The Rest Is History - 64. Hitler, with Ian Kershaw - part 2

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

In the second part of our examination of Adolf Hitler, Sir Ian Kershaw joins Dominic Sandbrook to discuss the Nazi leader’s years leading up to and during the Second World War. 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. What Hitler did was advertise unoriginal ideas in an original way. He gave voice to phobias, prejudice and resentment as no one else could. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said than how he said it that counted. Welcome to The Rest Is History. We are with Sir Ian Kershaw talking about Hitler and this obviously is Hitler Part Two. So hello Tom, looking forward to a bit more Hitler? I'm always looking forward to a bit more Hitler

and not least because really in Part One, you know, there was so much we covered. There was so much fascinating stuff that Sir Ian was giving us. There were his powers of oratory, the root of his hatred of the Jewish people, actually even the nature of evil. So this isn't a podcast just about Hitler. This is a podcast about incredibly broad themes, the kind of themes that contemplating Hitler almost inevitably provokes. And we barely made it out of the 1920s. So if you missed that first episode, please do make sure you go back and find it before you listen to this one. Although hopefully you already know how the story is going to end. Yes. So we were talking last time about Hitler's rhetoric and his sort of superpower, as it were, if that's not too trite a way of putting it, being his demagoguery.

And I think that takes us back into our next question to Syrians. So, Tom, it wasn't just words, was it, that Hitler used to impose his will on the German people? No. The methods that Hitler employs and the Nazis around him are, I mean, well, they're described by his critics as criminal. They employ thuggery, violence, blackmail. Do you think that, does Hitler think of himself as being criminal? Is he conscious of this strain of criminality within him? Or is he wholly convinced of his own rectitude throughout? He's convinced of his own rectitude throughout? He's convinced of his own rectitude, that it's in a just cause.

He recognises, of course, that he's engaged in activities which are regarded as criminal. After all, he was sent to jail for a short period of time in 1922 for the thuggery of his supporters in a beer hall brawl and let out on promise of good behaviour, which of course he reneged on in 1923. So these things were seen as criminal at the time. It wasn't just that people were subsequently seen as criminal. But Hitler saw them, he saw the real criminals he always spoke about uh from the early 1920s always spoke about the november criminals these were the people in his view who brought

about the revolution of 1918 and the destruction of of the german nation and he saws uh central to that that a bunch of so-called november criminals jew Jews. So for Hitler, action which was served at attacking the real criminals, as he saw it, was a matter of rectitude, of political rectitude. And so after the failed putsch attempt in 1923, he took pride in standing before the court where he was arraigned of high treason and was responsible for it because this was actually defending Germany supporting Germany upholding German interests against the real criminals of these November criminals so he saw himself as serving

a purpose of rectitude throughout including of course later on as well so there wasn't a question in Hitler's mind that he was doing something that was wrong or evil. He was doing something in his own mind that was right. And Hitler's, throughout this period, the Nazis, as Tom says, there's a lot of thuggery, there were the stormtroopers and stuff. Violence is part of their ethos throughout this whole period. Is that, do you think, for Hitler, is that a product of the First World War?

Has he been desensitized to violence by his experience in the trenches? Because he's not a violent man before 1914 and not someone who particularly, as far as I'm aware, talks about violence or revels in violence. So do you think that's part of this sort of wider story or is there any psychological reason why he particularly could be so inured to the costs of violence? Violence was not just confined to Germany, of course, in the period immediately following the First World War. a level of brutalisation or insensitivity to violence is something that historians have utilised as an explanation for the behaviour of people drawn to fascist movements in different countries in the immediate period after the First World War. And certainly the First World War, the violence of the First World War

helped to inculcate a readiness in many people then to accept violence, which had not been part of anything to anything like this extent of society in most parts of Europe. Some parts that were very violent before the First World War, but in Western Europe, certainly the levels of violence were new. And Hitler was part of this general trend. So it's not a matter of just for Hitler personally, but for many other people too. We see that now there's a readiness to accept the correctness, to use Tom's point previously, of violence to bring about political aims in a way that hadn't been

there before and Hitler is part of that trend in the early 1920s. And the ability to use violence, the ability to menace people, you know you've talked about this is his great talent, his ability to sniff out weakness and to strike when opportunity presents. The converse of that, I guess, is also that it might have gone wrong, that circumstances might have worked out very differently. And how close does Hitler come to failing completely? Quite close, in particular with the putsch, of course, in November 1923. And when he was on trial um in april 1924 he was sentenced to a very lenient few months in jail and then even let out early although he shouldn't have been given his previous offense he should have been kept in there but um that was the point where he

it comes closest to failure probably and where he um uh it could have it could have been expelled from germany even he wasn't a german citizen at the time he was still an austrian um uh he uh that was a point where he had actually failed and yet the leniency of bavarian justice let him off the hook and allowed him then to rebuild his own party after he came out of prematurely let out of jail. And as I said before, while he was in prison, he was very, very comfortable in prison. He had lots of visitors. He was, his own image was built up while he was in there.

