Hitler and his God

A Mental Make-Up

Hitler is still often represented in the popular media as a madman obsessed by a few fixed ideas. There is truth in the obsession, but he was not a madman. “Hitler was not mad”, writes John Lukacs, “he was responsible for what he did and said and thought … He had very considerable intellectual talents”. 124 He had, for one, an excellent memory, which was a principal instrument in his exercise of authority in all phases of his political career, and which he used to impress his interlocutors. He had also the gift of simplifying and summarizing complex matters. As Fest puts it: “Hitler had the knack of translating into simple images the abstract character of political and functional relationships.” 125

When reading some biographies one might gain the impression that Hitler studied, in his Viennese years, some of the most influential philosophers – an impression furthered by Hitler himself by dropping their names in his writings and speeches. Yet it is hardly believable that a twenty year old, unsystematic autodidact could grasp the intricacies of philosophers like Nietzsche, Marx and Schopenhauer. Hitler would no doubt be able to quote striking sayings and passages from philosophers which accorded with his prejudices, but this is not exactly the same as insight into a philosopher’s thinking. “It must be understood that young Hitler in no way drew from primary sources, which means that mostly he did not have his knowledge from let us say Darwin, Chamberlain, Dühring, Le Bon, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Schiller. He drew his knowledge in the first place from articles about all this in newspapers, brochures and popular writings.” (Brigitte Hamann 126) “In actual fact, knowledge meant nothing to Hitler; he was not acquainted with the pleasure or struggle that go with its acquisition; to him it was merely useful, and ‘the art of correct reading’ of which he spoke was nothing more than the hunt for formulations to borrow and authorities to cite in support of his own preconceptions …” (Joachim Fest 127) “Ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important as tools of mobilization.” (Ian Kershaw 128)

“Books, always books! I cannot think of Adolf Hitler without books. Books were his world,” 129 writes August Kubizek, Hitler’s close friend in Linz and Vienna until somewhere in 1909, when Hitler failed his entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts for the second time and disappeared into the anonymity of the metropolis. Hitler read about the subjects that interested him: Richard Wagner, the theatre, the technical aspects of stagecraft, architecture, military equipment and war, German history, and the political background of the events he witnessed in Vienna. But another and no less important source of his mental make-up were the newspapers, at present still a familiar feature in the Viennese cafés, where it was warm and where Hitler could pass hours reading behind a cup of coffee. “He learned especially from newspapers”, writes Hamann, and Hitler himself mentions “so much reading of the newspapers when I was quite young”. “Earlier Hitler biographers tended to confine their surveys of Hitler’s supposed sources of inspiration to intellectually respectable writers on racial superiority and anti-Semitism such as Gobineau, Nietzsche, Wagner and Chamberlain. But there is no evidence that Hitler read their scholarly works. It is altogether more likely that he would have picked up ideas to rationalize his own dualist outlook and fixation on Germany from cheap and accessible pamphlets in contemporary Vienna.” 130

André François-Poncet, the French ambassador in Berlin who knew Hitler well and who was the only foreign diplomat to gain his esteem, writes in his memoirs: “He is an autodidact whose curiosity goes out to the subjects which catch the attention of the public mind, the attention of the man in the street … Hitler’s talent consists in absorbing what the brain of the common man might absorb, in linking the various elements with one another by apparent logic, and in presenting them in a simple and vivid way, comprehensible to a rudimentary intelligence.” 131 “[Hitler] read not for knowledge or enlightenment, but for confirmation of his own perceptions”, 132 writes Kershaw echoing Kubizek’s remark: “He found in the books only what suited him.” 133 “Amateurishness was one of Hitler’s dominant traits”, remembers architect Albert Speer. “He never learned a profession and basically always remained an outsider to all fields of endeavour. Like many self-taught people, he had no idea what real specialized knowledge meant.” 134 And Speer writes in another context: “We all knew that he firmly believed in reading only the end of a book, because everything important was to be found there.” 135

All of the above is confirmed in the passage in Mein Kampf where Hitler lectures his readers on the art of reading. “I know people who read interminably. book after book, from page to page, and yet I would not call them ‘well-read’. Of course they ‘know’ an immense amount, but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They lack the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book … For reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life …” 136

There was, however, another side to Hitler’s mind: a kind of intuition which made him remarkably perceptive and able to react instantly to the attitudes and arguments of the persons or situations he had to deal with, using the mental material at his disposal and charging it with the power of conviction. SS-General Walter Schellenberg, who worked with him, writes: “There was his extraordinary dialectical ability which enabled him to out-argue even the most expert authorities in any field of discussion … He threw them so off balance that they did not think of the appropriate replies until afterwards.” 137 Few were Hitler’s interlocutors who could keep a clear mind in his presence and did not leave him convinced or at least impressed.