Explaining Nazi Germany:Six Answers To A Level/

SAT2 Nazi Germany Ques-tions

Hi there, thank you for downloading this ebook, I really wanted to take everything I've been doing at www.explaninghistory.com and condense it down into some quick, easy to use, valuable information for the students that contact me every week. I hope to do a few more of these free ebooks in the future on the Soviet Union, the Cold War and other topics.If you've downloaded this free Explaining History ebook, it's probably for one of the follow-ing reasons, either a) you've got an essay or coursework due and there are big questions about the Third Reich that don't make sense or b) exams are looming and your teacher hasn't explained something crucial. I've decided just to focus on six main frequently asked but highly important questions that, if understood fully, give us a deep insight into the inter-nal workings of Nazism, many students when examining this topic come to understand the lurid details, Hitler's policies, the SS and anti Semitism, but fail to examine their causes or question what their existence shows us. This is not the practice of good historians and I hope that this guide will help to steer you away from that approach, in many ways we need to focus less on telling the 'what' and more on explaining the 'why' (though obviously un-derstanding the 'what' is also important).This ebook isn't written to be anything like a proper work of history, it's a short, convenient guide for students with limited time, who see a 500 page book and feel daunted. What it will do is give you detailed information on six main areas, and also give argument, historio-graphical perspective and judgement. If there is something I haven't covered that you'd like me to answer, drop me a line at info@explaininghistory.com

Nick Shepley

Why Was Hitler's Style Of Government Chaotic?

Because Hitler rarely wrote anything down and rarely signed any official paperwork, finding evidence about Hitler's beliefs about his own style of government is quite a challenge for historians. The lack of detail in itself is telling, Hitler hated bureaucrats and paperwork, believing that most matters could be dealt with informally, and an inner circle of favourites who he felt he could rely on and trust were feted by the Fuehrer as a result.

Hitler's love of informality saw a virtual court establish itself at the Berchtesgardten in Bavaria, his mountain top residence and retreat. He disliked going to Berlin, believing that it was a corrupted and morally bankrupt city, that the 20's and 30's under the Weimar Gov-ernment had seen a flowering of vice, prostitution, sexual permissiveness and liberal thought, designed to corrupt and weaken the German people.So accessing the Fuehrer was often difficult, and he seems to have preferred it that way, he constantly feared assassination attempts, and believed that the best way to keep his lieutenants pliable and eager to please was to keep them at arms length.When senior Nazis did want to communicate with Hitler they had to go through his secre-tary, Heinz Heinrich Lammers, who worked as a barrier between Hitler and the world. Lammers would take policy initiatives from other Nazis to Hitler and normally communicate the idea verbally to him, with much of the detail being lost in translation. Hitler would often give a verbal reply, sometimes even a grunt of approval, and Lammers would then interpret what it was exactly the Fuehrer wanted to be done. He would then re-peat this message back to the Nazi in question.

This often tortuous process, allied with the fact that Hitler's favourites, for example Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Herman Goering and Robert Ley were all given powerful but un-official positions. They created informal parallel organisations that competed with estab-lished government ministries, often with farcical and sometimes disastrous results.Hitler introduced into the German system of government (previously the most efficient and well ordered in the world) an enormous degree of chaos, rivalry and maladministration, and it was an environment in which the top Nazis and their associates were able to enrich themselves enormously.Hitler presented a view of the world where he as the defender of the German people was to be the scourge of greed and corruption, the source of which he maintained was the pre-vious liberal Weimar Government and the Jews.Without a doubt one of the most corrupt and embezzling regimes in the 20th Century was born in January 1933, and it was allowed to exist in no small part by Hitler and his infor-mal, chaotic style of government.

Was Hitler A Strong Or Weak Dictator?

It is easy for students of Nazi Germany who have studied it at GCSE level to form an opin-ion of Hitler's government that conforms to a simplistic stereotype.The picture of the regime that emerges is one of Hitler as a monolithic figure, involved in all areas of policy, making sure his will is imposed on all aspects of life in Nazi Germany. It is a picture that suggests that Hitler's government operated with ruthless efficiency, and that each act of state repression was carefully and methodically planned.

