Adorno viewed Hitler as a pawn of Western capitalist powers against Moscow.

Evidence

Adorno held that Hitler was a pawn in the Western monopoly-capitalist powers’ manoeuvres against Moscow, and feared in 1936 that In two years at the most, Germany will attack Russia, while France and England stand back on the basis of the treaties which will have been signed by then.' On the other hand, he found the show trials and the cultural policies of the Soviet Union disappointing, and thought that the most loyal attitude to Russia at the moment is probably shown by keeping quiet’. This was underlined when he emphasized melodramatically that, in spite of everything, it seemed to him that `in the current situation, which is truly desperate, one should really maintain discipline at any cost (and no one knows the cost better than I!) and not publish anything which might damage Russia’. All this was very much in accordance with Horkheimer’s line. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 653

Categorization

• QUESTION: Adorno’s 1936 geopolitical analysis casts Hitler as a capitalist pawn while insisting on silence about Soviet show trials — a striking historical position worth contextualizing against what actually happened in 1938 (Munich).
• XREF: connects to: Adorno saw Hitler as executor of a pre-existing deculturing tendency; Adorno traced Nazism to the deculturing of the middle classes by the culture industry — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1643; Hitler was prepared to ally with communists to destroy the bourgeois West

Broader Connections

• Adorno saw Hitler as executor of a pre-existing deculturing tendency #expands (0.78)
• Adorno traced Nazism to the deculturing of the middle classes by the culture industry #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1643
• Hitler was prepared to ally with communists to destroy the bourgeois West #complicates (0.72)