The Hitler Problem.

Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis, by Ian Kershaw (Norton, 1,115 pp., $35)

Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler, a prodigious work of more than 2,000 pages, comes at an exciting moment in the study of the Nazi regime and its indispensable man. Behind Kershaw lies a half century of scholarship in these matters, and a number of important and detailed controversies. Now Kershaw, who teaches at the University of Sheffield and has mastered the bulk of this material, is in a position to sum it up, express the mainstream professional consensus, and by adjudicating the principal questions produce the best account we are likely to have of the man in his time.

To get closer to Hitler, we need the larger narrative on which everyone agrees. But we also need to settle such questions as whether he was a reactionary or a revolutionary, whether and how his regime affected the social organization of Germany, the special political theory of the Nazi state, when and how he developed his extraordinary appeal as an orator, the quality of his military leadership, whether his ultimate goals were restricted or expansive, and, given the history of Europe in the 20th century, the roots of his special hatred of the Jews and how it evolved.

Kershaw's account of Hitler and his regime tends to contradict the accepted account of totalitarianism as presented by Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, among others. The National Socialist regime Hitler established was sui generis. It emphatically did not resemble Stalinism. The Stalin regime, which provided the model for the concept of totalitarianism, was a bureaucratic dictatorship from the top down. It controlled an often resistant and indeed rebellious population through a well-organized bureaucracy, a ubiquitous secret police, and widespread terror at all levels of society.

The Hitler regime was a populist dictatorship, drawing its strength from a growing and, in time, overwhelming popular majority. This support shivered when the war broke out in September 1939. There was no joy unter den Linden, and Berliners toasted "death, in the New Year." But public opinion did not turn against Hitler until the war turned sour in 1942. Until 1940, Kershaw says without fear of contradiction, Hitler would have won a legitimate election in a landslide. Kershaw goes so far as to say that Hitler "became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world."

In contrast to the Depression-wracked democracies, the German economy boomed, only in part due to warp-speed rearmament. Autobahns, Volkswagens, and strength-through-joy vacations began to be plentiful. The German birthrate also climbed, a sign of confidence in the future. Even in 1943, when many believed the war had been lost, life in Germany remained almost normal for most people. Only with the news of military disasters in Russia and Africa did the bonds between the Fuhrer and his countrymen begin to dissolve.

The political theory of National Socialism was also unique. Hitler viewed the Germans as a "people," or Volk. Hitler knew that his Volk was comprised of disparate components-Bavarians, Thuringians, Prussians, Rhinelanders, Sudetens, Austrians-but they were all parts of the German racial stock. The Volk existed prior to the state, and the volkisch state was its political expression. The Fuhrer was the leader and guardian of the volkisch state and embodied its will. Hence his slogan: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer. This was the Trinity of National Socialism-which, by definition, could never be international socialism. What Hitler sought to create was a Volksgemeinschaft, a term that had been popularized along with its opposite, Gesellschaft, by the sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies. The Gesellschaft was individualistic and based on contract, like a factory. The Gemeinschaft association (or society) was more like an extended family or kinship group. Hitler's Germany was to be a Volksgemeinschaft.

There can be no doubt that this was a potent idea in Germany during the 1930s. Hitler, through growing prosperity at home and successes abroad, through lavish parades and pageants, and the building of cathedrals of light designed by Albert Speer, became the object of a cult of adoration. But he especially achieved this through his voice. I myself think, though Kershaw does not mention this, that his orations were based on movements in the operas of his adored Wagner: He began hesitantly, brokenly, then gradually rose to paroxysms of ecstatic power in a verbal imitation of resurrection. He had the power of expressing the resentments, frustrations, and aspirations of a nation humiliated in 1918.

Yes, a populist dictatorship, willingly submitted to by the vast majority of Germans. Though the social pressure on nonconformists and individualists must have been terrific, most Germans did not experience coercion. The Gestapo (Geheim Staats Polizei) was much smaller than the postwar East German Stasi, its Communist equivalent. The Soviet Union imprisoned a much larger percentage of its own people than did Nazi Germany.

