Unfortunately, history is full of people that have made a horrible use of the confidence others have put in them, whether it was to attempt to force their will on them, or for their own enrichment, but in every case acting in ways that clearly went against what the people wanted or needed. Just a couple of weeks ago, the anniversary of the death of one of those people was celebrated, a person that, whether you like it or not, has been one of the most influential people in the 20th century: Adolf Hitler.
To begin, no, Hitler was not a devil, nor the personification of evil or anything that may be related to that: he was a human being, much like any of us. Yes, I agree that he would have deserved the worst punishments one could think about, had he not killed himself; yes, his abilities to show humanity and compassion for other peole were nearly zero, and he caused many acts of great evil, but he was still a person. This is one of the lessons about him that many forget: that anyone can be as horrible as him, or even worse (see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a great etcetera).
Born on April 20th 1889 in Braunau am Inn (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays Austria), Adolf was a young man with that might have followed an artistic path (he sung in the church choir and wanted to be a painter) and with a marked tendency towards Germanic nationalism. Between 1905 and 1913, he lived in Vienna, city that, at the time, was a source of great religious and racial prejudice (particularly towards the Jewish people), where he tried twice (unsuccessfully) to be accepted in the Academy of Fine Arts, and where it is believed that his antisemitic feelings, that affected the world so much, started to grow. During the First World War, he fought as part of the Bavarian Army (part of the Imperial German Army) in order to not form part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, and he received the Iron Cross, although for most of the war he was well away from the front.
After the war, he worked for a time as an intelligence agent of the Reichswehr (the post-war German Army) and he infiltrated the German Workers' Party (DAP, Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), but the ideology presented by its founder, Anton Drexler, attracted him so much that he joined the party, which would later become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), better known as the Nazi Party. The attempt of coup d'état of 1923 (the Munich Beer Hall Putsch) failed, but it allowed him to expand his message, and the Crash of 1929 gave his party wings. In 1933, he was named Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg at the suggestion of Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, and, although under his rule Germany showed economic growth, it was a a masquerade with which Hitler planned to take Germany into a war against its enemies (real or not), as well as killing those people Hitler considered "Enemies of the State": Jews, Roma, Slavs, Communists, homosexuals and many more.
The ending is well known by everyone: six years of brutal war that ended up killing more than 60 million people (approximately 2.5% of the world population at the time) and Hitler ended up killing himself by swallowing a cianure capsule and shooting himself on the head.
This post will speak about some potential points of divergence related to Hitler. We will ignore all those possibilities in which Nazi Germany wins in World War Two (an idea too depressing for my taste), so we will concentrate on other situations.
An easy example to begin with is his application to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna. Adolf was quite talented in painting watercolours of buildings, but painting people was something he was not so good at. The Academy director suggested him to study architecture, but he did not have the academic credential required for that. What if Adolf had been admitted, or if he had been able to study architecture? His studies would have surely kept him busy in the city, enough time that the war would begin while he was within the Austrian borders, so he might have been conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he would be facing Russians, Serbians and Italians: perhaps he might have died in the invasion of Serbia, the attacks against the Russian Army, any of the twelve battles that took place in the shores of the Isonzo River or the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Or, if he had been lucky to not to have to join the army, he would have remained in Vienna, away from the war (at least directly) and would have never earned the military credentials that he would later use in his favour.
Possibility #2 is that he could have died during the First World War as part of the German Army, and he had many chances of forming part of the ten million that died then. For example, in October 1914, a British sharpshooter (Soldier Henry Tandey, who, at the end of the war, was given the Victoria Cross) could have shot him while he limped towards his lines after being injured in battle, but he did not pull the trigger (much like what it happened to Washington, as I told you in post #7). Hitler was present in the First Battle of Ypres of October 1914 (where his company was reduced from 250 soldiers to 42 in two months), the Battle of the Somme (where a bomb exploded in the messengers' refuge, injuring his leg) or the Battle of Passchendaele (where more than 270,000 German soldiers lost their life). Finally, in October 1918, a month before the end of the war, he suffered a mustard gas attack and was temporarily blinded, but a higher dose could have been mortal. Had he died then, his loss would have not been noted, but the later changes would have been: the DAP might not have gained that much influence, but the Great Depression (almost unavoidable, unless the economy had been built differently in the post-war period) would have probably taken Germany towards a dictatorship, maybe less horrible than the one imposed by the Nazi Party, but stil reprehensible.
Another "What If?" from this time is the Beer Hall Putsch. During a fight between NSDAP members and the Bavarian state police, Hitler and Göring (future chief of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force) were both shot and arrested. These shots could have killed them, or maybe the judge and popular jury that were part of the trial against Hitler for high treason could have been more severe: his time in prison could have been longer than the five years he was condemned to (and of which he only spent one in prison), or he could have even been condemned to death. The loss of their leaders in this way would have made the NSDAP suffer a great defeat at a political level, and it could have also disappeared.
