Walther Johann von Löpp writes:
For a bunch of amoral foul-ups, the Nazis at Nuremberg were an above average group. Four of them, Schacht, Seyss-Inquart, Göring and Dönitz were in the genius range. In fact, Schacht and Seyss-Inquart possessed IQ’s equaled by a mere 1 percent of humanity. Unfortunately, Hitler himself was never tested (though some have attempted to estimate his IQ), leading to much speculation about his relative intelligence.
During the course of the defendants’ testimony during the trial of the major war criminals, many of them offered their reflections on Hitler; truly informed opinions which provide a number of clues to the Führer’s intellectual capacity. (Note: One must, of course, bear in mind that the defendants continually emphasized Hitlers unassailable authority as an element in their defense, saying in effect that the Führer was the whole show and they had little or no influence, thereby mitigating their own guilt.) The following are some pertinent excerpts from this fascinating material:
Funk – IQ 124: “I immediately received the impression of an exceptional personality…He grasped all problems with lightning speed and knew how to present them very impressively, with great fluency and highly expressive gestures.”
Jodl – IQ 127: “Hitler was a leader to an exceptional degree. His knowledge and his intellect, his rhetoric and his will power triumphed in the end in every spiritual conflict over everyone. He combined to an unusual extent logic and clarity of thought, skepticism and excess of imagination, which very frequently foresaw what would happen but also very often went astray. I really marveled at him when, in the winter of 1941-2, by his faith and his energy he established the wavering Eastern Front…The modesty in his mode of life was impressive… …I became convinced – at least during the years 1933 to 1938 – that he was not a charlatan but a man of gigantic personality who, however, in the end assumed infernal power. But at that time he definitely was an outstanding personality…My influence on the Führer was unfortunately not in the least as great as it might, or perhaps even ought to have been in view of the position I held. The reason lay in the powerful personality of the despot who never suffered advisors gladly.”
Ribbentrop – IQ 129: “His thoughts and statements always had something final and definite about them, and they appeared to come from his innermost self. I had the impression that I was facing a man who knew what he wanted and who had an unshakable will and who was a very strong personality.”
Keital – IQ 129: “To a degree which is almost incomprehensible…Hitler had studied general staff publications, military literature, essays on tactics, operations and strategy and…he had a knowledge in the military fields which can only be called amazing…Hitler was so well informed concerning, armament, leadership and equipment of all armies and…all navies of the globe that it was impossible to prove any error on his part…Hitler studied at night all the big general staff books by Moltke, Schieffen and Clausewitz…Therefore we had the impression: Only a genius can do that…even in the simple everyday questions concerning organization and equipment of the Wehrmacht … I was the pupil and not the master… …Concerning…decisions he did not brook any influence.”
Dönitz – IQ 138: “A powerful personality…with extraordinary intelligence and energy, with a truly universal education, a nature radiating force and an enormous power of suggestion. I deliberately went to his headquarters only rarely because after a few days stay at his headquarters I felt that I must remove myself from his power of suggestion…In principle there was no question of a general consultation with the Führer.”
Göring – IQ 138: “After a certain time, when I had acquired more insight into the Führer’s personality, I gave him my hand and said: ‘I unite my fate with yours for better or for worse…in good times and in bad, even unto death.’ …With the dynamic personality of the Führer, unsolicited advice was not in order and one had to be on very good terms with him. That is to say one had to have great influence, as I had…as I had beyond for many years…Suggestions and advice were curtly brushed aside whenever he had once made his decisions or if…the would-be advisor had not that influence or that influential position…Foreign policy above all was the Führer’s very own realm…Foreign policy on the one hand and the leadership of the Armed Forces on the other hand enlisted the Führer’s greatest interest and were his main activity…He busied himself exceptionally with these details…In certain cases he would ask for data to be submitted to him without the experts knowing the exact reason. In other cases he would explain to his advisors what he intended to do and get from them the data or their opinion. Final decisions he took himself…In my opinion the Fuehrer did not know about details in the concentration camps, about atrocities…As far as I know him I do not believe he was informed.”
