Adolf Hitler had a paranoid personality disorder. He feared and felt persecuted by Jews and Bolshevikes and, therein, projected his own hatred and anger and need to dominate over others into them. He externalised and inflated his inner psychological dynamics of feeling persecuted by others and need to subjugate others (in the first place) into the idea of a black-and-white race struggle and war of mythic proportions. He projected his ego and his need for grandeur into Germany, respectively the Reich, and tried to establish German/“Aryan“ hegemony over Eurasia, if not over the entire world. He did not have actual practical political goals, but tried to achieve a national „redemption“, a mythological Erlösung – out of feeling deeply uncomfortable inside. He did so out of a sentiment of (Germany) being undeservedly weak, constricted and humiliated, being a victim of treason, whereas he would bring justice in establishing proper balance again. He was both a capable politician, if not a political „genius“, an inexperienced person who could nevertheless outmaneuver others and his countless opponents, a gambler with a distinct sense of how to play out his cards at the right moment, and he achieved triumphant successes; yet his nemesis was his distinct inflexibility and unimaginativeness in seeing or accepting alternatives once the tide had turned against him, his bloated ego, spoiled by his successes, and him being a gambler and adventurer – instead of a strategist – until the last. Like many paranoid people he had an uncanny insight into human nature, but, in his hubris, was far better in detecting the weaknesses in others than their strengths (therein underestimating them). He prided himself of his willpower and caused millions of deaths and destruction when, after his waging of war had become defensive, he claimed that the war still could be won by „willpower“ alone – whereas in reality he was much of a lazy drifter, unable to change much about his situation by his own means, and his „willpower“ was his blatant egoism and psychological inflexibility. He became persecuted and obsessed by his own ideas and defense mechanisms and could not establish any critical distance to them, while at the same time he was cynical and did not really and truly stick to anything, apart from the integritiy of his own ego. According to Erich Fromm, who psychologically evaluated Hitler in his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Hitler lived in a world where nothing was completely true and nothing was completely false or wrong either – apart from the need to preserve the integrity of his own ego, as we might add.

When we look at Adolf Hitler as a person, we observe that he had been a very narcissistic individual, dreaming of grandeur and seeking to be a (dominant) „leader“, along with an obviously strong sense of entitlement from early on. His favorite – if not only – activities in his earlier childhood were playing war and adventure games with other children (with him being the leader) and daydreaming. From early on, and throughout his life, ne never liked to work, he never liked to learn and he never organised his life into a routine that is also accomodating to others. When he encountered authority, he reacted spitefully. Hitler´s father was an authoritatian and unfeeling man, yet also a talented social climber from humble beginnings and not without qualities. His mother was soft and loved and supported Adolf. He had a hard time coming by with his father, but he did not suffer childhood traumas or anything that would explain his (later) behaviour. Rather it seems that in the case of Hitler the genetic loading by his father was taken to something much worse. Most outstandingly, Hitler could not tolerate setbacks or being played or dominated by others. In such cases he would become very revengeful and bear longstanding grudges. In the case of paranoid people it´s as if they feel virtually annhiliated when they experience setbacks; they both have a grossly inflated ego as well as an ego almost reduced to zero. The wickedness of their psychology is that they cannot mediate between these disparities, and moreover, that they want to reduce their offenders to nothing – and they are easily offended. The vacancy of their ego is an indication that they do not have a true self. And they do not have a true self since they lack much of a constructive emotionality. Anger, envy, megalomania, paranoia, callousness and lack of attachment to others are the their defining emotions. Since they lack a true self, they easily project them into someone or something else. Hitler, from early on, hardly had any friends, nor the desire for attachment to others. He liked to look down on others. It is not even clear how much he truly felt for his mother.