The last three decades of research now suggests that this is an overly simplistic view, and one of the key debates you are likely as AS or A2 students to become involved in is the in-tentionalist/functionalist argument.Intentionalists, many of who were writing about the Third Reich in the immediate aftermath of the war and the discovery of the death camps, argue that Hitler had a long term set of strategies regarding the war and the holocaust. They cite Mein Kampf as evidence of this and argue that most of what happened in the Third Reich was a direct result of Hitler's will.The functionalist argument was more a product of the 1970s and 1980s, and focused on the idea that instead of being a strong, all powerful and 'monolithic' dictator, that in fact his hold on the day to day administration in the Third Reich was weak.Hitler ignored most of the paperwork that he was presented with, believing that it was not his job to attend to such trivial matters. Similarly, he seldom wrote anything down, instead communicating his wishes verbally to Heinz Heinrich Lammers, his personal secretary, who would then relay such wishes to senior Nazis.

The contention that functionalists put forward is that the power in the regime rested with ambitious underlings who were the real engineers of policy from 1933 onwards.Professor Ian Kershaw has created a synthesis of these two models, the 'Working To-wards The Fuehrer' model.He makes the point that Hitler never spoke in specifics when he addressed either the Nazi faithful at Nuremburg Rallies or when he was lecturing guests at the Berchtesgarten, ambi-tious Nazis had to interpret the Fuehrer's will in order to have his patronage.With the added problem that Hitler was very difficult to reach physically, he was seldom in Berlin and he restricted access to himself out of fear of assassination, and to better control his lieutenants, getting his approval for policies was a constant struggle.In this model, instead of Hitler having no control over his underlings due to his remote sta-tus, he actually manipulated them effectively, the degree of competition to please Hitler was intense, but the policies that were arrived at were often more radical than the quite cautious and conservative Hitler intended.Hitler would give his verbal approval to the general direction of policies such as the T4 Ac-tion, the murder of mentally and physically handicapped people, but the radicalisation of these policies happened as a result of the ambiguity of his wishes.Hitler was capable of intervening decisively in matters when it suited him and the argument of 'weak' dictatorship doesn't quite describe his rule accurately, just as the omnipotent Fuehrer is the stuff of movies. The 'Working Towards the Fuehrer' model is the most nu-anced and well supported argument that currently exists, though it has benefitted from re-search conducted after the end of the Cold War, with access to archives in East Germany.

How Did The Holocaust Radicalise From Persecu-

tion To Mass Murder?When looking back on the holocaust, it is tempting to think of it a a single event, com-menced during the war, but probably planned in advance, with Hitler's actions during the 1930s providing ominous clues about what was to come. The fact that many people have

this general view tells us more about how we tend to view the past, as a handy story that makes some kind of sense, than it tells is about the events themselves.The evidence that we have tends to paint a more confused, more complicated picture of the evolution of the holocaust, but once we fully understand it, we can use this picture as a powerful tool in order to explain the nature of Nazism.There are three main schools of thought when it comes to interpreting the holocaust and investigating its causes: Intentionalism, Functionalism and Synthesism, and before we look at the reasons behind the growing radicalisation of the holocaust, we really need to exam-ine these arguments, and select the ones that are most use to us.

Intentionalist holocaust historians believe, to differing degrees, that a 'master plan' for the holocaust existed, and that explicit orders to kill all of Europe's Jews came from Hitler.At the more extreme end of the intentionalist spectrum is the historian Lucy Dwadowicz, who's work has mostly focused on a close textual reading of Mein Kampf. As an American Jewish scholar in the 1930s, she spent a year in Poland up to August 1939 and left weeks before the German invasion. Most of the people she came to know as friends in here time there were murdered. She revisted a Europe at the end of the Second World War that was barely recognisable, and worked as an aid worker in camps for displaced persons, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. One criticism of Dawidowicz that seems reasonably valid, is that she is lacks a degree of dispassionate objectivity necessary to give her a real-istic perspective on events. Her passionate Zionism and belief in the need for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel), was also part of the subtext of her arguments. Having biases is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, we are all biased and partial human beings with our own perspectives and feelings, but the real weakness of Dawidowicz is her lack of primary source evidence for her arguments. Historian Raul Hilberg wrote of her work that it was based:

"Largely on secondary sources and conveying nothing whatever that could be called new."

