Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism [607078]

Ian Kershaw
Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism
There was something distinctive about nazism, even compared with other
brutal dictatorships. That much seems clear. A regime responsible for the mostdestructive war in history, leaving upwards of 40 million people dead, thatperpetrated, on behalf of the most modern, economically advanced, and cul-turally developed country on the continent of Europe, the worst genocide yetknown to mankind, has an obvious claim to singularity. But where did theuniqueness lie? Historians, political scientists and, not least, the countless victims of the nazi regime have puzzled over this question since 1945.
One set of answers came quickly, and quite naturally, after the war to those
who had fought against the nazi menace. The German militaristic, Herren-
mensch culture that for centuries had sought dominance in central and eastern
Europe was taken to be the key in this approach. A.J.P. Taylor’s The Course of
German History , written in 1944, might be seen as characteristic of its genre.
1
Its crudity was, in the circumstances, perhaps understandable. But as an expla-
nation, it led nowhere (as could also be said of the most modern variant of the‘peculiarity of German character’ interpretation in Daniel Goldhagen’s contro-versial book, emphasizing a unique and longstanding German desire to elimi-nate the Jews).
2From the German side came, unsurprisingly, a diametrically
opposed position, represented in different ways by Friedrich Meinecke andGerhard Ritter: that Germany’s healthy course of development had beenblown completely off track by the first world war, opening the way for thetype of demagogic politics that let Hitler into power.
3The interpretation saw
This article was first delivered in 2002 as a Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge.
1A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London 1945). ‘In the course of a thousand
years, the Germans have experienced everything except normality’, wrote Taylor. ‘Only thenormal person . . . has never set his stamp on German history’ (paperback edn, 1961, 1). Any positive qualities in Germans were in his eyes ‘synonymous with ineffectiveness’: ‘There were, andI daresay are, many millions of well-meaning kindly Germans; but what have they added up topolitically?’, he asked (viii–ix). The attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was, for him, ‘the climax,the logical conclusion of German history’ (260). The long pedigree of German abnormality, andits climax in nazism, is also a theme of Rohan O’Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London
1941); William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler. The History of Nazi-Fascist
Philosophy (London 1946); and, in essence, of William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich (New York 1960).
2Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York 1996).
3Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden 1946); Gerhard Ritter, Europa
und die deutsche Frage. Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staats-denkens (Munich 1948).Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 39(2), 239–254. ISSN 0022–0094.DOI: 10.1177/0022009404042130

nazism as part of a European problem of the degradation of politics. However,
this in turn left open what was unique to Germany in producing such a radicalstrain of inhumane politics. Stirred by Fritz Fischer’s analysis of Germany’s‘quest for world power’ in 1914, locating the blame for the first world war inthe expansionist aims of Germany’s élites,
4and by Ralf Dahrendorf’s emphasis
on the essence of the ‘German problem’ as social and political backwardnessin tandem with a rapidly advancing capitalist and industrial economy,
5a new
generation of German historians, led by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, now turned thespotlight on a ‘special path’ ( Sonderweg ) to modernity.
6Defence of privilege
by threatened but entrenched social and political élites provided the focus forthis interpretation of the German peculiarities which saw a line of continuityrunning from Bismarck to Hitler. By the 1980s, however, this interpretationwas itself running into a wall of criticism, beginning with the attack on‘German peculiarities’ launched by Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, whoundermined much of the case that had been made for the continued domi-nance of pre-industrial élites and stressed instead the common features whichGermany shared with other modern, capitalist economies at the time.
7Oddly,
interpretations have since that time tended to shift back in emphasis to what,if in completely different fashion, Meinecke and Ritter had been claiming somuch earlier: that the first world war and its aftermath, rather than deepercontinuities with Imperial Germany, explain the nazi phenomenon. DetlevPeukert, for instance, in a superb short study of the Weimar Republic, expressly rejected the Sonderweg argument as an explanation of nazism,
stressing instead a ‘crisis of classical modernity’ during the first Germandemocracy.
8Perhaps, it may be thought, this just reformulates the problem of
German uniqueness. Perhaps, the thought lingers, the Sonderweg argument, or
at least a strand or two of it, has been thrown out too abruptly.9My concern
here, in any case, is not directly the Sonderweg debate, but the uniqueness of
nazism itself, and of the dictatorship it spawned. Unavoidably, nevertheless,this raises questions about mentalities, prompting some reconsideration aboutwhat was special about Germany that led it to produce nazism.
To demonstrate uniqueness, comparison is necessary. That ought to be240 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
4Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf 1961).
5Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London 1968).
6Among Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s prolific output, Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen 1973),
serves as a paradigmatic expression of the thesis. He has modified, though maintained, theSonderweg approach in his magisterial work, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Bd.3, 1849–1914
(Munich 1995), 460–89, 1284–95. Another prominent proponent of the Sonderweg thesis, Jürgen
Kocka, put the case succinctly in his article, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about theGerman Sonderweg ’, Journal of Contemporary History , 23, 1 (January 1988), 3–16.
7David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford 1984).
8Detlev J.K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt
am Main 1987), 271 for the explicit rejection of the Sonderweg approach.
9On this point, Peter Pulzer, ‘Special Paths or Main Roads? Making Sense of German History’,
Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture, 22 May 2002 (as yet unpublished) offers some valuable reflec-tions and insights.

