Architect Of Evil

By Stefan Kanfer

One June morning in 1919, a Bavarian professor stopped to watch a 30-year- old corporal haranguing a group of students. "I had the peculiar feeling," the professor recalled, "that the man was feeding on the excitement that he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face and hair hanging down the forehead in unmilitary fashion. He had a close-cropped mustache, and his strikingly large, pale blue eyes shone with a cold fanatical light."

In the next 25 years the world was to grow fatally familiar with that sight: the forelock vibrating, the voice agitated, the stare fixed on destiny. Adolf ; Hitler seldom looked back; history was saturated with national and personal grievance. The future was what counted.

He had reason to despise what had gone before. Hitler's father was an Austrian civil servant, born illegitimate as Alois Schicklgruber (Alois was 39 before he acknowledged his origins and took his presumed father's surname). Although Alois was nominally a Roman Catholic, he placed his faith in the whip. When the sixth of his eight children misbehaved, he was beaten unmercifully. Schicklgruber/Hitler died when Adolf was 13, a lively and artistic youth racked by the need for recognition and the appetite for vengeance.

By Adolf Hitler's lights, there was much to avenge. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice refused to admit the apprentice painter. Very well, then, he would become an architect. But he was unqualified for further study. These rejections were aggravated by the death of Hitler's beloved mother Klara. The young man with no vices -- he neither drank nor smoked nor pursued women -- drifted in the city, living in flophouses, supporting himself by illustrating street scenes and postcards.

His self-education was wide but shallow. Vienna was peopled with brilliant artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire.

In early 1914 Adolf, his head spinning with unassimilated ideas, was rejected by the Austrian army as "unfit for combatant and auxiliary duties, too weak. Unable to bear arms." The Bavarian military had no such reservations. At the beginning of World War I, he was issued a uniform and sent to the front. Even there the trooper was set apart. He received no mail, shared no confidences, had no girlfriend. A fellow enlistee remembered "this white crow among us that didn't go along with us when we damned the war to hell." In France the white crow distinguished himself under fire. Thanks to the initiative of a Jewish officer, Corporal Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.

After the war, Hitler joined a new and violently anti-Semitic group, the $ forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers' Party -- Nazi for short. There, for the first time since adolescence, he found a home and friends. Within a year, he became the chief Nazi propagandist. Judaism, he told his audiences, had produced the profiteers and Bolsheviks responsible for the defeat of the fatherland and the strangulation of the economy. Jews were bacilli infecting the arts, the press, the government. Pogroms would be insufficient. "The final aim must unquestionably be the irrevocable Entfernung ((removal)) of the Jews."

Early on, Hitler had a central insight: "All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written but by the spoken word." He concentrated on an inflammatory speaking style flashing with dramatic gestures and catch phrases: "Germany, awake!" He ingeniously added a series of symbols that caught the national imagination. The most powerful was the Hakenkreuz (hooked cross), set in a circle and inscribed on a banner. "In red," he proclaimed, "we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man."

The Hitlerian pathology became more pronounced. He now regarded his audience as feminine: "The mass, the people, is for me a woman," ready to be seduced. But the seduction was figurative; the woman who seemed to beguile him most was Carola Hoffmann, an elderly widow. He frequently visited his admirer's home in a suburb of Munich, where she did his laundry and indulged his sweet tooth; acquaintances were once astonished to see Adolf put seven spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. When Frau Hoffmann offered to buy him a gift, he suggested a rhinoceros-hide dog whip like the one Alois had used long ago. There was every reason to agree with the appraisal of Hitler offered by the wife of an early follower: "I tell you, he is a neuter."

Initially, Hitler attracted those like himself, unappeased outsiders, misfits, losers. Joseph Goebbels was an unsuccessful novelist and playwright. Julius Streicher was a blackmailer. Ernst Rohm was a sadistic homosexual who advocated violence and murder. Hermann Goring was an air-force veteran without a scruple to his name. "I have no conscience," he liked to declare. "My conscience is Adolf Hitler." But then, Hitler was the conscience of all his cadre. Pan-Germanism was their creed, Adolf their Messiah. When criticized, Hitler would say, "Two thousand years ago, a man was similarly denounced . . . That man was dragged before a court, and they said, 'He is arousing the people!' So he too was an agitator!"

