Post #171: Brother Hitler?

30 Jan. 2025

     It was Thomas Mann’s idea, not mine, to call Hitler brother. Writing in early 1939 (and publishing his essay in Esquire!), when Hitler’s criminal nature had already revealed itself clearly enough but much worse was yet to come, Mann diagnosed in him the features of a mortifying, yet indisputable kinship: “A brother, then—an unpleasant and embarrassing sibling that gets on your nerves and makes you ashamed of the connection. Even so I do not wish to close my eyes to the semblance, because there is more sincerity and good cheer in such a recognition than in loathing; it is more productive, even if it means getting closer to what deserves our hatred.”*

     Mann was thinking mostly of the artistic side to Hitler’s temperament: “Mortifying as it is, the components are all there: how ‘difficult’ he was in his youth, how lazy, how pathetic, how impossible to place; the element of ‘what is you want, then?’; the senseless vegetating in the most debased bohemianism; the prideful rejection, as unworthy of his genius, of any reasonable or respectable activity—and on what basis? Only because he felt, vaguely, that he was meant for something as yet unnamable at which people might laugh if they heard it said out loud.” We may experience a similarly awkward moment of unwelcome recognition, today, when we are reminded that Hitler was a strict vegetarian, a teetotaler, a militant anti-smoker; a late-developing autodidact and eclectic reader; an odd but highly self-conscious dresser; esoterically inclined and conspiracy-minded; egocentric and attention-hungry; socially awkward and shy around women, though equally overbearing when he got the chance; prone to all manner of anxieties and depressions, and an extreme hypochondriac to boot.

     From its vantage point in the late 1930s, at least, Mann’s sketch (“a degraded caricature of the great man”) may have been fitting enough, and it certainly did not have anything to do with making apologies: “It amounts almost to an act of moral self-flagellation to admit even the bare facts of the matter, and this all the more so since, as one is forcing oneself, one must fear yielding too much before immorality, by not responding with the requisite hatred that is demanded of anyone who cares about the ethical fate of our times. Hatred indeed—and I do not find myself falling short there. I heartily wish for this public phenomenon to perish in utter disgrace, sooner than I dare hope. Nonetheless I do not feel that it is my finest hour when I hate this pitiable, catastrophic wretch: a fellow filled to the brim with the resentments and festering vengefulness of an utter reject and misfit, a miserable good-for-nothing, a failure ten times over; a man too lazy for any kind of purposeful work, a permanent loafer, the wannabe artist of the neighborhood—someone who never bothered with acquiring any serious skill or learning, and who out of sheer haughtiness did not even wish to do so; who could, even physically or mechanically, do none of the things other men can, be it to ride a horse, drive a car, fly a plane, or father a child—nothing at all but an unspeakably inferior, histrionic, and almost comical rhetorical gift that allowed him to agitate and aggravate the deep wounds of his people at the time…”**

     It would be inadequate, granted, to reduce Hitler to the dimensions of his modest beginnings, to his failures, or to a caricatured account of the more ludicrous aspects of his performances. He generated and channeled an enormous energy and developed much shrewdness that was too often underestimated, to everyone’s great detriment, by others who thought themselves his evident superiors. Still Mann’s portrait stands in large part: the point is not to belittle Hitler but to stress how much of his forward momentum, once it came, he derived from overcompensations, on a staggering scale, of various inferiorities that he must have felt very sharply, even though he rarely if ever admitted to them.

     Not that it was any crying hardship that shaped Hitler’s youth, although he later liked to pretend that he had risen from conditions of particular deprivation. His father had earned respectability enough to leave his son room for more than a touch of snobbery, and means sufficient for him to shirk any serious or sustained work. Hitler sank so low in the world of Vienna flop-houses, much lower than where he had started out, because he had such contempt for the petty aspirations and responsibilities that had lifted his father out of social marginality. He sneered at “working for bread,” and the revenue office that had been his father’s pride, to him appeared nothing more than “a cage full of monkeys crowded together.”*** For his own part, Hitler foundered for so many years not because he faced any great barriers, but because he would not work except on his own prideful, non-negotiable terms, whether at school, at painting, or at anything else, even party leadership.)