So that was a big moment of near failure. There were others as well, just point to one, the end of 1932, where on the verge of him becoming Chancellor of Germany, he, with the Nazi Party, divided and in a mess. The second most important leader of the Nazi Party, Gregor Strasser, wanted then to go into government as the vice chancellor of a nationalist government, and Hitler refused point blank.

It was a moment there where the party could potentially have fallen apart, but Hitler did, as he did so often, he appealed to the loyalty of those around him, they rallied to him, they turned on Strasser, and eventually Hitler was still left there as leader of a party. And a few weeks later, he was made Chancellor of Germany. But that was another moment where potentially things could have gone very wrong. And then, as you say, just a few weeks later, he becomes Chancellor of Germany. He's famously, you know, manoeuvred into office by the sort of internal machinations of the kind of nationalists and the right and stuff, the conservatives around Hindenburg, who think they're using this Austrian corporal and then

they'll discard him. And then he accumulates more and more power. And yet, I remember reading your biography 20 years ago and being so struck by what was to me a revelation because I didn't know much about it, how useless Hitler was as a kind of administrator, as the head of a government. You know, he's lazy, he gets up late, he gives the impression of somebody you can't trust to do his paperwork, all this kind of stuff. And I guess the question is, I mean,

you have a concept in your book of people kind of working towards the Fuhrer, of people imagining what Hitler wants and imagining kind of some radical idea and trying to deliver it. But was there a point, were there moments where people high up in the Nazi high command or in the administrative machine where they thought, you know, the Fuhrer is a bit of a dead loss. He is, you know, sleeping in all morning and, you know, he's a bit weird and this sort of...

Or did that just never seem to dawn on them at all? Well, I don't think if it dawned on them, they were very careful to keep quiet about it, I think. But you have to remember, of course, this was a very sophisticated modern state with a top civil service who could carry out things, who could anticipate actions in certain ways. They didn't just wait for directives to come down from Hitler, but they were preparing things. So they were, he laid down guidelines. You couldn't actually do something which went against, directly against those guys. You couldn't come along in 1937 or 38 and say, well, basically, I think Jews are a good thing and why don't we actually promote that?

I mean, these were things that were unthinkable. So as long as you had to follow the guidelines, there was a lot of room and scope for imaginative development there on the part of civil servants and many others, and military too. Hitler was doing things that the vast majority of military leaders actually wanted. So of course, some of them had cold feet about a war against the Western powers. But in general terms, what Hitler was doing was building up the armed forces and so on. So not until things went wrong later in the war, then there was no great antagonism there either. And so in all this, you have a leadership

which is representing things that many parts of that regime actually want and go along with. It wasn't actually, so the fact that he wasn't a bureaucratically efficient didn't really make much of a difference for most of the time. And of course, in the key decisions on foreign policy, and then when it came down to it on anti-Semitism and so on, Hitler did make these decisions. So there wasn't a notion that he was actually just feeble and not interested in things. He would take interest in it and act when it was necessary. And otherwise, things ticked along in the way that he wanted them to go. So what are the qualities that he brings to his chancellorship that enable him to become a success? A lot of it was this setting the tone, setting the directives, and then letting

the forces then mobilize themselves. So it didn't actually micromanage, but rather unleashed forces, which were already in many ways pent up there. There was pent up economic demand following the Great Depression, for example. He set the motor industry going. It didn't need to do any more then. You've got people in the motor industry who are only too anxious then to build it up. You've got the military going. So he unleashed a lot of forces from within that were very happy to move in the direction that

he wanted them to go in. And then, of course, he had a whole series of successes, seen from the point of view of most Germans at the time, successes in the economy was already going to rebound from the Great Depression anyway, but he was fortunate enough to be on the, at the time, the timing of that meant that he presided over that rebuilding. And everybody noticed how well things were going economically after this, that the rebuilding was taking place. There was a lot of activity. In terms of foreign policy, a number of big successes then already in the early 1930s, and you had the Western leaders coming to his door and taking notes of him.

