The historiography of Adolf Hitler deals with the academic studies of Adolf Hitler from the 1930s to the present. In 1998, a German editor said there were 120,000 studies of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Since then many more have appeared, with many of them decisively shaping the historiography regarding Hitler. [1]
The first important biography was written in exile in Switzerland by Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography (2 vol Zürich, 1936–1937); an English version appeared as Der Führer – Hitler's Rise to Power (1944). Heiden was a journalist for a liberal newspaper who witnessed Hitler's rise to power firsthand, and fled to exile when he realized that he was a target of the regime (he managed to escape the Gestapo). In his introduction Heiden wrote "the 'hero' of this book is neither a superman nor a puppet. He is a very interesting contemporary and, viewed quantitatively, a man who is stirred up the masses more than anyone else in human history." [2] Heiden was successful in analyzing Hitler as an orator, how he drew strength from his audience, learning which points to emphasize to maximize his impact. Hitler realized it was emotion, not rationality, he had to appeal to, using repetition, exaggeration, little lies and big lies, all the while vehemently denouncing the horrors of the past and promising a sparkling bright visions of the future. Like all early biographers, Heiden paid little attention to the anti-Semitic fulminations, or to Hitler's goals of destroying the Jews and seizing control of Eastern Europe for German resettlement. [3]
The Allies seized vast masses of documents in 1945, which British historian Alan Bullock (1914–2004) used with a brilliant writing style. Bullock's biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) depicts Hitler as the product of the chaos in Germany after 1918, where uncertainty and anger inflamed extremism and created the ideal setting for Hitler's demagoguery to succeed. Bullock tells of a totally unprincipled opportunist, who had no deep values or goals, except seizing power by any means possible. In 1991, John Campbell wrote "Although written so soon after the end of the war and despite a steady flow of fresh evidence and reinterpretation, it has not been surpassed in nearly 40 years: an astonishing achievement." [4]
Bullock's biography has generally stood the test of time, except that historians today reject the idea that Hitler was unprincipled, thanks especially to the work by German scholar Eberhard Jäckel (b 1929), Professor of Modern History at the University of Stuttgart. [5] In the 1970s and 1980s his demonstration of Hitler's unwavering commitment to a few extreme principles of removing Jews and conquering living space in the East is no longer disputed. [6] Jäckel argues that Mein Kampf was not only a "blueprint" for power, but also for genocide. In Jäckel's view:
Academic historians by the 1960s were heavily committed to social history, and rejected the great man interpretation of the past. That meant biography could be a popular art form, but was theoretically incapable of explaining great events. Popular historians, biographers, and the general public disregarded these abstract laws history, and demanded colorful history based on idiosyncratic personality traits. This popular approach was based on what scholars call "intentionalism." [8]
Who ordered the Holocaust has been a central theme of the debate. Intentionalists maintained that Adolf Hitler intended from the earliest days of his political career to exterminate the Jews. Functionalists (or structuralists) argued that although Hitler had a longstanding murderous hatred of Jews, his plan to exterminate them did not arise until bureaucratic opportunities and world events (such as war with Russia) converged to make extermination functionally possible. The debate largely faded away after 1980 as such scholars as Ian Kershaw and Michael Burleigh increasingly agreed that "intention" and "structure" are both essential to understanding Nazi Germany and need synthesis rather than opposition. [9] For example, taking note of the shift of interest among professional historians toward social history in the 1960s, Alan Bullock agreed that in general deep long-term social forces are decisive in history. But not always, he argued, for there are times when the Great Man is decisive. In revolutionary circumstances, "It is possible for an individual to exert a powerful even a decisive influence on the way events develop and the policies that are followed....After the pendulum has swung between exaggerating and underestimating [individuals]...the longer perspective suggests that in both cases neither the historical circumstances nor the individual personality is sufficient explanation by itself without the other" [10]
Those historians who took an intentionalist line, like Andreas Hillgruber, argued that everything that happened after the invasion of the USSR in 1941 was part of a masterplan he credited Hitler with developing in the 1920s. Hillgruber wrote in his 1967 book Germany and the Two World Wars that for Hitler:
The German historian Helmut Krausnick argued that:
Against the intentionalist interpretation, functionalist historians like Martin Broszat argued that the lower officials of the Nazi state had started exterminating people on their own initiative. [14] Broszat argued that the Holocaust began “bit by bit” as German officials stumbled into genocide. [15] Broszat argued that in the fall of 1941 German officials had begun "improvised" killing schemes as the "simplest" solution. [16] In Broszat's analysis, Hitler subsequently approved of the measures initiated by the lower officials and allowed the expansion of the Holocaust from Eastern Europe to all of Europe. [17] In this way, Broszat argued that the Shoah was not begun in response to an order, written or unwritten, from Hitler but was rather “a way out of the blind alley into which the Nazis had manoeuvred themselves”. [18] The American historian Christopher Browning has argued that:
Swiss historian Philippe Burrin argues that such a decision was not made before August 1941 at the earliest. Browning argues that sometime in mid-July 1941 Hitler made the decision to begin general genocide owing to his exhilaration over his victories over the Red Army, whereas Burrin contends that the decision was made in late August 1941 owing to Hitler's frustration over the slowing down of the Wehrmacht. [20] Kershaw argues that the dramatic expansion in both the range of victims and the intensity of the killings after mid-August 1941 indicates that Hitler issued an order to that effect, most probably a verbal order conveyed to the Einsatzgruppen commanders through either Himmler or Heydrich. [21]
Joachim Fest (1926–2006) was a German historian who wrote a biography of Hitler, Hitler: Eine Biographie (1973) which was the first major biography of Hitler since Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) and was the first by a German writer. It was much praised by reviewers for its elegant style. Fest relied almost entirely on published sources, thereby avoiding the archival research that historians specialize in. He sees Hitler as a "singular personality," and downplays structuralism or indeed any systematic analysis of political and social context. He made his strongest statement against the structuralist historiography. Historians agreed to the quality of the work, but they noted that he downplayed the key role of conservative elites who enabled the Nazis come to power in 1933. [22]
American historian John Toland (1912–2004) wrote a biography of Hitler (1976) which was based on an extensive amount of original research, such as previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes, photographs, and interviews with Hitler's colleagues and associates.