     Knowing better than Thomas Mann the full range of Hitler’s mental pathologies—the yawning abyss of his manias, his half-abandoned half-calculated rages, and his obsessive hatreds—and what they meant not only for those whom he always sought to destroy, but also for those whom he professed to love but destroyed anyway in the end—knowing all this and in view of so many millions of victims, can we still say what Mann did? Can any sense of kinship survive the surveying of such grotesque and cataclysmic aberrations, personal no less that political? Or was Hitler indeed so beastly, so utterly beyond the pale, that we must disavow him entirely?

     Much depends on what we take compassion to be about. Surely it cannot mean, in so devastating a case as this, that we could sympathize with that which has become monstrous through a succession of choices and circumstances in someone’s life. Yet we may still find room, despite everything that pushes us towards revulsion and nothing else, for recognizing that the freedom to go so desperately wrong is as deeply human as the freedom to do the right thing. Even where the results look culpable in the extreme, nay morally catastrophic, they are still not expressions of primal evil so much as of ignorance in the deepest sense—or so those of us would say who have come to accept Plato’s and the Buddha’s view of the matter. Behind even the most terrible turns of the human mind stands not incorrigible malignity, but the progressive corruption, one bad step at a time, of our moral faculties by mistaken ideas of the good. It is this terrible moral-mental confusion with its intolerable consequences, for the confused themselves no less than their victims, that remains a fit object of our compassion, despite everything that might pull us the other way and tempt us to return only hatred for hatred.

     Towards the end of his life, when Hitler had become a shuffling, drooling wraith [Fest 945, 1025], the masks dropped off entirely, revealing in all its naked horror the full extent of Hitler’s loathing and his utter disregard for anything above and beyond himself, except perhaps grandiose phrases and choreographies of power. In earlier days, when he had already sent so many millions to their deaths, by the wars he unleashed or by the campaigns of extermination he initiated, perhaps one might still have mistaken him for a particularly ruthless champion of his people, one who would stop at nothing for their sake. But it was never the Germans he cared about, at bottom, but his plans for them, his dream-nightmares of unending conflagrations that he meant to fuel with their blood as surely as with all the other human materials to which his egomania felt entitled as a matter of course. In the end, when his once-favorite toy lay broken before him, blunted and bleeding, he threw it away as callously as everything else he had used, discarded, and trampled on along the way. When the Great Hall of Germania that he had been constructing in his mind (as the concrete heart of his empire) did not materialize, he did not scruple in the least to bring the roof down any way he could. If his vision for Germany must perish, he proclaimed, then “we will in going under drag half the world down with us” [Fest 1021–22].

     Should triumph and world dominion prove to be beyond the powers of his chosen people in those insane wars of mutual extermination that to Hitler’s disordered intellect appeared the normal and natural state of things, then the Germans themselves did not deserve to outlast their defeat. The good ones had already fallen in the fight, and the rest did not matter, he announced in March 1945 to a horrified Albert Speer, who was desperately trying to hold things together (and who had helped with the designs for Hitler’s Great Hall, quite literally). It was not necessary, the “Führer” concluded in his characteristic fashion, to spare even the barest essentials necessary for the continued survival of a people that he had once professed to love above everything.

     Thus it was that Hitler issued the so-called “Nero Decrees,” ordering such troops as were still blindly committed enough to carry out his commands to the last, mostly SS units, to blow everything up without mercy [Fest 1029–32].† Speer’s shock was to his credit, but he should not have been so surprised: only a few months earlier, when the German defenses on all sides were already tottering like a “house of cards” (in the words of Guderian, who was then briefly Chief of the General Staff, before he too lost favor like so many others before him [Fest 1018])), Hitler assembled his generals for a meeting after Christmas and let them know that he had never capitulated before anything in his life (yet another blatant untruth), and that what the country was now facing (utter calamity and disgrace) was nothing compared to what he had already gone through during the years of his vaunted “struggle” [Fest 947, 1017]. An utterly deranged perspective on the downfall of a once-great nation, ruined not least by his hand; but there was method to Hitler’s madness, if nothing else, and what was perhaps only now coming into full view had been like writing on the wall from the very outset, though only in outline.