Earlier I spoke of various key questions about Hitler that have been the subject of scholarly debate. Of the first importance, surely, is the genesis and crystallization of Hitler's hatred of the Jews. Without Hitler there would have been no death factories, no murderous Einsatzgruppen accompanying the Wehrmacht eastward; Hitlerism even legitimized the slaughter of Jews in satellites Hungary and Rumania.

The problem for historians can be put briefly. In Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler at length places his anti-Semitic epiphany in prewar Vienna and his down-and-out bohemian years from 1908 to 1913. Yet there is little or no evidence external to Mein Kampf that supports this, not his letters nor the testimony of those who knew him. In fact, though cosmopolitan Vienna might well have shocked the young provincial from Linz, Hitler associated with Jews, and sold his drawings to Jewish retailers, eking out a precarious living.

All the evidence points to November 1918-May 1919 as the period of crystallization. While Hitler has little to say about these tumultuous months in Mein Kampf, it is during this period that "Jewish Bolshevism" becomes virtually a single word in his vocabulary, and his anti- Semitism becomes the core of a Weltanschauung that posits a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Germany.

On November 8, 1918, Hitler lay in a military hospital in Pasewalk, temporarily blinded by gas (he had fought for four years on the Western Front and won two Iron Cross decorations-one First Class, very rare for an enlisted man). On that day, a Protestant chaplain announced the armistice to the men in Hitler's ward. In Mein Kampf, Hitler testifies to the devastating effect this had on him, leading to his conviction that the German army had been "stabbed in the back."

This belief was possible only because while the essentially defeated army was still fighting, a violent Marxist-inspired revolution swept through Germany. There were naval mutinies at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, and uprisings in most cities and towns. On November 9, there was an uprising in Berlin. When Hitler returned to Munich, he found a Soviet trying to govern, backed by Red Guards and a Red Army of some 20,000 men, mostly factory workers. The Executive Council in Munich was headed by a Jew, Eugene Levine; another radical leader, Kurt Eisner, held massive rallies in support of the revolution. The revolutionary leaders in Berlin included Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Both Jewish, they were soon murdered by counterrevolutionaries. Other Jewish revolutionaries included Max Levien, Rudolf Englhofer, Ernst Toller, and Gustav Landauer.

In Catholic, conservative Bavaria, the revolution never had a chance. Within weeks, it was crushed by units of the regular army and returned veterans organized into Freikorps troops. Hitler later referred to this period as "the passing rule of the Jews." Yet it is here that Kershaw locates the hardening of Hitler's distinctive form of anti-Semitism, when he begins to refer to the Jews in biological similes as a disease of society: parasites and bacilli, language that is clearly genocidal. By 1924 he writes in Mein Kampf that a million German lives lost during the Great War would have been saved if "twelve to fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas."

Kershaw notices that Hitler devoted very little space in Mein Kampf to those formative events in Munich, displacing his anti-Semitic epiphany backward to Vienna before the war. He believes that Hitler did this because he himself had played no heroic role in Munich. He was a mere spectator, embarrassing to him as he contemplated his "mission" as the savior of Germany.

The Fuhrer state, as Kershaw shows, moved dynamically in a radical direction. Hitler himself was the source of all power because of his hold on the German Volk. There was no need to issue detailed orders. He merely set forth the goals in broad outline, as he had done in Mein Kampf and countless speeches. Here Kershaw introduces an expression I had not known before: "working toward the Fuhrer." Individuals competed for Hitler's favor by divining his wishes and getting things done. Whether building U-boats or bombers, producing artificial rubber, or rounding up and "relocating" Jews, the elites of the Reich "worked toward the Fuhrer." This produced accelerating activity in the direction he was known to favor. Little was to be gained by arguing that the country had enough U-boats, for example. And there were no institutional checks: no Politburo, no highly organized and bureaucratic party. Many of his generals correctly regarded Hitler as a military dilettante and reckless gambler, but as he rolled up success after success, none could gainsay him.

