| Note (1) | This book was originally published by Ambo Baarn (NL) in 1992, but is reissued by Gopher Publishers in 2000. |
| Note (2) | This book is published in Dutch. |
Chapter I - INLEIDING EN VERKLARING [Introduction and explanation]
This chapter is a kind of preface. It explains why I wrote this book. When I, as an eighteen-year-old young man began to study history at the University of Amsterdam, World War II broke out. In May 1940 Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands. Who was the man behind all this? My interest in Adolf Hitler was aroused.
In 1947 I got my first job, as a reseacher in the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Soon I was dispatched to Berlin to investigate the SS-archives, which occupied me for almost a year. Hitler was not a member of SS, but without him there would have been no SS. Once again: who was he?
In 1948 I became a history teacher in a secondary school. After some years I began to teach modern history, that of Nazi Germany, of the war, of the occupation period, and … of Adolf Hitler. When I came to speak of him, the questions of my pupils became more engaged than otherwise was the case. This forced me to read and think about him
The first important book I read about him was that of Alan Bullock, Adolf Hitler. A Study in Tyranny. London, 1952. Another revealing book was that of H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler. London, 1947. A real eye-opener, read much later, was Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler. München, 19788
When my retirement began, in 1983, I had at last the time to read the voluminous biography by Joachim Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie. Frankfurt a.M., 1973. This is a magnificent book which taught me very much. Yet it did not answer some of the questions, which had occupied me for so many years. On January 13, 1987, I wrote in one track an article that would become the immediate cause for writing this book. It was called `What is not to be found in Fest’ and was published in Kleio, the monthly of the Dutch Association of History Teachers. Interested readers asked me to write more, and some more articles followed.
Now being well under way, I decided to write a book on Hitler. However, the present book is not a biography; there are already quite a number of these. I am not going to speak of Hitler as the Führer of the NSDAP, as the politician, as the head of the German state, as a strategist, and so on. My book should therefore not be called a biography.
Neither is it a psychological study. What I want to do is to highlight some aspects of Hitler’s life and personality, which, in spite of the thousands of book on him, nevertheless remained somewhat underexposed. For instance, Fest does not pay any attention to Hitler’s religious development.
Needless to say, my book is not an apology of Hitler. He was a criminal, but we do not come nearer to an explanation by saying on every page that he was a monster. (Length of this chapter = 23 pp.)
Chapter II - HET MYSTERIE VAN HITLERS AFSTAMMING [The Mystery of Hitler’s descent]
Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was an illegitimate child. His mother was Maria Anna Schicklgruber; the name of the father is unknown and will in all probability always remain so. Maria Anna married later Johann Georg Hiedler. Alois was educated by Johann Georg’s brother Johann von Nepomuk Hütler. This man adopted Alois as his son; Alois Schicklgruber then became Alois Hitler. The parish priest by mistake changed the name Hütler into Hitler.
Since the name of Alois’s father was unknown, rumours circulated, very painful for the Jew baiter Adolf Hitler, that his grandfather might have been a Jew. This idea was an obsession for him. (Length of this chapter = 8 pp.)
Chapter III - HITLER EN ZIJN VADER [Hitler and his father]
Alois Hitler made a succesful career as an employee of the Austrian customs service; he earned a good salary. He was not a pleasant man, not a true family man. His sexual life was turbulent: apart from casual affairs, he married three times. His first wife had no children.
Under her eyes Alois had an affair with the servant girl, Franziska Matzelsberger, whom he married after his first wife’s death. She had two children, Alois jr. and Angela. She became ill; Alois had an affair with the girl who nursed her, Klara Pölzl.
After Franziska’s death Alois married Klara. She had five children, of whom only Adolf and Paula did not die an early death. It was not a happy marriage. Hitler grew up between his gruff and authoritarian father and his shy and mild mother.
Much has been written on the relationship of Hitler and his father. There was no real love between them. In his later life Hitler always denigrated him. Alois died in 1903. (Length of this chapter = 10 pp.)
Chapter IV - HITLER EN ZIJN MOEDER [HITLER AND HIS MOTHER]
With all the attention for the relation of Hitler and his father, that between him and his mother remained underexposed. Nevertheless, it is very imporant. Klara doted very much on her son and was the first to believe in him. In his later life he always venerated her.
All the same, he cleverly manipulated her. In primary school he did well, but things went wrong in secondary school. He repeated a class and finally left school without a diploma. Klara died of cancer in 1907. Hitler, eighteen then, nursed her until her end. (Length of this chapter = 20 pp.)
Chapter V - DE ZIEKE HITLER [The ailing Hitler]
As a boy and as a young man Hitler was reasonably healthy, or else he could not have served for four years in the trenches. Nevertheless, his sleeping problems dated from the war.
