Explaining Hitler

...Yet the way had to be prepared for Hitler...

...4o million died besides in the war of Hitler's making...

...the evidence is in the pains he took to conceal his responsibility for the Final Solution...

...During the years since the appearance of his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), Bullock has revised his understanding, and now thinks of Hitler as an actor who was so taken with the part he was playing that he came to believe it was real...

...I s the Holocaust the worst thing that men have ever done...

...No one can reasonably claim that the Holocaust was an outburst of Christian fervor...

...A master of the veiled reference, the lethal insinuation, the inside joke, Hitler in his ascent left most people certain he had said one thing while he intimated quite another to his devotees...

...The Nazis and the Cambodian Communists 78 October 1998 • The American Spectator both murdered innocents...

...he either prompted her to commit suicide or had her murdered...

...The question is critical, and the debate intense, roughly along the division defined by two greatly influential Oxford historians...

...That Hitler was indeed a madman and that his madness can be traced to the syphilis he acquired from a whore constituted a line of speculation common enough during his rise to power...

...he was "convinced of his own rectitude," brutally deluded but unfailingly sincere, certain that the extermination of the Jews — vermin, bacilli, viruses—was a contribution to the public health as valuable as the work of Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch...

...In the closing days of the twentieth century, a man cannot be considered civilized unless he is acquainted with the worst sorts of savagely...

...The night of October 25, 1941, when Hitler's "special guests" were Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, his principal instruments in the conduct of the Final Solution, which by then was humming along, he averred, "It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews...

...He knew what he was doing was unspeakable, and he knew precisely how not to speak about it...

...One can see what an advantage this would give a man with the highest political ambitions, but then life isn't fair...

...Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the Harvard scholar whose Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) caused an enormous stir, argues that "eliminationist anti-Semitism" seized hold of the Germans in the nineteenth century, so that well before there was a Hitler most ordinary Germans wanted to kill Jews...

...What then explains the power that Hitler had over the souls of men...

...The real Hitler, whom Bullock makes out more clearly than Trevor-Roper, evidently was not above the occasional extravagant insincerity, for reputation's sake...

...W hat did Hitler himself think of the evil he did...

...Even Robert Conquest, the masterly historian of the Soviet Union who has written about Stalin's use of famine as a domestic policy tool, the Great Terror of the 1930's, and the Arctic death camps of Kolyma, told Rosenbaum that Hitler's evil "just feels worse" than Stalin's...

...that the whore was a Viennese Jewess is an embellishment to the account added by, of all people, Simon Wiesenthal, the renowned hunter of Nazi war criminals...

...Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler takes as its subject not only Hitler himself but also this fascination that he has inspired...

...When a Doctor Schweitzer springs up and unfolds like some rare flower, we may be awestruck by his spiritual beauty, but we customarily do not trouble ourselves about the question of where such beauty came from...

...power...

...Reading some of the most important works about Hitler—biography, history, philosophy, theology, fiction—and interviewing the authors of those works, Rosenbaum has written a remarkable study, rich in humanity as a fine novel, of Hitler's evil and the effect it has had on those who have spent their lives trying to comprehend it...

...Rosenbaum characterizes Maccoby as an earnest and scrupulous scholar who, like others trying to explain Hitler, has been moved to ferocious extremism...

...one young Nazi caught some of the falling babies on his bayonet, until the sport became too messy for his taste...

...Only by renouncing the divinity of Christ, Maccoby maintains, can Christianity cleanse itself of its blood-guilt and enter the ranks of decent religions...

...Henceforth his every thought was death to the enemy, Dawidowicz claims, and in this she departs from the more accepted interpretation, which holds that throughout the 1920's and 1930's Hitler indeed had various sorts of unpleasantness in mind for the Jews but that he did not seriously think of killing them all until 1941...

...one need only eradicate bourgeois or religious or otherwise subversive inclinations...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Thinking Man's Hitler Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil Ron Rosenbaum Random House /444 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas A s much as we might admire human beings of exceptional goodness we are nonetheless inclined to take them for granted...

