Hitler: Downfall (2021) by Volker Ullrich

Book Review

Hitler: Downfall (2021)

by Volker Ullrich

  I love a new book about Hitler! Knowing jokes about obsessions with "Hitler Studies" are at least as old as White Noise, the 1985 novel by Don Delillo, where the protagonist is a professor of the subject.  I confess that while I am 100% not a "Civil War, World War II" type of reader of popular history, I 100% am interested in the great totalitarian states of the 20th century:  the Soviet Union, Communist China and the Nazi's.  There is so much to learn about totalitarianism and its intersections with with the other great isms of the 20th century: capitalism, socialism, media culture, economics. 

   And the nature of totalitarianism as a movement is that you get a powerful leader at the top and, you know, the decision making process, and the way that this guy convinces others to do his bidding, even when the bidding is just bat shit crazy insane- there is a lot to learn about human psychology on the road to murdering six millions Jews and ten million Russians.   

  What the reader learns about Adolf Hitler from Downfall is that Hitler was a gambler who liked to "bet big on a single card," a phrase that is repeated so frequently during the forty hours of Audiobook runtime that I will forever associate playing cards with Hitler's battle strategy on the Eastern front.   This strategy worked wonders for Hitler on the way up- a prime example of an individual seizing the moment, again and again, against the grain of "conventional wisdom."

  This run of wins lasted all the way up to his terrible decision to invade the Soviet Union.  What I learned is that because of his run of wins- from his assumption of power through the defeat of France, convinced the German Army Generals- who were at best Nazi's of convenience, at worst openly contemptuous of Hitler's very being- that Hitler might actually be a genius.   

  The reader also learns that Hitler was amazingly consistent about his desire to eliminate European Jewry and his refusal to rationally contemplate something other than total victory.  For Ullrich, the war was essentially lost for Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa- the surprise attack against the Soviet Union- stalled outside of Moscow.  Mind you, this took place before Pearl Harbor.  Hitler's years long refusal to contemplate the reality of this situation led to untold suffering on both sides. 

   As the war drew to conclusion, Hitler became increasingly isolated from reality.  In one memorable scene, he spends the day of the Allied invasion of France (D-Day) micromanaging the deportation of half a million Hungarian Jews.   In the end, he became obsessed with a Wagnerian defeat that would also spell the annihilation of the German people.  Fortunately, this was a step too far even for his own followers, who ensured that his orders to raze German industry to the ground in advance of the invading Americans, British and Russians were not followed. 

  At all times, it seems like the premature death of Hitler really would have been one of those great moments upon which history turns.  It is hard to imagine the Nazi's moving forward with the Holocaust in the absence of Hitler's monomaniacally obsession with the subject.  The chapters devoted to the different attempts to rescue the Germans from Hitler are the most moving (only moving?) chapters in the entire book.