     Having done what he could to inflict his apocalyptic visions in their last consequence upon his enemies, Hitler now set his sights on the systematic destruction of everything that remained around him. After all, as he had announced at another occasion, someone like him, without heirs, might as well put the torch to his home in the final hours and take with him what he could, nothing but ashes [Fest 1021]. (At the end of February 1945, he expressed regret that his house at Obersalzberg had been spared; the RAF obliged him and turned the site into a “lunar landscape” with a 300-strong deployment of bombers.) Meanwhile, the once-proud German armies were reduced to pressing into their ranks boys as young as fifteen and men as old as sixty [Fest 1011], on the lofty principle that it is never too early in life, or too late in a war, to die for a lost cause, and that to surrender before overwhelming numbers, when one has done what one could short of dying, is not soldierly common sense, but intolerable dishonor. (How effective the indoctrinators were in getting the boys to believe it, and what an impression it left on the other side, is unforgettably described by Paul Fussell in “My War: How I Got Irony in the Infantry,” Harper’s, January 1982.)

     On his final birthday, only a few days before the end, Hitler received a group of such boys and decorated them, cameras clicking, for bravery before the enemy. Anyone who thinks Hitler great might ponder just how young some of these kids look, then picture them manning machine guns, and reflect how this alleged savior of his people felt not a moment’s pang about sending them, with an avuncular pat on their cheeks, to their graves for his sake. Earlier, when the tide of the war was turning in the East and Hitler was informed by his generals of just how frightful the losses were among the junior officers, all he had to say was, “But what else are the young fellows for?” [Fest 42].

     It may strain credulity that a supposed leader could say such maniacal things before armed men, charged with protecting their own people, if nothing else, and live. (Hitler was not entirely oblivious and took to disarming even the most high-ranking officers in his presence.) Belatedly, especially from early 1944 on, quite a few of the military men who had previously, with often complex rationalizations, been willing to put themselves at Hitler’s service, were having second or third thoughts. It was a difficult and convoluted process, involving vagaries that need not be traced or judged here; suffice it to note that in their tortured confessions before each other, some rose to pitch of declaring that they hoped “to kill him like a mad dog” (thus Colonel v. Gersdorff’s account of an exchange with Field Marshall Manstein, who did not join the conspirators, but knew of them). To remain with the metaphor, one might say that Hitler had a canine’s nose for such things; he sniffed out the traps, or got lucky, and it is astounding how many bungled or aborted attempts on his life he escaped in this manner even before the final, most famous one in July 1944 [Fest 986–89]—so many of them, in fact, that one cannot help wondering what part unresolved inner conflicts may have played in their countless miscarriages.

     When Hitler discovered the plots, especially the last, the revenge he took was as gruesome and excessive as one would expect [Fest 1005–6]. Not enough with having the conspirators hanged in prison clothes, they had to be slowly strangled, or hung from meat hooks like butchered carcasses, with their trousers pulled down for extra humiliation during the last moments. (The sadistic scenes were filmed and subsequently shown to Hitler for his personal delectation.) Even the executioner and his assistants at Plötzensee Prison, hardened men though they were, could not take it without boozing themselves up between rounds. (More than 1500 members of the resistance were put to death there in total.) Hitler had summoned the chief hangman personally and laid down in pedantic detail (always a particular specialty of his) the savage cruelties he wished to see visited upon men of rank and honor who were everything he was not. He vowed to extirpate entire families, down to the infants, to bury their illustrious names in infamy, and he wrought much havoc upon them. But there were limits to what he could get even the most infernal state machine to do, and he achieved the opposite of what he intended: despite all that was problematic about where they had stood earlier, their names were not extinguished but allowed to shine, or at least flicker, in the great German darkness of those years.