In his youth he discovered some interest and talent for painting and wanted to become a painter, respectively an artist, and developed grandiose fantasies about that. He especially admired, or almost projected himself into Richard Wagner (a paranoid character himself) and his missionary vision of an all-encompassing art that would spiritualise and rejuvenate Germany and lead to „salvation“ and „redemption“ (that specific desire for Erlösung could be interpreted as a desire for a person feeling uncomfortable and constrained in herself, to finally get released from the incubus they experience in themselves). Unfortunately for the world, Hitler lacked the talent of Wagner and failed to become an artist. Having left school prematurely (due to his disdain for other´s authority over him), having lost his father and his mother and, finally, financial support, he degenerated into a drifter, living as a humble painter in a residential home in Vienna, unable to improve much about his situation. That he was not accepted at the academy of arts was a huge setback for him, draining his (little) energy; in the residential home he nevertheless could feel intellectually superior to most of the other stranded individuals; in way he had accomotated himself and would probably have drifted through life in a similar fashion forever, had circumstances not changed. When the war broke out he volunteered, finally seeing a possibility to alter the course of his life and, moreover, to fight for the glory of the Reich. He was a commited soldier and enjoyed the Kameradschaft in his batallion, although he remained a distant and eccentric loner to his comrades all the same. His superiors did not promote him too much and prevented him from becoming a superior over others as they noted his arrogant – and actually not leader-like – character. The creature that mattered most to him during the war was Foxi, a dog.

The defeat of the Achse in the war came as a devastating blow to him, causing immense feelings of „shame“ inside him. Like many others he escaped into the fantasy of the Dolchstoßlegende, that Germany had only been defeated by treason commited by socialists, by a shady enemy inside. After the war he tried to remain in the army as long as possible, since he did not know what to do else, making him all the more desperate and upset. After the short-lived communist putsch and the Räteregime in Bajuvaria in 1919, most parts of the army had become vigilant and obsessed with the danger posed by socialism and communism and so they promoted the anticommunist Hitler and others as observers and contact men between the army and the political scene. During seminars Hitler (and his superiors) discovered his talent for being an agitator and being able to quickly defeat others rhetorically (paranoid people like to be argumentative and are able to invest a lot of energy in it). The proto-NSDAP discovered that talent in Hitler as well. He became a member and soon indispensable as he quickly attracted large growds that would listen to the eccentric, very unusal agitator. The fierceness of his speeches and his behaviour impressed many people. They saw his furious dedication as a sign of honesty and sincerity. In reality, Hitler´s speeches largely were about the sentiment that Germany had been betrayed and humiliated, a sentiment that many people shared. Hitler´s talent as an agitator was based on this own bubbling paranoid resentments – that made him become so furious and desperate about allegedly having been betrayed and scaled down by others and trying to seek revenge, respectively „justice“, that, in his rage, he appeared „authentic“ and true to others.

In the early 1920s Hitler, despite being a right-wing agitator, was much of a bohemian and much of his behaviour was awkward and clumsy – which nevertheless fascinated all the more conservatives and nationalists from the upper class who tried to promote and educate Hitler (including the Bayreuth circle which saw some kind of Siegfried in him). His manner of being superficially polite and calm, modest and even diffident in the encounters with others, and apparently being somehow unworldy and naive (therein all the more authentically quixotic) made him appear much more approachable and easy to be influenced – and human – than he was. To women, he used to be superficially galant and impress them by displaying typical „Viennese charme“. His odd chaplinesque looks made him appear not only singular, unmistakably and iconic but also, in a way, harmless and likeable. Yet he was rhetorically brutal and fieverish when it came to expessing his political aims and his ideology. Out of a pathological feeling that Germany had been humiliated and betrayed, he ardently opposed the Treaty of Versailles and promoted the reinstallment of German national glory (and imperialistic expansionism); therein suggesting that he would only bring justice to the national destiny (which is a much more motivating force concerning attracting the populace than nationalism per se). He was anticommunist and promoted fear from Bolshevism. He would introduce a „national socialism“ designed to balance the interests between not only labour and capital, but between all the different social strata and milieus of German society, therein offering a harmonious and pridefull vision of broad appeal. He promoted authoritarianism and strong hand rule that would defeat the present „chaos“ (and release ordinary citizens from the resposibility to engage in politics, apart from being obedient to the benevolent leader). And he promoted antisemitism and sought to trace back all the current misery to the malicious impact of „the Jews“. What made Hitler so attractive was that he formulated his political goals and his political struggle (which actually was all the more his idiosyncratic inner struggle) in mythical and eschatological terms – since, in his paranoia and megalomania, he actually experienced it as a quasi-cosmic struggle between archetypical principles. He made an overreaching ideology out of it, implicitely and explicitely carrying missionary zeal. He constructed not only „Jews“ but also „Aryans“. He promoted not only an eschatological and heroic struggle between good and evil but a vision of purity and redemption. National socialism was an all-encompassing philosophy and a lookalike to a religion. What distinguished Hitler from all the other Nazis and legitimately made him their leader was that he was a visionary, moreover, that he was consumed by his vision and enlivened it. Antisemitic philosopher and member of the Bayreuth circle Houston Steward Chamberlain saw in Hitler a singular individual that would not only talk like an antisemite – like so many others – but also dare to act and lash out. The Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 also demonstrated that Hitler was willing to act and to cross red lines. After the Beer Hall Putsch and after Hitler being released from prison in 1925 the fascination for the Nazis had ebbed. It was the Great Economic Depression ignited in 1929 that catapulted the NSDAP in strong positions and ultimately into power.

