Parts I –
What compels an individual to be consumed by the craving for power and domination, asks British historian Richard J. Evans. The collapse of the Weimar Republic, the democratic government that governed Germany between 1918 and 1933, and the ascendance of the Nazi regime continue to fascinate and confound. Evans notes that Adolf Hitler and his subordinates, who implemented his policies, have been portrayed as psychopaths, criminals, a bunch of misfits and outsiders, insane, or at the very least psychologically disturbed in some manner.
In this essay, based on Evans’ book “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich” (New York: Penguin Press, 2024), we will examine the life of Hitler, who has frequently been described as an “enigma.” We know that without Hitler there would have been no Third Reich, no Second World War, and no attempted destruction of the Jews of Europe, or at any rate not in the way the catastrophic events unfolded.
Hitler “was a human being … his life and career therefore raise difficult and troubling questions about what it means to be human,” asserts German journalist Volker Ullrich.
Attempts to understand Hitler continue unabated. Works of questionable literary or artistic merit, “speculative fantasies, politically exploitative narratives,” and startling but illusory revelations inundate the publishing industry, the media, and the internet. There are also a number of significant and serious studies.
The Early Years
Throughout the first 30 years of Hitler’s life, he was a nonentity, Evans points out. The dearth of information about him fueled numerous conjectures, most of which had no basis in reality. It was motivated by a “misguided” interest in finding the reason for his subsequent aberrant behavior, assumed to be found in the alleged pathology of his formative years.
In his youth, Hitler focused on painting and drawing. In 1907, he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for failing to draw a human head. He was advised to study architecture instead, but lacked the prerequisites. Yet, he still considered himself an artist.
After moving to Vienna in February 1908, he remained in the city for five years, spending his time drawing, sketching, and reading German legends and Wild West stories. Throughout these stories and legends, Evans said there was “a curious atmosphere of doom, decline, and redemption through violence.” Hitler enjoyed attending the opera, especially the “music dramas of Richard Wagner, centered largely on medieval myth and sagas of knightly heroism, love, and death.”
Myths
Hitler’s claim that he became a follower of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the extreme Austrian nationalist, politician, and antisemite, must be regarded with “skepticism.” Furthermore, Hitler’s statement in “Mein Kampf” that in Vienna he became a radical antisemite is equally questionable, since he had a cordial relationship with several Jews while in the city. There is no credible support for his having evinced interest in politics or being “imbued with a hatred of Jews” at that point. As a teenager, his best friend was August Kubizek, a music student who would become a professional violinist and theater director. They shared a love of opera, which they visited regularly.
Throughout his life, Hitler was “obsessed” with redesigning towns and cities, especially the city of Linz, in Upper Austria.
Having exhausted all his inheritance and other financial resources, he entered an asylum for homeless men for a number of months. In 1909, a second attempt to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna also ended in failure. To earn a small income, he sold copies of picture postcards.
On May 25, 1913, he moved to Munich after receiving an inheritance from a relative. He continued his directionless ways, sitting in coffeehouses in Schwabing, alongside artists and freethinkers. Evans concludes that nothing at this stage in his life suggested a future career in politics. “His life had been a failure, his ambitions unfulfilled, and his early social position, growing up in a solidly bourgeois family, had sunk about as low as it could get. Of all the Nazi leaders, he was the most déclassé, his social decline the most precipitous.”
Military Service
Although an Austrian citizen and having been rejected for compulsory military service in Austria, Hitler successfully enlisted in the German army on August 16, 1914, not long after the onset of the First World War on July 28, 1914. He described his service as “the greatest of all experiences.” He served on the Western Front as a messenger, conveying orders to the front from regimental field headquarters. As a dispatch runner primarily operating behind the front lines, he was exposed to some risk and was awarded the Iron Cross. Soldiers working at headquarters, where officers had the ability to confer metals, were significantly overrepresented among those awarded the Iron Cross.
Hitler was recalled as a loner, an “oddity,” who did not smoke, drink, or patronize brothels, but sat by himself reading. As with his fellow comrades, his experiences disabused him of any “romantic” or “heroic illusions” about war that had motivated him to volunteer. Instead, Evans said, “Hitler learned to be hard and ruthless and to be indifferent to suffering and death. Military hierarchy and discipline gave a sense of order and structure to his life.”
Part II – Interpreting Hitler: What Did He Say? What Did He Mean?
There is a considerable degree of misunderstanding and confusion about how much information was known regarding the destruction of European Jewry, and for good reason. Germans used linguistic deception to obscure the actual intention of their anti-Jewish policy, which changed in meaning as the intensity of the persecution became more extreme over the years, asserts German historian Peter Longerich.
This subterfuge—designed for secrecy—has not stopped the certainty held by some that Germany’s ultimate intentions ought to have been clear from Hitler’s political statements. When analyzing the meaning of the terms Hitler and other prominent National Socialist leaders used concerning the Jews, it is imperative to consider in which period the words were communicated. “They have no meaning independent of the time factor,” Longrich emphasizes.