     There is nothing gratifying about the glimpses we get of the prematurely aged, stooped creature that Hitler became in the final phase, wandering about on unsteady legs, hands trembling, eyes bloodshot, wolfing down one heaped plateful of cakes after another [Fest 1025], yet never getting enough, as if he were already a hungry ghost from one of the Buddhist hell-realms. For some time already he had looked, as one of his officers noted with dread, like something that had risen from the grave [Fest 1024–25, 1035]. As the end drew closer, he recited more and more obsessively his litany of tearful accusations and lamentations, now mumbling, now shouting, about the badness of the world and the faithlessness of his associates: it was they who had let him down, nearly every one of them. His only fault, you see, was that he had been too good and mild for such a worthless mankind and such a cruel world [Fest 1023, 1026, 1040, 1043, 1047]. Such was, by all appearances, his genuine self-perception, sunk in depths of delusion and madly conceited self-pity almost beyond fathoming.

     No doubt the German Nero would have liked to see Berlin burn to the ground before his eyes, immolated in a final titanic air strike, or better yet, incinerated by his last loyalists in preference to leaving anything for the victors to enjoy. With his own impending exit from the stage, what did anything else matter? We may be grateful that the vandal-in-chief’s wish was not granted, either by his henchmen or the Allies, and that the world was spared this concluding act of barbarism (in the European theater at least) [Fest 1022]. The final act in Hitler’s cave beneath the Reichskanzlei was less Twilight of the Gods than scenes from a soap opera gone terribly wrong, with poison and a bullet on the couch, in a macabre parody of petty-bourgeois matrimony—after hastily arranged death-bed nuptials with Eva Braun, who, though much older and more disillusioned than the teenage original, was made to stand in for Mary Vetsera at Mayerling, where, in the year of Hitler’s birth, a morbidly run-down Crown Prince Rudolf had rehearsed the demise of the House of Habsburg. Outside, in late April 1945, the world was ending, for many, with terrible bangs; inside the bunker it ended with nary a whimper. And to that pitiful, barely audible last sound of an utterly derailed human life, a human train-wreck in all its bleak and banal horror, we should not close our hearts, no matter how loathsome and repulsive a being it is coming from.

     To recognize the ruined remnants of a fellow human being amidst so much that was aberrant, vile, and even fiendish about Hitler is not to make any concessions to his warped thinking or his criminal cause. There was nothing great about him: not only was he mostly playing a role, as if he had no more than a giant stage before him, not the fates of millions in or near his hands;†† not only did he alternate between pathological stubbornness and scenes of rage so demented (though possibly still staged by Hitler to a point)††† that even Himmler came to doubt whether he was still in full command of his faculties and ordered a medical assessment drawn up on the sly [Fest 990]; not only was he inwardly deranged, but even outwardly he wasted without remorse whatever he had built up, and much more. To all he claimed to cherish, even to venerate, he brought ruin beyond imagination; to what he hated, he became very nearly the incarnation of evil itself, though also a stepping stone to rebirth and reversal, whereby precisely what Hitler has most sought to defeat emerged most vindicated. Thus he stands before us not as a legitimate object of fascination, but as a monumental warning about the dangers that inhere in bad ideas. A devil he was not, only one of the most deplorable human beings that ever lived; but that is quite enough.

     We might imagine, perhaps, that because Hitler died unrepentant, so far as we know, he somehow got away with his crimes. We think so because we must make do with the outside view—so long as we lack the imagination, that is, to hear the unclean things with whom he made his pacts beating their dark wings over his head, and inside it, mercilessly and without cease. The constant headaches by which he was plagued, especially towards the end, the terrible fears, the horrid obsessions and debilitating depressions—all these speak clearly enough of a completely disordered inner life: precisely the mental-moral derangements against whose origins in our own motives the Platonists and Buddhist warn us with such urgency. (A dubious medical regimen administered by a clever if quackish personal physician, Dr. Morell, a fashionable Berlin specialist for skin and venereal diseases, did not only help to prop Hitler up, but also undermined his health in about equal measure [Fest 953–54]. At the root of his disorders were not, however, the countless drugs, as many as two dozen at a time, but the nervous pathologies induced by how he thought and lived.)

     Pausing over Hitler’s miseries is not about setting them beside those of his countless victims, which would be an intolerable and indeed an obscene exercise; the point is merely to illustrate, crudely and from outward hints only, that what he had done surely came back to haunt him, not by way of confessions or admissions of guilt, but by all kinds of more diffuse and less conscious channels, from all directions. And so it must be, if the Buddhist have it right at all: a life more contrary to the Dhamma it is scarcely possible to imagine, and the unspeakable disorders and dislocations implied at the karmic level are not for the faint of heart. To imagine that such a life could go well, by the Buddhist logic, would be like believing that someone could not only walk on sewage, but make it flow up by its own powers, or that a leaden spirit would float above the filth, not sink like a cannonball.

