Joachim Fest - Historian of Nazi Germany

Historian of Nazi Germany

Fest then embarked on his most important work, his biography of Adolf Hitler, which was published in 1973: It was the first major Hitler biography since that of Alan Bullock in 1952 and the first by a German writer. It came at a time when the younger generation of Germans was confronting the legacy of the Nazi period, and was both very successful in commercial terms and immensely influential. It sparked controversy among German historians, because Fest, a political conservative, rejected the then-dominant left-wing view that the causes of Hitler's rise to power had been largely economic.

Fest explained Hitler’s success in terms of what he termed the “great fear” that overcame the German middle classes as a result of Bolshevism and First World War dislocation, but also more broadly in response to rapid modernisation, which led to a romantic longing for a lost past. This led to resentment of other groups — especially Jews — seen as agents of modernity. It also made many Germans susceptible to a figure such as Hitler who could articulate their mood. “He was never only their leader, he was always their voice ... the people, as if electrified, recognised themselves in him."

In 1977, Fest directed a documentary entitled Hitler, eine Karriere (Hitler: A Career). Fest's film which was intended to explain why ordinary people in Germany loved Hitler created some controversy with some critics such as the American historian Deborah Lipstadt writing that by featuring extensive clips of Hitler from propaganda films while totally ignoring the Holocaust, Fest had engaged in a glorification of the Führer.

Fest served as the editorial aide for Albert Speer, Hitler's court architect and later Minister for Munitions, when Speer was working on his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich (1970). After Speer's death, amid controversy over the reliability of the memoirs, Fest wrote Speer: The Final Verdict (2002), in which he criticised Speer for his knowing complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, something he successfully concealed at the time of the Nuremberg Trials. This echoed the verdict of Gitta Sereny in her major work Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. (1995)

Fest's other major work of German history was Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler (1994), written to mark the 50th anniversary of the 20 July plot to kill Hitler. This work marked a partial reconsideration of his earlier harsh verdict on the German people. He acknowledged that many Germans had opposed the Nazi regime within the limits imposed on them by their circumstances. He maintained his view, however, that the majority of Germans had wilfully refused to accept the truth about Nazism until it was too late.

In 2002 he published Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, a work based on newly-available evidence following the opening of the Soviet archives, but which largely confirmed the account of Hitler's death given in Hugh Trevor-Roper's book The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Inside Hitler's Bunker, along with the memoirs of Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge, formed the source material for the 2004 German film Der Untergang (Downfall), the third postwar German feature film to depict Hitler directly.