obvious, but seems often not to be so. Alongside those theories that looked no
further than German development to explain nazism, ran, from the start,attempts to locate it in new types of political movement and organization, dating from the turmoil produced by the first world war: whether as a Germanform of the European-wide phenomenon of fascism, or as the German mani-festation of something also found only after 1918, the growth of totalitarian-ism. To consider all the variants of these theories and approaches would takeus far out of our way here, and would in any case not be altogether profit-able.
10So let me begin to make my position clear at this point. Both ‘fascism’
and ‘totalitarianism’ are difficult concepts to use, and have attracted muchcriticism, some of it justified. In addition, going back to their usage in the ColdWar, they have usually been seen as opposed rather than complementary con-cepts. However, I see no problem in seeing nazism as a form of each of them,as long as we are looking for common features, not identity. It is not hard tofind features that nazism had in common with fascist movements in otherparts of Europe and elements of its rule shared with regimes generally seen astotalitarian. The forms of organization and the methods and function of massmobilization of the NSDAP, for example, bear much resemblance to those ofthe Italian Fascist Party and of other fascist movements in Europe. In the caseof totalitarianism, superficial similarities, at least, with the Soviet regime underStalin can be seen in the nazi regime’s revolutionary élan, its repressive apparatus, its monopolistic ideology, and its ‘total claim’ on the ruled. So Ihave no difficulty in describing German National Socialism both as a specificform of fascism and as a particular expression of totalitarianism.
Even so, comparison reveals obvious and significant differences. Race, for
example, plays only a secondary role in Italian fascism. In nazism it is, ofcourse, absolutely central. As regards totalitarianism, anything beyond themost superficial glance reveals that the structures of the one-party state, theleadership cult and, not least, the economic base of the nazi and Soviet systemsare quite different. The typology is, in each case, markedly weakened. It can,of course, still be useful, depending upon the art and skill of the political Kershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 241
10 I explored these in some detail in the second chapter of my The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems
and Perspectives of Interpretation (4th edn, London 2000). See also my reservations about the
totalitarianism concept in the essay ‘Totalitarianism Revisited: Nazism and Stalinism inComparative Perspective’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte , 23 (1994), 23–40.
Among a library of works on fascism, Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London 1991), is
outstanding in conceptualization and Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945
(London 1995), in typology, while Michael Mann’s as yet unpublished study, Fascists , offers the
most profound comparative analysis undertaken of the supporters of fascist movements, theirmotivation, and their actions. I am extremely grateful to Professor Mann for a preview of thisimportant work and its interlinked, companion volume, The Dark-Side of Democracy: Explaining
Ethnic Cleansing (not yet published). Recent anthologies on totalitarianism, a concept revived
since the fall of Soviet communism, include Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahr-
hundert. Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung (2nd edn, Bonn 1999); and Enzo Traverso, Le
Totalitarisme: le XXe siècle en débat (Paris 2001).

scientist, historian, or sociologist involved, and can prompt valuable empirical
comparative work of the kind too rarely undertaken. But when it comes toexplaining the essence of the nazi phenomenon, it is less than satisfying.Whether seen as fascism, totalitarianism, or both, there is still something lack-ing. Martin Broszat hinted at this in the introduction to his masterpiece, Der
Staat Hitlers , in 1969, when he indicated the difficulty of placing nazism in
any typology of rule.
11Ultimately, the singular, the unique in nazism, remains
more important, if more elusive, than what it has in common with other move-ments or regimes.
In the eyes of the non-specialist, the ordinary layman, nazism’s historic —
perhaps metahistoric — significance can be summed up in two words: war andgenocide. It takes us back to the self-evident initial claim to singularity withwhich this article began. By war, we naturally mean here the war of unparal-leled barbarity that the nazis launched, especially in eastern Europe. And bygenocide, we think primarily of the destruction of the European Jews, but alsoof the wider-ranging genocidal intent to restructure racially the whole of theEuropean continent. Both words, war and genocide — or perhaps better:world war and murder of the Jews — automatically evoke direct associationwith Hitler. After all, they lay at the heart of his Weltanschauung , his world-
view; they were in essence what he stood for. This is the obvious reason whyone significant strand of historical interpretation has remained insistent thatthere is no need to look any further in the search for nazism’s uniqueness thanthe personality and ideas of its leader. ‘It was indeed Hitler’s “Weltan-schauung” and nothing else that mattered in the end’, Karl-Dietrich Brachersummed up, many years ago.
12Nazism’s uniqueness was Hitler, no more and
no less. Nazism was Hitlerism, pure and simple.
There was a certain easy attractiveness to the argument. At first sight, it
seemed compelling. But, put at its most forthright, as so often, by KlausHildebrand, the thesis was bound to raise the hackles of those, prominentamong them Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, who sought more complexreasons for the calamity wrought on Germany and Europe and found them inthe internal structures and workings of nazi rule, in which Hitler’s hand wasoften none too evident.
13So was born the long-running, everyday story of
historical folk: the debate between the ‘intentionalists’, who looked no furtherthan Hitler’s clear, ideological programme, systematically and logicallyfollowed through, and the ‘structuralists’ or ‘functionalists’, who pointed to an242 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
11 Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers (Munich 1969), 9.
12 Karl Dietrich Bracher, ‘The Role of Hitler’ in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism. A Reader’s
Guide (Harmondsworth 1979), 201.
13 See the directly opposed contributions of Klaus Hildebrand and Hans Mommsen in Michael
Bosch (ed.), Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte (Düsseldorf 1977), 55–71 and further
references to the controversy in Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship , chap. 4. Martin Broszat’s
brilliant essay, ‘Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus’, Vierteljahrs-
hefte für Zeitgeschichte , 18 (1970), 392–409, also amounted to a subtle assault on the ‘Hitlerism’
argument.

