Adolf Hitler

What Trump is Not

When things are bad, economically, socially, demagogues rise. When things are bad, populism leads. When the two political sides are in extreme culture war, division and polarization only increase. The Left and Right were in fierce cultural and political battles in the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany. Look what the result was. Offer citizens something. Hitler was a consummate liar; he lied more than any other leader probably in all of history. He was Orwellian to the core. In his mind: He was helping the Jews. He had wanted nothing more than no war; Britain and France had attacked him. He was a savior of the German people. He had sacrificed everything, especially his personal life, for his people, his Aryan brothers and sisters. He was a fount of moral goodness.

All of these were of course dirty, worm-slithering lies. Hitler was a psychopathic madman who cared not one bit about the German people, or about the Jews. In the end he tried to destroy them both.

*This is a lengthy piece, at over 6,000 words. It’s an in-depth (but general and definitely not exhaustive) look at Hitler both personally and politically. To read the full essay please start a paid subscription for $35/year or $5/month. Enjoy.

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I recently read the absolutely fascinating, horrifically terrifying 1973 classic by Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. I found the book while browsing in a local Lompoc bookstore, using half of my $100 birthday gift certificate. (I also purchased a biography of Marilyn Monroe, poetry by W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas, the concentration-camp memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, The Iliad and Dante’s Inferno.) It’s a lovely, used bookstore and I chose the books at random.

Like many people, I’ve always been fascinated by the 20^th century phenomenon of Naziism. What was it? How did it arise? Who, really, was Hitler? It’s easy to look at a psychopathic mass-murderer like Hitler and simply decide that he was insane and horrific—both true—and to leave it at there.

And yet, if we look away from the terror I fear we risk making the same choices again. By “we” I mean western civilization broadly. I tell you one thing: Trump—who I do not support in any way, shape or form—is NOT Hitler. There is a vast, impossible chasm between these two men, and conflating them is dangerous, ahistorical and foolish. Believe me: You cannot read the story of Hitler’s rise to power, and his megalomaniacal, self-righteous insane rage, and compare him to a run-of-the-mill malignant narcissist like Trump. Trump cares about Trump. Hitler cared about destroying the world. And he nearly did.

*

It didn’t start that way.  Born and raised in a small Austrian town in 1889, Hitler was of the lower middle-class. His father was a civil servant. He was very close with his mother, not with Dad. Beginning in childhood he seemed to be a strange mix of bright and stubborn, and like going against the grain. He was a natural rebel. He cherished reading. Much of his inner world—and he possessed a large inner world—was based in fantasy. But, at first, he seemed to be a more or less normal kid. He liked to draw. He liked to create stories in his head. In many ways he lived in a world of his own.

Everything changed when Hitler was about 10. His younger brother, Edmund,  became sick with measles and died in 1900. This was a hard shock to the system. The whole family suffered. It was around this time that Adolf started acting out. Talking back in class. Mocking the teachers—he became locally famous for this throughout his school years—getting into minor trouble with friends, and, most crucially, pushing back against his irate, strict, rather authoritarian father.

His father felt his son should complete formal schooling and then join the civil service like himself. Hitler, however, by his pre-teens, had already decided his fate was to become an artist. His father fought bitterly about this. Hitler wanted to be taken out of his normal school—he was failing several classes, not because he was stupid but because he was resisting formal schooling; before Edmund’s death he’d generally achieved stellar grades—and placed in an art school. His father, Alois, refused.

The shock from Edmund’s death still fresh in his system, his father suddenly died from a pleural hemorrhage in 1903, when Hitler was about 13. He’d never gotten along with his dad, resenting the authoritarian strictness of the old man. Accounts differ as to whether physical abuse was going on, but this book, which interviewed friends and survivors, claims that he most likely was not physically abused by his father. And yet yelling, troubling levels of dictatorial control, and hard-drinking were part of his father’s repertoire. Despite their issues, the 14-year-old Hitler was plunged even further into the sordid isolation of his reading and deep, rich inner world. He focused on art. He became obsessed with going to art school in Vienna. He had few friends and he lived mostly in fantasy. Reading occupied much of his time. At this period he was not yet antisemitic. He frequently drew pictures, especially of buildings and structures. He possessed an eye for architectural design.

Around 1905 or 1906 Hitler’s mother, Klara, was diagnosed with cancer. Hitler truly loved his mother and was devoted to her. She’d been a domestic servant and maid for a long time. She received some inheritance and a pension, plus the house her husband had purchased after his death. She loved her son intensely. While she grew sicker, Hitler stayed loyally by her side. He took care of her. The doctor who came to their home frequently and did everything in his power to help her, was Jewish. When she finally succumbed to the cancer—and the toxic treatment—and died in 1907 (Hitler was about 18) the young, intense man profusely thanked the Jewish Austrian doctor. Hitler’s mother was only 47.

