Updated Feb. 20, 2024 at 12:10 p.m.*
BERLIN — Lazy and incompetent, showing little interest in most of the issues that fell within role he had sought so hard to attain: Adolf Hitler was in many ways poorly qualified to be a politician.
Nevertheless, no other figure in German history changed so much in such a short period of time — albeit almost exclusively for the worse. His influence was due to two qualities: his charisma (a term that has no moral value and should certainly not be viewed as positive) and his rhetorical skill.
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From Konrad Heiden in 1936 to Wolfgang Schieder in 2023, more than 100 journalists and historians have sought, in biographies, to unlock the mystery of Hitler’s effect on people, but mostly without success. The role of Hitler’s rhetoric has been consistently underestimated.
No academic presence
There are two main reasons for this. First, the same extracts of Hitler’s speeches are repeated in TV documentaries. These usually show him gesticulating wildly and shouting into the microphone, a delivery style that seems unappealing to the modern viewer. While these images, mainly from official recordings to be shown on the news, are genuine, they misrepresent the reality. In most of his public appearances, Hitler spoke quietly, with a calmer intonation; the shouting performances that are so familiar to us now were far from typical.
The second reason is more surprising: there is still no scholarly collection of Hitler’s speeches from the period between his rise to power, on Jan. 30, 1933 and his suicide on April 30, 1945. Despite the vast array of literature available that covers almost all aspects of the Third Reich, and the periods before and after it, academics rely on copies of these speeches in contemporary newspapers or a notoriously unreliable collection of excerpts from Hitler’s speeches.
The first academic edition of Hitler’s inflammatory “Mein Kampf” was not published until 2016.
The fact that no such academic book has been published at first seems surprising. But it is not an anomaly: the first academic edition of Hitler’s inflammatory Mein Kampf was not published until 2016, after the Free State of Bavaria, which officially holds the copyright to Hitler’s works, blocked it for many years.
Scholars were, therefore, forced to rely on Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945 by the Würzburg archivist Max Domarus, which was first published in the early 1960s. Domarus started collecting Hitler’s public speeches in 1932. Then a student, he wanted to study the effect they had on people. After 1945 he expanded his collection, mainly using material drawn from Nazi newspapers, including Völkischer Beobachter, and adding a “commentary from a contemporary witness”.
The Hitler Diaries
The result was 2,323 pages of tightly set text separated into two, or sometimes four, volumes. The collection was first published in 1962-1963, revised in 1973 and republished in 1988 featuring more than 20,000 extracts. Domarus also self-published an English translation.
But the sweeping cuts (Domarus removed large parts of the speeches that he considered redundant) and the supplementary texts that he added made the book considerably less reliable. Domarus also made a number of mistakes and, because he did not consult archives, often repeated false representations that were widespread in the Third Reich.
Some of the many outstanding questions about the Hitler Diaries may soon be answered.
Konrad Kujau, who created the so-called Hitler Diaries, relied heavily on Domarus’s work when forging his 60 handwritten notebooks. This was in part how the German National Archive was able to expose Kujau’s forgery in 1983 in addition to forensic analysis of the physical materials: “When Domarus’s book didn’t record anything for a few days, then the Führer supposedly goes to bed without writing in his diary,” observed the former President of Germany’s National Archives, Hans Booms.
Domarus sued Kujau for misuse of his work, claiming that the forger had copied entire passages word for word. Kujau defended himself by claiming that he and Domarus had simply both relied on the same sources.
This is one of the many outstanding questions about the Hitler Diaries that may soon be answered. In 2023, the personal archive of Gerd Heidemann, the former Stern reporter who supposedly discovered the diaries, was turned over to the renowned Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, where it is now being digitized. At the same time, Kujau’s handwritten “originals” are being digitized by the German National Archives.
A need forexplanation
Now the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, the German National Broadcasting Archive and other research institutes have launched a joint project to replace Domarus’s work. First, the researchers want to identify, analyze and compile a critical collection of all Hitler’s speeches from 1933 to 1945. They plan to release a printed edition, mainly for libraries, as well as an online version. The approach is similar to that taken for Mein Kampf in 2016, which was published in two volumes. It became a surprise success, with 13 editions published, and has been available for free on the internet since 2022.
The online version will also include all available sound recordings. An important addition, the audio will allow users to understand how Hitler actually sounded when he spoke.
Like the academic edition of “Mein Kampf,” this project will fill a gap in the world of academia
The work is due to be completed around 2027 — which is astonishing, given that for many years the Institute of Contemporary History has been collecting material for a planned expanded edition of Hitler: Speeches, Writings, Orders 1925–1933 (published between 1992 and 2003), which will now be replaced by the new publishing project.
It will take four more years for the text version of the speeches to be published, supplemented by academic introductions explaining the contemporary context: “The commentary will be more detailed than in Hitler: Speeches, Writings, Orders, but not as extensive as it was for Mein Kampf,” says Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary History and project leader. He notes the “need for extensive explanation” concerning Hitler’s speeches from 1933 to 1945.
Like the academic edition of Mein Kampf, this project will fill a gap in the world of academia and provide a strong basis for further research. It is only surprising that it has taken so long. The latest date for the full project to be completed is 2033, the 100th anniversary of the Nazis coming to power.
*This article was updated Feb. 20, 2024 at 12:10 p.m. with enriched media and audio file.