administratively chaotic regime, lacking clear planning, and stumbling from
crisis to crisis in its own dynamic spiral of self-destructiveness.
The ‘Hitlerism’ argument will not go away. In fact, there are some signs,
amid the current preoccupation with sexuality in history (as in everythingelse), that the old psycho-historical interpretations are making a comeback,and in equally reductionist fashion. Hence, we have recent attempts to reducethe disaster of nazism to Hitler’s alleged homosexuality, or supposed syphilis.
14
In each case, one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence are surrounded bymuch inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for worldhistory shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’. Reduced toabsurdity, a rent-boy in Munich or a prostitute in Vienna thereby carries ultimate responsibility for the evils of nazism.
However, the ‘structural-functionalist’ argument is also weak at its core. In
reducing Hitler to a ‘weak dictator’,
15at times coming close, it often seemed, to
underestimating him grossly, even to writing him out of the script, and indownplaying ideology into no more than a tool of propagandistic mobiliza-tion, this line of interpretation left the central driving-force of nazism ulti-mately a mystery; the cause of the (ultimately unprovable) self-destructivedynamism hard to explain. My own work on the Third Reich since the mid-1980s, culminating in my Hitler biography, was prompted by the need toovercome this deep divide in interpretation, which was by no means as sterileas is sometimes claimed. The short analysis of Hitler’s power which I wrote in1990, and even more so the biography that followed,
16were attempts to
reassert Hitler’s absolute centrality while at the same time placing the actionsof even such a powerful dictator in the context of the forces, internal andexternal, which shaped the exercise of his power. Writing these books clarifiedin certain ways how I would understand the uniqueness of nazism. I willreturn shortly to Hitler’s own role in that uniqueness.
Let us meanwhile go back to war and genocide as the hallmarks of nazism.
Surprisingly, they played remarkably little part, except on the fringes, in the‘intentionalist-structuralist’ debates before the 1980s. Only since then, and ingood measure via the belated take-off of ‘history from below’ (as it was fre-quently called), have the war, in which nazism came of its own, and the murder of the Jews, that emanated from it, become the focus of sustained andKershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 243
14 Lothar Machtan, The Hidden Hitler (London 2001), for the argument, which has encoun-
tered widespread criticism, that Hitler was a homosexual. The syphilis argument, outrightly rejected by those who have most thoroughly explored Hitler’s medical history, notably FritzRedlich, Hitler. Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (New York/Oxford 1999), and Ernst Günther
Schenck, Patient Hitler. Eine medizinische Biographie (Düsseldorf 1989), has recently resurfaced
in an investigation — the most thorough imaginable of this topic — by Deborah Hayden, towhom I am grateful for a preview of this, as yet, unpublished work.15 A formulation which has become famous, coined by Hans Mommsen and first stated in a
footnote to his Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart 1966), 98, note 26. The debate ensuing
from the term is explored in my Nazi Dictatorship , op. cit., chap. 4.
16 Ian Kershaw, Hitler. A Profile in Power (London 1991, 2nd edn 2001); Hitler, 1889–1936:
Hubris (London 1998); Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London 2000).

systematic research and fully integrated into the history of the nazi regime.
This research, given a massive boost through the opening of archives in theformer Soviet bloc after 1990, has not simply cast much new light on decision-making processes and the escalatory genocidal phases within such a brutalwar, but has also revealed ever more plainly how far the complicity and par-ticipation in the direst forms of gross inhumanity stretched.
17This is, of course,
not sufficient in itself to claim uniqueness. But it does suggest that Hitleralone, however important his role, is not enough to explain the extraordinarylurch of a society, relatively non-violent before 1914, into ever more radicalbrutality and such a frenzy of destruction.
The development of the nazi regime had at least two characteristics which
were unusual, even in comparison with other dictatorships. One was whatHans Mommsen has dubbed ‘cumulative radicalization’.
18Normally, after the
initial bloody phase following a dictator’s takeover of power when there is ashowdown with former opponents, the revolutionary dynamic sags. In Italy,this ‘normalizing’ phase begins in 1925; in Spain, not too long after the end ofthe Civil War. In Russia, under quite different conditions, there was a second,unbelievably awful, phase of radicalization under Stalin, after the first waveduring the revolutionary turmoil then the extraordinarily violent civil war hadsubsided in the 1920s. But the regime’s radical ideological drive gave way toboosting more conventional patriotism during the fight against the Germaninvader, before disappearing almost entirely after Stalin’s death. Radicaliza-tion, in other words, was temporary and fluctuating, rather than an intrinsicfeature of the system itself. So the ‘cumulative radicalization’ so central tonazism is left needing an explanation.
Linked to this is the capacity for destruction — again extraordinary even for
dictatorships. This destructive capacity, though present from the outset, devel-oped over time and in phases; against internal political, then increasingly,‘racial’ enemies in spring 1933, across the spring and summer of 1935, andduring the summer and autumn of 1938; following this, the qualitative leap inits extension to the Poles from autumn 1939 onwards; and the unleashing ofits full might in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Theunceasing radicalization of the regime, and the different stages in the unfoldingof its destructive capacity cannot, however, as has come to be generally recog-nized, be explained by Hitler’s commands and actions alone. Rather, theyfollowed countless initiatives from below, at many different levels of theregime. Invariably, these occurred within a broad ideological framework asso-ciated with Hitler’s wishes and intentions. But those initiating the actions were244 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
17 For a summary of the advances in research, see Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische
Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945 (Frankfurt am Main 1998), 9–66. Much of the new research is
incorporated in the excellent survey by Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesamt-
darstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich/Zurich 1998).
18 First formulated in Hans Mommsen, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus. Kumulative Radikalisierung
und Selbstzerstörung des Regimes’, Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon , Bd.16 (Mannheim 1976),
785–90.