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So at this point Hitler is 18, and he’s lost his younger brother and both his parents. His dream was still to go to art school in Vienna. He had one friend, who listened to Hitler’s long, hardcore raging rants about people, life, art, history, politics and society. His friend—Kubizek—followed him everywhere. They spent endless hours together, wandering around the town and talking. Hitler received a small inheritance and a pension in the form of a monthly amount. Strictly-speaking, he didn’t have to work. He wasn’t rich, by any means. But he wasn’t poor. He essentially had a passive-income.

This was the period when he rented a tiny, prison-like room in Vienna and tried to get into art school. In the book I read there are half a dozen drawings and watercolors and paintings done by Hitler over his lifetime. While not a Picasso or Cezanne or Renoir, the man did have some talent. Especially when it came to architectural drawings. Yet, when he took the art school examinations, including examples of various pieces of art, he failed. When he tried to take the test a second time, he was denied even the ability to take the test.

During his time in Vienna—his buddy Kubizek, a pianist by then, moved in with him—Hitler went through several metamorphoses. For one, he actually did begin to make a living doing his art. Maybe not in the way he’d planned or hoped. He sold postcards with his drawings and paintings on them, and he started to do fairly well. He was living, at one point, in a poor-house for men. For a very low fee, men who were close to poverty could live in the house as long as they were actively searching for work. He’d bungled his inheritance and there was a mix-up around the monthly pension he was receiving and so, for a little while, he had little income.

Prior to this, he’d actually been “on the streets.” He’d literally run out of money and had, in the freezing Vienna winter, slept on benches and in bus stops, eventually staying for a while in a homeless shelter. It was here that he met a man who told him about the poor men’s house. This man also, for a while, became Hitler's “art agent,” helping to sell his painted postcards, taking a small fee. He ended up living in the men’s house for several years. He frequently sold postcards to Jewish retailers.

It makes one wonder: What would have happened if Hitler had gotten into art school? Would we be contemplating Adolf Hitler the 20^th century eccentric artist instead of the totalitarian dictator who almost destroyed humankind?

Maybe.

*

Hitler drifted for a while. He showed up at his half-brother’s house in Liverpool, crashing on he and his wife’s couch for several months, recuperating from his exhausting, impoverished lifestyle. Later he ended up in Bavaria, southern Germany. When World War I started, in 1914, he pleaded with Emperor Wilhelm II to be allowed to join the military and fight for Germany. This was granted. Hitler was 25 years old, “old” in terms of the average soldier. Choosing to go to war was easy for Hitler: He had no sense of self still; his dreams of being an artist had more or less dissolved inside the acid of harsh reality; and he had zero direction. The military would give him an angle, discipline him, and open him up to camaraderie and friendship.

For four years, throughout the entirety of the war, Hitler fought bravely for the Germans. He was a dispatch runner, meaning that he faced a constant hail of deadly bullets sprinting across open fields and open areas in order to deliver crucial messages from one regiment and captain to another. He faced constant danger. He was wounded twice, once which included blinding him for about a week. Twice he ended up in the hospital; both times he went back out into battle afterwards. He was daring and courageous. He received many military awards, including the famed Iron Cross.

For roughly two years after the war—1918 to 1920—he technically still worked for the military. He was given the military intelligence job of infiltrating the nascent German Workers’ Party (DAP).

Never a particularly political person—though a fairly well-read one in terms of politics and history—he’d by this time, in his late twenties, very early thirties, become an antisemite. (He also gorged on books engulfed in conspiracy theories.) This was not shocking because, disgustingly and tragically, antisemitism was pretty accepted and normal at that time, not only in Germany but in Europe in general, as well as the United States and most of the globe. Not everyone was an antisemite, of course, but it wasn’t outside of the window of normality. It stayed inside the Overton Window.

Hitler had always been a strange mix of inner contradictions. He railed against Jews and yet sold his picture postcards to Jews and had some Jewish friends. Even the first woman he obsessed over was Jewish. (They never dated and hardly ever even met.) He read books voraciously yet loathed formal education and teachers especially. He had a certain sophisticated refinement—he loved, for example, attending the opera and did it often (his favorite was Richard Wagner, a genius and blatant antisemite)—and yet he also had a sort of rebel feral streak inside himself which smacked of the anti-intellectual conspiracy-theory type.