Despite his bragging about having had original insights into the wicked nature of Jews (being not a different religion, but a different, and antagonistic, race) from early on, historians note that Hitler´s hateful and commited antisemitism only emerged when he had already been a mature man, notably after the defeat of Germany in the Great War. His antisemitism is seen to have remained more under the surface in his days in Vienna, where antisemitic remarks by him did happen, but remained more anectodal (he would even say positive things about „Jews“ all alike back then, for instance that they had superior cultural taste). Yet this does not mean that he already had strong antisemitic tendencies back then. Most recently, evidence was traced that Hitler had already been more or less commited in this antisemtism in the days of his youth in Linz. (There once was a book by Australian author Kimberly Cornish that claimed that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was Jewish) was to blame for Hitler´s antisemitism; both went to the same school and Wittgenstein allegedly irritated Hitler with his intellectual supremacy, triggering deep resentments inside him. Yet those claims did not have much impact in the scientific community.) Antisemitism is a paranoid scheme that stems out of fear and envy, and from anxiety from some „other“ that is alien, chaotic and cannot be integrated into one´s proper society and territory. Yet it was Hitler´s extreme paranoia that sought to identify Jewishness with a destructive and evil antagonistic world principle per se that needs to be aggressively confronted, that finally needs to be rooted out. It´s as if Hitler had projected his own evil and megalomania, he himself being an embodiment of evil, into others, because that´s all he could honestly see in the mirror. The most uncanny thing is how this most obvious paranoid delusion was widely accepted or shared by much of Hitler´s surroundings and within society, regardless of how crazy it became. The most uncanny thing was that hardly anyone noticed the most obvious thing: that Hitler was a deadly madman.