Schacht – IQ 143: “He read an enormous amount and acquired a wide knowledge. He juggled with that knowledge in a masterly manner in all debates, discussions and speeches. He was undoubtedly a man of genius in certain respects. He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality. He was a mass psychologist of really diabolical genius…I believe that originally he was not filled only with evil desires; originally, no doubt, he believed he was aiming at good, but gradually he himself fell victim to the same spell which he exercised over the masses…He was a man of unbending energy and of a will-power which overcame all obstacles…Only those two characteristics – mass psychology and his energy and will-power – explain that Hitler was able to rally up to 40 per cent, and later almost 50 per cent, of the German people behind him.”
Some maintain that Hitler was not an ‘original thinker,’ thus denying that his IQ was much more than 140 or so. I am of the opinion that Hitler WAS an original thinker. This is based on the obvious innovations Hitler created in the fields of armored warfare and propaganda, as well as his compelling-to-Germans-of his-time synthesis of the major ideas of his day (Social Darwinism, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, etc.) into a workable ideology. My best guess was that Hitler’s IQ was around 150.
Sources: The IMT Transcripts, and Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial by Werner Maser, translated by Richard Barry.
Anatoly Karlin writes:
People tend to associate most closely with people of similar IQs.
Fortunately, uniquely for the elites of a major state, we have some detailed data on the IQs of the Nazi leadership (with the exception of a few important guys like Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and the Fuhrer himself) thanks to the US psychometrists attached to Nuremberg.
1 Hjalmar Schacht 143
2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141
3 Hermann Goering 138
4 Karl Doenitz 138
5 Franz von Papen 134
6 Eric Raeder 134
7 Dr. Hans Frank 130
8 Hans Fritsche 130
9 Baldur von Schirach 130
10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129
11 Wilhelm Keitel 129
12 Albert Speer 128
13 Alfred Jodl 127
14 Alfred Rosenberg 127
15 Constantin von Neurath 125
16 Walther Funk 124
17 Wilhelm Frick 124
18 Rudolf Hess 120
19 Fritz Sauckel 118
20 Ernst Kaltenbrunner 113
21 Julius Streicher 106
As I recall from what I’ve read on Hitler and internal Nazi politics, of the above list, particularly “close associates” of Hitler would include: Goering; Ribbentrop; Speer; and until his “betrayal,” Hess. Their average IQ is 129.
While there was never much love lost between Hitler and the German military establishment, the closest military connection to Hitler from that list would be Keitel, who was infamous for his toadying behavior towards the Fuhrer. His IQ also happened to be precisely 129.
(Incidentally, while Jodl is regarded as far more competent than Keitel – he is the guy who actually made OKW command structure run – it’s interesting to note his IQ was actually lower than that of his boss, if marginally so).
In practice, Goering’s IQ during his time as Nazi bigwig might have actually been lower, due to his morphine addiction. On the other hand, there are suspicions that Speer was in fact considerably cleverer than his test scores indicated, because he was playing the “dumb dreamer architect” type so as to pretend ignorance of the death camps and avoid execution (if so he was successful). So these two factors might cancel out.
Adjusting for the Flynn effect – but only modestly, since the most useful (not rules-dependent) forms of intelligence haven’t improved all that radically, and we have an IQ of around 125 for Hitler normed to today’s Greenwich standards.
I think this is essentially accurate. He was a high school dropout and failed to get into the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. He was a brilliant orator, but oratory skills have low g loadings.
Hitler did write a famous book. But Mein Kampf is a very badly written book, even ideology outside. Here is one particularly egregious example that I still recall reading a dozen years later by virtue of just how bad it was:
THE EXTENT of the fall of a body is always measured by the distance between its momentary position and the one it originally occupied. The same is true of nations and states. A decisive significance must be ascribed to their previous position or rather elevation. Only what is accustomed to rise above the common limit can fall and crash to a manifest low This is what makes the collapse of the Reich so hard and terrible for every thinking and feeling man, since it brought a crash from heights which today, in view of the depths of our present degradation, are scarcely conceivable.
And this was after Hess – with an IQ of 120 – had labored on Mein Kampf long and hard to make it at least minimally suitable for publication.
On the other hand, Hitler was always near the top of his class academically, which puts a lower limit of about 120 on his IQ. Here is is a quote from a book b y a childhood friend of Hitler’s via Pumpkin Person:
From school sources there is abundant authentic material describing his school performance. In primary school he was always near the top of the class. He learned quickly and made good progress without much effort.