The suicide of his amour Geli Raubal in 1931 was a very heavy shock for him. He then abjured alcohol and became a consequent and even fanatical vegetarian. His self-fabricated vegetarian menu had a bad effect on his health.
Hitler was a crank with regard to his health, always supposing that something was wrong. He had himself repeatedly examined by famous doctors. Yet there never was a real problem. In 1936 a certain dr. Morell became his trusted doctor. This Morell began to feed Hitler pills, always more; the result was that Hitler slowly but surely became poisoned. Toady we would say that he was a drugs addict.
In the course of the years his health slowly but inexorably deteriorated. The tensions of the war, especially when things began to go wrong, did make it worse. He had a tremor in a hand and in a leg; since 1943 he looked abysmally bad. In September 1944 he had a bad attack of jaundice.
In 1945 he was an old man, who walked with difficulty. If he would not have committed suicide in April 1945, he could not have lived much longer. (Length of this chapter = 10 pp.)
Chapter VI - HITLER EN EROS [Hitler and Eros]
There can be no doubt that Hitler’s first great love was his mother. It is a fact that he had only one testicle. This need not be a problem for sexual fulfilment, but there are indications that Hitler feared that he was not complete.
Hitler’s erotic development followed a normal course. When he was sixteen, he fell in love with a certain Stefanie; it was a typical calf-love, from afar, for he never exchanged a word with her.
I do not think that Hitler ever had sexual contacts, neither with a man nor with a woman. It is possible that he was homoerotically inclined.
He was prudish with regard to his own body; nobody saw him ever naked, not even in his underwear. However, he did not respect other people’s privacy. He loved nudity, especially that of young girls.
His social intercourse with women was courteous; he could be charming to them. He loved to be surrounded by beautiful women, but studiously avoided to be alone with some woman. We may guess that he was basically afraid of women.
He had older motherly lady-friends, who doted on him. One of them was called (by others) the Hitler-Mutti. His great protectress became Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner. It is well-known that he had a great admiration for the composer and that he very much befriended the Wagner-family.
His great love was Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half-sister Angela. The relationship was doubtless erotic, but did, in all probability, not have a sexual character. The girl found Onkel Adolf probably not unsympathetic, but very oppressive and jealous. On September 18, 1931, she committed suicide. Geli became Hitler’s second saint, after his mother.
Hitler made the acquaintance of Eva Braun in 1929. She too tried to commit suicide in 1932, because the Führer neglected her. Gradually the relationship became steady, but was kept secret. In April 30, 1945, she accompanied Hitler into death. (Length of this chapter = 37 pp.)
Chapter VII - HITLER DE ZWERVER [Hitler the vagabond]
This chapter demonstrates that Hitler really nowhere was at home. He began with being born in a Gasthof. As an employee of the customs service, his father was regularly transferred.
Part of his youth he spent in Linz, a town he loved and which he wanted to make great after the war.
Vienna was a city that he hated. He had been poor there and been rejected by the art world.
His best year before the war (1913-1914) was the time he spent in Munich.
In August 1914 he volunteered in a Bavarian regiment. Then came the four years at the front, from where he only rarely went home.
After the war Munich became his hometown, where he felt accepted and where he began his career as the leader of the nazi party. After the failed putsch in Munich, he spent some months in prison in Landsberg (1924).
Back in Munich, his second residence became a villa on the Obersalzberg, later enlarged to the Berghof. In 1929 he rented and in 1936 bought a large appartment at the Prinzregentenplatz. This remained his home until the end, while the Berghof was his Ferienhaus (where he very often was).
Yet Hitler was not a stay-at-home. He travelled endlessly through Germany, making use of cars, trains and aircraft. He possessed his own train.
When he became chancellor in 1933, the Reichskanzlei in Berlin became his official residence. However, he did not love Berlin and did not feel at home in the Chancellary, which he had completely rebuilt.
During the war he spent much time behind the front in the Führerhauptquartiere, of which the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia was the best-known.
His last `home’ was the enormous dugout in the garden of the Chancellary; here he committed suicide in April 1930. (Length of this chapter = 42 pp.)
Chapter VIII - HITLER DE SOLDAAT [Hitler as a soldier]
Hitler the volunteer experienced the front, the trenches, as his Heimat, his `home’; the war was the first time that he really had a job and he loved it. He was a fabulously courageous soldier, performing the most perilous missions.
He was several times decorated; his highest distinction was the Iron Cross first class (1918). Nevertheless, he was never more than a lance corporal; his superiors found his attitude too sloppy for a good soldier.
The simple men who were his comrades appreciated him, but found him at the same time a strange fellow, what with his enthusiasm for the war.