Germany was back on the scene. And then from 1936, a succession of major foreign policy successes, German militarisation was again a major factor in this. So Hitler seemed to be very successful. And as long as he was successful, people were prepared to grant him more or less what he wanted. So he didn't need to do more than, I say, it sounds a bit puny when I put it that way, because of course, decisions like the Rhineland and so on, they were big political decisions.

But Hitler set the tone, set the directives, and then freed up these resources and unleashed the pent-up resources, which were all ready to go, and which then acted in the ways that were moving along in the direction that Hitler himself wanted. And this may sound an odd question because it runs counter to our knowledge of how history actually worked out. But is there a world in which the Nazi dictatorship could have become stable and could have become sort of, as it were, de-radicalized. So, you know, people love to do these sort of man-in-the-high-castle type fantasies of a world in which the Nazis win the Second World War. What does a Nazi Europe look like in the 1950s or 1960s?

Is that world imaginable? Is a world in which Adolf Hitler leads a German government that has just become sort of almost, I mean, this would sound an extraordinary thing to say, but almost a kind of small C conservative, steady as she goes government? Or was there an inbuilt ratchet always towards greater radicalisation, towards, you know, ever more sort of eye catching coups and gambles and so on? In the Nazism that we actually know, down to 1945, there was no stopping the aim of radicalisation. And after all, in genocidal politics, it didn't stop with the Holocaust at all. But the SS were working out plans in 1942, or as they called the General Plan for the East, which anticipated the removal, i.e. killing, of around 30 million people over about the next 25 years.

And this demanded an extension and control of wide swathes of German territory. Now, that depended obviously upon German military victory. That military victory, that total military victory, is difficult for us really to conceive of, I think, because it meant, which you could say 1942 was a pivotal year when things were looking good for Germany, bad for other countries. And yet in 1942, you already see Germany's overextending itself in the attempt to gain the oil of the Caucasus and so on. And we already know that the Americans are building up an enormous force, much bigger than the one that actually took part in D-Day and so on, to tackle Germany eventually. So the notion of a final German victory,

which would need to establish it, where there would be a leader after Hitler who would turn this into a steady and stable form of established government, is to me more or less unthinkable. So I can't see that that is, apart from the realms of fantasy and novelism, so I can't see that that is, apart from the realms of fantasy and novelism, so I can't see that's really was ever a realisable prospect.

And just to follow up on that, and there's no scenario in which there would not have been a major European war at the end of the 1930s or sometime later in the 1940s. So there's no scenario in which Hitler would have accepted

a more modest expansion of Germany's borders, you know, the Sudetenland or whatever, and then sort of settling down as a normal European state. That was because that didn't feature in his ideologies. Is that right? That's absolutely right. For Hitler, I think the Second World War was the unfinished business of the first. Another war had to undo the history of the first. It was apocalyptic in a sense. It had to destroy the enemies of Germany. And they weren't confined to one particular part of the globe either. They were international. They were all over. And so that war could never be limited and settled down into

just, of course, the mistake that people like Chamberlain made and thought that Hitler was actually an extreme nationalist, but nothing more. It was something more. And this was, for him and for other parts of the Nazi leadership as well, this was something that was far more than just a matter of adjusting Germany's borders. And so it could never have settled down. War was inevitable at some point, and would probably have come about under any nationalist leader, not just Hitler, but it would have been a different sort of war almost certainly. And presumably then his success fuels his ambition for more success and broadens his horizons and the scope of what he thinks he's capable of doing. And that's then what feeds into his plans for the East, and I guess specifically

for Jews, but for many other of the people that he's conquered as well. So essentially, there is no way that the process of conquest will not fuel ever more grandiose, ever more horrific ambition. Yes, I think that's absolutely correct. And also this Hitler is not just a free agent in all this, but other countries are also acting. And by 1941, he's achieved the extraordinary triumph of the defeat of France within a matter of a few weeks. And then what does he do? He immediately turns to preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union the following year. Now, this is a visionary thing for Hitler. Of course, it's ideological. But it also has strategic purpose for it because he's unable to get Britain out of here.