He was also a good but not brilliant artist. On the basis of this, Pumpkin Person estimates his Performance IQ at 133 (Flynn-adjusted).
Hitler has some major geopolitical successes early on, but these were probably more a result of aggression and blind luck than intelligence (had France decisively reacted anytime at Munich or beforehand, the Nazis would have been finished. Not even necessarily due to the allies. The generals were interminably planning a coup throughout the 1930s, to be put into action should Hitler’s plans have blown up).
These geopolitical victories were in any case completely reversed later on – thanks in significant part to Hitler refusing to listen to and heed the advice of his generals (in contrast, Stalin realized he was hopeless on military matters after 1941, and with a few costly exceptions like the Third Battle of Kharkov, largely left the technical details to his generals thereafter).
Against that, it should be admitted that the Nazi leadership was more or less uniformly of the opinion that Hitler had a very high intellect, and was possibly a genius. Apparently, this included Hjalmar Schacht, the brightest of them all:
He read an enormous amount and acquired a wide knowledge. He juggled with that knowledge in a masterly manner in all debates, discussions and speeches. He was undoubtedly a man of genius in certain respects. He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality. He was a mass psychologist of really diabolical genius…
However, there are two potential confounds here. First of all, Hitler was a brilliant orator, which expressed itself not only in his speeches but his casual “table talk.” Even very intelligent people can easily mistake this for genius, especially if they are lacking in the rhetorical/charismatic department themselves. Second, the Nazis at Nuremburg had a vested interest in presenting Hitler as a “diabolical genius” type of character in order to diminish their own share of responsibility for war crimes (and their risk of being hanged).
My (very rough) impressions/recollections from reading Nazi histories is that Hitler was certainly a step above the likes of feckless-schoolboy type Hess or the infamously callous Kaltenbrunner, but decidedly below Franz von Papen, Doenitz, and Schacht. To the contrary, his intellectual ability seems to fit right in besides that of Speer and Ribbentrop (also personal friends), and of Rosenberg (the Nazi “philosopher”).
Comments:
* John Gotti had an IQ of around 140. I am confident Hitler was at that level before taking power. Ernst Hanfstaengl said no one who heard Hitler speak in his later years could have any idea of his gifts. He was suffering from heart disease and probably had lost a bit by the end. Everyone who dealt with Hitler was amazed by his incredibly powerful and retentive memory, according to ‘The psychopathic god: Adolf Hitler’ (Waite)
He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality
. He came very close to making Germany the most powerful state in the world. through the effectiveness of the combination of his decisiveness and the German army’s fighting power.
Hitler has some major geopolitical successes early on, but these were probably more a result of aggression and blind luck than intelligence (had France decisively reacted anytime at Munich or beforehand, the Nazis would have been finished
You need to read some John Mearshiemer or Brendan Simms to understand how Hitler almost alone put Germany in a position to win WW2 and lay the basis for it to become the most powerful state on Earth.
The edgiest parts of Tragedy are when Mearsheimer presents full-bore rationales for the aggression of Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan.
The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was … a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon.
As for Hitler, he “did indeed learn from World War I.” Hitler learned that Germany could not fight on two fronts at the same time, and he would have to win quick, successive victories, which, in fact, he achieved early in World War II.
Hitler performed a calculus as complex as any algebra to play the West and Soviets off against on another
CIA official site review of What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa” Murphy reprints two secret letters from Hitler to Stalin that he found in the published Russian sources, hitherto unknown in the West. In these, the Führer seeks to reassure the Soviet dictator about the scarcely concealable German military buildup in eastern Europe. Hitler confides to Stalin that troops were being moved east to protect them from British bombing and to conceal the preparations for the invasion of the British Isles. He concludes with an assurance “on my honor as a head of state” that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union.[2] Some may question the authenticity of these letters, but they are difficult to dismiss out of hand. Assuming they are genuine, they add to what is perhaps the most bewildering paradox of the Soviet-German war: Stalin, the man who trusted no one, trusted Hitler.”
