Hello, I’m Margaret MacMillan.
When leaders start to believe that they possess the truth, they become in a way rather like
gods I suppose. They think that they are always right. And that of course can be very, very dangerous.
Given enough power, most of us I think would be corrupted by it, but I think there are
certain people who really take that power and use it often for evil.
Chapter five: Megalomania, playing God.
In the case of Hitler, he was convinced – he had this Messianic sense that he was the person
destined to lead the Aryan race, as he called it.
And I think you see something similar, but with different reasons, in Josef Stalin. And
both those men were prepared to sacrifice anything– the lives of their own people
but also lives of other people in pursuit of the goal. In the case of Hitler, the goal
was the dominance of the Aryan race. In the case of Stalin, the creation of socialism
on earth.
I think it’s very difficult to find a point when Hitler started to go off the rails. He
was always off the rails. I mean this was someone who had a warped and dangerous vision
of the world which he was prepared to try and put into effect. I mean you read Mein
Kampf, which he wrote as a young man in the 1920s and it’s all laid out there. I mean
these are not just the ravings of a young man who changed his mind later. This is what
he seriously intended to do and this is what he tried to do.
Where it began to go wrong for Germany and the world was when Hitler got into power in
1933 because he now had the capacity to put these dreadful ideas into practice.
He got the war he wanted in 1939 when he attacked Poland and that was a very quick victory.
He then turned on France and won a very quick victory against France in 1940. So he appeared
to be riding on top of the world. And at that point he began to make mistakes. And of course
what those string of victories had done was persuade him that he was always right and
that his military advisors and others didn’t know what they were talking about.
And so when he decided to attack Russia, the Soviet Union, a number of his generals were
reluctant. They said it’s a very big country. We’re not sure we have the capacity to do
it. Hitler overruled them and so the German forces got bogged down in the Soviet Union.
But as this was going on, Hitler was sitting in his forward command post, the Wolf’s Lair,
and drawing designs of all the great cities he was going to build in the great
empire he was going to build.
And, Joseph Goebbels his minister of propaganda had to beg him to go and visit
some of the bombed German cities to try and rally the morale of the German people. I think
Hitler more and more was out of touch with reality, more and more dreaming these grandiose
schemes.
There’s this very chilling moment where Albert Speer who saw him shortly before he
committed suicide said to Hitler, you know, you ordered me to destroy all the remaining
infrastructure in Germany, to blow up the remaining dams, to destroy the remaining electrical
power plants. And Speer said to Hitler, but how will the German
people survive if we do this? And Hitler said, they don’t deserve to survive.
Josef Stalin also saw himself as speaking for great historical forces, in this case
the forces of socialism. And he was prepared to sacrifice anything to do it, including
the lives, of course, of a great many of his own subjects.
And so Stalin pushed through a program of forced collectivization in the countryside
and forced industrialization after 1927 at often the point of a gun. And Stalin believed
that the way to do this was to push the farmers into collective farms. Farmers should not
be thinking individually, they should put all their farms together, all their animals
together, all their implements together into collective farms. The farmers who resisted
were often shots, they were killed. They were sent off to the Gulag.
It was not wise to challenge Stalin. Stalin’s colleagues were so afraid of Stalin that when
Stalin suffered the stroke that was going to kill him, he lay in his bedroom for I think
about 24 hours because no one dared go in. And when they finally went in he was apparently
– so the story goes – conscious and looking at them. He had rather yellow eyes, people
said like eyes of a tiger and he was looking at them, couldn’t speak. And he died. And
there has always been a rumour that the beloved colleagues of Stalin stood around the bed
and said, which of us is going to put the pillow over his face. And that may not be
true. But they were terrified of him.
We don’t know how many people Stalin killed, but millions died of starvation. Millions
died in the gulag, millions died for resisting collectivization. And Stalin never seems to
have worried the slightest bit about it. And he said those people are just whining. They’re
trying to upset socialism; they’re trying to block socialism. They’re just complaining
too much. He probably killed more of his own people overall than Hitler did.
Unfortunately, when you look around the world at the moment, it's quite possible to find
leaders who have become convinced that they're always right in that rather dangerous way.
I think Mugabe in Zimbabwe who was a very clever man, led the independence struggle,
but I think who has become absolutely convinced that he is the only person who understands
what his unfortunate country needs.
Well, those oppose Mugabe are seen as traitors, they often find themselves arrested, their
property confiscated. Zimbabwe should be one of the most prosperous countries in Africa.
And Mugabe has driven it I think downhill, has driven out talented people. Has alienated
those who don’t agree with him. And has left it I think it a very bad way.
Well, I mean, there's a long list if you want to really get going. I mean, Saddam Hussein
was convinced that he was the only leader for Iraq; Gaddafi I think felt the same in
Libya, the various Kims in North Korea.
I mean, I could go on, but it's a rather depressing list.
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Go on, it's good stuff.
He'd often do an enveloping battle
which if it succeeded would panic the enemy because they'd be looking at the frontal attack
It's when he'd send in his final assault.