seldom — except in the realms of foreign policy and war strategy — following
direct orders from Hitler and were by no means always ideologically moti-vated. A whole panoply of motives was involved. What motivated the indi-vidual — ideological conviction, career advancement, power-lust, sadism andother factors — is, in fact, of secondary importance. Of primary significance isthat, whatever the motivation, the actions had the function of workingtowards the accomplishment of the visionary goals of the regime, embodied inthe person of the Führer.
We are getting closer to what we might begin to see as the unique character
of nazism, and to Hitler’s part in that uniqueness. A set of counter-factualpropositions will underline how I see Hitler’s indispensability. Let me putthem this way. No Hitler: no SS-police state, untrammelled by the rule of law,and with such massive accretions of power, commencing in 1933. No Hitler:no general European war by the late 1930s. No Hitler: an alternative warstrategy and no attack on the Soviet Union. No Hitler: no Holocaust, no statepolicy aimed at wiping out the Jews of Europe. And yet: the forces that led tothe undermining of law, to expansionism and war, to the ‘teutonic fury’ thatdescended upon the Soviet Union in 1941 and to the quest for ever more radi-cal solutions to the ‘Jewish Question’, were not personal creations of Hitler.Hitler’s personality was, of course, a crucial component of any singularity ofnazism. Who would seriously deny it? But decisive for the unending radicalismand unlimited destructive capacity of nazism was something in addition tothis: the leadership position of Hitler and the type of leadership he embodied.
The bonds between Hitler and his ‘following’ (at different levels of regime
and society) are vital here. A constant theme of my writing on Hitler andNational Socialism has been to suggest that they are best grasped throughMax Weber’s quasi-religious concept of ‘charismatic authority’, in which irra-tional hopes and expectations of salvation are projected onto an individual,who is thereby invested with heroic qualities.
19Hitler’s ‘charismatic leadership’
offered the prospect of national salvation — redemption brought about byKershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 245
19 I first directly deployed Weber’s concept to help explore the shaping of popular opinion in
‘The Führer Image and Political Integration: The Popular Conception of Hitler in Bavaria duringthe Third Reich’ in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (eds), Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos
und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart 1981), 133–61,
‘Alltägliches und Außeralltägliches: ihre Bedeutung für die Volksmeinung 1933–1939’ in DetlevPeukert and Jürgen Reulecke (eds), Die Reihen fast geschlossen. Beiträge zur Geschichte des
Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal 1981), 273–92, and, more extensively, in The
‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford 1987). I deployed it more directly to
examine the nature of Hitler’s power in Hitler: A Profile in Power , op. cit., as well as in a number
of essays, such as ‘The Nazi State: an Exceptional State?’, New Left Review , 176 (1989), 47–67
and ‘“Working towards the Führer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’,Contemporary European History , 2 (1993), 103–18. The concept is also used by M. Rainer
Lepsius, ‘Charismatic Leadership: Max Weber’s Model and its Applicability to the Rule of Hitler’in Carl Friedrich Graumann and Serge Moscovici (eds), Changing Conceptions of Leadership
(New York 1986), 53–66.

purging the impure and pernicious evil within — to rapidly expanding
numbers of Germans experiencing a comprehensive crisis of social and cul-tural values as well as a total crisis of state and economy. Of course, mani-festations of ‘charismatic leadership’ were far from confined to Germany inthe interwar period. But Hitler’s was both different in character and more far-reaching in impact than the charismatic forms seen anywhere else — some-thing to which I will briefly return.
There was another big difference. Hitler’s ‘charismatic power’, resting on the
invocation of the politics of national salvation, was superimposed after 1933upon the instruments of the most modern state on the European continent —upon an advanced economy (if currently crisis-ridden); upon a well-developedand efficient system of enforcement and repression (if for the time being weakened through political crisis); upon a sophisticated apparatus of stateadministration (if at the time its exponents were demoralized by perceivedundermining of authority in a disputed and crisis-wracked democracy); and,not least, upon a modernized, professional army (if temporarily enfeebled)which was thirsting for a return to its glory days, for a chance to kick over thetraces of the ignominy summed up by the name ‘Versailles’ and for futureexpansion to acquire European hegemony. Hitler’s ‘charismatic authority’ andthe promise of national salvation fitted, if not perfectly, then neverthelessextremely well, the need to unite the expectations of these varying strands ofthe political élite. Hitler was, we might say, the intersection point of a numberof ideological traits which cumulatively, if not singly, made up the unique political culture of which these élites were a product, and which extendedbeyond class confines to extensive sections of German society. This politicalculture was not in itself nazi. But it provided the fertile ground within whichnazism could flourish. Among its components were: an understanding ofnationality that rested upon ethnicity (and was hence open to notions ofrestoration of national strength through ‘ethnic cleansing’); an imperialist ideathat looked not in the main to overseas colonies, but to German dominance inthe ethnic mélange of eastern Europe, at the expense of the Slav population; apresumption of Germany’s rightful position as a great power, accompanied bydeep resentment at the country’s treatment since the war and its national weakness and humiliation; and a visceral detestation of bolshevism coupledwith the sense that Germany was the last bulwark in the defence of western civilization. Not the least of Hitler’s contributions to the spiralling radicalismof the nazi regime after 1933 was to unleash the pent-up social and ideologicalforces embraced by this short catalogue of ideological traits; to open up hither-to unimaginable opportunities; to make the unthinkable seem realizable. His‘charismatic authority’ set the guidelines; the bureacracy of a modern state wasthere to implement them. But ‘charismatic authority’ sits uneasily with the rulesand regulations of bureacracy. The tension between the two could neither subside nor turn into a stable and permanent form of state. Allied to the under-lying ideological thrust and the varied social forces which Hitler represented,this created a dynamism — intrinsically self-destructive since the charismatic246 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2