Yet he never was a madman all along. Having a personality disorder means that you are partially mad, but not that you lose your entire sanity and accountability (which also never happened to Hitler). Hitler´s entire inner life revolved around seeking to dominate over others and being admired by them, and feeling afraid and paranoid about being dominated by others or failing at dominating others and rising to narcissistic grandeur. The latter would ignite pathological and longstanding grudges, outbursts of rage and revengefulness. It revolved around persecution, being engaged and entangled in the world of mutual persecution. Therefore he naturally was afraid of anything that could make him fall prey to persecution or reduce his capacity to persecute and dominate others. He was afraid of weakness and sought strength. His antisemitism and contempt for socialism and communism, which sympathised with the underclass and the proletariat, stemmed out of his psychological need to feel „superior“. Therein, he also had a disdain for „the weaker sex“, for women. Individuals with the psychology of Hitler do not feel motivated to lift someone up who is „weak“ or in need; much rather they desire to put them down even further, so that they can feel superior themselves in relation to them all the more. It is tempting to think that Hitler also felt so much despise for „the weak“ as he was aware of his own inner shallowness and therefore, in a way, human weakness and inauthenticity. Hitler was also afraid of anything „unclean“ and „unhealthy“ and longing for great „purity“ instead (involving the concept that „purity“ can only be achieved by (ethical and moral) „cleansing“). Erich Fromm, in his Anatomy of Human Destructivenss, suggested that Hitler was the extreme case of a „necrophiliac“ person: a person with a shallow inner life, yet attracted to death, destruction, decay, morbidity, foul language and excrements; an, if you may, personification of the Freudian death drive; which he therefore tried to hide from himself and from others. Hitler also was probably well aware of the evil and the destructiveness inside him, and possibly was very afraid of it. At least it would not match with his grandiose narcisstic ego ideal of being the good guy, respectively a heroic saviour. So, apart from projecting it into others in a conscious or unconscious fashion, he tried to avoid being identified with his own malevolent tendencies. Hitler never personally killed someone. He tried to be nice and polite to people. He liked dogs. His vegetarianism probably was about demonstrating to him and to others that he cannot even hurt a fly (other explanations for his (idosyncratic and unhealthy) vegetarian diet are remorse about Geli Raubal´s death and his tendency, again, to be afraid of meat as something unclean and unhealthy). So you have an actually dubious psychology. Erich Fromm suggests that Hitler was living in a world where nothing was completely true and stable, and nothing was completely false or wrong neither (apart from the need to assure the integrity of his ego, as we might add).

Solipsistic was Hitler also in relation to others. Even those closest to him, and his personal entourage over the years, found him difficult to approach, let alone developing friendship with him. From a more theoretical viewpoint they could not sort out a clear portrait of his personality, experiencing it as disparate and not fitting together. The same thing happens to historians and biographers when they try to capture Hitler. Yet a (paranoid) personality disorder basically means an incoherent personality; which is, nevertheless, not that weird or singular, but, in its patterns and behaviour, possible to identify. The specific paranoid Urkonflikt seems like a dominant and expansive individual experiencing dominance and restriction from an outside force that threatens to overpower him. Such might easily be a toxic relationship pattern in early childhood, which is then deeply and at its roots integrated into the child´s psyche which is therefore impossible to overcome that disparity and to develop and mature. Nevertheless (and since there obviously have not been that deep frustrations in Hitler´s early childhood), the root of such a personality disposition might also lie in the individual´s genes (or both). People close to Hitler would, above all, notice the shallowness and vacancy within Hitler´s personality, that he did not only have little passion for people (of both sexes) but also little passion for things. Probably he was so good at turning him into an oversized public, political figure since he hardly harboured a private person. Illustrative also seems the way Hitler communicated with others. The conversation between Hitler and any others usually came in the morbid way of Hitler engaging in hours-long monologues, often revolving about always the same subjects, that would greatly annoy even his closest admirers, like Magda Goebbles. Therein, his monad-like personality and pathological self-referentiality and him being unable to actually socialise even with individuals closest to him – and actually also to establish a meaningful relation to himself –  became apparent in another uncanny fashion (in his final days, when doom had become imminent, he would admit to his doctor that these monologues served to him like a drug, as a means to calm him and to escape reality). From an intellectual standpoint his talks – a selection of them written down and later published by Henry Picker as Hitler´s Table Talk –  were not that undistinguished, they could be remarkable; at least if you not got exposed to often to them. Hitler was a reasonably educated and cultivated man, although his ability to frequently display impressive knowledge more likely rather stemmed out from his excellent memory than from his education. According to the internet, Hitler had an IQ of 141. In fact, it never got tested, but that seems adequate guess about his cognitive abilities.