Hitler's "hubris" (the subtitle of Kershaw's first volume) grew through his triumphs, though in fact he had been exploiting the weakness and unpreparedness of powers reluctant to re-fight the Western Front. To a degree he knew this, and therefore felt driven to act before England, especially, was ready to fight. In late summer 1939, he decided to move against Poland, betting that England would not go to war. The Germans crossed the Polish border on September 1. A few days later, England declared war. Angrily, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop and asked, "What now?" His miscalculation led directly to 1945 and the inevitable coming of (to borrow the subtitle of Kershaw's second volume) "nemesis."

Though England was caught unprepared, Hitler's resources were less adequate relative to his enemies than the Kaiser's had been in 1914. Though he came close to defeating England in the summer and fall of 1940, his ME-109 fighter planes were designed for close troop support and lacked the range to protect his heavy bombers. A couple of thousand Spitfire and Hurricane pilots cancelled the projected invasion. Meanwhile, vastly underestimating the reserve capacities of the Soviets, Hitler invaded Russia. Given his military assets, he had started the war on a shoestring and paid the price. "What now," indeed. In short order he had managed to unite against himself a powerful coalition of England, the U.S., and the USSR. His own allies were the have-nots Italy and Japan, neither of which could do him much good (the defeat of Japan took only 15 percent of the U.S. military budget). From that point, it was onward to catastrophe. Kershaw believes that Hitler realized the war was lost as early as 1941, a year that indeed marked the strategic turning point.

The portrait of Hitler that Kershaw draws throughout his two magnificent volumes shows him to have been a thoroughly repugnant individual. He was a loner all his life and died with no close friends. His relations with Eva Braun remain opaque. He mostly ignored her, but she was around for social occasions. He showed more affection for his police dog Blondi. He taught himself to be acceptable in polite society, but otherwise he was narcissistic. At Berchtesgaden, at the Wolf's Lair command post in East Prussia, and in the final Berlin bunker, he treated his sycophants to hours-long monologues that were stupefyingly boring. His manners were prissy, reminiscent of Robespierre; even his raised-arm salute was odd, turned up at the wrist. He was a vegetarian who neither drank nor smoked, and regarded Winston Churchill as a dirty old drunk. He was also a hypochondriac and fanatical about cleanliness. When he learned that he had shaken hands with a former prostitute who was marrying one of his generals, he immediately took multiple shower baths. People regarded his cold stare as transfixing. It should have been: He spent hours practicing it.

The end of Hitler in his bunker at the Reich Chancellery was grim and unheroic. When Soviet troops were advancing in the neighborhood of the bunker, he tested the cyanide on his dog. Then he fed the poison to Braun, after which he shot himself. By any measure, this was disgraceful. He deserted troops who were still fighting, who had taken a personal oath of loyalty to him and were sacrificing their lives. Hitler should have found an officer's uniform and a machine gun and died with his soldiers. He was no Wagnerian hero.

"It is an awesome story," writes Kershaw, "of national as well as individual self-destruction, of the way a people and their representatives engineered their own catastrophe-as part of a calamitous destruction of European civilization." Without the moral and material destruction brought about by the First World War, he makes clear, Hitler would have been unthinkable. And what had been the necessary condition of that earlier war? John Keegan, with the simplicity of genuine insight, replies: prosperity. Since Waterloo, the leading nations had enjoyed vast industrial development, improved medicine and health, the accumulation of national wealth, and expendable surplus populations. For the first time in history they could afford the investment required by the Western Front.

The larger question here is whether evil like Hitler's is explainable in terms of material causes or whether there is something in human nature that makes it unavoidable. The subtitles of Kershaw's two prodigious volumes, Hubris and Nemesis, are the central elements of Greek tragedy, suggesting that the real engine of history is fallen human nature, and that we are therefore always liable to catastrophe. We may think, in view of our present prosperity, that wealth and material progress protect us from this threat. But Hitler is always a possibility that lurks in the depths of human darkness and emerges when society and restraining custom collapse. That is why Thomas Mann, who loathed Hitler and Nazism, nevertheless entitled a famous essay, "Hitler, My Brother."