The Third Reich
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Max Lerner, Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Leonard Bernstein, et al. Their hero was former Vice President Henry Wallace, who, first as editor of the New Republic, then as presidential candidate...
...Doubtless to a worrier such as Churchill such names suggested the fantasies of a predator...
...The lassitude, demagogy, and lawlessness of the Clinton-Gore years have opened the door to such cranks as Jesse Jackson...
...The cantankerous academics now faulting Churchill for the destruction Hitler left behind are as frivolous as the 193o's Europeans who assumed that they could "deal with" the disgusting little boor from the Austrian down-and-out...
...Churchill's latest critics have a knack...
...Those Americans who in the 199o's allowed the rule of law to be selectively abandoned and intellectual standards to be ignored might find the stories Burleigh and Kershaw have chronicled instructive...
...Joyeelyn Elders, the Clinton Administration's militant condomist (an advocate of godless eondomism...
...But for all their pseudo-mysticism, fundamentally the Nazis were a type known to all history: predators, killers...
...While the twentieth century's other ideological visionaries celebrated "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and other pretty thoughts, Hitler and the jack-booted boys celebrated the predatory life, referred to generally as war...
...First came Germany's nearby democracies...
...By the way, the Ftihrer had named his headquarters the "Wolf's Lair...
...Sweeping off the Asiatic steppes in the fifth century, the Hun hordes answered to the same predatory impulse and doubtless would have heralded their campaigns with rhetorical masterpieces the equal of Hitler's at Nuremberg if they could write or stand still long enough...
...Their hero was former Vice President Henry Wallace, who, first as editor of the New Republic, then as presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948 , argued that anti-Stalinism "was per se warmongering...
...Had the generation governing Germany enforced German law, Hitler would have remained a ranter in some dismal beer Stube and died quietly and painfully...
...His penchant The Third Reich: A New History Michael Burleigh Hill and Wang / 938 pages / $40 Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis Ian Kershaw W.W...
...Recall, if you will, the momentous propositions advanced by Dr...
...German politicians allowed unreason, mysticism, resentment, and bigotry to flourish...
...Charmley's sanguinity, they demonstrate yet again the Fiihrer's fondness for animals...
...He calls Hitler's henchman, Heinrieh Himmler, "a moralizing little creep...
...To be sure, ahead lay further divisions within the American intellectual community, with the anti-Communist faction splitting once again over the Vietnam war and d6tente...
...In Kershaw's first volume (Hitler ~8891936: Hubris) the biographer shows how the dictator's rise came about through flukes, his opponents' ineptitude, their indolence, stupidity, and the fatuous convietion that they had Hitler on a string...
...With noble exceptions, the failure was that of an entire European generation...
...Yet to this day the myth endures that Hitler was a genius, politically and militarily...
...p erhaps the English academics now blaming Churchill for failing to negotiate with this lunatic find it easier to blame one heroic figure than to accept that many of the most distinguished Europeans of the 193o's were responsible for Europe's ruin...
...The American Spectator 9 Fc b r u a ry 2 o o z 67...
...He was a sucker for medical and dietary quackery...
...Few e~ ~r learned from their failures...
...Throngs of Germans adored the hys...
...He might have added that though Wallace has been dead now for many years-and though he subsequently repudiated his pro-Soviet views-revisionists are still trying to rehabilitate him as a selfless martyr to our own alleged Cold War bellicosity (see, for example, John Morton Blum's The Price of Vision...
...Alas, too often it races on, and soon its proprietor is advancing some momentous proposition injurious to the public...
...is editor-in-chief authoritative biographer, Ian Kershaw, of The American Spectator...
...But he had promised the mob a resurrection, and, writes Kershaw, "mounting economic problems fed into the military and strategic pressures for expansion...
...As standards of democratic restraint eroded, the cranks emerged from the shadows...
...Wallace was also the author of this memorable phrase: "If we define an American fascist as one who in the ease of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States...
...Norton / ~o4o pages / $35 REVIEWED BY R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...True, in their emotionalism, Nazi racial and scientific theories took on the appearance of a pseudo-religion, as Michael Burleigh points out in his masterful The Third Reich: A New History...
...Had European statesmen beyond Germany enforced treaties, Hitler never would have gotten past his attempt to militarize the Rhineland...
...When his plumbing ached and his bodily stench became unbearable he resorted to potions that were probably poisonous...
