The political views of Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. Adolf Hitler's writings and methods were often adapted to circumstance, although certain themes remained steady, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-parliamentarianism, German (), belief in the superiority of an Aryan race, and an extreme form of German nationalism. Hitler claimed he was fighting against Jewish Marxism.
Hitler's political views were formed during three periods; namely (1) his years as an impoverished young man in Vienna and Munich prior to the First World War, during which he turned to nationalist-oriented political pamphlets and antisemitic newspapers out of distrust for mainstream newspapers and political parties; (2) the closing months of the war, when the German Empire lost, and Hitler claimed to have developed his extreme nationalism and to have pledged to "save" Germany from external and internal enemies, who in his view had betrayed it (stab in the back myth); (3) and the 1920s, during which his early political career began and he wrote his autobiographical political manifesto (). Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925, but did not acquire German citizenship until 1932, which enabled him to run for public office. Hitler was influenced by Benito Mussolini, who was appointed Prime Minister of Italy on 31 October 1922 after his March on Rome. Hitler in many ways epitomised "the force of personality in political life" as described by historian Friedrich Meinecke. Hitler was essential to the political appeal and development of Nazism; so important were his views that they immediately affected the policies of Nazi Germany. He asserted the (), which advocated the absolute obedience of all subordinates to their superiors; correspondingly, Hitler viewed himself at the top of both party and government in this structure.
Hitler firmly believed that the force of "will" was decisive in determining the political course for a nation and rationalised his actions accordingly. Given that Hitler was appointed "leader of the German Reich for life", he "embodied the supreme power of the state and, as the delegate of the German people"; it was his role to determine the "outward form and structure of the Reich". To that end, Hitler's political motivation was an ideology combining traditional German and Austrian antisemitism with an intellectualised racial doctrine resting on an admixture of social Darwinism and the ideas—mostly obtained second-hand and only partially understood—of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georges Sorel; racialist thinkers Hans F. K. Günther, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau, and Madison Grant; as well as Paul de Lagarde, Richard Wagner, Alfred Ploetz, among others.
Pre-World War I During his life in Vienna between 1907 and 1913, Hitler was exposed to racist rhetoric. Populists such as Mayor Karl Lueger exploited the city's prevalent antisemitic sentiment, blamed Jews "for simply anything and everything", and also espoused German nationalist notions for political benefit. German nationalist sentiments were widespread in the Mariahilf district of Vienna, where Hitler then lived. Hitler read local newspapers that promoted prejudice, along with pamphlets in relation to philosophers, theoreticians, and racialists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Hitler developed fervent anti-Slavic sentiments during his life in Vienna. He became strongly influenced by the ideas of Nordicist philosophers like Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and Houston Stewart Chamberlain who promulgated the theory of "Aryan Herrenvolk" and advocated notions of racial superiority of Nordic peoples. These philosophers claimed that the “Aryan people" were facing dangerous threats from those whom they considered inferior, such as Jews and Slavs. They further advocated for implementing what they regarded as "racial purity", arguing that it was necessary for the survival of Nordic peoples in the modern world, while also denouncing communism. Hitler was also influenced by the Austrian politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a radical pan-Germanic nationalist who campaigned for the incorporation of Austria into the German Empire and fervently denounced the Jewish and Slavic minorities living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. British historian Alan Bullock wrote about Hitler’s distaste for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the mixture of the different ethnic groups living in it:
During his time in Vienna, Hitler also became vehemently opposed to ideas of social democracy. Earlier, he had a favourable opinion of the social democratic party, since he viewed them as a political faction that could facilitate the collapse of the Habsburg rule, which he regarded as being too pro-Slavic and anti-German. Hitler regarded Slavs as inferior people who were incapable of political organising skills and saw them as the biggest threat to the pan-Germanic movement. Hitler eventually turned against the social democrats for their policy of accepting non-German-speaking members within their ranks. Describing his experience with the social democrats he encountered in Vienna, Hitler wrote in his autobiographical political manifesto Mein Kampf:
Army intelligence agent
During the First World War, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack on 15 October 1918, for which he was hospitalised in Pasewalk. While there, Hitler learned of Germany's defeat, with the armistice to take effect on 11 November. By his own account, upon receiving this news, he suffered a second bout of blindness. Days after digesting this traumatic news, Hitler later stated his decision: "... my own fate became known to me ... I ... decided to go into politics." On 19 November 1918 Hitler was discharged from Pasewalk and returned to Munich, which at the time was in a state of socialist upheaval. Arriving on 21 November, he was assigned to the 7th Company of the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. In December he was reassigned to a prisoner-of-war camp in Traunstein as a guard. There he would stay until the camp was decommissioned in January 1919.