This is because the Holocaust was a “twisted road to Auschwitz.” There was no master plan. No German official or bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what type of measures would be enacted in 1938 or what would occur in 1942, notes political scientist Raul Hilberg.
Hitler’s First Political Declaration
One example of this failure to place Hitler’s remarks in historical context is his first political declaration, made on Sept. 16, 1919, which is mistakenly quoted to illustrate his genocidal objectives, which it does not: “The purely emotional antisemitism finds its final expression in the form of pogroms. Rational antisemitism, by contrast, must lead to a systematic and legal struggle against and eradication of what privileges the Jews enjoy over other foreigners living among us (Alien Laws). Its final objective, however, must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst. Both objectives can only be achieved by a government of national strength, never by a government of national impotence.”
Early Objective: Jewish Emigration
Between 1933 and 1939, the German objective was to force Jews to leave Germany through anti-Jewish legislation, expropriation of Jewish property, boycotts of Jewish businesses, and physical violence. These actions intensified over more than a decade and ultimately led to the “Final Solution.”
When the Germans used the term “annihilation” (Vernichtung) during this period, they meant the attempt to prevent Jews from being involved in any part of German life and society. “Unless we expel the Jewish people soon, they will have Judaized our people within a short time,” Hitler warned in a speech on Jan. 3, 1923.
German historian Eberhard Jöckel asserts that during this early period, “Hitler did not … mean the physical killing of human beings every time he spoke of extermination.” He cautions that “one should not interpret his words too readily, nor should one always accept at face value Hitler’s brutally strong language.”
Nevertheless, Longrich says that based on the relevant texts, it is clear that “the term already had a violent and even murderous component to its meaning, however vaguely defined this might have been.” In this early stage, a cautious explanation and description of the term “annihilation” would be “ambiguous.” The “perspective of mass murder was already present.”
Intensified Pressure to Expel the Jews
At the end of the 1930s, the Germans increased the pressure to coerce Jews to leave Germany. Terms such as “removal” (Entfernung) or “final solution” (Endlösung) signified the Jewish presence in Germany was no longer tolerable or acceptable, Longrich said. The violent nature of the anti-Jewish policy became increasingly more substantial. During 1938, a year before World War II, “the term ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung) pointed clearly to the possibility of genocide,” he adds.
Thirty-seven thousand German Jews left Germany in 1933, approximately 23,000 in 1934, 21,000 in 1935, and some 25,000 in 1936, Longrich said. During the latter part of 1937, finding refuge became quite difficult as countries became more restrictive about their immigration policies. Although some 37,000 Jews emigrated in 1937, the number began to decline during the third quarter of 1937.
The Germans were so intent on ridding their country of Jews that they signed the Haavara Agreement (Transfer Agreement) in August 1933, allowing approximately 20,000 German Jews with capital to flee Germany to Palestine with their financial assets—about 37% of all German Jews, according to historian Yehuda Bauer.
Emigration to Palestine
The agreement was made between the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Zionist organization of Germany, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the financial arm of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.
Searching for a Territorial Solution
Between 1939 and 1941, expulsion and ghettoization became German policy toward the Jews, as historian Christopher Browning shows. Too often ghettoization has been interpreted as an “integral, even conscious” preliminary stage toward extermination, while the Germans viewed this period as transitory “improvisation” after the attempt to expel the Jews had failed. The Germans were experimenting with a territorial solution to purge themselves of the Jews, because after the outbreak of the war in Europe in September 1939, emigration opportunities were significantly decreased.
During this period, the terms “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) or “evacuation” (Evakuierung) meant relocating large numbers of people. The terminology increasingly included the perspective that this meant the physical disappearance of Jews from European soil. The term “final solution” was used in the same manner, Longrich said.
Meanings of Terms Changed
From the summer of 1941 and particularly from the spring of 1942, the meaning of the terms changed. They were progressively used as substitutes for mass murder, Longerich said. However, even between the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1942, the language could, in some situations, be ambivalent. This is why each expression has to be evaluated from a historical perspective. One cannot dismiss the possibility, Longrich notes, that in April or May 1942, when the systematic mass murder of Jews was well advanced, Hitler and those involved in the destruction process might have discussed “alternative plans for a final solution.” Even at that point, they might have been referring to prior plans to deport Jews to German-controlled areas where they would be murdered or left to die. This is particularly possible if it involved Western European Jews, who, in the summer of 1942, had not yet been officially designated for the final solution.
Occasional references to alternative solutions might reflect Hitler and his inner circle’s hesitancy to openly mention the effect of the resolve to murder European Jewry, which was now being carried out.
Hitler made the decision “in principle to murder all the Jews in Europe, on or around December 12, 1941,” according to German historian Christian Gerlach.Hitler made the decision “in principle to murder all the Jews in Europe, on or around December 12, 1941,” according to German historian Christian Gerlach.
Alex Grobman, PhD, is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
These were first published by the Jewish Link on October 23 and the 30, 2025