Dawidowicz is adamant, however, that a long term plan existed in Hitler's mind, and that it was conceived in 1918. She wrote:

"Through a maze of time, Hitler's decision of November 1918 led to Operation Bar-barossa. There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination. In the end only the question of opportunity mattered."

Another key intentionalist is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who believes that there was some-thing about the German people themselves that made the holocaust possible.In his controversial book, Hitler's Willing Exectioners, he believes that there was an 'elimi-nationist anti semitism' within Germany, and that there was something distinct and genoci-dal about the German people. He wrote:

"The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent antisemitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews some-how from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between antisemitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and sup-ported."

This is an exceedingly weak argument, particularly when it focuses on 'the vast majority of Germans'. The vast majority of Germans played little if any part in the holocaust, and when it became an open secret in about 1943, many German diarists at the time report wide-spread feelings of shock, shame and disgust. In his excellent 'Berlin At War' Roger Moor-house makes the point that many Germans were shocked by the forcing of the Jews to wear the Judenstern (Jewish Star) on their overcoats. What Goldhagen also ignores is the culpability of the rest of Europe. Jews were denounced not just in Germany but in France, Belgium, Holland (the Diary of Anne Frank makes this point very clear), and in the East Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Croats and Hungarians all helped to round up, imprison and execute Jews.So the over simplified and overly deterministic views of the intentionalists are perhaps too inaccurate for our purposes as historians, so what of the functionalist argument?Functionalists tend to argue that the key to understanding the Holocaust is to observe the inner workings of the Nazi state. A dictator like Hitler, who was frequently disinterested in administrative matters, who set up his chief lieutenants against one another so they would compete to please him, who made few specific policies and allowed matters to be left alone 'so they might resolve themselves', argue functionalists, is hardly the dictator de-scribed by Dawidowicz.

On the more extreme fringes of the argument is Gotz Aly, an historian who argues that Hitler had no involvement at all, and that it was the actions of mid level bureaucrats in the Nazi administration that pursued the policy of a 'Final Solution'. This does not tally with the facts of the Wannsee Conference, however, when Reinhard Heydrich, hardly a mid level bureaucrat, was instructed by Herman Goering, and possibly even Hitler himself, to create a 'final solution' to the Jewish problem in Europe.A more moderate position is presented by Christopher Browning, an historian who has previously attracted fierce criticism from Goldhagen. He argues that the rivalries between key figures within the Third Reich, created by Hitler, did much to radicalise the treatment of the Jews.The notion of a 'crooked path' towards genocide also seems to have much to recommend it, and it requires us to understand the Nazis ambitions during the war. Hitler's use of Ein-satzgruppen death squads in Poland, indiscriminately murdering Poles and Jews demon-strates that from September 1939 onwards that there was a clear intention on the part of the SS at least, and most likely Hitler, to 'ethnically cleanse' Poland and to force Jews into the racial dumping ground of the 'General Government' in central Poland. Hitler made it clear to Arthur Grieser and Robert Forster, the two Gaulieter (regional leaders) of Warthe-gau and East Prussia (both regions annexed from Poland) that he was not concerned about the methods they used to dispose of Jews in those regions.

The flood of Jews into the General Government was uncoordinated, unplanned or thought through, and the first plan to deal with the Jewish population, ghettoisation and starvation was commenced.Nazi planners had hoped that this would be a stop gap, and that shipping the Jews to Ger-many's temporary ally the Soviet Union, to work and die in Stalin's labour camps would be a more permanent alternative. Having been faced with a refusal to accept millions of Jews from a paranoiac Stalin, who assumed they would be used by some foreign power as a hidden army within Russia (wildly unrealistic, but consistent with much of Stalin's thinking) the Nazis contemplated shipping the Jews in 1940 to Madagascar.Madagascar was under the control of France, a country conquered by Germany in 1940, the puppet Vichy regime, established under the French fascist Pierre Laval and the anti Semitic World War One General Marshal Phillipe Petain, would have been happy to oblige the Germans, but the British Royal Navy, a powerful enemy presence at sea, made the

plan of sailing millions of Jews through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and down the coast of East Africa a pipe dream. With Britain still in the war, the Madagascar plan was unlikely to ever happen.

