Ronald Lewin Hitler’s Mistakes (1984) Lewin had a good reputation as a military historian, so it’s not surprising that this book focusses on Hitler’s mistakes as a “warlord”, which were many, all derived from a hubristic belief in his own military skills, compounded by his impatience with and contempt for the professional soldiers who could, if he had left them to fulfill their mission, have won the war for him.
But the fundamental error was in his conception of the Thousand Year Empire. He conceived of imperial power as pure oppression. Despite his professed admiration for the Roman (and British) empires, and his claim that he had studied their histories, he did not grasp that these successful empires lasted for hundreds of years because they brought law and order, and hence a measure of peace, to the nations they controlled. True, they both suppressed anything that looked like organised opposition or rebellion, but they were more concerned with maintaining order and promoting trade than with establishing totalitarian rule. Both also afforded the subjugated people the advantages of citizenship, the Romans explicitly, the British implicitly by assimilation, especially of the conquered ruling classes.
In contrast, Hitler’s vision was that of raw power, exercised by the Aryan colonists over the Untermenschen of the conquered lands. Lewin, following other people’s attempts at writing a psychological profile of Hitler, claims that Hitler’s character made it impossible for him to imagine any other form of empire. He was an egotistical, narcissistic psychopath, incapable of conceiving of anything beyond his self; but that self was empty at its core. The external trappings of power, even when he despised the toadies who flattered his ego, were all that sustained Hitler. He existed only as reflected by his environment; and so he had to build an environment that assured him that he was the most important object in the world, at its very centre, the hub that held together the wheel that turned and turned around him.
The misconception of imperial power as oppression was one of the two primary socio-economic mistakes. The other was the eradication of the Jews, which from a purely practical point of view was stupid, for Hitler thereby eliminated a vast pool of labour and talent. It was conceptually stupid, too, because of course the Jews did not have the power and influence that Hitler ascribed to them. His belief in Jewish control in a way was a distorted reflection of his self-concept as the man of iron will, who made things happen merely by willing them. That it was a moral horror compounded the error, for it gave his enemies one more reason to attack him.
Reading Lewin’s carefully laid out case for the errors that cost Hitler the war, one is left wondering how he could impose his will on a nation, and on a cadre of professional soldiers who obeyed him despite his obvious incompetence. How could such a stupid man get so many smart people to do what he wanted?
One reason, in my opinion the main reason, was that he surrounded himself with thugs and psychopaths and then set them at odds with each other, thus ensuring that they would do whatever they thought he wanted merely in order to gain and hold power and the spoils of power. This method also prevented anyone from building a power base from which to claim the succession. But in preventing anything resembling a succession plan, Hitler also undermined his vision of a millennial empire. Even if he had won the war and established Nazi rule over Eastern Europe, the thugs and psychopaths would have engaged in ruinous internecine warfare as soon as Hitler died. The empire would have disintegrated almost immediately.
Several times while reading this book, I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. The state of constant “competition” described by Screwtape as the natural order of things (in contrast to the Enemy’s maundering on about Love) is, I think, a perfect image of the world that Hitler created. It also explains why that world was doomed to end in abysmal failure. The tragedy is that while it lasted, it cost millions of lives; and destroying it cost millions of lives more.
Lewin also mentions that Hitler was a coward. He visited a front only once. In 1944 he travelled to consult with the generals commanding the defence against the Allied advance in France. When an Allied bomber dropped a few bombs a couple kilometres from where Hitler and his generals were holed up, Hitler promptly turned around and went back to Berlin.
A good book worth reading for the lessons it teaches. If you want to found an empire, do the opposite of what Hitler did, and you’ll likely succeed. A few too many typos mar an otherwise excellent text. ***
