a turncoat, so he's now actually denouncing people in his barracks and elsewhere who then took part in this council's movements. And that's the key moment, I think, where Hitler then becomes converted. After that, then, in the army, then in the army still in the army he becomes then seen as somebody

who is can by September 1919 be writing a tract seen as a somehow as a specialist on the Jewish question where he can write a letter in answer to an inquiry to come in and saying that the future has to be built upon the removal or any nationalist nationalist government would aim to remove the Jews altogether. And in September 1919, he joins the infant German Workers' Party, which was called later the Nazi Party. And in that summer months of 1919, he's sent on to indoctrinate troops who are waiting for demobilisation. And he learns at that time, as he puts it in Mein Kampf, he learns that he could speak. That is to say that people were listening to his message

and they were enthused by it. And he came across then as an archetypal anti-Semitic firebrand, which was enthusing the troops who were already open to these messages in the barracks. So that's a peer which was absolutely crucial in the troops who were already open to these messages in the barracks. So that's a period which was absolutely crucial in Hitler's own personal development. And by September 1919, when he's joining the infant Nazi party, still in the army, he then is visibly then somebody who is prepared now to engage in right-wing, radical, extreme, racist politics. And we had a lot of questions about this sort of period and about this issue.

Because, I mean, you've famously called Hitler a non-person. And the first part of your biography shows so convincingly that Hitler, for the first 30 years of his life, he's a nobody. He is a pitiful figure, really. He's a loser. He's one of life's losers. And then he discovers, I mean, what you could call, if you were being trite, he discovers his superpower.

And we had tons of questions about this. So, for example, Andrew Kelman asks, you know, if he's so useless, what talents did he possess? And is it just speaking, rhetorical ability, or is there something more? Wherein lies his charisma, if you like you know wherein lies his charisma if you like wherein lies his charisma that's a big question but um in terms of his abilities um he in this period i'm just talking about now as he said it twice in mein kampf um i then i i realized i could

speak and for the first time people were listening him, which says something about the way in which German mentality as a general politics had shifted in the immediate post-war period. So before the First World War, these views were those of an extreme minority, which were not, would have been, Hitler would have made no mark at all then. People would have been seeing him. And he actually didn't have these views until the immediate period so what he had was he learned that he had this ability to reach an audience with his rhetoric it was he became then aware of his own demagogic talents

but these demagogic talents were real ones because he spoke from the heart. It wasn't contrived. He felt like this. He felt an intense anger and resentment and hatred of those people who he thought had done Germany down towards the end of the First World War. So that period towards the end of the First World War and into the revolution and through the revolution and out at the other side of it was the period that was really crucial for him because always whatever inbuilt hatreds he'd had of a personal kind before, then became turned into a sort of worldview, as he put it, an ideology.

And the focus upon Jews was the central point of this, but he was a German, extreme German nationalist. And what he was wanting to do then, in the Munich beer halls, was to pour out his bile on the politicians who he felt had sold Germany down the river. And this is the message that he got across. And the more he got the message across, the more it had a resonance within himself. So he saw himself then increasingly as a figure who could do this. But he called himself for some years in the early 1920s, the drummer, and was seen as the drummer up of support for the great leader who was going to come. And only from 1923, 24 onwards, did he come to see himself as that leader himself.

And once there, you're into the building up then of a sense of charisma. Charisma then is a manufactured product. It's not something that an individual has innately, but rather something that the people around him see in him. And that people were portraying this on Hitler and saying that he's Germany's Mussolini. That went to his head as well. So immediately following Mussolini's takeover in Italy in 1922, in the beer halls of Munich, people said, we've got our own Mussolini here. Those things to a character like Hitler, who was so aware of his own fanatical ideas already,

this went to his head too. So he started to see himself in this way and others saw him more and more in that way too. This process by which John the Baptist decides that, well, actually I'm Jesus. I'm going to be the Messiah. It does seem to align with the fact that his talent is for demagoguery, because we see it now with the process of radicalization, that the more you talk about something, and the more you get an audience, and the more the audience enthuse you, do you think? Do you think he becomes progressively, say, more anti-Semitic, more hostile to the people that he privately disliked through the process of articulating it and seeing people enthused by what he's saying to them?

I think it certainly reinforces the views that he had, but I think he had those views fairly consistently from 1919 right through to the end and that period of once hitler's sort of character that once he developed an idea a fixated idea he never moved away from it and those ideas were i think already fixed with him by the by 1919 or afterwards and then come to the reinforcement of those ideas through exactly what you're saying, through the appeal that he found, he could instill in other people through his harangues in the Munich beer halls and the rest of it.