The Nazis next scheme, the Ostplan, following the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941 was a bid to ship Jews to be worked to death in the far north of German conquered Russia, but by the winter of 1941 the plan, along with the invasion of Russia, was in disar-ray, as German hopes for a swift victory were in tatters after a massive Soviet counter of-fensive at Moscow. Germany had conquered a huge swathe of Russia and Eastern Eu-rope, and instead of divesting herself of Jews, she had most of the world's Jews within her new borders, as Poland and Russia were the traditional European homelands of the Jews.In February 1942, following these crises, and also the December decision by Hitler to de-clare war on the USA, the Wannsee Conference, where the final destruction of the Jews on a mass industrial scale was planned, took place. It seems unlikely that the new realities of a war on several fronts that had not, as Hitler had hoped, been a short and easy affair, didn't have a major bearing on the radicalisation of policy. The argument that many moder-ate functionalists put forward was that the haphazard planning of the regime, and the chaotic and muddled war strategy, combined with the immense brutalisation of wartime, led to a lethal radicalisation in policy.

Synthesists, led by Sir Ian Kershaw agree with much of this, but argue that Hitler was still involved at an authorising, if not an architectural level. Put simply, he may not have dealt up the gas chambers, but it is very unlikely that they did not have his blessing. Kershaw writes that a 'working towards the Fuehrer' model, explains how decision making in Nazi Germany worked. He claims, with some impressive evidence to back up his assertions, that Hitler tended to speak in 'broad visions' but not specifics, and that ambitious Nazis in-terpreted his orders and built policy in a manner that they hoped would please him. Hitler was therefore, in Kershaw's eyes a key figure of responsibility for the holocaust, and radi-calisation occurred because of the kind of regime he had created for himself.

Did The Nazis Use Mass Terror To Build Support For Themselves?

It is really important for students of Nazi Germany to become far more analytical and nu-anced when it comes to this question. All too often, examiners see students argue, with far too little evidence to back up their statements that the German people were bombarded by terror consistently. Ian Kershaw makes the very compelling argument that in most in-stances, most people were neither fanatical supporters of the Nazi regime, nor were they active opponents, they simply 'muddled through' and hoped for the best. Most people probably had no experience of the Nazi terror state at all, Nazi terror in the 1930s was

quite different from its Stalinist neighbour. In Stalinist Russia, arrests were in the millions and executions, at the height of the Terror, was in the hundreds of thousands. In Nazi Ger-many, there was no terror on that scale before the war, and during the war, most of the mass terror was exported, so the Poles and other Europeans felt the full force of Nazi vio-lence.

This does not mean that Germany was free from fear, however. Hitler had demonstrated his ability to deal with his perceived enemies in 1933 during the arrest of communists and socialists after the Reichstag fire. He had also shown he would not be sentimental over former comrades following the execution of the leadership of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives. However, in both actions, there was a considerable degree of public sympa-thy for his actions, he was seen to have dealt with a dangerous threat to Germany, particu-larly to her middle classes and her Mittelstand (lower middle class) when he arrested the communists. Many observers at the time believed that there would most likely have been an equivalent purge had the communists got into power (and being as the KPD took much of their ideological line from Moscow and Stalin via Comintern, it seems unlikely that a lib-eral regime would have established itself.) Concentration camps like Dachau were built in plain view of the public, and in the minds of many were operating like an important public amenity, protecting German society.The numbers of Gestapo men were very low, Roger Moorhouse points out that in wartime Berlin there were as few as one Gestapo officer for 5,000 citizens, which makes it hard to believe that they could achieve very much at all. The Gestapo agent had a great deal of assistance from the general public, they didn't need to investigate 'crimes' themselves, as they could rely on Germans denouncing one another, which is in part evidence that many Germans were happy to cooperate with the regime, and also an indication of want tends to happen to a society when denunciation for political or social crimes becomes part of daily life. Many may well have participated out of fear of denunciation themselves.