What will happen if Americans come into the war? So he has to attack the Soviet Union in his own thinking then as soon as possible so the ideological and the strategic come together in that. And Joe I mean by that point you know Hitler's involved in in World War II it's become a commonplace at this point in the West that he's mad so you hear it again and again Churchill and British newspapers will say Hitler is a madman and he's surrounded by criminals. It is an interesting question, isn't it, particularly as the war reaches its later stages. Is Hitler mad or is that merely a convenient sort of get out to escape the more difficult questions about Hitler's politics? As you've put it, it's a convenient get out.

The question of madness is, you could say by maybe at the very end there in the last weeks of the war he was living on a diet of pet pills and medicines of one sort or another and then uh under the under that strain you could speak about some mental imbalance to put it mildly but uh for the most part then then, in the earlier period, there was no madness there. And it's an apologia, again. I mean, if Hitler was mad, what does it say about all the people who followed him all the time, you know, at different levels of this?

So it's not a good argument at all. And there was actually strategic sense in what he was doing, even if it was built upon this enormous gamble for world power. And even the thing that's always pointed out, the ultimate moment of madness, which is then the declaration of war on the USA in December 1941. There was a strategic aim, but it was a move of desperation, it's true, was a strategic aim in that, which was to move the war to the Pacific and to allow German U-boats to cut off the supply of materials from America to Britain. So even that move, however desperate it was, had some strategic element to it. It wasn't the move of a madman. And as I say, I think the notion that Hitler was mad is simply a way of avoiding any real analysis of the reasons why Germany got into that plight in the first place.

Tom, that's such an interesting point, isn't it? Because we've talked about Nero a couple of podcasts ago. And he's another character from history that people always say, oh, he was mad, like Caligula, or like any of these sort of Roman figures. So that must be quite resonant with you, that stuff about insanity and evil and used as a sort of pejorative. Well, I think that saying someone is mad, because it explains everything, explains nothing. Yeah. So absolutely, you know, you can say Germany went mad,

but. But even that doesn't. Yeah. It's inadequate, isn't it? Which is why we need great historians to, to go beyond that. I'll tell you what it reminds me of.

Actually, we talked a little bit before about Stalin in an earlier podcast. So Stalin wasn't mad. Stalin was very clever and Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. And he was ideologically driven as Hitler was. And I think that comparison is, I mean, it's obviously been made a billion times. So I've just said, just descended into historical banality as ever. Anyway, so we're going to come back after, I think we should come back after the break on that Monday note

and we will talk about the downfall. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. about the downfall. Hello there, Al Murray here. For live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello there, Al Murray here. I'd just like a moment of your time to make an appeal to you on behalf of the charity DKMS. I thought because you're fans of history, you might like to make some in your own personal way. DKMS run a blood stem cell donor service to help people with blood cancer. A blood stem cell donation can save someone's life or it can buy them and their family precious time. I found out about DKMS because my nephew is very ill with a childhood leukaemia,

a bitterly cruel disease. The only known cure is a blood stem cell donation. Thanks to three donors, he is still with us. What DKMS do is very simple, yet quietly amazing. They can make you into a lifesaver in waiting. Here's how. Go to their website www.dkms.org.uk and find out if you are eligible to donate blood stem cells. Register on their database and they will send you a swab pack. A year and a half ago when I first started campaigning for DKMS I had to explain what the swab pack was. Since Covid-19 perhaps you're all a little more familiar with it. You swab your cheeks, pop the swabs in an envelope and return them to DKMS. Then, if and when you are found to be a genetic match for someone who needs your blood stem cells, it's like a fingerprint, only more so, they will get in touch. Your blood stem cells could go

anywhere in the world. You could help someone like Finlay, wherever they are. Since the pandemic, registration has fallen, and it would be great if between us, we could do something about it. Go to dkms.org.uk to see if you are eligible to donate blood stem cells. Thanks very much. welcome back to the rest is history and we are talking adolf hitler with sir ian kershaw and we've reached the later stages of the second world war things are not going well for germany um and i wonder sir ian um when do you think think Hitler realised that the game was up? I think by after Stalingrad and the retreat from the Caucasus and the defeat in North Africa, by 1943, the bombs are then hailing down on, raining down on German cities. I think by that time, he realizes that the war cannot be won in the way that he'd anticipated.