     Hitler rose, for a few years, to perhaps unprecedented power on the sundry sinister compacts he made with what was darkest in his mind and the surrounding times, and he learned to mesmerize as if by magic the most immense crowds, for a spell; being able to do so was his rush, his fix, but like all such highs, it wore off quickly every time, never giving him any but the most fleeting satisfaction, and instead leaving him as insatiable and restless as ever. He toyed casually and mercilessly with the lives and deaths of millions, those whom he professed to love no less than those he so rabidly hated, and led them all, friends and enemies alike, into a bottomless pit. Caspar David Friedrich’s “Island of the Dead” was not his favorite painting for nothing. We may think that because he did not end his days by being whipped through the streets, shot like a rabid dog, or strung up by his feet, as others of his ilk have been, he escaped his just desserts. We are misled because we go too much by specious external successes and crude chastisements, as if they were the proper measures of a life well or ill lived, when the true benefits and penalties of our actions have much more to do with the inner landscape we build with our volitional actions, which we must then inhabit, inescapably, for life, and perhaps beyond.

     Gambling as recklessly as Hitler did, again and again, without the least consideration or restraint, because one is at all times ready to throw it all away, may bear fruits for a while, before one is unmasked; but this has nothing to do with leadership, let alone greatness, only with irresponsibility almost beyond belief.‡ Even during the First World War, when he carried himself relatively well, Hitler was a runner—a suitably weasel-like role for an escapee from the flop-house. The Iron Cross (First Class) that he received, on the recommendation of a Jewish adjutant in his regiment, after four years of loyal service, was only very rarely given to enlisted men, and it would be churlish to deny that Hitler had earned it, even if his courage was that of a man who would not have known what to do with his life if it hadn’t been for the war. At the same time, his superiors never seriously considered promoting him beyond lance corporal because they could see nothing in him that might inspire respect. In this they appeared, in view of Hitler’s many later followers, to have been mistaken; but their judgment was at last resoundingly confirmed when the destination towards which he was leading everyone turned out to be nothing other than a mass grave.

     Along with all that was more personal about Hitler’s share in the horrors of the twentieth century, he was also the product of his times, not only their willful shaper, as he liked to pretend. The circumstances that made the dread phenomenon possible were dark and difficult, and anyway unique. Thus we may be sure that whatever political nightmares may yet lie ahead for us, another Hitler will not be among them. Spotting his abominable likeness in every menacing corner is not helpful, even if it be done in an effort to forestall repetition. Of course one may be able to discover troubling resemblances here and there, but they will be negated, in every case, by much else that is completely different. Strained and myopic exaggerations, on which I grew up as much as anyone, will not protect us, but only distort the challenges of our own times, which we need to see clearly and without hysteria. At the same time, that such a grim reaper should, even for a moment, resurface from the depths of hell as an object of admiration to anyone in our day, is a disturbing testimony not to the man’s trumped-up greatness, but to our own derangements and misguided compensatory fantasies, as well as a timely reminder that such deformations are not the prerogative of any one people, generation, or century.

*I am going by the German text (“Bruder Hitler”) that Mann published in March 1939 in Paris and Amsterdam (Das neue Tagebuch, vol. 7, no. 13), in my own translation, not the Esquire version, which I find too flat to do Mann’s prose justice.

**My rendition is rather free in an attempt to replicate the soaring quality of Mann’s eloquence in German, but not unfaithful to the original. “Miserable good-for-nothing” (trübseliger Nichtsnutz) appears a few lines later than the quoted passage, but it is a fair gloss on what Mann means by eines Unmöglichen, literally an impossible, useless fellow, but in this context also a social misfit and embarrassment.