He both believed firmly in facts and yet often made things up whole cloth when trying to make a point. He could be calm sometimes and raging and insane at others. His rages were notorious to people close to him at this time.

Strangely, he could condemn philosophy and then go read Schopenhauer. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had a big influence on Hitler’s notions of the “will to power.”) Hitler began to see himself during this period not so much as an artist anymore as a sort of “Superman” who would inevitably rise up from nothing and punch German’s enemies in the face until they cried uncle. Many of his influences had convinced him that both Germany and “Aryans” (the mythical white tall blue-eyed blond Nordic race of people) were destined for greatness and global rule.

*

At this time some people were talking about the infamous “stab in the back,” the idea that “the Jews” had screwed over Germany and thus had caused the nation’s loss in the war. The famous, brutal Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, had crippled Germany with harsh, unreasonable reparations ($33 billion gold marks), sliced off their military power, and significantly weakened Germany. Sections of Germany had been cut off of the map, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. All in all Germany lost about 13% of it’s territory. The nation had been humiliated.

Many Germans were angry. The king had fled. The country now had a parliamentary democracy. Inflation was out of control, as was unemployment. People felt despondent. Many developed the theory that the Jews were to blame, that corporate capitalist greedy race of people who supposedly pulled the global puppet strings. The idea was that Germany had not so much lost on the battlefield but had been undermined by Jews and Bolshevists at home by these groups’ creation of labor unrest and fomentation.

The loss of World War II had led to the abdication of the emperor and the democratic rise of government (the so-called Weimar Republic) and the dissolution of the Hohenzollern empire. (Also it’s important to remember that in Russia, 1917 had brought the Bolshevist Revolution to power.) Hitler hated two groups more than any other: Jews and Communists. He also severely distrusted and disliked democracy. He saw the United States as a joke.

Germany began doing better around the mid-1920s due to the Dawes Plan, which involved the United States giving out massive loans to Germany to help them pay off their French and British landlords.

Starting around 1919, after attending a German Workers’ Party meeting—at the time it was an unknown nascent party with only a dozen or so members—Hitler discovered, to his own shock, that he possessed strong public speaking skills. (He’d first learned this while speaking to a cluster of men at the men’s poor house but hadn’t thought much of it at the time.) He’d argued with some of the speakers from his chair a few times and then finally spoke up at the podium. The result was dramatic. He had a way of half screaming, of using his voice as a battering ram, of exploding into mad, wild frenzies of dramatic anger, of lifting the crowd up along with him, taking them along for a ride, of gesturing with his hands as if they were swinging scythes. He felt like an orchestra conductor, as if he were his hero Wagner. He used antisemitism, storytelling, politics and myth to create a sense of urgency.

Soon he was speaking constantly, rising fast and far above any of the other speakers. The number of German Workers’ Party members began to soar. People came to watch Hitler speak. His name became synonymous with power. Over time, he began to become indispensable to the party. He finally superseded the founding members and simply became the leader of the party, de facto. When the founders complained, Hitler threatened to leave the party. They reneged. He had the party in the palm of his hands. The party essentially was Hitler.

The ideology of the party was confused. There was a smear of pseudo working-class ideology, and pro-socialism ideas…but these were mostly just fluff. Underneath it all lay the real foundation: Antisemitism and Hitler himself. In this manner we can say Trump is similar: Both ravaged their respective party, did away with it, and made it themselves. Trump is not a Republican; Hitler was not a German Worker party member. It’s the Party of Trump and it was the Party of Hitler. He sought total, absolute power. It was never really about workers or socialism, though Hitler did early on claim to want to protect women and poor families, saying the government should never allow women to fall into depravity or prostitution, and that all families should be able to survive socioeconomically in society and that the government should guarantee this. He also felt wages should be guaranteed for workers.

As far as women personally, Hitler was strange. Much has been made about the myth that Hitler—and many of his nefarious cronies in the third Reich—were closeted homosexuals. The idea goes that it was largely their sterilized, repressed homosexuality that they projected outward as rage towards the world. Perhaps. It’s true that Hitler slept with and dated very few women. Much of his “liaisons” were actually fantasies in his tortured, indefatigable mind.

There was, of course, the 23 years younger Eva Braun, who he officially married and died with in 1945 and who he’d been seeing on and off for many years. There was also his much younger half-niece, Geli Raubal, who he slept with, lived with, and ultimately drove to suicide. More likely, I think he was simply either asexual or just not interested very much in sex. Sex, for Hitler, was power. Anything less than that—let alone a weak and trembling female—was absurd. (In his warped, twisted mind.)

Nevertheless, the man was often alone for much of his life, or else with a friend or two, until he discovered the German Workers’ Party.