Adolf Hitler

Amazon - Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations
- Some of the reviews have very interesting takeaways from the book.

I had to do a few hours of research into what biography of Hitler I should read. The conclusion I came to is that John Toland's biography was probably the best bet. While I haven't finished it yet, I can say that so far it has been very, very insightful.

John Toland's Biography of Adolf Hitler

http://www.amazon.com/Adolf-Hitler-The- ... 0385420536

General thoughts

this may sound obvious to some people, but this book really hit it home for me that a huge part of Hitler's success was his arguing for a path forward for the country that appealed to a huge percentage of Germans. Once you have everyone willing to move in the same direction you can get a lot done. The other movements of the time seemed to be more divisive: they'd have the support of the working class but not of the industrialists, for example.
- This has also made me realize that a lot of thought should go into identifying potential paths forward that everyone would agree about.
- And the biography has also made me realize the huge impact that directing people's attention has. If everyone is focused on fighting each other then nothing gets done, but you may actually be able to redirect everyone's attention through speeches, pamphlets, a people-reforming-group like the SA or Fight Club, etc.
He seems to have used the same rhetorical technique and basic speech content over and over again to get a rise out of his audience: he would start out talking calmly and slowly, telling the history of the past several years of Germany, and then gradually build up the intensity and emotionality of his speech, building, building, until at some point he'd end up extremely emotional and shouting. I've actually read this exact technique recommended by pick-up artists who try to get a group of people to feel like they're having more fun: the pick-up artist will join the group while trying to match their excitement-level, and then gradually try to raise the excitement level of the whole group through his own actions / stories. The result (if it's done well) is to have everyone feeling like they had a lot of fun with you. You can actually see Hitler doing this in a video of Hitler's first speech as chancellor(?). Before reading this biography I had had the impression that his speeches were much more varied, but now it reminds me a lot of someone like Eminem who performs the same set of songs over and over, working hard on each one so that someone hearing it for the first time will be spellbound.
Hitler's biography and personality seems to have an uncanny resemblance to those of Steve Jobs. Both spent time living very poor, not grooming themselves, to the point where that was how people thought of them. And then they both did a total 180 and became masters of appearance, obsessing over how their product would be presented to people. Both seemed to love being the center of attention, both seemed very self-obsessed. Both seemed extremely stubborn.

1987 - The Mask of Command by John Keegan

Main ideas from the chapter on Hitler:
- He didn't defer to the judgment of talented subordinates like Churchill / Roosevelt. Halder repeatedly brought up potential problems with the Russian campaign and was labeled as a defeatist and ended up in a concentration camp.
- His ruling-from-afar (bunkers hundreds of miles from the front) may have hurt his ability to make good tactical decisions. He thought that with the advent of the radio he had as good a picture of the fight as the generals who were there, but there were intangibles that you get from actually being there that he wasn't incorporating into his decisions. Other great generals of the time (Rommel, Montgomery) were purposely trying to get as close to the front as they safely could.

Summary of the chapter on Hitler:

Misc links

1940.03 - George Orwell - Review of Mein Kampf

...Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches....The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs-and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. [Nathan - I think this is related to entrepreneurs talking about the importance of the MISSION of the business. Or Sun Tzu talking about the moral law.] However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,’’ Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet [Nathan - IDK, I got the impression he was promising greatness and prosperity, an escape from the burdens of the Treaty of Versailles. The Anschluss didn't involve any struggle and it seems like the people were happy about it.]. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

2010.08.18 - Daily Mail - A loner, an object of ridicule and a 'rear-area pig': Adolf Hitler according to his WWI regiment
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... iment.html

2011.06.17 - NYTimes - Book Review - How Hitler Could Have Won

Quote:
Throughout the book, Roberts notes errors that, if avoided, might have helped the Germans to win battles and perhaps even the war itself. Hitler, he says, should have begun the war three years later than he did, in 1942 rather than 1939. He should not have allowed the British to escape at Dunkirk as France fell. He should have arranged for the Japanese to help in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Once on Soviet territory German forces should have recruited the non-Russian populations rather than repressing them, and returned farmland to peasants rather than exploiting their labor and taking their food. In September 1941, Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht should have pushed forward to Moscow rather than detouring to Kiev. Army Group South should have fought a war of maneuver rather than concentrating on Stalingrad.

Inevitably, the reader of these observations will find himself posing counterfactual questions. If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.

But even if the case for Churchill shows us the importance of this implicit counterfactual, it is still unclear just how to deal with Roberts’s explicit ones. Each depends upon careful judgment of what was thinkable in a given moment, and the fact that Roberts appears to use only English-language sources cuts against his ability to weigh convincingly what Hitler and other Germans considered possible. If Hitler had begun the war three years later, surely very many other things would have been different, and not all of them to his favor.

In other cases, the what-if’s require too much to be altered to be really useful. The reason German forces did not befriend the non-Russian minorities and assist the hungry peasantry in the Soviet Union was that they were embarked on a war of racial colonization that was meant to kill tens of millions of Jews and Slavs. In the end, as Roberts himself concludes, that is the war Hitler wanted. And as he knows, the reason Japan did not help the Germans in the Soviet Union was that Hitler did not want Japanese help. What’s more, the Japanese themselves had already decided to move south into the Pacific rather than north into Siberia. Tokyo had been quite powerfully alienated from Berlin by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Berlin seemed to exchange its alignment with Japan for an alliance with the Soviet Union. In other words, sometimes what appears at first to be just a matter of Hitler’s own decisions in fact involves the thinking of leaders of other countries as well, which means that the exercise becomes much more complicated.

Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.