***Hitler’s shadow has darkened too much of my life already, and I would be quite unwilling to give it any more space if it were not for Joachim Fest’s classic Hitler: eine Biographie, originally published in 1973, which makes it worth revisiting the subject once more, thirty years after I first discovered the book. Brilliantly incisive, imaginative, sure-footed, and humane, it is a monument more than a monograph, especially when one can read German and enjoy how well it is written. (The 2004 film “Downfall” is based largely on Fest’s work. As with everything else around Hitler, neither the film’s nor the book’s excellence has protected them from vitriolic criticism. Hitler still poisons everything he touches, even in hindsight.) My references in brackets are to the revised Ullstein edition of 2002 (pp. 51 and 53 for Hitler’s youthful sneering).

†Speer wrote an incredulous letter about the incident to Hitler and later recalled the exchange in a conversation with court-appointed psychologist Gustave Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials (Nuremberg Diary (Signet 1961), p. 29).

††Unlike Wilhelm II, who was so fatally fond of striking martial postures in uniform that others mistook him for a Hun, which in fact he was not (see my note to #144), Hitler’s keen instinct for power, his extreme ruthlessness, and his pronounced disposition to violence were all quite unfeigned. There was an element of posturing, to be sure, in proclaiming that he had never known any other principle than “Strike, strike, and strike again!”—and this not only until the very last hour but until five past 12 [Fest 939]—but unlike the Kaiser’s braggadocio, there was a lot more than big talk to Hitler’s bluster. Even so, with him as well, indeed even more so, there was something that thrived most of all on grand theatrical effects, on the thrills of the big stage much more than on the thunders of the battlefield that he liked to evoke. It was as a kind of political dramatist, in the role of the great leader rather than its reality, that Hitler was most at home—“at bottom a creature of the theater,” animated by a showman’s contempt of reality that was his great strength in the years of his rise as surely as it became his undoing later, and of all those he dragged down with him, as Fest argues convincingly [Fest 725–40, esp. 740, and 959].

†††Fest argues that Hitler could bring these notorious rages on deliberately, as a means of precluding argument and forcing his will on others [737–38, 950]. Whether he was really still in control of himself when he seemed least to be, seems very doubtful; that there was an element of staged drama at work even here, much less so.

‡At key junctures it seemed to Hitler’s friends and enemies alike that he had an uncanny power to defy reality itself; but Hitler had not discovered magic, only stumbled upon a few principles of the dark arts of manipulative politics. To wit, first, that reckless brinkmanship can be a powerful negotiating strategy in dealing with others who have a more developed sense of responsibility; and, second, that bad faith professing its pretended good intentions is often quite effective for duping others—until it is unmasked, at which point it turns with a vengeance against the cheater. As usual, Hitler had not read that far, and the chapters (in Machiavelli too) that warn against the corrosiveness of such means in politics never entered his mind.

     We may admit that in the earlier stages, Hitler’s disdain for what he deemed the pusillanimous realism of lesser men put him at a tactical advantage [Fest 740, 959], because it allow him to see and seize possibilities that simply appeared too far-fetched to others. Hitler’s gamble in the Ardennes in 1940, for example, looked so risky to the eyes of more conventional military men that Field Marshall Fedor von Bock denounced it as “exceeding the bounds of reason” to suppose that such a plan could ever work. But work it did, alas. (James Q. Wilson discusses just how bold an undertaking it really was at the outset of his Bureaucracy, 1989). Precisely such triumphs sowed the seeds of future disasters, however, because they reinforced the belief in Hitler’s near-miraculous capacities (Gröfaz, he liked to call himself: an abbreviation of “the greatest field-strategist of all times”). He alone was not bound by ordinary reality, he fancied, and needed to pay its troublesome constraints no heed—until it caught up with him, of course, and with all who made the mistake of entrusting themselves to his presumed magical powers.

     The reckless player who does not value anything more than the thrill of throwing the dice for great stakes, and the short-lived triumph of big wins, may set remarkable records along the way, but he usually cannot stop until he has gambled everything away. And so it was with Hitler, except that his losses were those of millions; even then he could only see his own setbacks and blamed others, or the world at large. When Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939, it is reported that Hermann Göring (no dove he) tried to caution Hitler, “Let us not play vabanque, shall we?” Hitler’s response says it all: “I have all my life played nothing but vabanque.”