Of course many Germans interacted with the regime on an entirely more every day and or-dinary level, young people joined the Hitler Youth and the League Of German Girls, adults and children participated in KDF (Strength through Joy) events, outings and holidays, and there were a variety of cultural and social events, festivals, rallies and activities that it was hard not to participate in. This does not necessarily suggest widespread and massive in-doctrination, people on KDF holidays enjoyed cheap travel, food and drink and often avoided the obligatory lecture from the party official sent along as their minder. In many ways, German people were as selective, as partial and discriminating with their politics as we might be today, the difference being that a totalitarian state existed for them where lib-eral democracy exists for us. There are very few blacks and whites when considering the reach of Nazi terror and its influence over the lives of most Germans, rather there are innu-merable shades of grey.

Why Did Ordinary Germans Go Along With The Nazis Crimes?This is an area of study fraught with uncertainty, and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that black and white distinctions should be avoided at all costs. As previ-ously mentioned, the Daniel Goldhagen approach, to blame the entire German people lacks the evidence really required to make such a case, and making such broad generali-sations about any one culture or people is hardly what good historians should be doing.As Ian Kershaw points out, the evidence paints an ambiguous picture of participation with few hardened opponents and few fanatic supporters, and in between, a broad swathe of the population who were involved with the Nazi state in various different ways.In general, in the first half of the 20th Century, most European and American states, demo-cratic or otherwise, expanded their activities to facilitate the economic, social, cultural and spiritual lives of their people, so any one of these states that perpetrate crimes against a section of the population is likely to be able to involve other sections of the population in its activities.

There were many different levels of participation in the activities of the Nazi state and it would have been virtually impossible to avoid them all. Nazi control over education, cul-tural life, economic and industrial matters, science and research, over accepted norms of thinking and talking about a whole range of issues - these would have required some de-gree of cooperation from most people. Dr Josef Goebbels made it quite clear in 1933 the Nazism would be a 'total revolution' and that reluctant acceptance was not an option, ac-tive and enthusiastic engagement was sought.After this 'every day' involvement in Nazism how far did more ideological and politicised support for Nazism go? The annual Nuremberg rallies in the Zeppelin field were so well at-tended that the Nazis build a railway station on site to bring the party faithful and support-ers to the rallies. How far the wild adulation extended into the population at large is un-clear, though at certain key points in Hitler's rule, he is undeniably popular, for example in June 1940 following the defeat of France.Does this active support translate into mass active support for Nazi crimes as Goldhagen suggests? The German people of the 1930s and 1940s seem to be much like any modern population, the majority of whom have little interest in or stomach for cruelty and violence.

Those that approved of the arrest of communists or asocials during the 1930s rationalised these actions as important for the protection of the state, they chose to believe the propa-ganda they were presented with. Hitler made few pronouncements about anti Semitism in the run up to the election of November 1932, no doubt sure that German people would be bemused at best over his interest in this tiny minority, and perhaps slightly alarmed that his focus was not on the economic crisis and the threat of communism.When Hitler's first mass killing programme, the T4 Aktion began it was such a poorly kept secret and aroused such disgust, that it had to be abandoned in 1941 two years after its

commencement. The German people, supposedly cowering under the weight of om-nipresent terror, were still motivated to write in their thousands to Hitler personally, com-plaining about the killings. The German state responded to this threat to the Fuehrer's pop-ularity be cancelling the killings (though secretly resuming them later on), thus showing that the simplistic model where the citizen was but the hostage of the over mighty state doesn't always apply. Similarly, as the persecution of the Jews became a 'final solution', and this in turn became an 'open secret' in Germany, there are numerous SS and SD re-ports of ordinary Germans feeling shocked, ashamed, disgusted and appalled at what Ger-many had done to the Jews, many saw the disastrous turn of events during the later war as God's judgement on Germany.In reality the worst crimes of the Nazis were carried out in secret for a good reason, Hitler and Himmler knew they would not have widespread support in Germany, he called the holocaust:

"‘a glorious page in our history that will never be written."