regime was unable to reproduce itself — which constitutes an important com-
ponent of nazism’s uniqueness.
If this explosive mixture of the ‘charismatic’ politics of national salvation
and the apparatus of a highly modern state was central to nazism’s unique-ness, then it ought to be possible to distinguish the unholy combination fromthe differing preconditions of other dictatorships. This, however briefly andsuperficially, I shall try to do.
The quest for national rebirth lay, of course, at the heart of all fascist move-
ments.
20But only in Germany did the striving for national renewal adopt such
strongly pseudo-religious tones. Even if we count the Spanish dictatorship asoutrightly fascist, its national ‘redemptive’ element, if important, was nonethe-less far weaker than that in Germany, amounting to little more than the questfor the ‘true Spain’ and the restoration of the values of reactionary Catholi-cism, together with the utter rejection of all that was modern and smacked ofassociation with godless socialism and bolshevism. In Italy, pseudo-religiousnotions of national ‘salvation’ or ‘redemption’ were even weaker than inSpain, and certainly possessed little or nothing of the apocalyptic sense ofbeing the last bulwark of western, Christian culture against the atheistic threatof Asiatic (and Jewish) bolshevism that was prevalent in Germany. Mussolini’sexternal ambitions, too, like Franco’s, were purely traditional, even if dressedin new clothes. War and imperialist expansion in Africa were intended torestore lost colonies, revenge the ignominy of Italian humiliation in 1896 atthe hands of the Ethiopians, and thereby establish Italy’s glory and its place inthe sun as a world power, with the useful side-effect of bolstering the dictator-ship within Italy through the prestige of external victories and acquisition ofempire. But nothing much resembled the depth of hope placed in national salvation in Germany.
Though it is often played down in historiography these days, the extraordi-
narily strong fears of a threat to German culture, a profound cultural pessi-mism in Germany’s unusually broad-based intelligentsia, widespread alreadybefore the first world war, formed one of the roots of such susceptibility.Oswald Spengler’s widely-read and influential tract on the downfall of westernculture, the first volume of which was published a month before the end of thewar in 1918,
21embodied feelings which, in cruder form, had been spread by a
multiplicity of patriotic organizations long before the nazis appeared on thescene. In the polarized society of the Weimar Republic, the antagonism of theperceived threat of modernity to what were portrayed as traditional and trueGerman values — a threat focused on socialism, capitalism and, not least, therepresentative scapegoat figure for both: the Jew — spread both at élite andpopular levels. Shored up by the trauma of a lost war, a trauma arguablygreater in Germany than in any other land — in a country where the hatedKershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 247
20 Griffin, in particular, has made this the focal point of his interpretation of fascism. See his
Nature of Fascism , op. cit., 26, 32ff.
21 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Vienna/ Munich 1918–22).