The war experience exercized a strong influence on this young man whose character was sill unshaped. Since almost all his comrades of the first hour had fallen, he began to conceive of himself as a `survivor’, even as invulnerable. He felt he survived the horrors of the trenches, because he was spared for a higher mission. Above all, he learned that killing was a honourable occupation. (Length of this chapter = 15 pp.)
Chapter IX - HITLER DE KILLER [Hitler the killer]
In this chapter I argue that Hitler fundamentally was a killer, that he needed killing in order to be possible to live. Not that he killed personally; as far as I know, he never did anybody any harm; perhaps he did not even kill during the war. But he ordered to kill.
Hitler went through a process of radicalization. His first great school of killing was the war.
He was obsessed with death; he always carried a weapon on him and repeatedly threatened to kill himself, which in the end he really did. In the last phase of the war he wanted to destroy the whole German people, because it had lost his war.
The `Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934 became the first great instalment of his killing program. A (supposed) putsch by the SA-leader Röhm gave him the opportunity of having quite a number of his enemies executed.
A second, still greater wave of killing was ordered after the failed attack on Hitler on July 20, 1944. Hundreds of people, many of whom knew nothing of the conspiracy, were executed.
Then there was the euthanasia program, the Gnadentod, as it was then called. On Hitler’s personal orders inmates of psychiatric institutions and chronicly ill people were murdered, tens of thousands of them (1940). However, it became known and it rained protests, even in the NSDAP. The action was stopped but was later resumed in the deepest secrecy.
By far the greatest killing action was the Endlösung der Judenfrage, today better known as the Holocaust. Hitler was not an anti-Semite in the ordinary sense of the word; I feel that he was not even a racist. He did not learn his hatred of the Jews at home nor even, as is thought so often, in the prewar years in Vienna.
I argue that Hitler’s anti-Semitism had an artificial origin. It dates from September 18, 1919, when he intended to become a member of the nazi party. He immediately attempted to become its leader, ousting the man who had founded it. For this he needed a far more radical program than the rather vague one the party then had. However, the idea did not remain artificial: Hitler believed fanatically in his own notions. I also argue that the plan to kill all the Jews existed from the very beginning.
The war gave him at last the chance to do this. We all know what happened. The plans were made and executed in the utmost secrecy; only a handful of persons knew the full extent. (Length of this chapter = 38 pp.)
Chapter X - WIE WAS HIJ? [Who was he?]
First the common notion is rejected that Hitler was a madman. He certainly was neurotic, but he was not psychotic.
Another popular notion is also rejected, namely, that Hitler was stupid. Quite the contrary: he was very intelligent and endowed with a fabulous memory.
Hitler is often depicted as a miserable Spieβbürger, a petit bourgeois. This is thought of the man who made the night into the day, who was virtually homeless, who was not married, who never had a proper job.
Hitler was not a politician, a man of the kind of his great opponent Churchill. He conceived of himself as an artist. He hated working at his desk and was always improvising.
Hitler was not well-read, but he had talents as an actor (he loved imitating others). He was also a great lover of movies. He could draw well but had no real talent for it. His taste of music was real but restricted, it was mostly Beethoven and above all the operas of Wagner.
He went through a number of depressions in his life, for instance when he was blinded by gas in the autumn of 1918. There was another depression after the failed putsch of 1923. Geli’s suicide made him utterly dejected. From all these depressions he recovered but not from the last, that began after the catastrophe of Stalingrad in February 1943; this led to his end.
Hitler was a baptized Roman Catholic. At the age of twelve he made his First Communion and he was confirmed when he was sixteen. That was the end of it: never again in all his life he visited a church.
It is argued that Hitler developed a religion of his own, his Parsifal religion, the religion of the redeemer. In this context his esoteric teachers are mentioned, especially Lanz von Liebenfels and Dietrich Eckart.
Hitler’s view of life was dualistic: he hated this world and hated mankind. He prophecied a new world (which was not the in his eyes very imperfect nazi Germany). It is explained that the swastika really was a symbol of destruction.
The superstitious Hitler thought of himself as a magic priest, the founder and hierophant of a new religion. It is argued that he evermore began to conceive of himself as the new god, who would replace the Jewish-Christian one. The basic tenets of this new religion are presented.
Naturally the Roman Catholic Church was in his way; we may be sure that, had he won the war, he would have attempted to destroy it. But the basis of the Church is Judaism: to make an end of Christianity first of all the Jews had to be destroyed. (Length of this chapter = 58 pp.)
The book has appendices on some specific aspects of Hitler’s life, a Chronology of his life, his genealogy, notes, a Bibliography, and a General Index.
I refer the reader who wants to know more to the book itself.