...As he writes, "premature anti-Communists in the 'forties received as much censure from the left as premature anti-fascists in the 'thirties received from the right...
...Even worse creeps are in the shadows...
...It leaves the lessons of the 193o's to the imagination...
...or earlier propositions advanced by Woodrow Wilson or by Marx (Karl, not Groueho...
...Schlesinger gives us a foretaste of things to come in a painful discussion of his relations with the late Sidney Hook, whom he describes as "a highly intelligent man who permitted anticommunism to consume his life to the point that his obsession, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up nearly everything else...
...Thankfully Professor Burleigh has no such scruples...
...The drama is something for democrats to ponder...
...He agreed and got worse...
...Of Hitler he says, "He combined being the worst sort of reductionist scientific bore, forever citing cats and rats, with being a saloon-bar conspiracy theorist, forever banging on about the Jews...
...This is an error...
...To this day the myth endures that Hitler was a genius...
...demonstrates in the final volume of his 66 Fe b r u a ry 2 o o x 9 The American Spectator two-volume biography, Hitler 1936q945: Nemesis...
...Many of what are called "intellectual debates" exist merely because some third-rate thinker's brain would not shut down when sleep beckoned or cannabis agitated or an alien idea excited vast cogitations...
...another the "Eagle's Nest...
...To those academies sharing Prof...
...terical spellbinder, as his most recent and R. EMMET-F TYRRF.LL, JR...
...Predatory Man...
...One fears its tone and direction will be quite different...
...Some encouraged it...
...As the Nazis' chief theoretician and poet, Hitler composed dithyrambs to "the sword...
...That book, and Schlesinger's review of it, belongs to the Reagan era--which is to say, the period covered by the next volume...
...Accordingly, Churchill blew it again a couple of years later when the Fiihrer, then licking his wounds at headquarters, might have welcomed a hand extended in friendship...
...Cranks such as Hitler live in the shadows of every democracy, far in the shadows, but they are there...
...As they bungled and Hitler climbed the next rung on his ladder to ruin, they came to the view the tattered corporal was a genius...
...Then came the destruction of his own people, as he sat in demented solitude at the Wolf's Lair, mucking up the military's retreats and planning with his intellectual soul mate Albert Speer the architectural future of Europe--the F~ihrer from Charlie Chaplain on has been seen as an absurdity, and his intellectual and artistic pretensions are essential ingredients in the joke...
...He named Hitler and his Nazi party...
...In a famous review of Hook's autobiography Out of Step, Schlesinger had made the famous remark that "there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the anti-Communist philosophy...
...That such nonsense has endured into our own time can also be blamed on a generation of politicians who would not govern competently or enforce the law...
...From what I can only conclude is Kershaw's false sense of the historian's etiquette, Kershaw never declares what a lout Hitler really was...
...No European diplomat would have persuaded Hitler to subside, and by the time Hitler had acquired the chancellery and the Wehrmacht, Churchill was left no alternative but force of arms...
...It is then that the brain needs a rest...
...Next, Russia when the F~ihrer could no longer suppress his apprehensions about "Jewish Bolshevism...
...One ofthe most amusing anecdotes in the book describes a meeting at the New Republic in New York between Schlesinger and Wallace which resembles nothing so much as a leftist version of the Mad Hatter's tea party...
...It leaves Hitler appearing as the bad fruit of democracy in an off year...
...As time passed, and if he was not killed offby his doctors or by his vegetarian chef, his chaotic administration of the country and its doomed economy would have brought German collapse...
...for overlooking what was unique to A s with the human heart, the human brain never rests, which is not always a good thing...
...From Kershaw we see that Hitler was a diplomatic bungler and a military fool, but Burleigh within one exuberant outburst exposes the essence of Hitler's political genius...
...Whatever one may think of his subsequent political choices, Schlesinger cannot be praised enough for the courageous stand he took at this time...
...Certain English academics such as John Charmley, a historian at the University of East Anglia, argue that Churchill could have avoided World War II in the spring of 194 ~ and the consequent dissolution of the British Empire had he then offered to negotiate with the Fiihrer...
...A well-rested brain might have saved us from the controversies that these goof-ball academics stirred up, as well as from the current controversy over Winston Churchill's rude treatment of AdolfHitler...
...His reluctance has something to do with his sense that he is a scholar and not a moralist...
...for such names can be construed differently...
...He did not eat meat and contemplated taking strong measures against meat-eaters once the war was over...
Vol. 34 • February 2001 • No. 1
