Review of Ian Kershaw's NEMESIS, by Gitta Sereny

"Working toward the Führer" remains Ian Kershaw's main thesis in Nemesis, the huge second volume of his Hitler biography, and with its cool 841 pages of facts backed by 259 pages of largely new references, it is extraordinarily convincing.

Hitler's historical milestones from 1933 to 1936, and the growing adoration of the "Führer" by huge masses of Germans, were amply described in Kershaw's first volume, Hubris. Wisely, I feel, his many well-known "triumphs" between 1936 and the outbreak of war — the occupation of Austria, then the Sudetenland and the rape of Czechoslovakia — receive just the necessary space here. For with Nemesis, as I read it, the author has a goal: it is to show us how the man with the "genocidal mind" whom the German generals, industrialists and churches for several years looked upon as their tool, became so entirely and catastrophically their master.

Kershaw is a careful biographer: he cites psychological evaluations made by others only selectively. Where he feels he cannot quite document Hitler's part in events, he says "probably" and "presumably". This is not always satisfying for the reader, but it is honest. Stronger in this book than in many preceding biographies are the many proofs of that most fatal of Hitler's characteristics: the quality of impulse, of decisions taken on a whim or or a bout of anger. Further, of his predilection for Britain, a curious part of his personality which influenced many of his political and military decisions.

The description of Hitler's daily life and of his personal staff is deliberately kept short to make a point: that, from the start, nothing counted for him except to maintain his authority. During the long lunches with official guests, late suppers and his nightly "tea" around 1am with his close circle, it was almost exclusively he who talked. The others who listened to his endless monologues through which he rehearsed his ideas until, by constant repetition, he convinced himself that they were right.

We know now, of course, that they were deeply, tragically wrong, but Kershaw manages to demonstrate how those who should have, and even did for a while know better, succumbed and "worked toward" implementing them however wrong they knew they were.

In the course of the hundreds of pages, the words blur into images of millions of dead and what one is left feeling more than anything else is stupefaction that, not so much the German people, or politicians, but that the German Army could have allowed it to happen. It is really in this area that Kershaw's Nemesis, provides new thoughts and questions. I do not know any other Hitler biography that so coolly, factually and devastatingly presents the phenomena of "obedience" and charisma.

Hitler's gift was to use language which kindled imaginations and ambitions. Depending on the audience ("He was above all an actor," Speer told me) it could be frantically violent, while at other times pseudo-intellectual, bordering on the incomprehensible. There was a great deal of "cleansing work" necessary to prepare for the "new order of ethnographical relations" in former Poland, he pompously announced on October 6, 1940, making the bloodletting in occupied Poland, starting with the nobility, clergy and intellectuals, sound normal and harmless. And although ten days later in a meeting with his principal "executives" — Keitel, Frank, Himmler, Hess, Bormann, Lammers — he still used a pretentious term absent from any dictionary to describe the unfolding ideological rampage in Poland ("einen harten Volkstumskampf" — a hard national identity battle), he also announced, significantly, that it would not permit "any legal restrictions". Thus the massive use of quotes enables him not only to cite the euphemisms which were used to hide the real purposes of actions, but to show time and again the other side of the coin: the effectiveness of the frequent, indeed almost random, application of atrocious words Hitler used, such as vernichten, ausrotten, eliminieren (eradicate, exterminate, eliminate) to quite different and far more general purposes than the "final" murders, thereby bringing them into general and acceptable usage and minimising their shock effect. On various occasions, ie, when Hitler felt slighted by the British, he would say, grotesquely, that he would ausrotten the British if they didn't toe the line.

Most important in the book, because insufficiently described in virtually all previous biographies, is Kershaw's emphasis on the brutality of the Nazis' occupation of Poland. By the end of the war, three million Christian Poles as well as three million Polish Jews were dead. By going the unusual route of putting into context the suffering of the whole of Poland, Kershaw manages to alter the generally accepted image, ie, the pre-eminence of the genocide of the Jews, which although the key crime of Hitler's rule (and who can still fail to agree with this?), was part of a whole holocaust of murder.

He also emphasises that the taught anti-Semitism was carefully calculated to associate the words "Bolshevism" and "Jews". The Germans without doubt did not particularly like Jews, but they feared and hated Bolshevists. Kershaw demonstrates brilliantly and painstakingly how, step by step, this hate and fear was brought about, and so horrifyingly used.

The slow development toward genocide, of Jews, Poles and Slavs, is documented throughout, using formerly unobtainable archive material, from Russia and the former East Germany. He confirms (what revisionists determinedly ignore) that Hitler's main preoccupation with the "Jewish problem" were the German and Austrian Jews. Until well into the occupation of Poland, and then the invasion of Russia, he seemed almost unaware of the existence of millions of Polish and Russian Jews. And certainly, whatever planning there was for emigration and "resettlement", was for German and then Western Europe's Jews, not those in the East. Deportation was not even thought of until, first, most European countries, then Britain and America, virtually closed their borders to Jewish immigrants, and secondly, the outbreak of war which, with the sudden emergence of three million Jews in Poland, changed the entire picture within only weeks. Even then, his main concern was getting rid of what remained of Greater Germany's Jews — by the outbreak of war 215,000 in the old "Reich" and 60,000 in Austria.

Kershaw's preoccupation with the tragedy of the Jews and with the question of Hitler's personal involvement (rather than his moral responsibility, of which, like most of us, he has no doubt) emerges throughout. And although his "working toward the Führer" theme is manifestly applicable both to political as well as military events during the 12 years of Hitler's rule, it is central to the developments toward the "Final Solution". There are no deliberate replies to revisionists here, and there are no emotional arguments, but there is an infinitely telling quiet array of facts.

Kershaw's thesis brings new understanding of — though certainly no credit to — the origin of David Irving's familiar claim that Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews until October 1943. One of Irving's "proofs" of Hitler's personal innocence in the slaughter has always been a documented remark by Hitler in October 1941 that the "Final Solution" of the Jewish problem would have to wait until after the war. What he did not make clear was that Hitler said this when he was convinced his war in the East would be victoriously concluded by the end of 1941, leaving him the conqueror of all Russia's vast spaces.

When the war expanded, however, and after — with some difficulty for German soldiers — hundreds of thousands of communists, intellectuals, clergy, Jews and gypsies in Russia had been shot, other methods of killing, as we know, were agreed on. And it is true that Hitler, though manifestly abreast of all decisions, was carefully kept away from anything that could identify him personally with how the wholesale murders in Poland were to be carried out. Kershaw's merit in slowly building up the climate of ethnic "cleansing" to murder, and documenting the almost pathological submission to Hitler, not of the SS but of the General Staff, is incalculable. Speer, who I believe knew Hitler better than anyone, came to feel he was an evil genius with devastating demonic charisma, a belief all those who were emotionally and morally affected by Hitler would share, but which, it is true, many used as a justification for their deficiencies.

It is these deficiencies in all of German society at the time, and the readiness of the best (or at least the most powerful) to bow to Hitler's "genocidal mind", which Kershaw, a historian of a new generation and a new century, lays bare in this book.

Gitta Sereny's book, The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections, 1938-2000 is published by Penguin, £20