But the war not being won is different from the war being lost. And I think it was very late in the day when he accepted that the war was finally lost, that even as late as December 1944 with the Ardennes Offensive, what the Americans call the Battle of the Bulge. There was a last, of course, it proved out to be a vain attempt then to turn the tide. So I think there was a notion that at some point then,

the West will intervene because it's obvious that you've got a very unholy alliance between the West, Western capitalism and Soviet communism. The West will intervene, see sense and come to some sort of deal. Some even talked about the Soviets doing that. But I don't think that was ever a starter for Hitler. But the notion that the West would intervene, I think was something which stayed with him for a while. And then also the idea that the Germans will get wonder weapons, which will then turn the tide, atomic bombs even. All these were, I'm sorry, didn't accept until very late on that the war was now irredeemably lost. And when it was, then it was lost completely. And then, of course, he was ready to take down the German people,

the German state itself with him and said, we might go down, but we'll take down the world with us. Because that's what I find most amazing, in a way, about the last days, the last months, the last years of Hitler, is that I know that there that the assassination attempt against him, but even as the Russian forces are moving in on Berlin, even as it's evident that everything is falling to pieces, he's not abandoned. The magnetism holds. He is able to remain the Fuhrer. I mean, it just seems astonishing to me. Well, he is abandoned by increasing numbers of

people amongst the population, but also by increasing numbers of the leaders who are looking to find their own way out. So by the end, he's got a coterie of people around him, of course, in the bunker. And some of these are very powerful and important people. But, of course, then in the end, he dismisses Goering, the second man in the Reich, from his offices in the final days in the bunker. It is things are then falling apart in monster leadership. But what you've got to remember, it's not just Hitler personally, but he has got there still until these very last days. And people like Goebbels in charge of the propaganda operation,

Bormann in charge of the party and all its repressive apparatus, Schwerer in charge of the armaments and building programme. And these are crucial figures who helped to prop up the regime right then, not least Himmler, in charge of all the police apparatus. So this is a dictatorship that has still got great strength. And the military leaders are this time, they are, having seen the failed putsch, they're wringing their hands in desperation,

but they still see no way other than actually trying to follow up Hitler's orders, because what alternative do they have then? There is no way of bringing him down except through a putsch and that's failed already in July 1944. So they are condemned then really to undergo the complete destruction of Germany and go down with Hitler in a sense. But at the very end, most of the German leadership is looking for an escape in one way or another some of them by suicide but more more of them by trying to get out of it and giving themselves up to the west and then one question that's always fascinated me is you know Hitler

dies the third right collapses and Germany goes through this this you know sort of dreadful period of apocalyptic period really the year zero kind of of sense at the end of the Second World War. And what do all these people think who have voted for Hitler, who've been members of the Hitler Youth, who have had Hitler's picture on the wall, who have written him fan letters? I mean, we're talking about colossal numbers of people. Of course, they've seen their world collapse around them.

But when you get into, I don't know, the early 50s or the mid 50s or something. So West Germany is being rebuilt from the ruins. Do they all think then that everything was Hitler's fault and he was actually a madman and a monster and, you know, they were duped? Or do some of them still deep down think, you know, the Fuhrer was right and it was a shame that it ended as it did. You know, I mean, I'm fascinated by that issue of kind of denazification because people don't tend to ditch everything they believe in overnight, do they? No.

And denazification was, of course, a large measure of failure. And when it was handed over to the Germans themselves to do it, it became nothing more than a farce, really. So many people did, of course, hold on to the news, but they were more quiet about expressing them now. If you look at opinion surveys, then it's remarkable in a way that already still in the early 1950s, a percentage of people,

it's a declining percentage, but still 10% or thereabouts still think that Hitler was a good leader for Germany and he just made a couple of mistakes. One was the war and the other was the treatment of the Jews. Minor mistakes, you might say. But so people were, and many people still thought that the actions of the people who tried to kill Hitler in July 1944 were wrong. So there were residual levels of support for Nazism at the time, and about half the population when they were asked was Nazism a good thing, a bad thing,

or a good thing badly carried out, they largely said it was a good thing that was badly carried out. So prepare to blame Hitler and his other leaders too for leading them in the wrong direction. But in general terms, there was a lot of support still for the sense that not everything had been wrong that Hitler and the Nazis had tried to do. We have to say, of course, by the time you're into that,

