Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  So popular am I personally that a Microsoft robot by the name of Tay, designed to mimic the thought of a 19-year-old American girl, surprised its creators by learning to say that I had been right! All this proves, if proof were needed, how unique, how incomparable, I was and am. More important, it puts the nobodies who have run Germany since 1945 on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they want people to remember the Third Reich and me by way of what they call a Mahnung (warning) to future generations. On the other, they well know the true sentiments of many of our Volk. That is one reason why, in 2016, they were preparing to sue Facebook for failing to shut people up as, according to them, it should have done. They were also planning to fine it 500,000 euros for failing to remove every single piece of news they did not like within twenty-four hours. As these and countless other facts show, it would hardly be too much to say that everything the Bundesrepublik has ever said and done is explicitly meant to “face up to the past,” as the saying goes, and condemn anything I ever stood for. In vain. The harder they try, the longer the shadow I cast. As one of our slogans used to put it: the German people is me; I am they.

  Not only is Mein Kampf, which for decades was verboten in Germany and freely available there only to those soft-headed windbags, scholars, on sale again. It has, in fact, become something of a bestseller. This happened after some of the same windbags, employed by the aforementioned Institute for Contemporary History, had provided it with a “critical” apparatus meant to counter my “innumerable assertions, lies, and expressions of intent.” Yet in reality that same apparatus brought to light how much I, a young man of no means who had not even taken the Abitur, had thought and read. The editors’ hair-splitting comments, all 3,500 of them, surround the original text, making each page look as if it were pulled out of the Talmud. Perhaps that is why the Central Committee of Jews in Germany welcomed the edition as a “pedagogic tool!” To quote Nietzsche, “How are we to keep this colossus from doing what colossi do?” asked the chief dwarf. Short answer: no way.

  People often accuse our system of being “totalitarian.” If so, the Russian-Soviet one was much more so. Among other things, that is why the number of German POWs who died in Russian camps will never be known. According to some estimates, it was in excess of one million. The things the Russians did to some of our troops, especially Waffen SS men, who fell into their clutches defy the imagination. As to Russian POWs dying in our camps, I can only repeat that the Bolsheviks, by refusing to sign the Geneva Convention, brought the problem on themselves. Besides, trying to police Untermenschen whose only idea of justice is that which is meted out by the knout, what methods do you suggest other than those we used? Even the Western Allies, smug as they were, recognized that fact. Or else why did they allow my top anti-partisan general, the aforementioned Bach-Zelewsky, to avoid trial and to go on with his life?

  Compared to those enacted by Stalin and some others, the measures I took to suppress the uprisings against me—the one of June 1934 and the one of July 1944—were positively benign. Take the case of Ernst Torgler. During the last years of the Republic he was my second most important Communist opponent in Germany. Acquitted of being involved in the burning of the Reichstag, I allowed him to go free on the condition that he leave politics alone. He kept the bargain and turned back to his profession as a journalist; in 1941, having been told by his son, who was serving on the eastern front, what life in the worker’s paradise looked like, he wrote me, promising to renounce Communism forever! I also allowed both former Austrian Premier Schuschnigg and French Premier Daladier to survive. The same applies to Leon Blum, Jewish though he was. I intended the same with respect to the Italian Princess Mafalda, whom I had interned at Buchenwald. She was the daughter of my old “friend,” Vittorio Emmanuelle, and I hoped to use her as a hostage. In the event, she died when the Allies bombed the camp. But not before the local medical staff did their best to save her.

  As to violating the laws of war, look who is talking. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, said it at Nuremberg: If Dönitz was guilty of waging “unrestricted” submarine warfare, then he and his subordinates were equally so. Right from the first day of the war, he added! Bombing our cities, the English and the Americans killed incomparably more civilians than my Luftwaffe ever did. That’s to say nothing about the firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And those incidents only refer to the years 1939-45—not to the seven decades that followed, which were by no means always filled with light and sweetness either.

  In the decades since my death, innumerable scribblers, some Germans, others foreign, have presumed to condemn the path I took. The outcome has been endless rot. I should have become an artist and refrained from going into politics, they say. I should not have tried to avenge our defeat and reverse the verdict of Versailles, they say. I should not have gone after the Jews, they say. I should not have destroyed German democracy. I should not have torn up the Treaty of Versailles. I should not have rebuilt our armed forces. I should not have annexed Austria I should not have dismantled Czechoslovakia. I should not have gone to war with Poland. I should not have let the English off the hook when I had them at my mercy at Dunkirk. I should have launched my invasion of Russia earlier than I did (or, alternatively, not launched it at all). I should not have declared war on the U.S. I should not have ordered 6. Army to stay in Stalingrad. I should not have postponed the Kursk offensive. I should have gone for a kinder, gentler, new order. I should not have exterminated the Jews. I should not have prevented my generals from “maneuvering” (read, retreating), I should have thrown in the towel and “bowed to the inevitable” earlier than I did. As if anything is “inevitable” unless and until one bows to it! Many of these ideas came from ignoramuses who had never been in charge of anyone and anything. Others were impracticable. One and all, they meant that I should not have been who I was: Adolf Hitler.

  True, I am dead. But in a growing number of places, my light is marching on.