...if it is a type of political enemy that one is out to eliminate, one is not obliged to be so thoroughly murderous (though Stalin did kill more of his countrymen than Hitler did Jews and other enemies of the Reich...

...Dawidowicz argues that Hider first determined upon the annihilation of the Jews in November 1918, when, a suffering war hero confined to a sanitarium, blinded by poison gas, shell-shocked, he heard of Germany's surrender and knew in his heart that the Jews were responsible...

...On the way to the socialist paradise, one need not put to death every bourgeois or kulak or religious believer or ethnic patriot...

...Alan Bullock originally conceived of Hitler as a mountebank, who believed in nothing but who said and did whatever was expedient to gain and to keep the only thing he cared about:44 There was no finer joy than doing the worst he could imagine to the people he hated most...

...Nor does Rosenbaum have much use for the postmodernist historians who see Hitler, not as the nemesis of Western civ44 To Hitler, a Jew left alive means failure...

...a friend of hers was ordered to tug on a wire attached to the collar, causing the device to snap shut and slice the victim's head off...

...Da-widowicz's Hitler was thinking of extermination all along, even when he was saying or doing something else...

...Claude Lanzmann, who directed the film Shoah, reviles as obscene any attempt at explaining Hitler's evil, for explanation would only serve as excuse...

...anyhow, he is bent upon convincing the world of the truth of this notion...

...Rosenbaum shows the effect that thinking continually about the foulest human evil has upon the thinkers: George Steiner cries out in heartbroken protest at the suggestion that theater-goers had applauded, not him or his play, but the final speech delivered by Hitler and denouncing the Jews...

...The hatred that all but leveled Europe had to come from somewhere, and there is no shortage of explanations for Hitler's destructive fury...

...It would not even be correct to say that the Holocaust was a perversion of Christianity...

...Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler (1947), portrays an entirely different man, and insists that Hitler did not consider his actions evil in the least...

...this barnyard mayhem had altered the boy's outlook on life decisively...

...and books like this one by Ron Rosenbaum will fascinate even if they cannot hope to satisfy...

...It is a belief widely and hotly professed that Adolf Hitler was the most evil man who has ever lived...

...according to a Harvard psychologist who analyzed Hitler's character for the Office of Strategic Services, Baron Rothschild of Vienna was the grandfather...

...Evil is another story...

...The Holocaust happened, then, because it was Hitler's pleasure that it should...

...One would be hard pressed to argue that the Cambodians were less evil because they did not murder all the innocents, but rather gave some the opportunity to murder others...

...To Rosenbaum's mind, even the best efforts to make that case are dubious, and he suggests that sexual malignancy might be beside the point here: Hitler could just as well have been the monster that he was without any sexual wound to account for his evil...

...It is only a hunch that Wiesenthal has, without any real foundation of evidence, though he has heard stories...

...The British writer Hyam Maccoby detects in both Hitler and his followers "the evil of Christendom...

...Still, this Hitler remained lucid enough to be aware that he was performing acts of darkness...

...Considering two representative acts of barbarity from the Nazi and the Cambodian genocides might clarify the distinction and also reveal the similarity...

...There appears to be no more riveting mystery than that of profound human wickedness...

...Explaining Hitler considers the answers that students of Hitler have given to several questions in concatenation: what made Hitler who he was...

...Rosenbaum discerns behind such explanations "the impulse to find a way to avoid facing the possibility that Hitler chose to be who he was, that he was a deliberate perpetrator rather than a victim...

...a voice teacher...

...They did not act in the name of heaven, and they did not fear hell...

...In their misery, the Germans were disposed to hate everyone, and Hitler, exploiting a long tradition of anti-Semitism, inspired them to hate Jews in particular...

...Until one is granted the ultimate explanation, if indeed one ever is, merely human explanations will have to do...