British historian Ian Kershaw (born 1943) wrote a two-volume biography of Hitler between 1998 and 2000 (Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis) which has been hailed by historians as definitive, and as of 2012 [update] has not been displaced at the top of the bibliographies. [23] His approach is to emphasize structural factors, and then bring in Hitler's personality by arguing that the top leadership, the middle leadership, and even the lower ranks of the Nazi movement devoted themselves to working towards the Führer's supposed wishes, whether or not he had ever expressed those wishes, in the hopes of gaining the Führer's approval. Kershaw depicts Hitler's leadership as charismatic, which emphasizes his profound influence on the audience, and so the audience—and thereby the German society as a whole—was acting under his very broad command. [24]
German historian and journalist Volker Ullrich (born 1943) wrote a two-volume biography of Hitler. The first edition was published in German in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 ( Hitler – A Biography, Volume 1: Ascent 1889–1939 ); the second was published in 2018 and appeared in English translation in 2020 ( Hitler – A Biography. Volume II: Downfall 1939–1945 ). Ullrich depicts Hitler as a narcissist who was both clownish and deceitful and who rose to power using slick propaganda at a time the German elite was too dysfunctional to realize the danger he posed. [25]
The Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") was an intellectual and political controversy in the late 1980s in West Germany about the crimes of Nazi Germany, including their comparability with the crimes of the Soviet Union.
The Historikerstreit pitted right-wing against left-wing intellectuals. The positions taken by the right-wing intellectuals were largely based on the totalitarianism approach which takes a comparative approach to totalitarian states, while left-wing intellectuals argued that fascism was uniquely evil, referred to as the Sonderweg approach, and could not be equated with the crimes of Soviet communism. The former were accused by their critics of downplaying Nazi crimes, while the latter were accused by their critics of downplaying Soviet crimes. [26] The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants' frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers. It flared up again briefly in 2000 when one of its leading figures, Ernst Nolte, was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Prize for science. [27]
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government, where they would be killed.
Einsatzgruppen were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish question" in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the Catholic priesthood. Almost all of the people they murdered were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people, as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.
The Destruction of the European Jews is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus, until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".
The political views of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. Hitler's writings and methods were often adapted to need and circumstance, although there were some steady themes, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-slavism, anti-parliamentarianism, German Lebensraum, belief in the superiority of an "Aryan race" and an extreme form of German nationalism. Hitler personally claimed he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism" and "international Jewish finance".
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's foremost experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
The Historikerstreit was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the Historikerstreit. The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity.
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prize-winning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004).
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. It essentially centres on two questions:
Martin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history. As director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich from 1972 until his death, he became known as one of the world's most eminent scholars of Nazi Germany.
Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism. Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controversies related to the interpretation of the history of fascism and communism, including the Historikerstreit in the late 1980s. In later years, Nolte focused on Islamism and "Islamic fascism".
Eberhard Jäckel was a German historian. In the 1980s, he was a principal protagonist in the Historians' Dispute (Historikerstreit) over how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography and over Hitler's intentions.
Saul Friedländer is a Czech-born Jewish historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA.
This bibliography of Adolf Hitler is a list of some non-fiction texts in English written about and by him. Thousands of books and other texts have been written about him, so this is far from an all-inclusive list. It has been arranged into groups to make it more manageable.
Hitler's War is a biographical book by British author and Holocaust Revisionist David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Nazi Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler.
Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of an ongoing historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918 and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives that were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. To a large degree, the debate has been settled by acknowledgement of both centralized planning and decentralized attitudes and choices.
The bottom-up approach is a viewpoint on the causes of the Holocaust.
Helmut Krausnick was a German historian and writer. From 1959 to 1972, he was the head of the Institute of Contemporary History, a leading German research institute on the history of National Socialism.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, German Führer Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
