Nigel Cawthorne - Hitler: The Psychiatric Files

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler received the kind of adulation that is reserved for pop singers and film stars today.

A dolf Hitler has been dead for more than seventy years. He committed some of the most appalling crimes ever wreaked on humanity and dragged the world into the most destructive war in history. He even destroyed Germany, the country he purported to love. As the Allies invaded the Reich he once said would last for a thousand years, he ordered the destruction of the remaining infrastructure, because he believed that the German people were not worthy of him.

Appearing much older than his fifty-six years, he died an ignominious death, killing himself with a pistol while Eva Braun, his wife of one day, took cyanide. Many thought him a madman, though chillingly he was fully aware of his unique ruthlessness and brutality making his behaviour even more inexcusable and repellent. Yet, decades after his death, there are still people not just in Germany, but also in the United States and Russia, a country that lost so many to defeat him who idolize him.

Even those who despise Hitler and his philosophy are fascinated. The publishing industry continues to turn out more books about him than almost any other figure in history. Films and TV documentaries are constantly being made about him. We still try to understand how a man who had been barely more than a derelict, living in hostels for the homeless before becoming a soldier of little distinction, could rise to unprecedented power in one of the most civilized countries in the world and persuade its people to march into the abyss with him.

The Second World War did not come about by accident. A number of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials of war criminals in 194546 were convicted of beginning a war of aggression they had been at meetings where Hitler had made it perfectly clear that he intended to go to war.

It was already plain that the man was unhinged. The world had seen his ranting speeches in the newsreels and heard them on the radio. They made no sense other than to those caught up in his fervour. To the outside observer it was clear that, more than any other figure in modern times, Hitler was living out his own pathological psychodrama on the world stage. Hundreds of millions would be caught up in it; many millions died.

Even while the war was in progress, attempts were made to ascertain what was going on in his mind. Curiously, he had spent his early years as a down and out in Vienna, a city that was also home to Sigmund Freud, who in the early years of the twentieth century was advancing the discipline of psychoanalysis, which sought to unlock the understanding of the unconscious mind. This quickly became a dominant force in psychology and psychiatry.

When Hitler and the Nazis took over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, Freud, a Jew, was forced to flee to England where he died the following year, just three weeks after the outbreak of war. However, his understanding of the human psyche had not died with him. Across the Atlantic, academics at Harvard used his techniques in an attempt to fathom Hitlers pathology. These are Hitlers psychiatric files.

Nigel Cawthorne

Bloomsbury

Rudolf Hess stands next to SA commander Viktor Lutze as Hitler takes the salute during the 1938 Party Conference.

The twentieth century had more than its fair share of monstrous tyrants. There were plenty of petty despots too, including Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Mussoliniin Italy, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Idi Amin in Uganda, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Pol Pot in Cambodia and Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia.But however numerous their crimes, they hardly made it into the major league as challengers to Hitler.

W hen it comes to killing, the worst offender, without a doubt, was Chinas Mao Zedong. After coming to power in China in 1949, he systematically executed those he considered class enemies and throughout his long tenure of power he ruthlessly eliminated his political rivals. Millions were sent to labour camps where they were worked to death.

In his Great Leap Forward, which ran from 1958 to 1961, he forcibly collectivized agriculture and decided that to become an economic power China must make steel. Everyone must contribute by building smelting shops in their own backyards. Short of raw materials, people had to render pots and agricultural tools to meet quotas. As a result at least eighteen million people starved to death.

This was followed by the Cultural Revolution of 196676. The Revolution unleashed the Red Guards, militant university and high-school students who sought to root out counter-revolutionaries which turned out to be anyone they disagreed with. Then, in the Down to the Countryside Movement, privileged young city dwellers were forced out into the fields to become farmers. Again untold millions died. It is estimated that Mao was responsible for the deaths of some sixty million people.

When Hitler took over as leader of Germany, there was only one outcome: war. He was determined to bend the country to his will.

Joseph Stalin probably killed around forty million human beings. He deliberately created a famine in Ukraine by confiscating food stocks, killed the wealthier peasants, known as kulaks, purged his own party by having thousands shot, moved whole populations he considered disloyal to remote regions, where they starved, and consigned millions to the Gulags, a chain of labour camps in the Arctic regions. Few returned.

Adolf Hitler is thought to come third in the league of mass murderers. But there was something peculiarly appalling about his most notorious crime, the Holocaust. Although there exists no single document, signed by Hitler, ordering the extermination of the Jews, it is clear from his speeches and writings, and the testimony of those who went on to carry out the policy, that his wishes were being followed. It is still hard to comprehend to this day. He also unleashed a war that consumed Europe and, ultimately, the whole world.