Bluffmaster

I have been meaning to write this one ever since I finished my epic world war two volume (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich). But between my desire to shift immediately to reading about Indian freedom movement and the 1857 war, and wisely recommended to take a break in between reading so much history, a revision of the entire Harry Potter series has kept me sufficiently engaged to delay it until now.

The title of the blog, obviously, refers to one of the greatest charlatans of history, and the architect of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler. The book is not about the war per se, it is about the the rise and fall of the reich that the Nazis boasted would last a 1000 years. They were off the mark by about 990 years, but the book is about what conspired in those epochal 12 years with the founder of Nazism at the helm, and a nation, a continent, a civilization under his military boots.

The book is replete with facts, figures, names and dates, just like any other history book would, but Shirer has a narration style which makes the book a compulsive page turner for most of its 1200-page stretch. The book begins with the humble beginnings of the man who was born Schicklgruber, and how his ideology took a concrete shape, reading the racist ramblings of Arthur Gobineau during his living-in-a-gutter days at Vienna. The stage then shifts to Bavaria, and these are the troubled days of the newborn Republic after the humbling of the First World War. The air is rife with vindictive feelings against the ‘November criminals’, the generals who were brave enough to tell the Kaiser that he must go, for everything is now lost.

Enter Adolf Hitler, with his half baked theories of the supremacy of the Aryan race, the lowly-ness of the Jewish (who, in his opinion, were largely responsible for 1918) and the dreams of a truly Austro-German reich. A twittering NSDAP is vitalized by a youthful vagrant failed painter from Austria, and his speaking skills capture the imagination of a state. Until he tries to jump the gun of his political star, and the Beer Hall Putsch ends in a tragicomic failure – except that it gives him an opportunity to bring forth his oratorical skills in front of a nation watching the trial, and gives him a chance to put his muddled theories in his propaganda –ish biography, Mein Kampf.

Out of jail he emerges, more popular than ever, and more determined than ever to take the German helm, without any unconstitutional demeanor (sans the political killings and street battles with the communist party workers). The book tells a fascinating tale of all the political intrigue that went on in Berlin at this time, with every German in the good books of von Hindenburg fancying his chances. Twice, the Austrian corporal is spurned. But he returns, victorious, victory handed over to him by a German civilization which hasn’t known rebellion since times immemorial. He assembles a ragged army of ex-convicts, fugitives, crooks, perverts, homosexuals – men with a twisted view of humanity and even more twisted view of history – out to redefine what the word civilization means – Goebbels, Roehm, Himmler, Schacht, Strasser, Goering, Heydrich – the list goes on.

The man never truly had any of his own – and a first chilling demonstration is made during the Night of the Long Knives, when he affects the cold blooded killing of Ernst Roehm, the closest he had to a brother, in a bid to purge the SA. The signals are only amplified in his famous Reichstag speech calling for peace and harmony, delivered with an effervescence which makes the likes of seasoned veterans like Roosevelt look up and nod.

The scene shifts to Hitler’s constant rants about Lebensraum, and here’s his chance to put it in action. The man has a nation rallying behind him, for he shows them a picture of a glorious, majestic Germany, holding its head high after the indignations of losing the war and its reputation, and the economic catastrophe thereafter. One by one, Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia all fall into his kitty, wonderfully abetted by an appeasing Chamberlain and Daladier and the Munich Agreement, which must rank as one of Hitler’s greatest diplomatic successes ever. The world watches, uneasy, shifty, edgy, but with hopes that the man is now satisfied, a view further reinforced by another of Hitler’s masterpiece speeches to the Reichstag.

But the man’s greed catches up with him. Poland is a fish too big to swallow without a burp, and even the Russian roguish support cannot make it any smoother. The battlelines are now drawn in the open, and the world wakes up, belated. At the height of confidence, and faultless execution of Blitzkrieg which brings them infallible fortresses of Belgium, the Nordic coastlines, and a romp across half the territory of France and the entire Western Europe mainland, the german tactics are best summed up in three words – daring, deceit and surprise. The Wehrmacht’s stunning force, the panzer divisions rolling across the European plains, the Stuka divebombers and the never-say-die spirit of the german soldier bring him stunningly swift victories. The might of british naval power, and the boasts of French eastern front are left gasping for credibility, as Hitler’s army gobbles nation after another, and by the summer of 1942, Hitler’s men preside over a dazzling array of victories, ruling the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic to the Volga.

This is where the law of averages catches up with a man trying to outrun his destiny. The tactical confusion at Dunkirk, when all that was needed was a snap of the fingers, the failure of Operation Sea Lion when nothing but Britain’s superior use of radio kept it alive in the Battle of Britain, the neglect of Mediterranean and Africa, and the undeniable turning point – the failure of Operation Barbarossa and the gross underestimation of the Red Army’s tenacity, with Moscow’s spires within sight and then lost forever, a twin charge at Stalingrad and the Caucasian oil fields, and a loss of both – pegged the man back to where he belonged. His hopes irretrievably lost, as a quarter of all German armies without gaining as much as a foot of Russian soil, but not his iron will, he plots on, right until the day he commits suicide, and is consigned into the pages of history with a war cry to never give up and keep the struggle on.

The book doesn’t touch upon much of Pearl Harbour, another significant event that turned the tide of the world war, which I found a bit strange, but then, as I had to remind myself, the book was about the Third Reich, and its rise and fall. There is the obvious mention of the Holocaust – the most grim chapter of the entire saga, and not just literally. The man might still have passed off in history books as a warring marshal, had it not been for this most brutal implementation of all his botched up theories of eugenics and the superiority of the Aryan pure-blood. Shirer devotes a chapter on the various means and ends of ethnic cleansing, executed in all their sadism by Heydrich and Eichmann, but the sole chapter is gory enough for anyone who wishes to delve deeper into the psyche of the man, and corollarily, of the Third Reich. For here’s a man greater than a nation, with supreme power over the life and death of every citizen, and he takes them to unprecedented dizzying heights, before plunging them into an abyss so deep, that the collective conscience probably still hasn’t emerged out of it, given the hush hush references to anything and everything Nazi.

Whatever notion one carries about Italy’s role in the world war, the truth is revealed throughout the book. The fact remains that this was Hitler’s war, and all the victories were indeed, his. The military boasts of Mussolini were nothing more than that, boasts. And the Duce willingly got cold feet whenever the situation demanded for extreme (military) action. Although that didn't stop him from plunging his small dagger in the back of the French when the country was all but conquered by Hitler's marauders. Even after repeated chickening out, Hitler’s letters to Mussolini reveal how he thought that their fortunes were intriguingly linked, without any of the scowls that the man usually reserved for such display of spinelessness, time and again – something, that we would never truly understand, as Shirer himself confesses.

A masterful work, recommended to anyone with the tiniest bit of interest in history. The book is long, but it’s a journey worth pursuing.