...Trevor-Roper wrote the introduction to the English edition of the Secret Conversations, and he tells Rosenbaum that the book gives us "the real Hitler...

...Rosenbaum doesn't buy it, and to confute Trevor-Roper he cites a passage from Hitler's Secret Conversations, the collection of his midnight-to-dawn pontifications on just about everything, which were delivered to a select audience, recorded for posterity by a stenographer, and edited by Martin Bormann...

...It was German suffering in the aftermath of the First World War, with its "starvation, humiliation, and inflation, followed, after an all-too-brief interval, by a crushing depression," that made Germans susceptible to Hitler's demonic allure...

...there might be an "inverse narcissism" to such a contention, which asserts that the victims of the Armenian or the Soviet or the Cambodian genocide somehow did not know the same depth of suffering as the Jews did...

...the Holocaust revives in the most urgent way the immemorial problem of evil...

...Of course, what Hitler did quite apart from the destruction of the Jews was sufficient to earn him a place among the very worst of the wicked: Six million Jews must never be forgotten, but ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...It takes a somewhat different form under Communism than under Nazism, and that difference may be the reason why the Nazi genocide seems more terrible...

...to Stalin, a broken enemy serves as well as a dead one...

...Terror is a salutary thing...

...Whether impelled by hatred for an actual Jew in his bloodline or "for the spectral Jew that might be within him," Hitler set out to demonstrate that no one hated Jews more than he did...

...the Cambodians in addition forced innocents to commit murder...

...The Gospels' hateful depiction of Judas established him in the Christian mind as the definitive Jew, and true believers were ready and waiting to discharge centuries of accumulated, church-sanctioned venom The American Spectator • October 199 8 77 when Hitler roused them to strike...

...If the girl holding the wire refused to kill her friend, she was told, the two of them would change places...

...Another story has it that what drove Hitler around the genocidal bend was the death in 1931 of his half-niece, Geli Raubal, a young beauty and an aspiring singer...

...An article in a psychiatric journal in 1975 attributed both Hitler's moral degeneracy and his political success to a case of "post-encephalitic sociopathy," a bizarre complication of a disease contracted in the trenches during World War I: Years after the original infection sufferers exhibited the loss of normal moral capacity and a tendency toward blazing, grandiloquent mania...

...In a well-received book that appeared in 1981, a distinguished West German attorney recalled the secret wartime court-martial of a soldier who claimed to have been a schoolmate of Hitler's and who was tried for slandering him...

...That is a generous view...

...presumably his misadventure with the goat had shown him it was safer to be on the receiving end of such transactions...

...Milo-van Djilas has written that Stalin carried out the "physical and spiritual extermination" of his enemies: killing millions, destroying millions of others without quite killing them...

...why the Holocaust happened...

...The soldier told his comrades that when Hitler, the youthful scamp, had tried to urinate in a billy goat's mouth, the goat had taken offense and bitten a chunk out of his penis...

...Alan Bullock, a minister's son, confides over lunch at an Oxford high table, speaking softly so as not to be overheard by the other dons, "Some days I ask God, 'If you were there, why didn't you stop it...

...Rosenbaum sees a problem with the belief that "the evil of Auschwitz is absolutely unique...

...to Stalin, a broken enemy might serve as well as a dead one...

...the more abominable the criminal, the more imperative our need to understand him...

...and whether the destruction of the Jews was a monstrosity unique in the annals of human evil...

...ilization, but as the exemplar of its "racialbiological-based supremacist aesthetic...

...She killed her friend...

...What they all did was genocide, and one is right to think that genocide is worse than, say, the slaughter of soldiers in battle or even the wholesale destruction of enemy civilians, as in the bombing of London or Dresden or Hiroshima...

...The tradition goes that when Hitler found out Geli was engaged to, perhaps even pregnant by, a Jewish musician from Vienna — a violinist...

...and thus he is a figure of almost limitless fascination...

