Morality aside, Adolf Hitler was a garbage leader

I mention this in light of recent comments by Grand Valley State University’s now suspended offensive coordinator, Morris Berger. Asked by GVSU’s student newspaper which three historic figures he would want at dinner, Berger offered JFK, Christopher Columbus, and Hitler. Berger explained, “It was obviously very sad and [Hitler] had bad motives, but the way he was able to lead was second-to-none. How he rallied a group and a following, I want to know how he did that. Bad intentions of course, but you can’t deny he wasn’t a great leader.”

Actually, you can deny it — and you should.

I’m not here to cancel Berger. I doubt he is a Nazi sympathizer, but he didn’t learn enough history in school. Especially since others in public life have done far worse with no obvious reprisal. Note, for example, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff received very little repudiation for his hero worship of Nazi collaborator, Subhas Chandra Bose.

Still, Berger’s point is worth taking up. Because it’s not that rare to find someone who thinks that Hitler was a pretty good leader (if a deeply immoral one). These arguments tend to focus on particulars of Hitler’s rule and ignore its defining role in the climactic annihilation of Germany. Even then, and morality aside, the particulars aren’t in Hitler’s favor. Let’s address three of the most common tropes.

1) Hitler’s leadership “rallied” the people
This is Berger’s central argument, and that most commonly referenced in regards to Hitler’s supposed leadership qualities. And it’s true, Hitler was a skilled orator who at one point mobilized a stunning rise of support for Nazism.

Yet even at the apex of Hitler’s power, he was unable to secure a legitimate electoral victory. And when Hitler entered power, the Nazis were already on the decline. For a start, in the November 1932 election that would provide Hitler with his stepping stone to power, the Nazis actually lost 34 seats from their showing in an earlier election that July. Voters also ensured that the Bavarian, Conservative, Center, Social Democrat, and Communist parties retained showings, limiting the Nazis to just 33% control of the total Reichstag. Ironically, just two days after Germany’s November election, the United States would elect FDR, the leader most responsible for Hitler’s defeat.

This history matters in setting the context for Hitler’s arrival as Fuhrer.

Following the November 1932 election, Hitler was able to cajole the geriatric President Paul von Hindenburg into giving him the chancellery. Assuming that Hitler’s power would be retrained by the fractious parliamentary divisions, Hindenberg reluctantly acceded. It was a terrible error. Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933 as the opportunity to give himself supreme authority through the Enabling Act. From that point on, the Nazis seized absolute power and ruled by fear. Fear, then, first of economic concerns and then of the Gestapo, was the foundation of Hitler’s “rallying.”

2) Hitler’s leadership rebuilt the economy
Hitler’s mass works program did dramatically reduce unemployment in the mid-1930s. But it was supported by the end of the Great Depression and a massive, secretive rearmament program. That rearmament program was explicitly intended and effected toward a genocidal and expansionist mission, which would eventually destroy the German economy entirely. Indeed, the economy and its exclusionary war for purity could not be detached: they were two sides of the same coin.

As Richard Evans documents in The Third Reich at War, the third book of his masterpiece trilogy, the Nazi economy would prove a hollow shell when applied to its defining purpose of waging war. As the Second World War progressed, consumer goods factories were steadily transferred to arms production in order to keep up with an ever-increasing need for military equipment and parts. Germany’s civilian economy was shrunk and living standards alongside it. Only slave labor and the mass theft of economic resources from occupied territories kept the Third Reich going as long as it did. But the reality, borne out by production data, was clear from 1942 on: Germany lacked the economic heft to defeat its enemies. And for Albert Speer’s efforts, there was simply no way to escape this truth.

The wreckage of 1945 Germany thus rests at Hitler’s feet.

3) Hitler was a skilled military commander
Hitler was certainly bold. That’s a positive attribute in most military commanders. But Hitler’s command style also came with a fatal disregard for obvious facts and an inability to adapt to challenging circumstances. His preference for ideologues over skilled battlefield commanders also left his armies at a permanent disadvantage. Just watch the rant scene from Downfall and this becomes obvious, but it was a problem for the German effort long before the end.

The stunning 1940 success of Hitler’s invasion of France certainly buffered his credentials. German commanders and citizens alike assumed that Hitler was a genius and merited their trust. Britain, they assumed, could be starved and bombed into submission quickly. Then he could sign a truce with the West and make war against a fragile Soviet Union, winning the “living space” in the East that sat at the heart of Nazism. But Winston Churchill disagreed, and the Russian people refused to kneel.

In the end, Hitler utterly lacked strategic judgment about what sort of conflict he could win. He enjoyed a few key diplomatic and military victories early on by virtue of his boldness, but his invasion of the Soviet Union and his declaration of war on the United States sealed his defeat.

Hitler’s supreme overconfidence in himself and his ideology were always a systemic weakness. He wrongly believed the Soviet communists to be inherently weak. Hitler refused to learn from Napoleon’s 1812 disaster in Russia, and from the inevitability of the Russian winter. Once the Red Army found its feet after initial ignominious defeats, and backed by U.S. supplies and weapons, it overwhelmed the enemy.

At every step, Hitler’s deluded decisions helped the Soviets. The Wehrmacht’s three eastern front army groups were ordered to hold ground even as they were outmaneuvered and increasingly outgunned. The 6th Army’s encirclement and annihilation at Stalingrad was entirely the result of Hitler’s arrogance. Any minimally competent commander would have pulled back, consolidated defensive lines, and developed an alternative strategy, the way Douglas MacArthur managed to do in the Pacific. Yet Hitler used the 6th Army’s destruction as an example. It would set the trend for the remainder of the war.

Equally fatal was Hitler’s disregard for commanders who had great skill but were less sycophantic toward the Fuhrer. Hitler’s treatment of the exceptional Army Group commander Erich von Manstein offers a striking contrast with Omar Bradley’s constructive use of the irascible but brilliant George Patton.

In the end, only one point is necessary to prove Hitler’s failure as a military commander. Hitler claimed his leadership would enshrine his memory in the Volkshalle. Instead, as in this article’s cover photo, it delivered Berlin’s annihilation.

So again, judged by his own historic metric for success, Hitler was one of the worst ever. He failed to inspire except through fear; he created only the illusion of a functional economy; and his delusional, incompetent, arrogant command decisions sealed his nation’s fate and his own.

Put another way, he was a failure loser, not at all some kind of malevolent genius. That’s why there aren’t many normal neo-Nazis. And why, as Ricky Gervais observes, there are few boys named Adolf.