Stalin understood that he was freeing Hitler to strike in the west by making a pact with Hitler. In effect he facilitated it. The British considered the Soviet Union to be the real problem, Stalin had already grabbed the Baltic states plus parts of Finland and Rumania. The British were mobilizing against the USSR over the war with Finland even after declaring war with Germany. The British guarantee to Poland originally covered only their independence; the British thought allowing Germany to take Polish land was acceptable and it would make war between Germany and the USSR quite likely (Chamberlain’s strategy). Only after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced was the guarantee extended to Polands territory because at that point the British decided war was necessary; Germany and the USSR being friendly was not acceptable.
Clearly Stalin wanted to sit the war between the capitalists out and reap the rewards. Neville Chamberlain wanted to see the fighting done by the Germans and Bolshies, we know he thought that because he said so to a meeting of important Tories.With the the Nazi-Soviet pact the powerful Soviet deterent to any aggression was out of the equation and the British realized the balance of power had moved against them, which was unacceptable in a way that war between the Nazis and Soviets was not. If Hitler didn’t have to worry about the Soviets at his back that suddenly made all the previous calculations obsolete.
Although Stalin may have anticipated territorial demands or military pressure such as border incidents he was astounded when Hitler subjected the USSR to an all out attack with the promethean goal of conquering the soiet state. Everybody underestimated the effectiveness of the combination of Hitler decisiveness and the German army’s fighting power. There was nothing Stalin could do at that point because his forces were out of position, being in an offensive posture for they were too far forward. Stalin’s orders, when they came, were to stand and fight. That played into the Germans hands and allowed then to cut off and destroy much of the huge Soviet forces that Stalin had so foolishly concentrated along the border, especially in the south opposite Romania.
It was only because Hitler – against the advice of every military professional – decided to halt the drive to Moscow that the Soviet state was not overthrown in 1941.
* This is an exchange between Gustave Gilbert (the American chief psychologist who tested the defendants) and Hermann Göring, taken from Nuremberg Diary:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Which of them was smarter, Gilbert or Göering?
* Herr Hitler did not manage merely to get himself appointed as the new Chancellor of Germany, in early 1933; he also managed to be a hands-on activist leader, once in power, who largely stabilized and reinvigorated the German nation. By the time that Germany hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, three and a half years into his reign, it was basically the economic wonder of the Western World, for its rebound to functionality and productivity. What had Russia and the Soviet Union, in nearly twenty years of revolutionary furor, under Mssrs. Lenin and Stalin, managed that was remotely comparable, despite their utilizing totalitarian coercion and violence that dwarfed what had been employed in Germany under Hitler’ infamous Third Reich?
* Many years ago I read Konstantin Simonov’s reminiscences about his meetings with Stalin. Stalin read a large amount of the literary fiction of his time, and then had authors over to talk about what they were doing wrong, who was good, who was terrible, what writers shoud write about instead, etc. Long conversations like that.
The fascinating thing is that he didn’t delegate this task. I think that subsequent Soviet leaders did. Think of all the things he could have done with his time instead.
* I had already read a lot of books about both Stalin and Hitler when I learned – to my great surprise – that both were bookish. Somehow it is never mentioned.
* Hitler was pretty lazy when he was dictator and often slept until noon; he also delegated many tasks to his underlings who competed with each other (that’s the reason why “revisionists” like David Irving can claim Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust, though that’s obviously nonsensical). And when he did intervene, it often had disastrous consequences for the German war effort (like in the case of the Me 262).
Stalin also made disastrous mistakes, but in the end he probably was a lot more competent than Hitler (also probably more educated…didn’t he know all the classic Russian novels? Hitler’s favourite author by contrast was Karl May, who wrote adventure stories about the American west and is hardly known outside of Germany).
* Many people here seem to be under the impression that Hitler was some kind of economic genius. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He was self-admittedly ignorant of economic matters (and proud of it). Yes, he did restore pre-Depression GDP and at a faster rate than in the US or France, through a narrow focus on military Keynesianism that left consumption levels below their peaks under Weimar and was likely unsustainable in the long-run (according to Adam Tooze anyway). Regardless, during the critical years 1940-41, Germany was outmatched by the British in aircraft production, dooming them to lose the Battle of Britain and make Sealion unfeasible.