People with a paranoid personality disorder do not necessarily carry paranoid (or any) ideologies. More commonly, they tend to develop a pathological jealousy concerning their loved ones and the people that matter to them, becoming paranoid about their alleged infidelity, and therefore develop a need to control over them. Hitler practically had no loved ones in his life nor people that mattered to him. Yet when he developed a twisted affection for his half-niece, Geli Raubal, he turned into what she saw as a „monster“, and became very jealous, possessive and controling. Details are unknown, yet obviously during the affair aspects of Hitler´s personality became apparent to Geli that were shocking enough so as that she killed herself. Hitler later claimed that Geli Raubal had been the only woman he had ever loved; after her death he fell into a deep depression, yet recovered soon thereafter and became consumed by politics and being an agitator again (the other woman in his life he likely had a genuine affection for was his mother, to whose passing he reacted in the same way – devastated when she died, yet distracted soon thereafter). (The whole affair remained dubious, and it is nor even clear whether Geli actually died by suicide or was killed – there was even a rumour that she was expecting a child from Hitler, a fact that had enraged him – yet the suicide is the most plausible scenario.) Joseph Goebbles and Albert Speer came closest to being „friends“ with Hitler and people that personally mattered to him (Speer would later claim that actual friendship was impossible with Hitler). Both had distinct qualities that Hitler had himself or desired to have and so, in a way, they functioned as an extension of his own ego. Goebbles was a talented demagogue and propagandist himself as well as an intelligent man with a broader perspective with whom Hitler could discuss and sort out his politics; above all, he was a complementary narcissist who was completely devout to Hitler as he longed for his affection. Speer was the architect that Hitler desired to be – until the end Hitler liked to see himself primarily as an artist, and only secondarily as a political leader. In his youth, Hitler had a single „friend“, August Kubizek, who was a bit younger, easy to impress, and who shared Hitler´s passion for music, respectively Wagner. As a rather weak personality he had an admiration for the self-confident and pretentious Hitler, who, in reverse, appreciated Kubizek mostly as a follower and listener. When they were living together in Vienna later, he tried to isolate Kubizek from others, notably from women, and keep him to himself nevertheless. The relationship ended when Hitler left Kubizek without a note, obviously because he had been ashamed by the fact that he had failed to get approved at the academy of arts again. They would only see each other again when Hitler had become Reichskanzler and then occasionally meet at the Bayreuther Festspiele. After the war, Kubizek published his memoirs on Hitler, Alfred Hitler, mein Jugendfreund. His memoirs had been considered to a signifcant degree untrustworthy, yet more recently they are held in higher esteem and are largely considered to be correct by historians.

Hitler´s sexuality remains dubious, and he did not have much, if any, sexual life involving others. Yet we do not even know much about his fantasies either. Despite not being attractive, many women were fascinated about him. In an odd and enigmatic fashion Hitler recurrently attracted very young women, oscillating between girlhood and womanhood (like Geli Raubal). He (obviously) did not have much interest in them but would temporarily integrate them into his circle of personal admirers. The fact that he likely only had one testicle alone must have made him too ashamed to easily seek sexual encounters with others. More importantly, it was the vacancy and lovelessness of Hitler´s personality that seems to run counter any afffirmative sexuality. In his youth, and later on, he would feel repelled by sexuality, considering it as something unclean and unhealthy. Later, when he became the Führer, he would consider him „above“ such earthly and low desires as sexual ones. Not only in the present puritan spirit of his time but also according to his paranoid psychological scheme he valued „purity“ and abstention over „unclean“ and „vulgar“ sexuality. It does not come as a surprise that Hitler nevertheless felt attracted specifically to vulgar and profligate sexuality as a voyeur. Kubizek reports how in their young days in Vienna Hitler had a fascination for prostitution and often wanted to roam the brothel districts – for voyeuristic purposes, nevertheless. There are rumours (and also confirmed cases) that Hitler longed to be dominated by women, considering himself as someone very low. In the 1920s, someone tried to blackmail Hitler with being in possession of nude portraits of Geli Raubal in sexually explicit poses fabricated by Hitler. Again, this was a dubious affair, but seems plausible. Erich Fromm, in the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, suggests that Hitler, in his fantasies at least, was submissive (and aware of his lack of any good qualities inside him) concerning women of higher social status and anal-voyeuristic concerning women of lower social status than his own.

