The big black swastika beckoned, like a satanic siren willing me to it. I’ve had William Shirer’s epic “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” for some years, but by happenstance ran across the thick 1000+-page tome as I was leaving to visit an ailing brother in Florida.
I must’ve read and heard about Hitler, the Nazi’s, the Holocaust, WWI, the Versailles Treaty, Mein Kampf, WWII ,etc., etc., 3500 times*. Actually thought I knew most of the origins of how such an evil monstrosity as Hitler could come to power. Yet such is the improbable magnitude of Hitler’s rise, his spell on a nation, and the horrors that followed, that I can almost never get enough of reading about, trying to understand the real truth about, how this came to be.
So I lugged the thick book on the flights to Ft. Lauderdale and delved into it.
Mr. Shirer digs deep, to Hitler’s grandparents, to his upbringing with a domineering civil servant father who pooh poohed Hitler’s interest in art, his bohemian poverty in Vienna as a young teen, his failure to get into the Art Academy, living with the outcasts, reading, and filling his mind with the anti-Semitic lies (as well as books of all kind) that he would take for truth as the cause of the poverty, the division of the Germanic peoples-- his brethren of superior Aryan blood--with divine right to rule, and to rule with the Nietzschian iron fist, then his joining the German Army in WWI, his meritorious service until their surrender, which surrender Hitler, the industrial corporate and military elite ordered then falsely blamed on the “November Criminals,” the combination of the forward thinking political leaders who sought a new democratic German Republic, and who were back-stabbed by the military leaders, who wanted to run the show along with the old monarchy and industrial elite.
He then follows Hitler’s accidental arrival at the German Worker’s Party meeting where about 17 showed up, this the future Nazi party, which a shrewd, calculating and hard working Hitler would, over the next 10 years, forge into the beast it would become. He did it scientifically, learning from past failures, that any new political movement must get the approval of traditional power centers, like the military, the monarchy, the industrial elite, in order to get the masses to buy in. He learned from the failed Beer Hall Putsch, that force would not work, that he must succeed through the Constitutional way—the VOTE. He learned the psychology of controlling the masses, of propaganda, and he was tenacious in sticking with his vision.
While there were many twists and turns that would have prevented Hitler’s ascent, there are two that stick out:
1) His father, Alois, was an illegitimate child who for his first 39 years bore his mother’s name, SCHICKLGRUBER. While the probable father, Johann Hiedler (later changed to Hitler), married the mother 5 years after Alois was born, he never legitimized him. After the mother (Hitler’s grandmother, Anna) died Johann disappeared for 30 years. Then, at 84, he resurfaced to testify before a notary in the presence of three witnesses that he was the father of Alois Schicklgruber, probably to help him get a share of an uncle’s inheritance. The parish priest scratched out Alois Schicklgruber and put in Alois Hitler, the father who 13 years later sired Adolf…Hitler, not Schiklgruber.
We must understand, as Shirer says just how important this last minute name change was to history. “There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber. It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German… 'Heil Schicklgruber!’? It is a little difficult to imagine.”
2) The Great Depression. By the late 1920’s the new Democracy in Germany was finally starting to work. Inflation and the Versailles Treaty dictates were both easing, people started working, saving and living well. Then, the Great Depression hit and wiped it all out. Like everywhere else, but probably even worse in Germany because of its debts, the economy tanked. This alone provided the opportunity for Hitler and his Nazis to ply with propaganda upon a susceptible, suffering people their destiny to rule as a superior German race, and blame the current democratic republic, the Jews and internationalism (as opposed to strident German First and ONLY nationalism) as the scapegoats preventing their rise.
And I’m only 100 pages through.
*I actually worked this out: from the time I first heard of him, oh about 12 years old, then studied in earnest at 16-17, I figure I must have thought, read, mused, or analyzed this situation AT LEAST twice a week. I am now 51, 51-17=34, 34 X 52 x 2 = 3536. Is this manic on my part? May be, yet all that transpired is still so hard to believe…even harder that something equivalent could ever occur again—that it more than intrigues me, it re-awakens that old adage: humanity that does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
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