Once, sat around a table in a pub, I was told confidently and insistently by a group of people that Hitler was a genius. I felt as though I'd heard it all before, and I've heard it all again since. So I'm going to try to make the case that fortune, not intelligence, thrust Hitler to the fore, and that his leadership was often crucially hapless. I hope to hear arguments on both sides of the motion.
The night before the Munich Putsch in 1923, Hitler's two main allies, Kahr and Lossow, decided to call off the Nazi uprising. Angered with this, Hitler held them at gunpoint and demanded that they rejoin him in his march on Munich. Satisfied with their capitulation,
he let them go home. The next day Hitler and his soldiers stormed Munich, but overnight Kahr had tipped off the Weimar authorities, and army and police reinforcements had been dispatched to Munich. 16 Nazis died, and Hitler himself was wounded, tried for treason, and imprisoned for years. Beside the mistake of letting Kahr go home - right after having treated him like an enemy - he managed not to notice, or receive any intelligence, that the Wiemar Republic had moved hundreds of soldiers into the city he was in, overnight.
Sebastian Haffner
presents evidence that, during the second world war, Hitler knew that his health was failing and that his time was nearly up no matter what, and that this is why he was making madly overambitious strategic moves and using fight-or-die tactics, and even that some of his generals had sensed this and were merely trying to stall him.
During his reign Hitler did everything he could to centralise power upon himself, and in addition to this, demanded that his generals and high officials not wake him up
under any circumstances. On D-Day, Allied forces began to close in at 9am, while Hitler slept; and nobody had the authority to make his decisions for him. When he finally awoke at midday the war was, essentially, over.
It's a myth that the Nazis invaded Russia in the winter - they invaded it twice, in June then in August - but when they did invade they made no plans for upcoming winters. Russia, naturally, was not conquered by the time winter came around, and the red army turned the Nazis around and chased them back through Europe, marking the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. Hitler finally chose this moment to follow the advice of his generals and distribute assault rifles - a new invention, vetoed by him completely over the previous years on the grounds that he didn't have enough for everybody - to his armies. Too little, too late; and all this is without mentioning the insanity of declaring war on Russia (and the US) at all, given that the strategic difficulty of fighting on two fronts was what did for Germany in the previous war.
Which is nearer the mark: that Hitler achieved (if that is the right word) what he did due to talent, or due to luck, or by happening to be the expression of much German feeling at the time? Jensen, one of the inventors of the loudspeaker, regretted his invention on the grounds that physically unimpressive men could not have become leaders of vehement movements without it. And had the American economy not collapsed in the 1920s, leading America to demand faster payment of reparations from the Wiemar Republic, the republic would not have been so furiously hated by its populace. Without Article 48, power could not have become so centralised so easily. My contention is that the thing which propelled Hitler forward is the same thing which spelled his demise - not brilliance, but simple, uncompromising, audacity.