socialism had come to power through revolution and where established
religion seemed to be losing its hold — an appeal to hopes of national salva-tion held substantial political potential. Though other countries were also traumatized by the war, the cultural crisis, even in Italy, ran nowhere near sodeep as in Germany and, in consequence, was less formative for the nature ofthe dictatorship. In addition, the length of the crisis and the size of the massmovement before the takeover of power were significant.
Only in Italy, apart from Germany, did home-grown fascism develop into a
genuine mass movement before the takeover of power. By the time Mussoliniwas made prime minister in 1922, in the wake of Italy’s postwar crisis, theItalian Fascist Party had some 322,000 members, whereas in Spain, amid quitedifferent conditions of the mid-1930s, before the Spanish Civil War, theFalange could only muster around 10,000 members in a country of 26 millioninhabitants. If these figures are a deceptive guide to the potential backing forpolitics of national salvation in those countries, the activist base was in bothcases, quite extremely so in Spain, far more limited than it was in Germany.There, the hard core of believers in a party leader who promised national salvation as the heart of his message was already massive, with 850,000 partymembers and 427,000 SA men (often not members of the party itself), evenbefore Hitler took power.
And, as elsewhere, the first world war had left, as part of its legacy, the
readiness to resort to extreme violence to attain political aims. The crusadingidea of national salvation, redeeming Germany from its humiliation, purging itof the enemies — political and racial — seen to be threatening its life-blood,championing the cultural fight against the threat of Slavdom, evoking notionsof racial struggle to win back lost territories in eastern Europe, heralding anultimate showdown with godless, ‘Asiatic’ bolshevism, tapped brilliantly intothis new climate of violence. And whereas there was only a three-year periodbefore Italian fascism gained power, after which its élan rapidly waned, the 14years of ‘latent civil war’
22that preceded Hitler’s takeover allowed the prospect
of violently-accomplished national salvation to fester and spread, massively soin conditions of the complete collapse of legitimation of the Weimar Republicafter 1930.
Not only the street-fighters and beer-hall brawlers in the nazi movement
were attracted by the idea of violently-attained national salvation. As muchrecent research has shown, a new generation of intelligent, middle-class students at German universities in the early 1920s soaked up völkisch ideas,
those of extreme racist nationalism, intrinsic to the ideas of national regenera-tion.
23In this way, ‘national salvation’ found intellectualized form among
groups which would constitute a coming élite, groups whose doctorates in law248 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
22 For the term, see Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford 1993), 262.
23 See, for this, especially Ulrich Herbert, ‘“Generation der Sachlichkeit”: Die völkische
Studentenbewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland’ in Frank Bajohr, Werner Joheand Uwe Lohalm (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne
(Hamburg 1991), 115–44.

combined with a rationalized ‘ Neue Sachlichkeit’ (or ‘new objectivity’) type of
approach to the ‘cleansing’ of the nation: the excision of its ‘life-threateningdiseases’. Such mentalities were carried with them, 10 or 15 years after study-ing, into the upper echelons of the SS and Security Police, as well as into stateand party planning offices and ‘think tanks’. By the early 1940s, some of these‘intellectuals’ had their hands covered in blood as they led the Einsatzgruppen
into the Soviet Union, while others were laying down plans for the racial‘cleansing’ of the occupied territories of the east and the new ethnic order to beestablished there.
24
That ‘national salvation’ involved not just internal regeneration, but a ‘new
order’ based on the ethnic cleansing of the entire continent of Europe, also singles out National Socialism from all other forms of fascism. No small part ofits uniqueness, in other words, was the combination of racial nationalism andimperialism directed not abroad, but at Europe itself. And, as already indi-cated, though nazism amounted to the most extreme expression of such ideas,the politics of national salvation had every prospect of blending into the cul-tural pessimism of neo-conservatives and the anti-democratic and revisionist-expansionist currents that prevailed among the national-conservative élites.
It is not just the force in themselves of the ideas of national rebirth that
Hitler came to embody, but the fact that they arose in such a highly modernstate system, which was decisive for their uniquely destructive quality. Otherinterwar European dictatorships, both fascist and communist, emerged in societies with less advanced economies, less sophisticated apparatus of stateadministration, and less modernized armies. And, apart from the Soviet Union(where policies directed at creating a sphere of influence in the Baltic andBalkans to provide a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against the looming German threattook concrete form only by the end of the 1930s), geopolitical aims in Europegenerally stretched no further than localized irredentism. In other words: notonly did the expectations of ‘national salvation’ invested in Hitler enjoy a massbasis — 13 million nazi voters already in free elections in 1932, countless further millions to join them over the following years; not only did such ideascorrespond to more ‘intellectualized’ notions of the defence of western cultureamong the upper social classes and political élites; not only did ‘national salvation’ involve the reconstruction on racial lines of the whole of Europe;but — something present in no other dictatorship — a highly modern stateapparatus, increasingly infected by such notions, existed in Germany and was capable of turning visionary, utopian goals into practical, administrativereality.
Let us return at this point to Hitler and to the implementation of the politics
of national salvation after 1933. I have been suggesting that a modern statesystem directed by ‘charismatic authority’, based on ideas, frequently used by Hitler, of a ‘mission’ ( Sendung ) to bring about ‘salvation’ ( Rettung ) orKershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 249
24 See the fine study by Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des
Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg 2002).

