Hitler Reconsidered: A New Construct by Peter Longerich and His Contemporaries

Abstract

Hitler Reconsidered: A New Construct by Peter Longerich and His Contemporaries Paul Bookbinder Hitler: A Biography. By Peter Longerich. Trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 1344. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 978-0190056735. It is surprising that seventy-five years after his death there is still so much interest in Adolf Hitler. Historians are writing intensively researched books about him and political commentators are making comparisons with current Western leaders who are endorsing what is being labeled as “illiberal democracy.” In Germany, a new heavily annotated version of Mein Kampf is now available to the general public for the first time. Peter Longerich’s new biography of Hitler is a most significant addition to our understanding of Hitler both because of its comprehensive discussion of how Hitler achieved power, how he ruled, and his successes and failures and because Longerich, more than any other historian, sees Hitler as a brilliant practitioner of politics even more than as a charismatic leader. Longerich argues that Hitler understood how politics worked in an age of mass participation in national political life and could manipulate the forces that made for success in achieving and holding power. Longerich provides an armature of detail to build an understanding of Hitler’s path to power, his time as dictator, and his responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust. And he establishes a framework that students of the Nazi period can use to incorporate the work of such historians as Thomas Weber, who concentrates on the early part of Hitler’s rise to power; Johann Chapoutot, who describes his racial ideology and policies; and Stephen Fritz and Rolf-Dieter Müller, who study Hitler as a military leader. Longerich incorporates here many of the rich details amassed in his earlier exhaustive studies of the other major leaders of the Nazi movement to create a balanced and complete picture of Hitler and his unique role within the Nazi movement. While other impressive major biographies of Hitler have been around for some time, particularly Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography Hitler, Longerich’s work represents an updated attempt at a comprehensive reconsideration of the subject. In this essay, I concentrate on the major points that Longerich advances and compare his significant interpretations of almost all aspects of Hitler’s career, and particularly his role as a political leader, with the work of other historians who have recently written about similar issues. Taken together, Longerich’s book and these other recent works yield new ways of looking at this cataclysmic figure. [End Page 593] In the conclusion of his book, Longerich sums up the centrality of Hitler’s role in every aspect of the Nazi regime. He writes: It is beyond question that no single individual was responsible for the catastrophic outcome of the twelve years of dictatorship. Millions of committed Nazis had worked tirelessly for this regime; a huge army of willing helpers and opportunistic fellow travelers had given it unquestionable support; the elites had been only too glad to put their specialized knowledge and experience at its disposal; officers and soldiers had carried out their military tasks obediently and with great commitment; the majority of the population had followed their Führer devotedly and without protest. And yet these facts on their own are not adequate to explain what happened. There had to be a political figure who knew how to exploit the preconditions and forces designed to realize his aims and ambitions. At the heart of the Third Reich there was a determined dictator who shaped this process, focused all these energies on himself as an individual, and managed to acquire such extensive powers that he enjoyed unprecedented freedom of action. (949) Longerich claims, then, that “Hitler was actively involved in the most disparate areas of politics to a much greater extent than hitherto has been assumed” (949). It is particularly valuable to note that, in this argument, Longerich returns to Karl Bracher’s emphasis on Hitler’s political skills that the large numbers of historians who have focused on his charisma have often underestimated. “In this analysis,” Longerich explains, “we are following a ‘seizure of power’ in stages set out by...