So it's a two-way process there. But certainly the response he was getting in Munich shored up the feelings that he was right. One other thing that I'll just add to that, though, is that he wasn't just a demagogue. And he had very good tactical acumen, in particular for the weaknesses of his opponents. And he shows that already from the mid-1920s onwards. And increasingly, his time was thrown later on, of course, with foreign opponents as well. He's got a very sure notion of the weaknesses of his opponents and goes for the juggler role. And his astuteness in that is something that everybody underestimated right the way through. Just one obvious, I guess it's the huge question around, you know, Hitler had his ideas right from the beginning. Did he have the idea

of the final solution? When did he arrive at that? No. No. And just one word of caution on, he had these ideas from the very beginning. No, his ideas changed. So for example, although antisemitism was a central feature, hatred of Jews is a better term probably for it. Hatred of Jews was central to his thinking from, as I said, from 1919 onwards as an ideological explanation. It's a process itself, which doubtlessly was anti-Semitic to some extent already in Vienna. But the real key period was then the early 1920s when it becomes an ideology for him. But one other point, for example, the Lebensraum or the living space idea, that comes somewhat later. Also, the anti-Bolshevism isn't there initially. It's more anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism

linked to anti-capitalism at the beginning. It then changes. So by 1920, it's more anti-Bolshevism isn't there initially. It's more anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism linked to anti-capitalism at the beginning. It then changes. So by 1920, it's more anti-Bolshevism that's linked to that, anti-Marxism. And by 1924, when he's in prison, then the idea of living space becomes a crucial feature. And from between 1925 and 1928, speaks about about living space in every single speech practically so there's a development in Hitler's thinking but once they're there these ideas don't go away and that's the so there is development there when in case of the holocaust um his hatred of Jews is there from the beginning I mentioned before that in September 1919 in answer to a

question while he's in the army he responds that it must be the aim of any national government to remove the Jews altogether. What does that mean, removal of the Jews, though? It probably meant no more at the time, as many other people were speaking in the same sort of way, of getting the Jews, removing Jewish influence, first of all, in Germany, and removing Jews practically, maybe physically, altogether from Germany. It doesn't mean Auschwitz and gas chambers in extermination camps. Even Hitler wasn't thinking of that at that time. And that comes much later. So there's a long process of development, not just in the spread of anti-Semitism within Germany, but in anti-Semitic legislation.

From 1933, when Hitler comes into power, right down to 1941, the key moment when Germany invades the Soviet Union, when anti-Jewish policy now becomes a matter of, it's already become massively radicalized in Poland between 1939 and 41. And now it becomes an issue of removing the Jews, meaning now physically removing Jews. And the process is now set on the way of finding out how they can actually kill, exterminate the five or six million Jews that they've already calculated. And then, of course, the thinking was that after the war, it would go even further than that.

They would exterminate Jews elsewhere and many others besides Jews. So it's, again, a development, not an instantaneous thing that comes at an early stage. Just a question sort of biographically about Hitler and anti-Semitism. There's some disagreement about this, as far as I can make out. So some historians think that he was anti-Semitic early, very anti-Semitic before the First World War in Vienna, kind of getting it from Karl Luger and from the atmosphere of Vienna in what, you know, early 1900s, 1890s Vienna, and others think it developed, became more extreme later as a reaction to the First World War.

What's your view now of that? Well, the view hasn't changed, really, from the view that I expressed in the first volume of my biography, which is that Hitler was anti-Semitic in Vienna, probably not in Linz, where he lived before he moved to Vienna in 1908, but in Vienna. And it's almost impossible to imagine that this person of all people was living in such an anti-Semitic city as Vienna, one of the most anti-Semitic cities in Europe at the time. He was reading, as we know, anti-Semitic tracts in newspapers

and so on in Vienna. The two people that he singles out for admiration in Mein Kampf were both racial anti-Semites. Georg Schönerer, the leader of the Pan-German movement in Austria, and Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna. Both of them, Schönerer and Lueger, racial anti-Semites. Hitler admired them both. So my point there in the biography was that at this period,

Hitler was subjected to this. Almost certainly he was anti-Semitic in a general sense. But he had friends who were Jews at the time. He sold his pictures to Jewish dealers, people who were around him at the time, not that we have very good evidence from that period, but people around him at the time didn't notice his anti-Semitism, nor did they in the First World War. So it's fair to say that although Hitler was anti-Semitic at the time and racist, And one letter from the First World War in 1915 again says that this war will have served its purpose.

It will remove foreignness from our country and will remove the inner internationalism, destroy the inner internationalism. Now, he doesn't mention Jews specifically, but it's almost unthinkable that Jews were partly in his mind at any rate at this. But the key period then comes when these personal ideas about Jews or abstract notions about Jews or whatever,

they become then in the later period of the First World War almost certainly deepened as Germany then moves towards defeat and then the shock of defeat and revolution. And then comes the period I've been talking about in the early 19, in the early period, immediately after the First World War, from 1919 almost right down to 1923, when this becomes absolutely central and not just central, but becomes an ideology now, not just a personal animosity, but an ideology which helps to explain the world. So I think that's the process that we have to look at rather than a single moment and say,

was Hitler antisemitic in Vienna or was it later? It's a process where it moves through to the period, which is crucial then in the early 1920s. So we're in the 1920s. Obviously, we've still got quite a long way to go. We've recorded more than enough for one episode. So, I mean, Dominic, this was always going to happen, wasn't it? You know, we're discussing

the most important historical figure in recent history. We've barely scratched the surface. Yes, regular listeners will not be surprised to know that we have talked far too much. Anyway, so there's so much more to get into. We're barely, I mean, we're basically in the 1920s.

So what we're going to do, I think, is we're going to come back with Sir Ian on Thursday's podcast, talk about the Second World War, the question of madness, Hitler's suicide, and how Germany has reckoned with Hitler's legacy, the Nazi legacy, since 1945. So thank you for listening, and we will see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening