How Smart and Well-read was Adolf Hitler? [Good Life series]

One century ago, Adolf Hitler fighting in the Great War. He was a good soldier — he would be promoted to the rank of corporal, be wounded two times, and be awarded six medals. And with him during the war he had the writings of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The image of Hitler reading Schopenhauer is startling, as one popular depiction of Hitler is of a semi-literate, semi-sane outlier who somehow lucked and manipulated his way to power in Germany. Certainly after the devastation of World War Two and the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s tempting to think that those who caused them must be close to crazy and to dismiss the possibility that educated people could be responsible.

But if we are going to fully understand the causes of National Socialism and other horrors, we have to consider an unsettling possibility: Maybe those who commit them, like Hitler and his accomplices, can be highly intelligent, well educated, and think of themselves as noble idealists.

“Books, books, always books!” wrote August Kubizek, young Hitler’s teen-years friend. “I just can’t imagine Adolf without books. He had them piled up around him at home. He always had a book with him wherever he went.”

Also according to Kubizek, Hitler was registered with three libraries in Linz, Austria after the war, and spent much of his time in Vienna in the Hapsburgs’ court library. “Books were his world.”

The phenomenon of bookish young men and women becoming activists for political violence is not rare. Consider these geographically varied examples:

* Pol Pot, the genocidal dictator in Cambodia, was an indifferent student but received part of his education in Paris and upon his return to Cambodia taught French literature and history at a private college.

* Abimael Guzmán, leader of Peru’s Shining Path terrorist group, wrote a dissertation on Kant and became a professor of philosophy at a Peruvian university.

* Osama bin Laden — who was a university graduate with a degree in civil engineering — read the works of theologian Seyyid Qutb. At university in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden attended regularly the lectures of Muhammad Qutb, who was his brother Seyyid’s translator and editor as well as professor of Islamic Studies.

* And Josef Goebbels attended five of the best universities in Germany and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Heidelberg.

So let us return to Herr Hitler and try out another hypothesis:

Adolf Hitler was at one point young, intelligent, idealistic, and ambitious. But when he was young he bought into a set of plausible-seeming but deeply-wrong premises. From there, his drive and his capabilities led him logically along a path to terribly destructive results.

All of the evidence shows that Hitler not only collected books but was a serious and systematic reader. According to Professor Ambrus Miskolczy, author of Hitler’s Library (Central European University Press, 2003), Hitler’s books show much underlining and the systematic use of colored pencils, with the different colors indicating agreement or disagreement.

And he read widely — in Philosophy, including the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche; in History — he admired Greece and Rome as magnificent “cradles of culture”; in Economics and Military Strategy; and in Culture — he loved Music (especially Wagner), Art (especially Rembrandt), and Architecture.

Because of his great reverence for books and intellectuals, Hitler amassed a large personal library during the 1920s. Especially once royalties began to arrive from sales of his 1925 Mein Kampf, he was able to indulge in serious collecting. When he came to political power in the 1930s, visiting foreign dignitaries knew of his passion and presented him with gifts of books, including a set of volumes on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

And Hitler read them — the Fichte volumes contain “a veritable blizzard of underlines, question marks, exclamation points, and marginal strikes that sweeps across a hundred printed pages of dense theological prose,” according to historian Timothy W. Ryback, author of Hitler’s Private Library, writing in The Atlantic.

Of course it could be that Hitler read much but was bad at interpreting the great thinkers’ views. Quantity does not imply quality. A fair point, but we have also have to ask what standard of interpretive excellence we should expect from politicians and activists. How good was Maximilien Robespierre’s reading of his intellectual guru Jean-Jacques Rousseau? How scholarly was Thomas Jefferson with respect to his great hero John Locke? Did Vladimir Lenin — who also read and wrote copiously — mis-read Karl Marx?

The key point is that it’s always a bad strategy to underestimate one’s enemies. And especially with the recent popularity of National Socialist ideas and movements, we remain vulnerable if we do not fully understand them. It is more comfortable to dismiss a threat by thinking of our adversaries as stupid or depraved. But sometimes they are not.

It is much more difficult to face our enemy at his strongest — and to recognize that he is often highly intelligent and thinks of himself as committed to the good.

It’s also true that many people believe that philosophical ideas are too abstract to be of practical relevance. Many believe that intellectuals are well-meaning types who at most can be misguided. And many sense that philosophy is hard work and so are inclined to leave it to others and hope they do a good job of it.

But: If Hitler’s reading of some great thinkers led him to adopt their views and those views contributed to National Socialism, then it is important for us to know what those views are. Avoiding a repeat of National Socialism — or any authoritarian movement — can only come from knowing and countering its causes. If we focus only some of the causes — diplomatic failures and economic rivalries, for example — then we remain vulnerable. And all of the evidence about the National Socialists points to their being serious about some deep ideas and to being committed to putting into practice the intellectual systems they learned from the great thinkers they read.

Let us, therefore, please stop using scare quotes whenever referring to the views of Hitler and the Nazis: their “intellectuals,” their “philosophy,” their “architecture,” their “arguments,” and so on. Let us take seriously the ideas and ideals that led to terrible results, and let us develop better the ideas and ideals necessary to combat them.

Where to begin?

Here is one place: When some names crop up regularly in the reading lists and the writings of major activists who have committed political violence — as do the names Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, George Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche — then it is important to all of us that we commit ourselves to becoming better educated in philosophy.

[This article was originally published in English at EveryJoe.com and translated into Portuguese for Libertarianismo.org. The quotation from young Hitler’s friend August Kubizek is found here. The full archive of my articles in The Good Life series.]

[Related: My book-length treatment of the question of the extent to which Nietzsche’s philosophy contributed to National Socialism: Nietzsche and the Nazis.]