and maybe two other points very briefly. One is that the Adenauer government in the 1950s was doing what it could to help the collective amnesia of this period and to build up Germany by not making a big deal about the past and try to get away from the past and move forwards. And the second thing was that you had also the fact that Adenauer's policies were becoming popular,

the economic miracle was taking place. And so most Germans were not intent on support, on thinking about what had gone on under Hitler. And now, by this time, was regarded as the greatest leader since Bismarck, and Hitler had faded into a residue of a very small percentage of people who would never really change their views. And slowly, I guess, or is it slowly, Hitler's reputation becomes that of the satanic figure that we talked about right at the top of the program. Is it the case that that is a process? Because another strand in Hitler's, the way that Hitler is understood, certainly beyond Germany, is that he's a ludicrous figure, that he's a comic figure with his moustache and his gesticulations and his single testicle. In fact, did Hitler only have one ball? That's, I guess, maybe the key question of the... Another legend. Another legend. No, the medical report suggests it was perfectly normal in that capacity.

Yeah, but was it a process? Yeah, well, the Charlie Chaplin caricature, of course, had a big impact in foreign countries and people caricaturing Hitler. You could never in Germany see Hitler as a figure of thumb. Not until very recently, anyway. He was far too malign an individual for that. But there was a sense, I mean, also linking on with what Dominic was asking a few moments ago, there was a sense in the immediate

post-war period that Hitler became a sort of alibi for a nation, that you could blame Hitler and his the Nazi leaders for what had gone wrong and not turn too closely to investigate what ordinary people had done in all sorts of walks of life to make this regime function and that was a lengthy process by which people turned their attention away from Hitler to looking at German society itself and seeing why this worked in the way that it did and why Hitler was able to have the impact that he did within Germany. And from the 1960s onwards,

there was a turn away from, in German historiography, away from the notion that this was Hitler and the Nazis, Nazi leaders who had done this, to looking more widely at various structures of German society which had made this possible. But it was only really in the 1980s that the attention moved in a big way towards looking at the German society more generally. So German social history of the Third Reich was very slow to develop. And

when I went to Germany, I started working on this in the 1970s, I was in at the infancy of this, I was quite astonished that I was, that how little had been done on the grassroots of Germany at time, but that made big strides forward in the 1980s. And then the next step was that Hitler was reinserted into this picture. So instead of being now either structures of German society or a fixation on Hitler, it became linking Hitler into the structures of German society that have made this possible. I think that's a process that really would have arrived at by the time we got into the 1990s. And then what about this idea of Hitler, the way that Hitler has become this sort of embodiment of evil?

Because that's now the norm, isn't it? I mean, as Tom said right at the beginning of the recording, there's this sort of sense now that Hitler is the enduring benchmark. You know, if you don't like Donald Trump, you compare him with Hitler. If somebody says an opinion you disagree with hitler is the comparison that you kind of dust down do you sort of as a as as the well you know certainly the leading english-speaking expert on on um hitler do you do you wince when you see all this or do you think it has a value as a kind of cautionary tale as a kind of

political tool turning more towards the former i think i win slightly not because i um have any um truck with anything that hitler ever stood for of course i don't it's absolutely uh the abhorrent an abomination uh but it's it's a very easy device, isn't it, to attack someone with, to link them with Hitler and so on. And in a way, it reminds me, two or three decades ago, anybody whose ideas you disagreed with was called a fascist and so on. And so fascism was then just a catch-all for some political line that was disagreeable. Now Hitler, association with Hitler is a shortcut for some moral despicability on somebody's part. And the moral despicability needs to be assessed in its own right,

not by just turning to blame Hitler for all this. And so it's a very easy resort. And Hitler was absolutely a terrible figure. Perhaps the dominant, in terms of his impact, you could argue that he's the most significant figure in the first half of the 20th century. But there were others as well, of course. And you don't need to stop at Hitler to look for malign figures.