...The subtlest student of what Hitler said and did not say about his most fearsome intentions and deeds, Rosenbaum concludes, is the late Lucy Dawidowicz, who wrote The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (1975...

...Hyam Maccoby sits in a London library basement fulminating against the "sinisterfestival" of Christmas, while unsuspecting crowds go about their holiday shopping...

...If it is a racial enemy that one is getting rid of, then one must kill every last one of that enemy...

...For genocide is a crime against the variety of mankind, the extermination of some particular type of human being...

...Some historians contend that Hitler's father was a half-Jewish bastard...

...To Hitler, a Jew left alive is a mark of failure...

...Such feelings notwithstanding, what Stalin and Pol Pot and, one suspects, Mao Tse-tung did to their own people is indeed morally comparable to what Hitler did to the Jews...

...Unlike, say, the devout Muslims who are promised paradise for slaughtering their Jewish enemies—and Maccoby adduces Islam as one of the faiths superior to Christianity—no one who had a hand in the Final Solution did so in the hope he would get a heavenly reward for doing his part...

...No Hider, No Holocaust" is the way Milton Himmelfarb put it in the title of an essay that appeared in Commentary in 1984 and that Rosenbaum mentions with approbation...

...Hitler's love for Geli was powerful, and reputedly exceeded the bounds of avuncular convention: It was said —the OSS took it for gospel, but Rosenbaum is skeptical—that he enjoyed having her urinate on him...

...He took pride and delight in his triumphant duplicity, Rosenbaum writes, and he laughed shamelessly to himself and with his henchmen, for there was no finer joy than doing the worst things he could imagine to the people he hated most...

...Perusing the psychoanalytic and psychohistorical literature that has accreted on these various unsubstantiated accounts, Rosenbaum finds that nearly every Hitler explainer is out "for the ultimate explanatory prize, the missing link, the key hidden variable in Hitler studies: the link between his purportedly aberrant personal pathology and his abhorrent political ideology—between his sexuality and his anti-Semitism...

...In Lodz, Poland on September 1, 1942, SS men dropped newborn Jewish babies from an upper-story window of a hospital into a truck below...

...In a Khmer Rouge re-education camp, a young girl had a dog-collar made of razor blades placed around her neck...

...There is a widespread inclination to find some particular Jew— preferably, it seems, from Vienna, and having a dark influence on Hitler's sexual nature—to blame for Hitler's hatred of Jews at large...

...Cool reasonableness is welcome in these intellectually and emotionally torrid precincts, and the most sensible explanation of why Nazism emerged when and where it did comes from Richard Breitman, the editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies...

...George Steiner became notorious for putting into the mouth of his fictional Hitler, in the novel (also adapted for the stage) The Portage to San Crist6bal of A.H., the defense that he had only done what most men wished they could: exact vengeance upon the Jews for their having afflicted humanity with sublime moral demands that the mass of men cannot hope to meet—the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Marxist utopia...

...04 The American Spectator • October 1998 79...

...rather, it was the inevitable eruption of Christianity's very essence...

...he did not do it all by himself...

...The answer to that question is the one all Hitler explainers are really after...

...how he regarded his own actions...

...Like Hitler himself, those who murdered Jews under his aegis knew they were committing evil...

...Faulting Goldhagen for ignoring the German opposition to Hitler, Rosenbaum admiringly recounts the heroic campaign waged against Hitler by Munich journalists both socialist and conservative, and he observes that one does well to remember the Nazis got only thirty-three percent of the vote in the last free election...

...Yet there are men of acute moral intuition who do think that the Holocaust is incomparable...

...Other writers on the matter hold that Hitler only believed his grandfather was Jewish, or only entertained dread suspicions 76 October 199 8 • The American Spectator that he might have been Jewish...

...The principal abomination that Rosenbaum has in mind—that anyone has in mind—when he writes of Hitler's evil is the Holocaust...

...Simon Wiesenthal proposes alternatively that Geli killed herself because Hitler gave her syphilis...