Adolf Hitler Case

With all the power of great, long-term, political, social, economical and cultural forces that shape human history, historians are awed by the great role of key individuals, the ability of the right person at the right time and place to deeply affect the direction of history.

When World War 1 ended in a German defeat and the large German military was dismantled, most Germans accepted the new reality and did their best to build their new post-war civilian life, in difficult economic circumstances. For Adolf Hitler, who was a plain soldier in the war (severely wounded twice, decorated twice for bravery in battle), the prospects of new life and career were even less promising.

A high-school dropout who was a poor homeless nomad in Vienna before the war, Hitler was not even a German citizen, he was an Austrian who volunteered to the German military when World War 1 started. He had no family or friends in Germany, no contact with his family in Austria, and a [theoretical] attempt to evaluate his social skills by his relations with his fellow soldiers during the war, or with women, before and after the war, would also suggest a very unpromising future, since Hitler was unpopular in his unit, the other soldiers thought he was weird, and he was very inhibited with regard to women.

From such an unpromising start point, the chance that such a person can rise from so low to becoming an extremely popular and successful political leader, seemed practically impossible, but Hitler did that in just 13 years.

In 1920 he resigned from the army (he was still technically a soldier) to enter politics as the leader of a very tiny unknown extreme right political group, not even a party yet, and in 1933 he was elected the Chancellor of Germany, and quickly abolished democracy, as he said he would, and became a dictator of absolute power.

For Hitler's full biography, read my Adolf Hitler essay. Here I'll describe the unique set of qualities of Hitler's personality, and then explain why without them Hitler, or anyone else, could not lead Germany so fast to a second war, a World War that shook the world and almost drowned it in blood.

In his authoritative book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich : A History of Nazi Germany", William L. Shirer writes about Hitler :

"The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is true that he found in the German people, as centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and, until toward