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100 Years, 100 Legacies > 2/100
Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw explains
how WWI made Hitler possible–how it gave him a purpose, an aim, a
commitment and subsequently a mission.
World War I gave a meaning and direction to the life of a
drifter from Austria, who two decades later plunged Europe into an even
greater slaughter.
Adolf Hitler was a nobody before the war, and would have stayed one without it. Rejected by art school, he sank into homelessness, then eked out a living painting watercolors.
“Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social dropout would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue,” writes Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.
The lost war radicalized German politics, creating a market for chauvinist hate-mongering. In the turmoil after Germany’s defeat, Hitler discovered he excelled at it. In particular, his rage against Jews for supposedly causing the Reich’s defeat and collapse tapped the growing anti-Semitism of German nationalists looking for scapegoats.
The times and his talent for agitation—including also against the Versailles peace treaty—were enough to make him the dominant figure on Germany’s extreme right by the mid-1920s. But the Nazis would have remained a fringe movement if Germany’s economy and democracy had continued to stabilize. The party won only 2.6% of the vote in Germany’s 1928 elections.
The Great Depression turned the Nazis into a major force. The Weimar Republic, born of defeat and still bearing the stigma, lacked support from its own elites. They handed Hitler the opportunity to destroy it.
Adolf Hitler was a nobody before the war, and would have stayed one without it. Rejected by art school, he sank into homelessness, then eked out a living painting watercolors.
“Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social dropout would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue,” writes Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.
The lost war radicalized German politics, creating a market for chauvinist hate-mongering. In the turmoil after Germany’s defeat, Hitler discovered he excelled at it. In particular, his rage against Jews for supposedly causing the Reich’s defeat and collapse tapped the growing anti-Semitism of German nationalists looking for scapegoats.
The times and his talent for agitation—including also against the Versailles peace treaty—were enough to make him the dominant figure on Germany’s extreme right by the mid-1920s. But the Nazis would have remained a fringe movement if Germany’s economy and democracy had continued to stabilize. The party won only 2.6% of the vote in Germany’s 1928 elections.
The Great Depression turned the Nazis into a major force. The Weimar Republic, born of defeat and still bearing the stigma, lacked support from its own elites. They handed Hitler the opportunity to destroy it.
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Ian Kershaw, “Hitler,” (2009).
Thumbnail image: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.
Thumbnail image: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.
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