Before long Hitler was dragged before a court. He and his fellow Nazis had attempted an armed coup in Munich; when it failed, the instigators were imprisoned. Here at last was the longed-for martyrdom, and Hitler seized it. Up to now, events had formed the leader: Germany's humiliating loss of the Great War, the Allies' insistence on reparations, the monstrous inflation, the centuries-old distrust of Jewish professionals and merchants. From here on, the leader would create the events.

During his months behind bars, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf, the Nazi bible. The terrible arithmetic of the war and the Holocaust was prefigured on every page. Propaganda: "The German . . . people must be misled, if the support of the masses is required." Morality: "Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." Tactics: "The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Genetics: "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff."

Paroled on Dec. 19, 1924, Hitler spent the next five years reinvigorating the Nazi Party, exploiting Weimar democracy to bring down the Republic. The party's members were tireless, cajoling, exhorting, running for local offices, gathering about them a brutal elite guard called the Schutzstaffel, or SS. During this period an American journalist, Louis Lochner, watched the Nazi leader addressing students at Berlin University. "I came away from that meeting," he reported, "wondering how a man . . . who ranted and fumed and stamped could so impress young intellectuals. Of all people, I thought, they should have detected the palpable flaws in his logic."

But the flaws were in Hitler's overconfident detractors. The Nazi Party received strong support not only from the lower middle class but also from university students and professors. The existentialist Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Psychologist Carl Jung grew intoxicated with "the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment." A young architect named Albert Speer found that Hitler's oratory "swept away any skepticism, any reservations."

Among the others swept away were two pretty frauleins. One was Hitler's unstable niece Geli Raubal, the only woman he ever truly loved. It was a sad and unfulfilled affair. On a September evening in 1931, after an argument with & her uncle, Raubal fatally shot herself. He had only one subsequent lover, a young blond named Eva Braun. In 1932, frustrated by Hitler's inattention, she also aimed a pistol at herself, but the attempt failed. Nearly 13 years later, under Berlin's streets, the drama would be eerily restaged when Hitler took Braun for his bride, 40 hours before their double suicide by pistol, poison and flames.

Until that Walpurgisnacht, nothing could divert him from the goal of a new world order. In 1931 Hitler adopted a vegetarian diet, but it did not improve his disposition. Convinced -- falsely -- that he was suffering from a precancerous condition, he had a series of tantrums. "I cannot lose even a year," he cried. "I must come to power quickly in order to solve the gigantic problems in the little time remaining to me. I must! I must!"

Power arrived on Jan. 30, 1933. The unknown at 30 was named Chancellor of Germany at 43. From the beginning the Third Reich was a reflection of its new Fuhrer. Hitler's triumphs should have increased his confidence. Instead they fed his paranoia. Rohm and his followers were purged and murdered. The nation's most original minds were exiled to a concentration-camp universe from which few returned. Military tactics that demanded objectivity were decided for personal reasons. Friends who came upon the Fuhrer secretly reading with the aid of spectacles were told, "You see, I need glasses. I am getting old, and that is why I prefer to wage war at 50 rather than 60."

He turned to amphetamines, but these only increased his intimations of mortality. On another June morning, almost 21 years to the day after he caught the attention of the Bavarian professor, Hitler was taken on a triumphal tour of Paris. He paused at Napoleon's tomb, placed his cap over his heart, bowed and gazed at the crypt. Then the Fuhrer turned to a favorite and said somberly, "You will build my tomb." But construction had already begun on that mausoleum. At its completion five years later, it would also accommodate some 50 million others. It was called the Third Reich, and its designer was Adolf Hitler. The failed student was destined to be remembered as an architect after all.

NEXT WEEK

PART 3: Desperate Years

Hitler sweeps through Europe, but a formidable foe emerges

PART 4: What If . . .?

How the outcome could have been different

PLUS: Japan and the war in the Pacific