Hitler was promoted by parts of the conservative establishment, notably the Junkers, the landowning aristocracy, and the military. Yet other parts of the conservatives also tried to avoid and prevent him. After 1929, in the great economic crisis, President Hindenburg and other conservatives opted to abandon democracy and sought to introduce an authoritarian conservative regime, since they did not know how to rule with democratic means anymore. Yet Hindenburg also tried to avoid an unpredictable and dangerous demagogue like Hitler to become chancellor. Finally, Hindenburg had run out of other options, hoping that Hitler´s traditionally conservative coalition partner was capable of taming him and keeping him under control when Hitler had finally become chancellor in early 1933. Also, contrary to some popular notions, big business had not been so much in favor of Hitler, but tried to stick to its own traditional parties. The NSDAP had a broad base throughout different strata of German society, notably in the middle class and petty bourgeoisie. Contrary to traditional leftist notions, workers and proletarians were not that underrepresented in the Nazi electorate either. Underrepresented in the Nazi electorate were (despite that) workers, Catholics and women.

Yet the hopes that Hitler could be contained, used as an instrument or would soon stumple over his own ineptitude and lack of experience soon became dashed. The Reichstag fire gave a pretext of introducing an authoritarian rule and granting Hitler extralegal possibilities to knock out political oppenents, notably on the left. Yet Hitler would also speed up the Gleichschaltung, i.e. bringing the state, the media, as well as large parts of civil society under personal and ideological control of the Nazis. He would outmaneuver conservatives as well as dissident fractions in his own party, notably the SA in the Röhm purge of 1934. Yet his ruthlessness had appeal to the masses (who hated the frequent rowdyism of the SA men) as well as within the establishment. When Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler met no opposition in becoming president of Germany as well, therein a leader with truly cemented dictatorial powers – the Führer. Within one year and a half, Germany had become a Führerstaat. The entire politics within the Reich became subordinated to frenzy armament and military buildup and bringing Germany back into a more convenient strategic position. Hazardous coups like remilitarising the Rhineland or annexing Austria proved successful and further increased Hitler´s popularity. After all, they seemed as somehow legitimate defensive moves. The army approved Hitler´s politics, thinking that it would rejuvenate its former glory and high status in German society. Neither the army, nor big business, nor other parts of the establishment and of the entire population had envisaged that they would – despite all the possible collusion – ultimately become reduced to mere tools for Hitler´s personal ambitions. The most uncanny thing was how not only conservatives but finally large parts of German society were willing to quite quickly grant Hitler dictatorial powers once they noticed that he acted „decisively“ and „forward going“ – and, above all, seemingly in their interest – although he did little else than demonstrating shocking brutality and subordinating the entire country to his own needs.

Hitler was fantasising about gaining Lebensraum im Osten and destroying „Bolshevism“ and the Soviet Union from early on. Yet he himself did not imagine that German expansionism was possible at such a scale in his lifetime. He considered that as national goals in the longer run and envisaged his politics as making Germany fit for such undertakings. Hitler was obsessed with gaining Lebensraum for Germany. He experienced Germany as squeezed, scaled down and cut off from resources, as a people inhabitating a space too narrow and therefore impossible to flourish – such was the projection of Hitler´s own uncomfortable and neurotic inner life into the outside world.  What is true is that Germany lacked strategic depth in the case of a military attack, and Hitler was obsessed with Germany being under threat from the outside. Yet Hitler´s aggressive and frantic buildup of defense potentials was deeply and in a psychologically twisted way intertwined with an appetite to attack others, for imperialism and expansionism. It´s the paranoid scheme. His ultimate goal was to seize territory, Lebensraum, deep into Eastern Europe and Russia, depopulate it or reduce its native population to slaves for the arriving German settlers. Germany would so establish its own empire, become self-sufficient on resources, impossible to attack and therein the hegemon over Eurasia.

It was the most brutal and shocking plan anyone had ever had in history at such a grand scale. Hitler, Göring and others were casually engaging in plans to deport 30 million Russians into uninhabitable places in Siberia, most likely leaving them to die there, in the following thirty years once they had achieved victory over the Soviet Union. 27 million Soviet citizens already died in the Second World War. The ruthless waging of war, being a Vernichtungskrieg, was motivated by creating Lebensraum for Germany, as well as saving German resources – by avoiding to feed people in occupied territory, respectively to take away their means to feed the German army. Millions of people were killed by the Germans or left to die by starvation in famines, being not an accident but meticulously planned by Nazi official Herbert Backe, most notoriously in Belarus and the Ukraine.