Most equivalent crimes in the 20th Century have been carried out by small minorities on the behalf of national groups, normally without the latter's explicit consent, leaving the na-tion as a whole responsible for the burden of guilt. The question of why it was that the Ger-man people didn't 'do something' to stop the holocaust is frequently asked, and the answer really is that even if taking on the Nazi state hadn't been fraught with risk, the fact that Ger-many was in the midst of a world war and that all other sources of alternative government had been eliminated, meant that 'making the best of it' was the response adopted by most Germans.

Why did Germany lose the war, especially as she was so successful initially?By the summer of 1941 Hitler had built a vast European empire from the Pyranees to the Norwegian Arctic, from the coast of France to the Soviet Border and deep into the Balkans. his U-boats were devastating allied shipping in the Atlantic, and Britain had been defeated in Norway, Normandy, Crete and were on the verge of defeat in North Africa.In under four years all of this would be gone, his empire would be reduced to a rubble filled courtyard in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and the thunder of Soviet guns a few kilome-tres away would be the terrible Greek chorus to his downfall.

How could the massive successes of the German Army in the first two years of the war been so dramatically reversed? Part of the answer lies with Hitler himself. Hitler was cau-tious in the conduct of his foreign policy for the first half of the 1930s, and only after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, when he became convinced of the weakness and vacillation of the British and French, did he become more accustomed to taking risks. In 1938 and 1939 Hitler, egged on by the SS and by his foreign minister Ribbentrop, became ever more enthusiastic for a general European war, and Ribbentrop at least wanted a reckoning with Great Britain, a country he hated after he was rejected by the British in his demands for an Anglo German alliance.

Hitler's new style of warfare, blitzkrieg or 'lightning war' had been experimented with in Spain from 1936 onwards, as Hitler sent his Condor Legion to support General Franco's fascist revolt against the socialist Republican government. He annexed Austria, was awarded by Britain and France the Sudatenland region of Czechoslovakia and then an-nexed in 1939 the rest of the Czech lands.In September 1939, he quickly overwhelmed the Poles, and found himself at war with Britain and France, he took the threat of France far more seriously than he did that of Britain, he had no idea why the British would want to fight him at all, largely because Ribbentrop on his missions to Britain had wildly misinformed Hitler about British intentions.Throughout the winter and spring of 1939-40 little if anything on the Western Front oc-curred, but in the spring Hitler unleashed a series of devastating defeats on Britain and France in Norway, Belgium and France itself, trapping the British Expeditionary Forces at the port of Dunkirk in June 1940, only for them to be rescued by the Royal Navy in an op-eration that astounded even the British in its success. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler's later claims that he let the British escape is typical bluster from the dictator, who missed a perfect opportunity to force the British out of the war.

The German Army was ordered to wait before delivering the final blow on the BEF, and whilst the Germans were indeed exhausted, Hitler's generals reacted with exasperation, as they were well aware of the likelihood of a British evacuation. Goering boasted that he could finish the British off from the air, but a lack of aircraft and some. RAF fighter cover over the beaches proved him wrong. Hitler's half hearted plans for an invasion of Britain, code named operation Sealion, and his miscalculations during the Battle of Britain, led to a situation that he had hoped to avoid by the end of the year, the British were still in the war and determined not to give up. Hitler seems to have been mystified by the determination of the British to fight on, and left the matter to Admiral Doenitz, head of the U-Boat section to try to strangle Britain during the Battle of the Atlantic.Timothy Snyder in his book Bloodlands, claims that the first six months of the invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa were a fiasco, judged by the hoped for outcomes by Hitler. Soviet Armies, although devastated by the Germans, were not completely defeated, the plan to starve most of the population of Western Russia was unsuccessful (though a horrific death toll was achieved) and despite nearly succeeding, the Germans did not cause the Soviet State to collapse. Barbarossa was Hitler's great gamble and it was evi-dence that that cautious dictator of the mid 1930s had been replaced by a reckless gam-bler, one who's self belief had been fuelled by victories, parades and adulation following the fall of France in 1940, and who's general staff had been effectively sidelined.

