Was Hitler a fanatic?

Was Hitler a ranting and raving megalomaniac or a rational dictator? William Shirer of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and more recently Ian Kershaw of Hiter take the former position and A. J. P. Tayor of English History 1914-1945 and more recently David Irving of Hitler’s War take the latter position.  It is generally believed that Hitler’s fanatical all or nothing military strategy was responsible for losing the war. Actually, Ian Kershaw admits that Hitler rarely overruled his generals.  So he wasn’t so much of a fanatic that he brought about his own defeat. Hitler had two goals as leader of Germany that acted as his lodestar. One was the quest for living space for the German people through the drive to the East (Drang nach Osten). The other was the final solution to the Jewish problem (Endlosung). He never wavered from these two goals. Was he a megalomaniac? According to Ian Kershaw Hitler spoke often about the special relationship he had with the German people. But he didn’t speak of it as a sign of his own greatness. It was always in the context of his being able to achieve his objectives. Furthermore, Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Morel, wrote in his diary that he never showed any signs of mental illness. Yes Hitler did rant and rave as Ian Kershaw reports. But he was not really a megalomaniac and he was rational in the pursuit of his objectives.

Hitler in Vienna

Hitler was in Vienna as a teenager in the early years of the 20th century. He reports in Mein Kampf that he observed the pervasiveness of pornography and white slavery in the city and believed the Jews to be responsible. Ian Kershaw reflects on this in his biography Hitler: Hubris and makes the observation that Hitler was sexually repressed.  Is sexual repression a bad thing? The psychoanalysts in the Frankfurt School after World War II considered sexual repression to be a cause of authoritarianism–a mental disorder in their eyes.  But the alternate to sexual repression may be worse. Fornication can lead to venereal disease, to unwanted pregnancy and  to consequent abortion. Was Hitler really sexually repressed or was he engaged in moral posturing in Mein Kampf  to impress his German audience? Hitler called on early marriages to solve the problem of sexual immorality. Why didn’t he take his own advice? After Vienna and military service and several years of political activism in Munich he had a three year affair with Geli Raubal. We don’t know for sure if it was consumated but the two were passionately involved. After she committed suicide in 1929 he met Eva Braun and kept her as a mistress for most of the years they knew each other until they both committed suicide in the Bunker in 1945.  In 1931 Hitler defended the agressive homosexuality of the SA leader Ernst Rohm to the disgruntled Storm Troopers on the grounds that it was a private matter and that the SA was not a moral society but a “rough band of fighters”. If Hitler suffered from sexual repression as a teenager in Vienna, he certainly overcame it in Munich during the Roaring Twenties. Hitler was actually a liberal on sexual matters, yet very sensitive to any scandal that might diminish him in the eyes of the German people.

Hitler and Multiculturalism

What would Hitler say about the multiculturalism prevalent in the United States and Western Europe today? When he lived in Vienna as a teenager in the early twentieth century he observed large minorities of Jews and Slavs. He wrote in Mein Kampf that he instinctively disliked them. The main tenet of contemporary multiculturalism today is radical egalitarianism. I hear it from the pulpit on Sundays. God loves everyone equally. Therefore everyone is of equal worth. I read it in books on counseling. The individual is of infinite value just for the mere fact of existing. Albert Ellis wrote almost precisely this in his groundbreaking work A New Guide to Rational Living.  I read it in anthropology and education. All cultures are equal, all races are equal and all individuals are equal. Hitler did not believe in egalitarianism. He saw this egalitarianism in the Marxist ideology of his day. By contrast, he asserted that races, nation and individuals are not equal according to what he called the “volkisch” concept. “Volk” in German means “people” in the sense that the nation of Germany is made up of the Germanic people related much as members of an ethnic group are with common ancestry. He wrote in the first chapter of the second volume of Mein Kampf: “The assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and individuals are equal to one another…on the volkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the volkische concept separates  mankind into races of superior and inferior quality.  On the basis of this recognition it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker.” No, Hitler would not accept the multiculturalism of today.

Hitler’s Intelligence

I think that Hitler’s intelligence was probably that of an average man based reading Mein Kampf, his speeches and Table Talk. Both Mein Kampf and his speeches are very poorly written. In the introduction to Table Talk Hugh Trevor-Roper asserts that the text demonstrates that Hitler was a genius. As a matter of fact the content of the book is pedestrian at best. Hitler’s Second Book displays an ability to write that is the product of an mind that was as least as intelligent as the average University graduate of his time. Even though Hitler’s Second Book is considered by most scholars to be authentic, I do not think he was smart enough write it.  Many people considered him to be a genius based on his reputed photographic memory. He would rattle off statistics to his generals. But Ian Kershaw points out that no one ever seems to have checked these statistics for accuracy. We know that he wrote all his speeches and committed them to memory and that he quoted Schopenhauer at length. But memory is just one aspect of intelligence. And you can have a calendar mind as some retarded people do and have low general intelligence. People want to believe that Hitler was a genius because of his great insight into the yearnings of the German people.  He was indeed attuned to the spirit of the times. But that is something that is not measured by intelligence tests and is not formally a component of intelligence as it is studied by educational psychologists.