Someone could have also killed him when he came out of prison in 1924. At least, this is how the videogame series Command and Conquer: Red Alert begins: Albert Einstein travels in time from 1946 to 1924 and shakes Hitler's hand, making him disappear and preventing the resurgement of the Nazi Party, but in exchange the Soviet Union becomes a Great Power, as, without the threat of Hitler to the west, Stalin would have had no checks against his attempts to expand his control over Eurasia (we'll talk about this in a future post.
After 1924... well, as Hitler's influence increased, also did his enemies. In total, there were more than forty murder attempts against him. Just in 1933, there were ten. Nearly every attempt was planned by Germans opposed to Hitler. Apart from the July 20th Plot (part of the well-knwon Operation Valkyrie), there were the Oster Conspiracy (led by Hans Oster, who planned to kill Hitler if he ended up declaring war on Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland), and Operation Spark (in which several conservative militars expected to spark an internal coup aafter killing Hitler), as well as the efforts of the German Communist Party's leader, Beppo Römer, who tried to kill him between 1934 and 1942, when he was arrested. Curiously, during the war, neither English nor Americans tried to send assassins to kill Hitler: considering Hitler's general incompetence and his obsession with controlling every move carried out by the German army corps, particularly as the war advanced, the Allies considered that it would be more efficient to let Hitler remain in charge, shortening the war.
Wow, I'm feeling a little bloodthirsty today, with talking so much about death, death and more death. Is it possible that Hitler could have become a better person, if certain things in his past changed? Perhaps, but they would have to be very significant changes to avoid Hitler from going through the same problems that turned him into the individual he became in our reality.
Of course, many works exist in which changes in Hitler's life change the course of history. I have already mentioned Command and Conquer: Red Alert, but there are many other that bear studying.
British actor Stephen Fry (who recently played Sherlock Holmes' brother in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), wrote a novel called Making History in which a British young man and a Nazi doctor's son manage to send a permanent anticonceptive pill back into the past into Branau am Inn's well, in order to sterilize Adolf Hitler's father and prevent his birth. Although this procedure is successful, the world does not change for the better, because the Nazi Party becomes more successful thanks to another man that takes Hitler's place and leads Germany into becoming master of all of Europe (including the United Kingdom), defeating the Soviet Union after German scientists develop the atomic bomb, and are currently in the middle of a cold war with a more conservative United States. Only a procedure similar to the one used at the beginning manages to restore history to what it was, more or less.
There is also Quentin Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds, in which a group of American Jews manages to infiltrate France shortly before Operation Overlord (which started with the Normandy Landings) and trace a plan to kill Hitler and his main collaborators (Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Minister of Propagand Joseph Goebbels and Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann). The plan is successful, but only thanks to the parallel plan developed by a Jew girl whose family was murdered by the film's main villain and the latter's collaboration in exchange of amnesty. Many film lovers believe that this film is the reason why the Tarantino Universe (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and others) is a lot more violent than the real world.
A very funny choice is Fiction: Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results by John Scalzi, which shows several ways in which Hitler could have died, all of them in the same date (August 13th 1908), all of them hilarious, particularly the last one.
The novel The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad has, as its nucleus, a sci-fi novel written by an alternative Adolf Hitler that left for the United States shortly after the First World War, where he works as an illustrator for pulp novels before starting to write himself. Without him, Germany falls to a Communist revolution, and by the year 1954, the Soviet Union controls all of Eurasia and Africa and is beginning to expand into South America. Ironically, Spinrad wrote the book as a satire of crypto-fascist fiction, but the American Nazi Party did not catch the "satire" part and put the book in his recommended reading list.
In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, after the Nazi victory in World War Three against the United States, the Nazis end up putting Hitler in an asylum, knowing that the world they have built is mad, but unable to recognize it aloud.
And, to end on a high note, what better way to do this than speaking about superheroes? One of the Justice League series has Superman, Wonderwoman, Green Lantern, J'onn J'onzz and Hawkgirl appear in a world in which the Nazis have won the war after the immortal villain Vandal Savage managed to send important information on advanced technology and the Allied troops movements to his past self, so the group has to travel to the past as well to defeat Savage and restore history, as one of the chapter's last images is some Nazi officers suggesting to revive a cryogenically freezed Hitler. However, there is the implication that Vandal Savage's meddling, while it did not stop the Axis' defeat, it prevented the Holocaust from taking place.
I hope that, in spite of the potentially unpleasant matter I worked with, this post was interesting.
I'll see you next Friday with a new post.
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