Hitler had never really fully trusted his generals, frequently accusing them of cowardice, in-competence and hesitancy. In November-December 1941 when the Red Army effectively counter attacked at Moscow, Hitler ordered that no German soldier was to retreat, ignoring requests from the generals that a fighting retreat be ordered. On this occasion, Hitler was right, but it would be the last time he would be. This placed a huge amount of decision

making power in his hands over the next three years, leading him to make ever more reck-less gambles and judgement calls at Stalingrad, Normandy and in the Ardennes. His deci-sion, during the Battle of the Bulge, to try to repeat the 'sickle cut' manoeuvre of 1940 and force the British and Americans into a second Dunkirk was taken with the full knowledge that there was insufficient fuel. The race for the port of Antwerp ended in farce as the Ger-man Army ran out of fuel and the skies cleared for the first time in weeks so allied air power could bomb the frozen army with impunity. Hitler's generals had been suggesting a defensive strategy, concentrating hundreds of thousands of men on the borders of the Re-ich to stop the allied advance, and it would be those men who would spend the rest of the war as prisoners, or would fill unmarked graves in the Ardennes forest.

When Albert Speer took over war production in 1942, he discovered and institutional mess, with some factories supposed to be producing tanks or aircraft, actually standing empty. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom about the 'ruthless efficiency' of Nazism, and it also gives us another clue about the reasons for German defeat. Whilst Speer did an extraordinary job in tripling war production, it still wasn't enough, the com-bined war industry output of the USA, the entire British Empire and the USSR was far be-yond anything the axis powers combined could possibly match. The fact that much of the Wehrmacht's planning was based around initially grabbing resources, such as the food of the Ukraine or the iron ore of Norway, shows us that Germany was aware of its industrial weaknesses, and compensating for this by plunder was actually part of a general strategy.Hitler's military successes, therefore, whilst initially stunning, were unlikely to be sustain-able. They relied on 'knock out blows' such as the campaign in the west in 1940 and in the USSR in 1941, neither of which achieved a full knock out. It took a couple of years for the allies to be fully ready for a counter attack but by the beginning of 1943, the British, Ameri-cans and Russians were far more accustomed to fighting Hitler's war and had diversified tactics at sea, on land and in the air to fight back far more effectively.Hitler's war ultimately failed because of a decree of fatal over centralisation of power in his hands, a sidelining of the general staff, a reliance on luck which increasingly ran out after 1940, and opponents who's resolve and ability grew year on year.

Some FAQsWas Nazi Germany Totalitarian?

Well in some ways it was, and in other ways, less so:

Totalitarian means that all aspects of life within the country are controlled by the state, nor-mally in the interests of the ruling party of leader. Germany was a one party state, opposi-tion had been eliminated in 1933, all other political parties had been banned and party membership for most people was compulsory if they wanted to do well in their careers.Trade Unions were banned and replaced with the workers organisation the DAF, which again, w compulsory. Writers, artists and musicians who were considered politically unde-

sirable were not allowed to write or perform and all creative people had to be part of the a reich Chamber of Culture, making sure they were producing a culture for Germany that was consistent with Nazi ideals.There was, however a relatively small secret police, and before the war, arrests were noth-ing on the scale of neighbouring Stalinist Russia. In Berlin, by 1941, there was one Gestapo man for every 5,000 people, which raises interesting questions about how the Nazis kept control. It looks increasingly likely that a majority of the German people con-sented to be ruled by the Nazis, which doesn't mean that the state wasn't totalitarian, just that it operated with, for the most part, the people's blessing. It also should be noted that the main cause of arrest and imprisonment in a concentration camp was normally a de-nunciation from a neighbour or colleague to the Gestapo.Racial policy is the other main area in which the state was totalitarian, the persecution of a racial minority such as Jews, Gypsies and also those members of the 'Aryan' race Hitler saw as imperfect (mentally and physically disabled) was am indicator that state power could be used and abused in whatever way the leadership saw fit.