Yet what initiated the Second World War was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, enabling both the German as the Soviet invasion in Poland and causing England and France to declare war on Germany. The war against Poland was ruthless and the Nazi regime imposed was extremely brutal and racist. Hitler had not been hostile against Poland and the Poles before, he had sought their alliance. When Poland turned him down and dared to show its muscle against Hitler, Hitler again felt deeply humiliated and lashed out with frenzy, from then on seeing Poles as Untermenschen, to be oppressed and treated as slaves. In a similar way, yet not to such extremes, he had treated Czechoslovakia before. The successful Blitzkrieg against France was Hitler´s most spectacular achievement. Hitler had, then, most of Europe at his feet. Countries like Hungary of Romania sought his alliance, in countries like Norway he introduced puppet regimes. Spoiled by his truly spectacular successes, his ego became all the more bloated. He began to see himself as an envoy of and being protected by providence.

Yet England did not not succumb. Afraid that England and the Soviet Union could found an alliance and attack Germany sooner or later, Hitler decided to do what he wanted to do in the first place and invade and conquer the Soviet Union. The logic of war had implicitely turned against the hitherto triumphant aggressor. It had created all the more potential enemies, notably in the paranoid mind of Hitler. He had to turn quickly against them or lose his temporary advantages notably if the USA would enter the conflict. The fatal mistake not only of Hitler but also of his military men was that they greatly underestimated the Soviet Union by thinking they could conquer it in the hitherto Blitzkrieg-like manner. Yet the steamrolling and horrendous offensive came to a halt, deep inside the Soviet Union, in late 1941. The Wehrmacht carried out new offensives in the USSR in spring 1942, as well as it tried to get North Africa and the Middle East under control. Germany´s waging of war and operations in North Africa and the Middle East were motivated by cutting off Great Britian from its Empire and its resources and kicking it out of strategic positions and trying to create a circle-like German influence sphere around Europe, notably also serving as a bulwark against the USA. Yet after being successful in the first place, also those offensives came to a halt. Hitler had – like always – acted like a gambler taking great risks by launching offensives and expanding the war within a short timewindow of opportunity; yet at this time he had lost. And also the USA had entered the conflict.

With the war becoming a world war, Hitler became ever more obsessed in his personal paranoid „war“ against „the Jews“. Despite his violent rhetoric, Hitler did initially not plan to exterminate the Jews. He had wanted to oust them and make them emigrate. Yet the more territory he conquered in the war, the more Jewish people came under his sway. And the more aggressive his waging of war and megalomaniac his war goals had become the more he became obsessed with the idea that he was waging a race war against „the Jews“ and – to shift the blame – that the war had been caused by „the Jews“. Again, possibly afraid of his own hatred and destructiveness and projecting it into a Jewish conspiracy he became commited in exterminating all the Jews. Eichmann´s obsession to use trains and infrastructure to transport Jewish people to death camps even when the war had become distinctly defensive and the infrastructure would have been needed otherwise was, in fact, also Hitler´s obsession, and that of commited Nazis. While there is no direct evidence that Hitler officially ordered the Endlösung or even knew about the Wannsee Konferenz, the indirect evidence is sufficient that it came top-down (and again, that he tried to shun the possibility of any evidence of the Holocaust being ultimately traced back to him was just his usual behaviour). The Holocaust is a singular crime in history and ultimately beyond even sophisticated comprehension. Despite many Nazis engaging in it and fostering it, the singularity also rests on the Holocaust probably ultimately being the brainchild of a singular mind, of Hitler´s. It is not even that apparent that the Holocaust and the antisemitic cataclysm in Germany would have happened had Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann been the Führer (most of the leading Nazis were frail and sadistic beta-type personalities and not paranoid/megalomaniac visionaries). The extermination of the Jewish people, and the methods used in it, had a precedent in the killing of mentally disabled persons. The extermination of the mentally disabled had its roots in the lethal ideology of „racial purity“ and the extinction of lebensunwertem Leben, yet primarily followed the practical purpose of gaining medical and hospital capacities for wounded soldiers in the war. It was the protest of the church that finally stopped the campaign in which an estimated 70.000 people lost their lives. Peter Longerich claims that, above all, the Holocaust had a practical purpose: By involving his allies in such a heinous crime – and, for instance, Hitler did grow very angry and nervous about Hungary´s leader Horthy´s stubborn resistance to engage in it – he would make them complicit and cross a point of no return. Such a crime could not be forgiven and by being complicit in it, Hitler´s allied leaders had all the more intention not to lose the war or to terminate the alliance with him or to switch the sides – they would have been brought to justice for engaging in the Holocaust.

