By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939. Translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. x + 998 pp.
Confronted with a 998-page volume, one can only hint at its content. The book is not a pleasant read, although it contains a lot of material relevant to the present that needs to be taken seriously.
The story of Hitler’s rise to power is interesting in itself, but Volker Ullrich describes Hitler’s ascent to power in the context of Germany’s turmoil in the years following its defeat in the First World War and the damage done to its economy by the Treaty of Versailles. Social conditions begged for strong leadership. And Germany got it with the creation of the National Socialist Party with Adolf Hitler in command.
At age 30, Hitler was not the anti-Semite he eventually became. In spite of a few eccentricities — he was a serious, introverted man who read a lot and did not say much — he could be taken as an ordinary young man. He was discharged from the Wehrmacht after admirable service on the front line in the First and Third Battle of Ypres and was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, an unusual award for a mere private.
There is evidence that he got along well with comrades. His relationship with Jews was amicable. He loved the poetry of Heinrich Heine and the music of Gustav Mahler. He remained grateful to a number of Jewish patrons and to the Jewish community of Munich for their homeless shelters, which he used when he was down and out.
Hitler’s rise to power was due in part to his speaking ability, a talent that enabled him to engage an audience large or small, which he used effectively in opposing Kurt Eisner, a Bolshevist who in 1919 attempted to establish a Bavarian Soviet Republic. Eisner was a Jew, a Communist, and an internationalist, traits anathema to one, like Hitler, devoted to the Fatherland. In opposition to Eisner, Hitler founded the National Socialist Party (NSDAP). In 1920 alone he was 21 times the main speaker at Nazi party rallies. He did not speak extemporaneously but carefully prepared all his speeches, which like an actor he could modify to meet the mood of his audience.
At some point, due to the support of some prominent figures, he realized that he had been thrust into a position of leadership and could make a difference in the political scene. He seized upon a current of anti-Semitism in the populace and used it to his advantage. Jews were widely perceived as shirking military combat duty and as financially profiting from the war.
Though he had little respect for the masses that followed him, he adopted their anti-Semitism and declared that “Germany must be for Germans alone” and rid itself of the influx from the East.
In January 1923, French and Belgian troops entered the Ruhr Valley to punish Germany for falling behind on its reparation payments. In an effort to pay its debts, authorities in Germany had devalued its currency to such an extent that the exchange rate with the dollar was a million to one. Almost overnight the middle and working classes saw their savings disappear, while the financial sector amassed huge fortunes.
The capitalists who gained by devaluation were perceived to be Jewish. Demonstrations, strikes, and food riots shook the entire country. Hitler thought that the time was ripe to seize political power in order to cleanse the Fatherland of its internal enemies and prepare the populace for liberation.
Hitler’s failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich (November 8-9, 1923) resulted in his being tried and imprisoned, but did nothing to undermine his stature. Confined at Landsberg Prison to serve a six-month sentence, he lived in quarters that were described at the time by a journalist as “more like a spa than a prison.” His treatment reminded another of “the kind of punishment that might be handed out for a gentleman’s indiscretion, a holiday disguised by some legalese.”
In prison, Hitler received visitors, up to as many as five a day, from all walks of life. He was provided with a typewriter and a gramophone, and showered with gifts, flowers, and confections from admirers, so much so that his room, in the account of a guard, had the odor of a delicatessen.
While in Landsberg Prison, Hitler wrote his two-volume Mein Kampf (published in 1925, initially to modest sales). His latent or dormant anti-Semitism was reinforced by what he read while imprisoned. Transformed, he became the fanatic of his popular image. He took seriously Arthur de Gobineau’s teaching on the inequality of the human race. He read Hans Gunther’s Racial Ethology of the German People and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, as well as the racial pamphlets of Henry Ford. He found support for his racial social theory in the social Darwinism of the day.
Chapters of Ullrich’s book follow with titles such as “Dark Star Rising,” “Totalitarian Revolution,” “Eviscerating Versailles,” “Prelude to Genocide,” and “Hitler and the Churches.”
Violations Of The Concordat
After coming to power Hitler initially posed as a statesman who wanted to cooperate with Germany’s two churches. Catholic laymen early on had resisted Hitler’s rise to power. Catholic bishops in their pastoral letters consistently warned against the teachings of National Socialism. In August 1932 at their annual meeting at Fulda, the bishops declared that Catholics were not allowed to become members of the NSDAP.
Once in power, in a conciliatory mood, primarily because he needed the Catholic vote, Hitler instructed Franz von Papen draw up a treaty with the Vatican along the lines of the Lateran Accords that Mussolini had concluded in 1929.
Though von Papen’s draft prohibited Catholic clergy from engaging in any kind of political activity, the Nazi regime, in return, agreed to guarantee Catholics the freedom to practice their religion and Catholic lay organizations the ability to create schools and provide religious instruction. The treaty was perceived as “Hitler’s handshake with the Pope.”
The concordat had barely been signed when violations of its spirit and letter began. Party functionaries and police began targeting Catholic associations and the Catholic press. Munich’s Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber in a pastoral letter voiced his disapproval of the regime.
That letter, later edited by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli and approved by Pius XI, became the papal encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”). Faulhaber’s letter was printed and read in all Catholic churches on Palm Sunday, March 1937. Hitler was furious, and although Goebbels advised him to ignore it, Hitler began an all-out war in the press against the Church. “Opposition to the state cannot be tolerated,” he declared.
Hitler’s dealings with the Protestant Church were easy at the start. Prior to 1933, the NSDAP had received its biggest electoral triumphs in the Protestant sections of Germany. Hitler wanted to amalgamate the 28 regional Protestant churches into a single Reich Church that would serve as a counterweight to the Catholic Church. Ludwig Müller was elected Reich bishop at the first national synod in Luther’s home city of Wittenberg.
But Lutheran cooperation soon gave way, in part due to the opposition of Pastor Martin Niemoller and theologian Karl Barth, who recognized the direction the state was taking. Niemoller was imprisoned; Barth went on to achieve fame for his postwar treatises.
Volker Ullrich’s Hitler’s Ascent has to be considered the definitive biography of Hitler to date: 758 pages of text are supported by 212 pages of footnotes. While ever respectful of the work of previous biographers, with ample textual support, Ullrich often corrects many previously drawn profiles and judgments. He is especially critical of those psychological analyses which superficially skim the surface of his subject’s character, while ignoring its philosophical roots.
Above all Ullrich shows how an essentially good populace can easily be swayed by incessant rhetoric and a partisan press.
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