Was Hitler Insane?

Hi Julia,

Here are a few thoughts and then I'll get down to your questions. Firstly, it's common for people to assume that Hitler was insane, and whilst towards the end of the war he appears to have lost touch with reality, for most of his career there is little evidence of madness, which brings us to an uncomfortable truth; people can do monstrous things or authorise monstrous things and be sane (and conversely, most people who are mentally I'll are no threat to anyone at all). You raise some interesting questions, but it's important to identify the biggest factor that accounts for the rise in power of Hitler - the historical circumstances of the aftermath of World War One. The bigger factor in Hitler's rise is the chaos and des-peration experienced by millions of Germans, and the humiliation they felt over the Treaty of Versailles (for more on this see the two ebooks I've written on the Treaty of Versailles on my site www.explaininghistory.com). Most German people voted for the Nazis out of a sense of desperation and a belief that Hitler would 'save' them from their economic and so-cial crises and protect them from the menace of Communism. Very few were interested in Hitler's anti Jewish policies, and Hitler didn't really make many anti Jewish speeches be-fore coming to power in January 1933.

Do you think that Hitler had any mental health issues, if so why?

Not mental health issues (schizophrenia etc) as such, but he had a personality that was deeply destructive, he believed he had been 'chosen' for greatness, not by god, as he was an atheist, but by providence (good fortune) or history itself. In power he  believed he was the embodiment of the will of the German people. This sounds insane, but when judged against the megalomania of recent British Prime Ministers and US Presidents, it's relatively normal.

In your study of humanities are there any traits that a dictator must have?

Well obviously there are few generalisations that can or should be made about dictators, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pinochet are all different characters, risen to power by differ-ent tides of 20th Century history. Perhaps one thing that unites them is an opportunism, a shrewd judgement of how to seize opportunities, and a callous disregard for the victims of their policies. They all seem to have a need to justify or to rationalise their crimes, claiming their actions were justified, that they were defending the people against shadowy imagined threats.

Did Hitler's poor childhood impact on his later life?

Hitler had a reasonably humble background, his father was a low level public servant, but the family were never destitute or homeless or hungry, he attended school and received an inheritance when his father died, so I don't think this was really an issue.

Why did Hitler have such a strong hatred towards the Jews?

Partly due to the traditional anti semitism of central Europe, partly to explain away his own personal failings as a young man in Vienna (he lived as down and out in Vienna when he failed to get into Art School) and partly out of cynical opportunism when he came to power.

What kinds of things did Hitler do to people in the camps?

Well this is a vey broad question. Remember there were two kinds of camp, concentration camps that were based in Germany, largely full of non Jewish political opponents and open since 1933 and death camps in Poland and the Baltic states, set up during the war to exterminate all of Europe's Jews.

Was Hitler like his father?

Alois Hitler was a cruel stern and disapproving parent and Hitler hated him. He was also over indulged by his mother, the combination of the two seems to have had a profound ef-fect on him. On one hand he believed he was worthless, but at the same time believed he could do no wrong.

How did Hitler become so powerful over people?

Well Hitler ruled mainly through consent, his secret police, the Gestapo, were relatively small and couldn't arrest everyone and Hitler was chiefly concerned with the regime's pop-ularity with the public, so he definitely cared about public opinion.

What party was Hitler part of?He lead the Nazi Party, but a discussion of their policies is a story for another time!

Hitler/Evilness

I think it's not helpful to historians to think in terms of good and evil, though undoubtedly there were many 'evil' outcomes to Hitler's actions. I think obviously childhood experiences have a large part to play, but perhaps a more useful question to pose is why some children grow up into very destructive adults and others are Pre disposed towards being coopera-tive or creative?

Religion

Hitler was an atheist, he was far too self opinionated to believe in god

Hope this helps, come back to me if you need anything else or get me through my site www.explaininghistory.com

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