Hitler

Hitler: Ascent, 1889–1939 (2013), Volker Ullrich’s biography of Adolf Hitler, draws on previously unseen papers and a wealth of recent scholarly research to shed important new light on the man. Ullrich delves into the individual behind the public persona, touching on Hitler’s youth, his failures in Vienna and experiences during World War I, and his rise as a far-right party leader. Ullrich captures Hitler’s intelligence, grasp of politics, and oratory gifts, as well as his insecurities, megalomania, and the abhorrent worldview for which he would become infamous.

Ullrich begins by providing the details of Hitler’s early life in a section titled “Hitler as a Human Being.” Hitler was born on an Easter Monday in 1889 in an Austrian inn. In 1907, at age eighteen and while still in Austria, he was rejected for admission to Vienna’s Fine Arts Academy. His father had already died when Hitler was very young, and then his mother, Clara, died at age forty-seven of cancer. Hitler kept his mother’s portrait over his bed for the remainder of his life. In 1938, he would award unique Gestapo protection to Clara’s former doctor, a Jew.

Ullrich contends that the second crushing failure of acceptance into the art school in 1908 likely solidified Hitler’s hatred for academics. Left homeless in Vienna for the nine months that followed, Hitler lived off of small inheritances and different orphan pensions. He then lived at a men’s hostel for over three years while making a living selling hand-painted postcards.



Vienna, says Ullrich, fostered Hitler’s enduring love of grandiose buildings, such as Ringstrasse, and kitsch art like that of Böcklin, as well as Wagner and the Nibelungen. Vienna also served to introduce him to pan-Germanic politics, courtesy of Karl Lueger, the passionate city mayor. However, Ullrich states that there is little evidence that Vienna saw much of the start of Hitler’s anti-Semitic attitudes.

By 1913, a small inheritance allowed Hitler to relocate to Munich, and there, the anti-Semitic groups he met helped transform his own festering hostility into the eventual creed for grand destruction that was part of the movement he later founded. By age twenty-five, lacking education, training, or job experience, he was still entirely adrift, without a support network of friends or family and without future prospects.

He enlisted in August 1914, but he was not a typical soldier, having refrained from smoking, drinking, and pursuing women. He worked as a dispatch runner on the Western Front. War gave Hitler his first opportunity to engage in public speaking as an anti-Bolshevik instructor to soldiers who were returning home. This was his first confirmation of the fact that he was a strong speaker. Ullrich describes Hitler’s voice as tonally varied and hypnotic enough to inspire the poisonous combination of hope and hatred through which the demagogue moved a Germany in despair during the early post-war years. This voice, combined with untiring deceitfulness, allows us to start to comprehend the dreadful spell Hitler cast before finally seizing control.



World War I was a formative experience for Hitler. He volunteered for the Bavarian army, underwent intense frontline combat in 1914, and then survived four years while acting as a courier between the trenches and regimental headquarters. He embraced the structure, comradery, and sense of higher purpose that war gave him. Many veterans viewed the war as a tragic and senseless loss of life that should never be repeated. To Hitler, the only tragedy of the war was that Germany lost, and he believed it should be refought as quickly as it was possible to win.

What sets Ullrich’s biography apart from others written on Hitler is his refusal to see the man himself as invulnerable. For instance, he notes that in 1931, Hitler’s young niece Geli Raubal shot herself in her uncle’s flat in Munich. Besides his mother, Hitler named Geli as the only woman he had ever truly loved. Furthermore, while Hitler was often described as a narcissistic egomaniac with an inclination toward self-dramatization, Ullrich underscores his political shrewdness—a keen ability to assess others’ strengths and weaknesses and to expertly analyze and exploit situations.

Hitler also operated behind a machine of “bottomless mendacity,” which included propaganda that used the latest technology, such as radio, gramophone records, and film, to get his message out to the people. A former finance minister wrote that he was so deceitful, he could no longer tell the difference between the truth and lies. One edition of Mein Kampf was described by editors as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths, and real facts.”



Ullrich contends that Hitler’s rise was not inevitable. At numerous points, he might have been derailed, but he benefitted from a convergence of crises he was able to exploit, such as economic woes, unemployment, the erosion of a political center, and growing resentment for elites. Furthermore, his ascent was aided by domestic adversaries who naively failed to appreciate his mercilessness and by foreign statesman who felt they could control his aggression.

Finally, Ullrich writes that Hitler only needed five months to consolidate absolute power after he became chancellor. The other German states were brought into line using grassroots party pressure and pseudo-legal measures carried out by the Reich government. Other Germans joined the Nazis, he argues, in the hopes of improving their careers or from fear of speaking out. The independent press was banned, and books deemed “un-German” were burned. Ullrich concludes that by March 1933, Hitler had made clear that “his government was going to do away with all norms of separation of powers and the rule of law.”