This in turn was linked to the most catastrophic decision of them all: The refusal to fully mobilize the German economy for war production before 1943, when the situation had suddenly turned critical for them (unlike the case in the USSR or Britain). Had he done this, it is difficult to see how he could have ended up losing to the Soviet Union. As it was, Hitler staked nigh everything on the sheer skill and elan of the Wehrmacht, massively discounting the value of war production and logistics to the horror of his generals. In military affairs as in economics and virtually everything else he involved himself with, Hitler was the classical example of a dilettante.
* The dilettante accusation is reminiscent of Ernst Topitsch’s pointing out that Hitler had not established himself in any profession before joining the German Army. (He had to petition the German cabinet to be granted this privilege). His WW1 feat of impressing his officers as an exemplary soldier in years of dedication to duty in extreme danger as a messenger makes this quite unsustainable (he was one of the very few private soldiers to be awarded an Iron Cross 1st class).
It’s true Hitler had Bohemian habits (Speer said he often wondered when Hitler actually worked) but staying up all night or very very late was something Stalin and Churchill did as well. Hitler had an efficient civil service and could devote himself to his architectural scheme for Linz, and plans for conquering Russia. When he needed to Hitler came up with truly brilliant ideas all on his own such as the “military masterpiece” (according to Stolfi) assault on Fort Eben-Emael, he also accepted (as coinciding with his own intuitions) the Manstein plan for the battle of France, and alone asked Guderian what he would do one breaking through, and authorised the driving for the coast. Add up his clever father who rose as high as possible in the customs for one with his lack of education, ability to impress very clever people in conversation, his speech-writing/making ability and ability to play Britain and Russia off against one another, and finally choosing the right moment to strike; I think Hitler’s IQ can’t have been under 140.
* Hitler was no psychopath. In 1943 his secretary’s husband was killed on the front. He got very nervous and depressed when he heard that, because he had to break the news to the secretary. When others proposed that he could delegate the task to one of his minions, he insisted that this – obviously highly unpleasant – task was his duty, but tried to avoid meeting his secretary for several hours before finally gathering the strength to tell her. Were he a psychopath, 1) he wouldn’t have found telling this so unpleasant and 2) in any event would have avoided it altogether. I don’t think psychopaths have such strong feelings of personal duty towards a secretary when they are all-powerful dictators and so no social pressure could have any effect on them.
Another story is that in February 1945 he complained to his doctor of insomnia. He said the moment he closed his eyes he could see the map with the battalions around Stalingrad. It’s obvious he felt he had made some terrible and irreversible mistake at Stalingrad for which he alone was responsible. Not a psychopathic trait.
Hitler was a non-psychopathic mass murderer.
* This may be apocryphal, but apparently Stalin was passionate about chess and when he stayed in Vienna he was unbeatable; Trotsky among others was no match for him.
Stalin seems to have had more psychopathic traits than did Hitler, though neither one would probably be diagnosable as a psychopath (psychopathy includes traits that limit long-term success in life). In essence Stalin was a brilliant and ruthless Caucasian gangster who had embedded himself within a revolutionary movement that took over a nascent superpower, who was able to outmaneuver a lot of other scheming, intelligent and ruthless people to become absolute ruler. This required much more intelligence than what was required of Hitler.
Hitler also seemed to have genuine affection for animals, something that would not be true of psychopaths. This is why I stated that although Hitler certainly had psychopathic traits he would probably not be diagnosable as a “pure” psychopath.
As I had written, psychopathy involves traits that make it very difficult to succeed in life long-term. Psychopaths usually eventually slip up and fail.
* He was a brilliant orator, but oratory skills have low g loadings.
This is most likely truth. As a kid growing up in urban poor ghetto, my observation is that underclass kids are extremely verbal and social. They spent most their enery on social relationship with complicated gang or gang like structure. Using their words to manipulate each other is the core of their activities plus constant physical violence as part of game. They are less interested in figuring out natural truth/knowlage.
Poor people tend to live in close proximity due to reduced personal space (personal space reflecting size of property/wealth). Three generations living in the same room and single wall seperating neighbours are very much common in poor ghetto. Constant dealing with other people become necessary and unavoidable. Also poor people need supporting each other to survive. So dependency is sign of poverty. Self-actualizers style of isolation (few friends) and aloofness are truely luxury only avaible for the rich. So called top out of sight class.