In autumn of 1942 it became apparent that the war could not be won anymore. A politics of limiting the damage would have become obvious. Millions of lives could have been spared if Hitler had capitulated (or killed himself) earlier. From then on there was an ongoing conflict between Hitler and his generals who usually voted for retreat from positions that could not be kept. Hitler, by contrast, wanted to hold any position and keep it as point from where a new offensive could be unleashed when the luck within the war again would have fallen unto him (Hitler also permanently meddled into the war planning because he wanted to feel intellectually superior over the generals). Stalingrad and the annihilating defeat of his army due to Hitler´s order to fight until the last man instead of retreating in time became emblematic for his whole waging of war – and disrespect for the additional damage and human tragedy he inflicted – once it had become defensive. Although well aware of the fact that the odds had distinctly turned against him, he still liked to fantasise about a glorious Endsieg and claimed that victory is still possible when there is enough willpower. Again, his „willpower“ was little else than unwillingness to surrender or to seek alternatives to one´s own grandiose goals, blatant egoism, completely careless about the suffering he inflicted on millions of others. His inflexible logic was Sieg oder Untergang. Either the Reich would win the conflict or, in a way equally gloriously and triumphantly in its autonomousness, vanish; the Untergang was, in a morbid way, as resolutely a narcissistic phantasma as the Endsieg (Hitler also carried the idea that only a complete doom and tabula rasa would make a glorious rise of the Aryan race and principle possible again somewhere in the future).

Hitler declined and aged physically a lot in these final years. He did not appear in public all to often anymore as he had become distinctly unpopular. His furious speeches did not have substance anymore as he had less and less to actually offer to his people; so he left the demagoguery more and more to Goebbles. In gradually losing the war, Hitler all the more felt betrayed by his generals, to whom he shifted the blame, and he felt betrayed by the entire world. Yet he remained staunch and unforgiving in keeping up the war effort and waging the „race war“ against „the Jews“. He did foresee the Allied invasion on the continent, but when the D-Day finally came he underestimated it. Also in 1944 an assassination attempt had been carried out against Hitler by a circle of military men under the leadership of Oberst von Stauffenberg, which he survived (seeing it as a sign of „providence“ once again). It had become difficult to potentially assassinate or overthrow Hitler because he had become all the more difficult to approach. He shunned away in his shelters and refuges in the mountains and did not let many individuals come close (an assassintation attempt that came close to success was carried out by Georg Elser, a left leaning loner, in 1939). The more the Allied forces were steamrolling over Europe and, finally, Germany, the more Hitler engaged in fantasies about the Alliance breaking up due to internal rivelries and sparing Germany. In his final weeks he would become obsessed with architectural projects about creating the town of his youth, Linz, anew after the Endsieg. Ultimately he would give a „Nero-order“, to have all the remaining infrastructure and industry and the livelihood in Germany destroyed, thinking that a people who got defeated by others does not have a right to exist and to flourish anymore. At least that order was not carried out (because of the secret intervention by Speer and others, including the industry captains; other Nazis probably would also have gone that far).

It was in the very final moments, and when he was still ordering defensive fights over Berlin involving many casualties, before the Soviets entered his bunker that Hitler decided to kill himself and release the world from his ominous presence. History had distinctly unfolded otherwise had he never lived, or died before.