Even Hitler Wasn’t Hitler

The Nazi Leader's Imperialist Ambitions and Jewish Policies are Still Misconstrued

Adolph Hitler delivering a speech in October 1944.

We know, as a culture, that Adolph Hitler is the worst person in the history of the world.

Despite the fact that other historical figures—such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Genghis Khan—were responsible for a greater number of deaths and a wider scale of destruction, Hitler has been singularly enshrined as the earthly Satan. In public consciousness, particularly within the United States and other Western nations, his name is a synonym for evil itself.

Foreign enemies of the United States have routinely been cast as modern incarnations of Hitler. Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas are organizations of Hitlers. Putin is the most dangerous Hitler.

When prompted to explain what specifically makes Hitler’s legacy uniquely demonic, most Americans would say that he was a totalitarian who wanted to control all aspects of public and private life, an insatiable imperialist who wished to conquer the world, and a man who hated Jews so much he tried to kill them all.

No serious historian doubts the totalitarian nature of Hitler’s domestic regime, in which speech, language, culture, and the behavior and attitudes of ordinary Germans were closely and militantly regulated by the centralized Nazi state. It is indisputable that Hitler throughout his political life wished and planned for Germany to conquer and colonize substantial portions of eastern Europe as “Greater Germany.” And anyone familiar with Hitler’s writings and speeches will know that he was a passionate anti-Semite throughout his life. Yet growing numbers of academic scholars in Germany, Britain, and the U.S. have shown that Hitler’s intentions regarding foreign policy and Jewish policy were substantially and qualitatively different than what we are all now expected to believe.

Hitler in military uniform, c. 1919.

In September 1919, thirty-year-old Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to an acquaintance who had asked him about his opinion on the Jews living in Germany. The letter was written when Hitler was becoming active in radical politics, having just joined the fledgling German Workers’ Party, an organization of a few hundred members who shared a love for traditional German culture, a belief in a powerful central government, a disdain for capitalism, and a hatred of Jews. In his letter, which was the first recorded statement of his political ideas, Hitler wrote that Jews were “absolutely a race and not a religious association” and that they were determined by their nature to undermine and destroy any society they inhabited. The Jew was “like a leech fastened upon the nations” “who recognizes only the majesty of money,” Hitler wrote. “In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.”

However, though his loathing of Jews was unsurpassed, Hitler counseled against the use of wide-scale lethal violence against them. That kind of response to the Jewish problem, he argued, would not provide a final solution to it. “Anti-Semitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts,” Hitler wrote. The massacres of Jews in Russia in recent decades had not eliminated Jewish influence in the affairs of that country, as evidenced by the leading role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution. “Anti-Semitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom,” Hitler wrote. “An anti-Semitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews . . . The ultimate objective must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.”

In 1920, Hitler began working full time for the party, which had renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers Party. He designed the party’s banner of a black swastika in a white circle on a red background, and in a series of speeches clarified what he meant by “irrevocable removal” of the Jews. He spoke of either “expulsion” or “emigration” and in one speech called for both “the removal of the Jews from among our people” and for the Jew to “look for human rights in his own country, in Palestine.”

Hitler with his dog Wolf in 1923.

For Hitler, the final solution of the “Jewish Problem” was to move the Jews out of Germany, by force if necessary, but not to kill them. This remained the intention of Hitler and the Nazi Party as they rose to power over the next thirteen years, and when Hitler took office as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, it became their policy. Thirty-two days later, the man who would ultimately cause Hitler to change his solution to the Jewish problem into something far worse was inaugurated as President of the United States.