Almost universally any gain in wealth often leads to increased personal space (your own private bedroom, more space in room, larger size of property, distance from neighbor ect). With higher g associated with more wealth over generations, characters associated with self-actualizer behavior might become genetically fixed. Especially during feudal time, the social status is inherited. After thousands years, the personality might be genetically fixed due to confortable fitting of such self-actualizer personality (enjoying being alone/intravert). All they need is to have intelligence to gain and control large amount of wealth which can be used to control hired army and police to protect the rule or laws efforcement.
* The fact remains, in just a few years’ time, his regime turned around both the German economy and the German mindset– and that was not the result of his enemies’ stupidity. In the same amount of time in office, the lauded, nearly deified, Franklin Roosevelt, in my own country, did nothing but flail about, and generally waste unprecedented amounts of borrowed money. In 1937, as he was starting his second term, the unemployment rate was back up around 17%, after four years of Keynesian-style deficit spending– which he himself had run against, back in 1932. In order to counter deflation, his administration actually went around killing lifestock and destroying goods! If Hitler was merely luckier than Roosevelt, than luck indeed favors a prepared mind. At the end of the day, as someone trained in History, Psychology and Business Administration, inter alia, I simply find it very hard to believe that Herr Hitler was no smarter than, say, George W. Bush or O. J. Simpson!?!
* But (speaking in general) winning power struggles is not highly g-loaded. It isn’t perhaps so much that IQ doesn’t make a difference but rather that it can make an adverse difference. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to work in a large organization, you’ll know there are always alliances and power struggles, and the winner is often a dimwit. This is partly because dimwits can assemble alliances because their intellects challenge no one.
Consider the pre-Stalin power struggle between Stalin, Bukharin, and Trotsky. Bukharin was smart; Trotsky brilliant; Stalin (almost) universally recognized as a mediocrity. If you read their works, the intellectual difference is enormous.
Yet Bukharin was got a bullet and Trotsky the ice pick.
* Hitler’s moustache hid a long narrow philtrum. If people had seen it they would have thought ‘I would not put anything past this man.’
* There’s a theory (I wish I could track it down) that seems plausible to me. It holds that the IQ level of a movement leader and the next level of followers won’t exceed 18. That sounds about right, although of course I can’t be confident about the exact number. After 18, communication breaks down. (What was communication between Streicher and Schacht like.) I think we can reasonably expand the theory to say that the members of the leader’s circle will neither be exceeded nor exceed the leader by more than 18 points. (A skillful leader can tolerate someone smarter than he, but not someone beyond his comprehension.)
It’s a tight fit, and IQ 124 or 125 comes very close.
* Lenin’s theories had little relation to real life, in practice he was a fool who handed a key position to Stalin, Hitler outmaneuvered everyone. It seems the type of IQ that copes best with real life difficulties is accounted worthless. Hitler identified the source of communist power as street intimidators not theoretical dialectic. I have already said that the figure for Streicher seems to0 low. Gotti sometimes tested low when in prison and one would wonder what the incentive is for a person on trial for their life to seem highly intelligent. An IQ of 125 is possible for Hitler but it would be rock bottom, and you could give that figure for Mozart too. Neither could be properly assessed by an IQ test, they had a highly specialised type of intelligence.
* I have a problem with the following types of whitewashing:
– role of specific persons’ personal decisions minimized (as you can see with my conversation with Silviosilver), when in fact people did make decisions, it’s the same thing with ‘structuralists’ in the case of Nazism: while there were local excesses and local SS commanders often escalated (and/or proposed Berlin how to escalate) the originally modest orders, long term only the decisions made in the center (personally by Hitler) were the ones that counted, as Hitler’s will always prevailed when he wanted to (and it must be noted that most ordinary Nazis never wanted to exterminate all Jews, but many were willing to go along with some central policy to that effect, and those unwilling self-selected themselves out of the machinery of extermination)
– famine deaths are counted as “well, just a famine”, when in fact all Soviet famines in the 20th century claimed more (in the case of 1921 and 1933, way way more) lives, than the last Czarist famines, and there were disturbing deliberate actions by the central government which can only be seen as government action to induce the deaths of the famine victims (in 1921 confiscating grain with the calculated effect of causing a famine and thereby putting an end to the peasant guerrilla movement, in 1933 deporting back people who had fled famine-stricken areas to the very same famine-stricken areas, or preventing them to leave in the first place); famine in the Warsaw ghetto was always counted as part of the holocaust, so famine victims can be victims of mass murder anyway
– splitting the Soviet totals 1917-39 based on “Stalin wasn’t in power before 1925″ and giving only the 1925-39 totals, when he was part of the earlier regime, did participate in its mass murder (and in fact was among the more ruthless) and approved of all the murderous policies of the regime (yes, you can give a 1917-24 total for Lenin and a 1924-39 or 1924-53 total for Stalin, but always add that Stalin was a very high ranking official of Lenin’s regime already, and always give the total for the two added together)
There might be more, these are what I don’t like.