‘redemption’ ( Erlösung ) — all, of course, terms tapping religious or quasi-
religious emotions — was unique. (I should, perhaps, add that, in my view, thispopulistic exploitation of naïve ‘messianic’ hopes and illusions among mem-bers of a society plunged into comprehensive crisis does not mean that nazismhas claim to be regarded as a ‘political religion’, a currently voguish revampingof an age-old notion, though no less convincing for being repeated so persist-ently.
25) The singularity of the nazi form of rule was, thus, undeniably bound up
with the singularity of Hitler’s position of power. Though familiar enough, it isworthwhile reminding ourselves of the essence of this power.
During the course of the early 1920s, Hitler developed a pronounced sense
of his ‘national mission’ — ‘messianic allures’, as one ironic remark had it atthe time.
26The ‘mission’ can be summed up as follows: nationalize the masses;
take over the state, destroy the enemy within — the ‘November criminals’(meaning Jews and Marxists, much the same in his eyes); build up defences;then undertake expansion ‘by the sword’ to secure Germany’s future in over-coming the ‘shortage of land’ ( Raumnot ) and acquiring new territory in the
east of Europe. Towards the end of 1922, a small but growing band of fanati-cal followers — the initial ‘charismatic community’ — inspired by Mussolini’s‘March on Rome’, began to project their own desire for a ‘heroic’ nationalleader onto Hitler. (As early as 1920, such desires were expressed by neo-conservatives, not nazis, as the longing for a leader who, in contrast to thecontemptible ‘politicians’ of the new Republic, would be a statesman with thequalities of the ‘ruler, warrior, and high priest’ rolled into one.
27) Innumerable
letters eulogizing Hitler as a national hero poured into the Landsberg fortress,where in 1924 he spent a comfortable few months of internment after his trialfor high treason at Munich, which had given him new prominence and stand-ing on the racist-nationalist Right. A book published that year waxed lyrical(and mystical) about the new hero: 250 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
25 The perception of nazism as a form of political religion, advanced as long ago as 1938 by the
émigré Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Vienna 1938), has recently gained a new lease of
life. Among others who have found the notion attractive, Michael Burleigh adopted it, alongside‘totalitarianism’, as a major conceptual prop of his interpretation in The Third Reich. A New
History (London 2000). See also Burleigh’s essay, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’ in
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions , 1, 2 (2000), 1–26. It has also been deployed for
fascist Italy by Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism as Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History ,
25, 2–3 (May–June 1990), 229–51, and idem, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy
(Cambridge, MA 1996). See also Gentile’s ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions,Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’ inTotalitarian Movements and Political Religions , 1, 1 (2000), 18–55. For sharp criticism of its
application to nazism, see Michael Rißmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und
Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators (Zurich/Munich 2001), 191–7; and Griffin, Nature
of Fascism , op. cit., 30–2. Griffin, once critical, has, however, changed his mind and now favours
the use of the concept, as can be seen in his ‘Nazism’s “Cleansing Hurricane” and theMetamorphosis of Fascist Studies’ in W. Loh (ed.), ‘Faschismus’ kontrovers (Paderborn 2002).
26 Cited in Albrecht Tyrell, Vom ‘Trommler’ zum ‘Führer’ (Munich 1975), 163.
27 Cited in Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (3rd edn,
Munich 1992), 217.

The secret of his personality resides in the fact that in it the deepest of what lies dormant in
the soul of the German people has taken shape in full living features. . . . That has appearedin Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the nation’s yearning.
28
Hitler believed this bilge. He used his time in Landsberg to describe his
‘mission’ in the first volume of Mein Kampf (which, with scant regard for
catchy, publishers’ titles, he had wanted to call ‘Four and a Half Years ofStruggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice’). He also learnt lessons fromthe failure of his movement in 1923. One important lesson was that a re-founded nazi movement had, in contrast to the pre- Putsch era, to be exclusively
a ‘Leader Party’. From 1925 onwards, the NSDAP was gradually transformedinto precisely this ‘Leader Party’. Hitler became not just the organizational ful-crum of the movement, but also the sole fount of doctrinal orthodoxy. Leaderand Idea (however vague the latter remained) blended into one, and by the endof the 1920s, the NSDAP had swallowed all strands of the former diversevölkisch movement and now possessed a monopoly on the racist-nationalist
Right. In conditions of the terminal crisis of Weimar, Hitler, backed by a muchmore solid organization than had been the case before 1923, was in a positionto stake a claim for ever-growing numbers of Germans to be the coming national ‘saviour’, a redeemer figure.
It is necessary to underline this development, however well-known it is in
general, since, despite leadership cults elsewhere, there was actually nothingsimilar in the genesis of other dictatorships. The Duce cult before the ‘Marchon Rome’ had not been remotely so important or powerful within Italianfascism as had the Führer cult to the growth of German National Socialism.Mussolini was at that stage still essentially first among equals among theregional fascist leaders. The full efflorescence of the cult only came later, after1925.
29In Spain, the Caudillo cult attached to Franco was even more of an
artificial creation, the claim to being a great national leader, apeing the Italianand German models, coming long after he had made his name and careerthrough the army.
30An obvious point of comparison in totalitarian theory,
linking dictatorships of Left and Right, appears to be that of the Führer cultKershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 251
28 Georg Schott, Das Volksbuch vom Hitler (Munich 1924), 18.
29 See Piero Melograni, ‘The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary
History , 11, 4 (October 1976), 221–37; Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power (London 1973),
72ff, 166–75; and, most recently the excellent political biography by R.J.B. Bosworth, Benito
Mussolini (London 2002), chaps 6–11. It took several years before the customary mode of address
and reference to Mussolini changed from Presidente to Duce and some among his old comradesnever took to the ‘heroic’ form. See R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and
Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London 1998), 62, note 14. A valu-
able study of the incomparably more dynamic impact of the Führer cult than the Duce cult onstate administration and bureaucracy is provided by Maurizio Bach, Die charismatischen
Führerdiktaturen. Drittes Reich und italienischer Faschismus im Vergleich ihrerHerrschaftsstrukturen (Baden-Baden 1991). Walter Rauscher, Hitler und Mussolini. Macht, Krieg
und Terror (Graz/Vienna/Cologne 2001), provides a parallel biography of the two dictators,
though offers no structural comparison.30 See Paul Preston, Franco. A Biography (London 1993), 187ff.

