Having now redeemed the humiliation that had so seared his consciousness, Hitler returned to his military headquarters at Bruly-le-Péche. Following the signing of a Franco-Italian armistice on 24 June, all fighting was to cease at 1:35 A.M. on the following morning. Shortly before the agreed time, Hitler, sitting in his field headquarters, gave orders to turn out the light and open the windows. “Silently,” Albert Speer remembered, “we sat in the darkness, swept by the sense of experiencing a historic moment so close to the author of it. Outside, a bugler blew the traditional signal for the end of fighting…. Occasional flashes of heat lightning shimmered through the dark room…. Then Hitler’s voice sounded, soft and unemphatic: ‘This responsibility….’ And a few minutes later: ‘Now switch the light on….’ For me it remained a rare event. I thought I had seen Hitler as a human being.” Three days later, in the early morning hours of 28 June, Hitler and an entourage including Speer and the sculptor Arno Breker descended on Paris for a whirlwind visit. The Führer delighted in showing off his detailed knowledge of the Opéra, and appeared impressed by the Eiffel Tower and the tomb of Napoléon in the Invalides, but otherwise seemed disappointed in the famous city. During the course of the three-hour tour, the question arose of a German victory parade in the city, but Hitler eventually rejected the idea, saying, “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t at the end yet.”3
What exactly Hitler meant by this cryptic remark is still open to interpretation. Some see in it only a reference to the expected impending victory over Great Britain, while others view the comment as evidence of Hitler’s deeper ideological obsession with the Soviet Union. In any case, his assessment of the situation in late June was more accurate than perhaps even he realized at the time. Unbeknownst to Hitler, the British cabinet had made the key decision to continue to fight even before he began his historic tour of the old battlefields of Flanders. His gamble in September 1939 had now backfired, as he found himself entangled in a war in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy and one, moreover, from which he could not easily extricate himself.
In “Beim Propheten,” a short story written in 1904, Thomas Mann described “strange places, strange minds, strange regions of the spirit…, on the peripheries of large cities where the street-lights grow fewer and the police go in pairs…, pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood…. Here rules defiance, the most extreme consequences, the despairing, crowning ‘I’… madness and death.”4 Written years before Adolf Hitler launched a career in politics, Mann’s story cannot itself be seen as prophetic of a specific individual. Still, Hitler was almost the perfect incarnation of Mann’s “criminal of the dream,” a man who thought concretely and sought to shape the world according to his will. Hitler had little formal education, but he possessed a quick mind and an astonishing memory, and his weltanschauung (worldview) took shape and was nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of post–World War I Munich. What emerged, cobbled together from rather standard ideas floating around Germany and Europe at the turn of the century, was a unique explanatory system with considerable inner logic: a curious combination of fear, anxiety, resentment, revenge, conspiratorial fantasies, and rational, pragmatic assessment. Above all, two things characterized his ideology: his all-encompassing hatreds and his belief in the importance of will and the power of ideas. Stunned by the sudden German collapse and defeat in World War I, Hitler, like most Germans, struggled to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable. His ideology—shaped by war, the trauma of German impotence and vulnerability in November 1918, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and the postwar political turmoil—not only pointed to those allegedly responsible for what had been done to Germany but explained why it had happened, promised revenge on the “November criminals,” and outlined an idealistic vision of a new society.
Central to Hitler’s ideology were an extreme social Darwinism that posited the struggle for survival as an all-or-nothing process that governed the life of nations as well as individuals; a belief that racial conflict between peoples and nations of differing “value,” and not class struggle, shaped the process of history; a radical anti-Semitism that viewed Jews as a conspiratorial, destructive force in world history; and the necessity of securing Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation as a means of ensuring its survival in this process of struggle for existence. By themselves, none of these ideas was original; what was unique was the manner in which Hitler combined his pathological anti-Semitism with the notion of Lebensraum to imbue German expansion to the east with a sense of urgency and historic mission.5
In both Mein Kampf and his so-called Second Book, Hitler asserted that history unfolded as a result of the unceasing process of racial struggle, which provided “the key not only to world history but to all human culture.” This notion of culture was significant since he asserted that only people of a higher racial quality, so-called culture-creating races, could produce a sustainable civilization. What distinguished Hitler’s racialist notions was his Manichaean belief that this was a struggle of good versus evil. Thus, to him, the alleged culture-destroying races—the Jews being the prime example—constantly sought to undermine the culture created by the superior racial entities. Lacking a nation of their own, the Jews acted as a parasitic force, working from within to undermine and destroy the superior culture. For Hitler, the culmination of this process was unfolding before his very eyes in Russia, where the “blood Jew,” ruling through Bolshevism, had “killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman torture…. But the end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jews, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.”6
Moreover, Jewish-Bolshevism, as he now identified it, posed an imminent, existential threat to Germany that had to be confronted. From the beginning of his political activity, Hitler displayed an overriding, all-encompassing obsession with the danger posed by the Jews, on whom again and again he blamed the German collapse in 1918. In a famous passage in Mein Kampf, he made an explicit connection between the destructive workings of the Jews and the loss of the war: “If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas… the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans.” This passage should not be taken as evidence of a straight line from intention to later mass murder, but it does indicate, as Ian Kershaw has stressed, the connection in Hitler’s mind between the loss of the war, the destruction of the Jews, and national salvation.7