And not just Stalin either, but many others, Mao Zedong too and many of them. So it's because we've concentrated so much on Germany and Germany is fairly close to us and it's a society we understand and we have a lot of dealings with. We focus much more on that. And we were actually involved in a war against this country not that long ago. And the Second World War has become the central point of British post-war mythology, I think. So in all these ways, Hitler has become then the central figure of political evil. And it's a very easy move then to use that to associate Hitler with anybody else who's used repulsive views or whatever we disagree now and want to highlight. Turning that on its head, we have a question from Peter Evans, who asks, so many figures from the past who committed atrocious acts of mass murder

and genocide, and he cites Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, seem eventually to be rehabilitated, their crimes excused or forgotten. Will that happen to Hitler in, say, 200 years or 500 years? We won't be around to see what happens in 200 or 500 years, so I don't know the answer to that question. But I could imagine that, just for the sake of argument, I could imagine in 1,000 years that Hitler will be one figure whose absolutely horrific acts are then relativised. As you mentioned Genghis Khan, I think, a little while ago,

and one Swiss writer, Burkhardt, a cultural historian, actually writing about historical greatness, singled out Genghis Khan as a great leader. We think of him now in terms of the horrors that he perpetrated. But it's very much how we look on these characters morally. And I don't think many people today are very preoccupied by the morality of Genghis Khan. But Hitler is very close to our time, so we are preoccupied with him.

How it will be in 500 or 1,000 years, I don't know. But I could imagine that there'll be other monsters that come along in the meanwhile, and we're more preoccupied with them than we are with Hitler. Yeah, so Hitler's sort of status, he won't, I mean, Tom and I have talked before in this podcast, we've been talking about morality and history, the way in which the Nazis have become this sort of moral benchmark.

But you don't think that will endure. I mean, so that will have a shelf life as the Second World War recedes into history, do you think? And we will develop new kind of quasi-religious figures to judge politicians against. I think for the absolutely foreseeable future, we will continue to see that as the benchmark of political evil, and quite rightly so. But how that will materialise over a lengthy period of time is impossible for us to say. And I can just imagine at any rate that that will be relativised then.

Practically everything in history is relativised. I mean, when you think of the legacy of political leaders, however great those leaders have been seen in their own time, the legacy tends to fade. And maybe it's only a small number of religious leaders whose legacy has been impermeable over the centuries. So I think there probably will be some way in which that is no longer the sole or the leading benchmark of evil. But I think that sort of speculative question is one that historians can't really answer and nor can anybody else for that matter. I think leaving the episode on a question

that historians, even you, Sir Ian, cannot answer is perhaps the best note to end this absolute tour de force. I can't thank you enough. And Les Dominic, you have any final questions? I think we should. Sirian has performed manfully and I think he probably has long overdue for arrest.

It's been very enjoyable talking to you both anyway. And thank you very much for the questions and for the people who sent the questions in. Yeah, some fantastic questions this week and even better answers, of course. Tom, it's such an interesting subject, isn't it? I mean, it seems so familiar because Hitler is sort of so deeply embedded in the contemporary imagination. And I mean, we've talked so much about this idea of Hitler as the devil, you know, which we're all so familiar with.

Well, I mean, you in your book on Christianity, I mean, this is your first chance to plug Christianity. Two whole episodes of that. Thank you, Dominic. Yeah, you'll have to forgive him, Sir Ian. Sorry about this. But you sort of tee up Hitler, don't you, as the ultimate anti-Christian figure. And do you think he'll be with us in that respect? So what these two episodes have been about is a great historian, kind of paint stripping myth to show us the reality, to show us the man. But I think that the myth has become a crucially significant fact of history in itself. So the myths that people believe of Hitler, the sense they have of him as the essence of evil, in a sense, he's become a theological figure i think

so i think he's replaced the devil in our imaginings and i've said you know auschwitz is hell um the horrors that the nazis and ultimately hitler brought about you know that that that in the imaginings of people has replaced the kind of Christian mythology and it's become a new mythology. And so in a sense, the relationship of Hitler to the horrors that he unleashed prompts all kinds of theological questions about responsibility, about the nature of evil, about our potential for evil. Is there a Hitler within us? Is there a Hitler constantly waiting us is there a hitler constantly waiting within our societies to take over i think these are ultimately theological rather than political anxieties yeah i mean i think that's a good note on which to end actually the idea

you know hitler is not somebody outside ourselves who is the incarnation of evil i mean he's actually in us um very sort of william golding ish uh point he is golem he's actually in us. Very sort of William Golding-ish point. He is Gollum. We're all got potential. Anyway, that's very... Once again, I've managed to dumb it down right at the end, which is kind of what I think... Well done, Dominic. It's what listeners kind of expect, isn't it? Anyway, Sir Ian, thank you so much

for coming on the podcast. It's been fantastic to have you, and we will be back next week. Goodbye. Bye. Goodbye. our view and uh we will be back next week goodbye bye goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening and access to our chat community please sign up up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.