I thought about which one was ‘worse’ or ‘better’, but I think there’s no good answer. The Soviet regime “only” wanted to kill maybe 5% (according to Zinoviev in 1918, maybe 10%) of the population it conquered (wherever it took power), and in the end it only killed a few thousand people in most Eastern European (non-Soviet) countries (but they did kill the 5% in China and I think in Vietnam, too), and they wanted to conquer the whole world, not just a however huge part of it, so the intended body count (for which they never had a chance to reach) might be 100 million (if we calculate with the 2 billion population in the 1940s). Hitler of course wanted to get rid of most of the Slavic (and all of the Jewish) population where he conquered (that could be 100 million, too), and not only did he have realistic chances of conquering that area but also it’s possible he would have wanted to conquer even more, had he won. A total Nazi conquest of the Earth would have resulted in the death of 90% of humanity (had the Nazis followed up on Hitler’s theories after expanding so much his original goals). On the other hand, a total Stalinist conquest of the Earth would have killed off probably only 5% of the population, but it would have been disproportionately from among the most worthy 5% capable of creating arts and sciences. Moreover, Nazi Germany was freer (from the point of view of a German) than the USSR (from the point of view of a Soviet citizen, be it a Politburo member or an average Ivan Ivanovich) and so probably life for the future humanity would have been better.
It must also be kept in mind that the Nazis were conscious of the fact that they had to hurry up with their genocide because after the war (and they were counting on a victory) they wouldn’t be able to do that any more. In other words, probably after a victory the genocide would have stopped or at least slowed down. Same thing after Hitler’s death – who knows what his successors would have done? I also sometimes think that even if for example my ancestors would have been exterminated by Hitler, I have German ancestors as well, and Germans are closely related to Slavs and other non-Southern Europeans, so if the present Eurabia scenario turns reality, maybe even Polish etc. genetic interests would be better served by their extermination at the hands of close genetic relatives (the Germans) as opposed to distant peoples (MENA and SSA peoples). Also the Nazi vision was based on human nature. The Communist vision was based on a false view of human nature. This kind of honesty might have been better after the system cooled down and stopped mass murder.
But yes, the Nazis were probably worse from a purely humanitarian point of view. It’s a question how much worse. The 60 million victims of Mao might have been spared (no Soviet victory, no Maoist victory in China), same thing for Pol Pot’s victims, etc. The Japanese might have killed several millions, though.
* Stalin’s key position didn’t mean automatic power for him, though. He needed to outmaneuver the other Politburo members.
In the Soviet ‘democratic centralism’ the Politburo could remove Stalin from his position and expel him from the party. Then they could replace most people below them, and then get their acts retroactively approved at a new party congress. So Stalin what needed to avoid was Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev getting together. He managed to split them (because all three of them underestimated him), and only then was he finally safe.
I agree that Hitler had special talents for some things. I think he could have been a great architect (according to Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics basically all Nazi public structures could be considered his personal creations, almost all of them were based on his sketches, and he kept modifying the plans until they were exactly how he imagined them), and he definitely had an aesthetic sense (see those cool Nazi uniforms that were all designed based on his sketches and then modified… or his Parteitagen… you get the point), I’m not sure if it would show up in his IQ.
He had a very good memory, and I think there’s a good correlation between memory and IQ. But savants also have very good long-term memory (but low IQ and also bad short-term memory), and I’m not sure how good his short-term memory was.
