No one knows how many biographies about Hitler exist, but John Lukacs claims in his book The Hitler of History that, at the end of the last century, there were already more than a hundred. We’re not talking about monographs like “Hitler as a vegetarian,” “Hitler and architecture,” “Hitler as an artist,” or “Hitler’s library,” or about the memoirs written by chauffeurs, doctors, soldiers, or neighbors who, at one time, worked with, fought with, or even sat on the lap of Hitler. Also not included are the biographies that are clearly based on rumors, like the book that “proves” Hitler lived in Argentina during the 1970s.

Although the stream of Hitler books keeps widening, specialists agree that there are four biographies about the man that stand above all others: Konreid Heiden’s take, The Fuhrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, because it was the first (1936), and Alan Bullock’s careful look at the dictator (1952), Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, is renowned for its rigor. More than 20 years later, Joachim Fest’s take on the subject, Hitler, is remembered for its strong writing and interpretative analyses. Ian Kershaw’s two-part biography, Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: A Biography, which he concluded in 2000, is usually regarded as the definitive one.

Although Volker Ullrich, in Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, cites from these biographies extensively, he does not hide the fact that there are gaps in the literature: While Hitler’s actions have been widely described, his personal life has not.

Ullrich, however, does describe Hitler’s personal life, but not by exposing the innermost feelings of the anti-Semite from Braunau, Austria. Instead, he gains insight into Hitler’s personal life by presenting important events and relationships. Hitler’s brandishing of the whip, his angry outbursts, his ability to pretend; Ullrich’s interests go beyond all of this into the realm of Hitler’s enigmatic personality and the way he used it to gain power.

For someone who wanted a thousand-year empire, Hitler had seen little of the world he sought to conquer. Apart from his work as a liaison officer during the First World War in Belgium and the north of France, he had never been outside of Germany and Austria, nor did he speak a word of English.

According to Ullrich, this has led to conclusions that Hitler had a limited mental horizon. Many illustrations point to the contrary. Next to being known as an accomplished actor and charmer, there are countless testimonies that show he was an avid reader with a sharp memory. The well-known narrative about Hitler’s time as a vagabond in Vienna and Munich, his failed attempt to seize power in 1923, the construction of his national-socialist party, and his hypnotizing talent as a public speaker are well described in this book. But Ullrich tells more than that.

Rejecting the cliché that Hitler’s life outside of politics was completely uninteresting, Ullrich goes looking for the personal. For this he consults many published and unpublished notes from contemporaries, analyses remarks from foreign diplomats, and scours archives for new material. He finds interesting, little-known facts, like the plan for the Austrian-born Hitler to gain German nationality by appointing him professor of “Organic Sociology” at the technical University of Braunschweig.

During one of his long monologues in the Führerheadquarters, Hitler remarked: “I am a completely familyless being…I belong to my national community.” This is an odd remark for someone who let his household be managed by his half-sister and fell in love with her daughter, his niece. All of this was so stifling for the 19-year-old Geli Raubal that she shot herself in the head with Hitler’s pistol in September 1931. Hitler’s father passed away in 1903 and his mother in 1907.

As is well known, Hitler married Eva Braun just before his suicide in April 1945, and there’s a popular belief that their union was unconsummated. There is mention of Hitler’s genitals being mutilated during the First World War, while others surmise homosexuality kept him from sustaining a romantic relationship with a woman.

Ullrich counters these rumors with evidence of young women with whom Hitler sought contact. Even as early as 1921, party members complained about his “exaggerated engagement with women.” Once, while dressed in Lederhosen, he approached 16-year-old Maria Reiter in the park at his property in Berchtesgaden: “Sheep dogs are very loyal and devoted. I cannot imagine my life without them. Does the same go for you?”

Part one of Ullrich’s impressive Hitler biography ends on the eve of the Second World War. Hitler is headed for Vienna, the city he left 25 years earlier as an unknown failure. It’s the 13th of March 1938, the day after the “Anschluss” of Austria to Germany. Just before Hitler would speak in front of more than 100,000 delirious followers, he visits the Zentralfriedhof. There, he stands lonely at the grave of his niece, Geli Raubal.

*****

It’s been more than three years since the first part of Ullrich’s biography of Hitler appeared (in German). The conclusion of this masterly book has not materialized, and yet another biography of the Nazi leader has been released. German historian Peter Longerich, who teaches in London, belongs to the foremost specialists on Nazi history, with his worldwide-lauded biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

In his recent Hitler: Biographie, Longerich begins his chapter about Hitler’s church politics with Eltz-Rübenach. In July 1937, Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, the minister of “Rijksverkeer en Rijkspost,” refused to accept a gold medal from Hitler. He did not agree with the Führer’s church politics. Naturally, he had to resign after his refusal.

This story is important because we know in the early years of the Nazi rise to power, pious Catholics could still perform high functions, and that there was resistance toward Hitler’s assimilation policy. But after the Eltz-Rübenach debacle, Hitler became serious about suppressing the church.

It is a typical Longerich introduction of a chapter: reducing big themes to human scale/relationships and, at the same time, using broad strokes to connect the importance of these dynamics — in this case, church politics — with Hitler’s improvising talent. He had hoped to dampen the negative reactions to his anti-church measures by propagating politics against so-called cultural decay. In the same month Eltz-Rübenach was deposed, Hitler opened the House of German Art with a lot of publicity.

To this day, historians discuss whether Hitler was a puppet of circumstance, or if he was working on a masterplan, the result of which was the Holocaust. Longerich does not believe in such explanations. He is attempting to fathom Hitler’s personality by explaining it through his deeds. Where many of the earlier biographies dwell on Hitler’s early years, in this 1,550-page work, Hitler is already 30 years old by page 60 and — so concludes the biographer — up until then, there isn’t the slightest hint of anti-Semitism.

Longerich introduces a steady hand to illustrate that National Socialism became more and more of a one-man show, not just because Hitler was a control freak, but because he had increasingly wayward reactions to the situations that arose. Previous biographers were not wrong when they claim that Hitler only served the will of the people, but Longerich emphasizes that it was the Führer himself, who, with the help of propaganda, created the impression that he was the executor of the people’s will.

In Volker Ullrich’s “half” biography, Hitler’s personal life is emphasized. Longerich, on the other hand, sculpts his image of Hitler according to the data. Fascinating are Hitler’s amateur military decisions. In 1941, for instance, he decreed to boost weapon production by recruiting Russian prisoners of war. These prisoners, however, were treated so badly that increased production never took off.

Longerich’s claim that Hitler wasn’t a “weak dictator,” as has been proposed many times by other biographers, is convincing. The persecution of Jews would mainly be invented and executed by Himmler, which Longerich documents in his biography of Himmler from five years earlier. He now claims that Hitler actually did initiate the radicalization of anti-Semitism — not from a preconceived plan, but rather to frame war against Russia as a battle against communism and Judaism.

Longerich has written an impressive book, but the curiosity toward Ullrich's sequel remains undiminished.

Hans Renders is a professor of history and theory of biography at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

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