Hitler Biographer Joachim Fest Died

In praise of ... Joachim Fest


Twentieth-century German history is a minefield, and few have negotiated it deftly enough to make a lasting difference to our understanding of Hitler and the Third Reich.

Joachim Fest's illuminating biography of the Nazi leader was published in 1973 when Germans who were young during the war began to re-examine their terrible past. Fest, who has died aged 79, argued that Hitler was an "unperson" driven by ideological obsessions for which he was willing to take huge risks and make sacrifices, even to the point of disaster. Crucially, he emphasised how much that disaster fell upon Germans as well as their victims, principally millions of Jews. Controversy was inevitable.

Fest, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was attacked later for publicising the revisionist Ernst Nolte, whose work relativised Hitler's crimes against the background of Stalinist atrocities. The charge was that conservative anti-communists were seeking to "normalise" Germany's past to create a more comfortable national identity. Fest's study of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, and a riveting account of the dictator's final days in his bunker (basis for the film Downfall) were popular but the latter was seen to portray Germans more as victims than perpetrators, blurring their culpability.

Historiographical trench warfare over the meaning of the Third Reich seems certain to continue. It will always be hard to "get Hitler right". Fest may not have quite managed it. But his insights still made a huge contribution.