I’d think AK’s 125 estimate is within the bounds of what I’d think right, but my guess would be at least 5 points higher. (Maybe even 10-15 points higher.) It’s also my impression that he liked to listen to his own voice a lot, and most of the people he surrounded himself with had to be good listeners. This might mean that he surrounded himself with lower-IQ types who worshipped him for being a genius because he told them things they could never have come up with themselves.
* The organized mass murder of Jews only started in the summer of 1941 in the territories captured from the USSR. Most holocaust historians now accept that the decision to kill all Soviet Jews only came at the earliest in August 1941 (but possibly sometime later), and the decision to kill all Jews was probably made later (according to Christian Gerlach, only in December 1941).
It is well known that Hitler openly threatened that “if international Jewry once more starts a world war”, then the result will be the end of European Jewry. According to Jewish historian Jeffrey Herf (in The Jewish Enemy) this meant that Hitler essentially tried to use European Jews as hostages against the Americans whom he believed to be under control of a Jewish cabal. Now America was definitely not under the control of a tightly knit Jewish cabal, but contrary to what Herf tries to prove, Jews were definitely influential there.
Sorry for the distraction, but let me cite a few examples of how Herf tries to make the Nazi viewpoint more irrational than it was. Herf for example mentions that the Nazi propaganda “irrationally” painted New York mayor LaGuardia as Jewish, when in fact he was raised a Catholic and born to a Catholic Italian father. He fails to mention that his mother was Jewish, so many Jews, including the secular leaders of present-day Israel, would consider him Jewish. Similarly, he mentions how Nazi propaganda “irrationally” mentioned that all Hollywood studios were under Jewish control, when in fact not all of those studios were controlled by Jews. Herf, again, fails to mention what percentage of Hollywood studios were Jewish. (The vast majority, maybe 75%.)
So contrary to Herf, Jews really were influential. They just weren’t a closely knit cabal who could make decisions – it was simply many Jews in influential positions, and all of them making decisions based on both their emotions and rational analysis (as all other humans do). Obviously they hated Hitler already in the 1930s (and with good reason – while I don’t deny it wasn’t irrational of Hitler to try to get rid of Jews, I cannot deny that it was with reason that the Jews hated Hitler after he started his anti-Jewish policies in the 1930s).
This is why Hitler’s policy of trying to blackmail Americans (American Jews) into not pushing for war with him became irrational: by his declarations of how European Jewry will get exterminated, he only made those American Jews hate him even more, so they kept pushing for war just as they had before. (I think since they had been pushing for war with him already in 1939-40, it’s difficult to see how it worsened Hitler’s position, but it didn’t help him either.)
And so once the Americans started to get even more involved in the war against him (by sending free weapons to the USSR) and got into a shooting war with him (already in late summer of 1941), he started executing his hostages. And once it became irreversible (after December 1941), he went on to enhance it to a thorough extermination program.
Since anti-war movements had little chances anyway, I fail to see how it made his position worse. He spent probably less than 1% of his resources on the holocaust, and for example according to John Keegan the fact that most people in Europe knew or suspected that all or most Jews might be killed simply because they are Jews helped keep the (largely nonexistent) resistance movements’ heads down. When you’re ruling very large populations who hate you a lot, it helps if you keep advertising how ruthless you are.
* Lenin’s thought was derived from Marx (who hdd drawn heavily on Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon). Hitler’s speeches can stand with Lenin’s writing for effectiveness, and if anything Lenin deluded himself no less about the world than Hitler did. Certainly once in power Hitler’s ideas were put into practice, while Lenin found many of his were unworkable. Lenin was roughly comparable to Hitler inasmuch during their rise to power both established themselves in their chosen mode of expression as leaders of vision who overcame obstacles. Philosophers took Lenin seriously because he like all Marxists claimed to be espousing a true science, not the dead weight of prior generations’ actual experience. But we can see that he was actually advancing nonsense. Lenin and was skilled at writing as Hitler was at speaking. Note that epistemological authority Richard H. Popkin published a conspiracy theory about JFK.
In the subjects he was interested in (especially music and architecture) , Hitler throughout his life could converse with experts. He had unusual knowledge of biology and medicine, and though not a military professional came up with brilliant ideas that took him to shattering victories.