Returning to Munich, Hitler spent a few months in barracks waiting for reassignment. During this time Munich was a part of the recently proclaimed socialist People's State of Bavaria, which was in a state of chaos with a number of assassinations occurring, including that of Kurt Eisner, the socialist Minister President of Bavaria who was shot dead in Munich by a German nationalist on 21 February 1919. Other acts of violence were the killings of both Major Paul Ritter von Jahreiß and the conservative MP . Eventually, on 6–7 April 1919, communists and anarchists declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic, forcing the previous socialist government to flee, and Berlin sent in the military to suppress it. During that time, Hitler was elected twice as the liaison of his military battalion—once on 3 April, before the proclamation of the Soviet Republic, and again after it, on 15 April. When an attempt was made on 13 April to overthrow the Soviet government and restore the previous socialist government, Hitler allegedly urged his unit to stay out of the fighting instead of defending what he called "a gang of vagrant Jews", although this anecdote may be apocryphal. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was officially crushed on 6 May 1919, when Lt. General Burghard von Oven and his military forces declared the city secure. In the aftermath of arrests and executions, Hitler denounced a fellow liaison, Georg Dufter, as a Soviet "radical rabble-rouser." Other testimony he gave to the military board of inquiry allowed them to root out other members of the military that "had been infected with revolutionary fervor." For his anti-communist views he was allowed to avoid discharge when his unit was disbanded in May 1919.
In June 1919 he was moved to the demobilisation office of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. Around this time the German military command released an edict that the army's main priority was to "carry out, in conjunction with the police, stricter surveillance of the population ... so that the ignition of any new unrest can be discovered and extinguished." In May 1919 Karl Mayr became commander of the 6th Battalion of the guards regiment in Munich and from 30 May the head of the "Education and Propaganda Department" (Dept Ib/P) of the Bavarian , Headquarters 4. In this capacity as head of the intelligence department, Mayr recruited Hitler as an undercover agent in early June 1919. Under Captain Mayr "national thinking" courses were arranged at the Reichswehrlager Lechfeld near Augsburg, with Hitler attending from 10 to 19 July 1919. During this time Hitler so impressed Mayr that he assigned him to an anti-bolshevik "educational commando" as one of 26 instructors in the summer of 1919.
These courses he taught helped to popularise the notion that there was a scapegoat responsible for the outbreak of war and Germany's defeat. Hitler's own bitterness over the collapse of the war effort also began to shape his ideology. Like other German nationalists, he believed the () which claimed that the German Army, "undefeated in the field", had been "stabbed in the back" on the home front by civilian leaders and Marxists, later dubbed the "November criminals". "International Jewry" was described as a scourge composed of communists relentlessly destroying Germany. Such scapegoating was essential to Hitler's political career and it seems that he genuinely believed that Jews were responsible for Germany's post-war troubles.
The origin and development of Hitler's antisemitism remain a matter of debate. His friend August Kubizek claimed that Hitler was a "confirmed anti-Semite" before he left Linz. However, historian Brigitte Hamann described Kubizek's claim as "problematical". While Hitler asserted in his autobiographical manifesto "" that he had first become an antisemite in Vienna, Reinhold Hanisch, who helped him sell his paintings, disagreed with that assertion. Hitler had dealings with Jews while living in Vienna. Historian Richard J. Evans stated that "historians now generally agree that his notorious, murderous anti-Semitism emerged well after Germany's defeat [in World War I], as a product of the paranoid "stab-in-the-back" explanation for the catastrophe".
In July 1919 Hitler was appointed () of an () of the , both to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party (DAP). Much like the political activists in the DAP, Hitler blamed the loss of the war on Jewish intrigue at home and abroad, espousing -nationalist political beliefs with the intention of resurrecting Germany's greatness by smashing the Versailles Treaty. Along those lines, Hitler proclaimed that the "German yoke must be broken by German iron" ().
Nazi Party
In September 1919, Hitler wrote what is often deemed his first antisemitic text, requested by Mayr as a reply to an inquiry by Adolf Gemlich, who had participated in the same "educational courses" as Hitler. In this report, Hitler argued for a "rational anti-Semitism" which would not resort to pogroms, but instead "legally fight and remove the privileges enjoyed by the Jews as opposed to other foreigners living among us. Its final goal, however, must be the irrevocable removal of the Jews themselves". Most people at the time understood this as a call for forced expulsion. Europe has a long history of expelling Jews and the of the Inquisition.