with the Stalin cult. Certainly, there was more than a casual pseudo-religious
strain to the Stalin cult. Russian peasants plainly saw in ‘the boss’ some sort ofsubstitute for ‘father Tsar’.
31Nonetheless, the Stalin cult was in essence a late
accretion to the position which had gained Stalin his power, that of PartyGeneral Secretary in prime position to inherit Lenin’s mantle. Unlike nazism,the personality cult was not intrinsic to the form of rule, as its denunciationand effective abolition after Stalin’s death demonstrated. Later rulers in theSoviet Union did not try to revamp it; the term ‘charismatic leadership’ doesnot readily trip off the lips when we think of Brezhnev or Chernenko. In con-trast, the Führer cult was the indispensable basis, the irreplaceable essence andthe dynamic motor of a nazi regime unthinkable without it. The ‘Führer myth’was the platform for the massive expansion of Hitler’s own power once thestyle of leadership in the party had been transferred to the running of amodern, sophisticated state. It served to integrate the party, determine the‘guidelines for action’ of the movement, to sustain the focus on the visionaryideological goals, to drive on the radicalization, to maintain the ideologicalmomentum, and, not least, to legitimate the initiatives of others ‘workingtowards the Führer’.
32
The core points of Hitler’s ideology were few, and visionary rather than
specific. But they were unchanging and unnegotiable: ‘removal of the Jews’(meaning different things to different party and state agencies at differenttimes); attaining ‘living space’ to secure Germany’s future (a notion vagueenough to encompass different strands of expansionism); race as the explana-tion of world history, and eternal struggle as the basic law of human existence.For Hitler personally, this was a vision demanding war to bring about nationalsalvation through expunging the shame of the capitulation of 1918 anddestroying those reponsible for it (who were in his eyes the Jews). FewGermans saw things in the way that Hitler did. But mobilization of the massesbrought them closer to doing so. Here, Hitler remained the supreme motiva-tor. Mass mobilization was never, however, as he realized from the outset,going to suffice. He needed the power of the state, the co-option of its instru-ments of rule, and the support of the élites who traditionally controlled them.Naturally, the conservative élites were not true believers. They did not, in themain, swallow the excesses of the Führer cult, and could even be privately contemptuous or condescending about Hitler and his movement. Beyond that,they were often disappointed with the realities of National Socialism. Even so,Hitler’s new form of leadership offered them the chance, as they saw it, of sustaining their own power. Their weakness was Hitler’s strength, before andafter 1933. And, as we have seen, there were plenty of ideological overlapseven without complete identity. Gradually, a state administration run, like252 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2
31 See Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System. Essays in the Social History of Interwar
Russia (London 1985), 57–71, 268–76; and also Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and
Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge 1997), chaps 1, 4 and 5.
32 For the term, see Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris , op. cit., 529.

that of all modern states, on the basis of ‘expedient rationality’, succumbed to
the irrational goals of the politics of national salvation, embodied by Hitler —a process culminating in the bureaucratically-organized and industrially-executed genocide against the Jews, premised on irrational notions of nationalredemption.
Not only the complicity of the old élites was needed for this process of
subordination of rational principles of government and administration to theirrational goals of ‘charismatic leadership’. New élites, as has already beensuggested, were only too ready to exploit the unheard of opportunities offeredto them in the Führer state to build up unimaginable power accretions, free ofany legal or administrative shackles. The new ‘technocrats of power’, of thetype exemplified by Reinhard Heydrich, combined ideological fanaticism withcold, ruthless, depersonified efficiency and organizational skills. They couldfind rationality in irrationality; could turn into practical reality the goals asso-ciated with Hitler, needing no further legitimitation than recourse to the ‘wishof the Führer’.
33This was no ‘banality of evil’.34This was the working of an
ideologically-motivated élite coldly prepared to plan for the eradication of 11million Jews (the figure laid down at the Wannsee Conference of January1942), and for the ‘resettlement’ to the Siberian wastes, plainly genocidal inintent, of over 30 million, mainly Slavs, over the following 25 years. That, insuch a system, they would find countless ‘willing executioners’ prepared to dotheir bit, whatever the individual motivation of those involved, goes withoutsaying. This was, however, not on account of national character, or somelong-existent, specifically German desire to eliminate the Jews. Rather, it wasthat the idea of racial cleansing, the core of the notion of national salvation,had become, via Hitler’s leadership position, institutionalized in all aspects oforganized life in the nazi state. That was decisive.
Unquestionably, Hitler was a unique historical personality. But the unique-
ness of the nazi dictatorship cannot be reduced to that. It is explained less byHitler’s character, extraordinary as it was, than by the specific form of rulewhich he embodied and its corrupting effect on the instruments and mecha-nisms of the most advanced state in Europe. Both the broad acceptance of the
‘project’ of ‘national salvation’, seen as personified in Hitler, andthe internal-
ization of the ideological goals by a new, modern power-élite, operating along-side weakened old élites through the bureaucratic sophistication of a modernstate, were necessary prerequisites for the world-historical catastrophe of theThird Reich. Kershaw: Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism 253
33 Gerald Fleming, Hitler und die Endlösung. ‘Es ist des Führers Wunsch’ (Wiesbaden/Munich
1982), shows how frequently the phrase was invoked by those involved in the extermination ofthe Jews.34 The memorable, though nonetheless misleading, concept was coined by Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (London 1963).

Ian Kershaw
is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. His
latest publications are (ed. with Moshe Lewin), Stalinism and
Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge 1997); Hitler,
1889–1936: Hubris (London 1998); Hitler, 1936–2000: Nemesis
(London 2000).254 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 2