  Afterword

  by Martin van Creveld

  I am a Jew and Israeli. And I am proud of it. My grandparents, my parents, and most of my aunts and uncles went through the Holocaust in their native Netherlands. A few of my relatives died at Auschwitz. Some were deported to various camps but returned home, more or less sound in body and mind. All the survivors lost family and friends. All were legally discriminated against, persecuted by the police, had their property taken away, and were thrown out of their homes.

  But that was only the beginning. Having escaped from the camp in which they were interned, during the last eighteen months of the war many of them were driven underground, forced to hide, and hunted down like rats. If most escaped the worst and survived, then it was no thanks to the German occupation authorities. Nor were the Dutch administration and police, who often assisted the Germans to the best of their ability worthy of gratitude. What saved my relatives was luck and their own resourcefulness as well as the incredible courage and kindness of some non-Jewish, people, including, in some cases, total strangers, who either did their best or turned a timely blind eye. Among them were a few Germans, including one close supporter of the Führer.

  Much later, several of the rescued survivors, as well as their rescuers, wrote their memoirs. Others told me their stories. Some of the details are harrowing indeed. For example, what is one to say about the experience of my grandparents, who hid in a hole between a ceiling and an upstairs floor, from where they could hear their landlord, who had given them shelter, being arrested and beaten up by the Germans? Or about my aunt and uncle who, when told that they had been betrayed and that the police were looking for a young couple with a baby girl, were forced to leave that girl under the bed in a house about to be searched? Fortunately she was asleep, remained quiet, and survived. But that was not the end of the story. To save her life, the girl was handed over to a non-Jewish couple. They became very attached to her and, after the war ended, initially refused to g
ive her back. In the end they did give her back. But what a tragedy for both sides.

  At my childhood home near Tel Aviv, the Holocaust was seldom mentioned. Only many years later did I learn my parents’ stories. My mother escaped arrest and evacuation by joining a cousin of hers in hiding under the floor of a wooden shower cabin; later, that cousin, along with one of his brothers, tried to cross into Switzerland, was turned back at the border, and ended up in Auschwitz. My father lived under a false name with false papers. Twice, he was stopped by Dutch SS men, and once he was summoned to the local German Ortskommandant. Each time he succeeded in bluffing his way through. Five years after the war, in leaving the Netherlands and moving to the fragile, dirt-poor Israel of those days, my parents’ objective was to make sure, as far as possible, that my siblings and I would not have to experience what they had suffered. My mother in particular tended to think in those terms. In early 1967, when they received some reparations money, they used it to invite some of those who had helped them to visit Israel. That was the kind of person she was, and he, now 98 years old, still is.

  I think I read my first book-length account of Hitler and National Socialism in 1962, when I was sixteen years old. The author was Mr. Uri Avnery, the maverick owner, publisher, and editor of a highly politically incorrect (as we would say now) weekly called Haolam Hazeh (This World). The volume was called Tzlav Hakeres (The Swastika). So spellbinding was it that, over half a century later, I can still recall entire sentences. Significantly, its purpose was not simply to provide an account of what had happened. Rather, it was to warn against what the author saw as the rise of Israeli chauvinism and militarism. It was a warning which, as events following the 1967 War were to show, was not misplaced.

  Since then, my interest in National Socialism and its leader has never flagged. I read and read and read. I also watched movies, visited some of the places mentioned in this book, and did research—including archival research—on parts of the historical periods that interested me. Like so many others, I wanted to understand what had happened and why it had happened as well as what had been swept away by history and what was still alive and kicking. Above all, I hoped to find the clue to the man. There just had to be some piece of information, perhaps hidden in some safe deep inside a lake or down in a salt mine, which would solve the riddle: how could anyone be born so utterly wicked? And how, being so wicked, could he make millions and millions of ordinary people follow him as if he was the Messiah? Like so many others, I failed.

  Several times I tried to write my own biography of the Führer as so many others have done. Several times, convinced there was nothing of any importance others had not said many times before, I gave up. Then, one cloudy Friday morning in the spring of 2015 as I was cleaning my house, I was struck by an idea. To gain a real understanding of Hitler, I had to depart from the beaten path. Instead of writing about him from the outside, I had to focus on the way he understood himself; in other words, I had to give my work the form of a memoir or an autobiography. It would be, in some ways, similar to Richard Lourie’s outstanding The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel (1999). A book which, in my opinion and that of some others, provides as good a psychological portrait of the man as may be had.

  Lourie, who was born in 1940, is an American Jew, journalist, and novelist. I, by contrast, am an Israeli historian trying to write what is perhaps best described as alternative history. Doing so, I felt obliged to stay considerably closer to the recorded facts than he did. I did not invent a plot; the plot was there for anyone to read. The description, in the prologue, of Hell and Hitler’s life in it apart, I did not mention any people, moves, episodes, anecdotes, or conversations except those for which there is good evidence in the kinds of sources historians normally use. On the basis of my research and understanding of Hitler, though, I did allow him to express thoughts which, incarcerated in Hell (may he remain there forever) after his death, he very likely would have had. Most of those thoughts dwell on the way things were when he was still alive and active. But some, and by no means the least important ones, concern developments that have taken place after his death.

  As a historian, indeed as a human being, I consider it my first duty to search for the truth and to record it as best I can. In this particular case the truth I seek is not about the “objective” world. Rather, I tried to uncover the subjective truth as it was seen or, in respect to the post-1945 world, probably would have been seen, through the eyes of one man—a man who, whatever else he may have been or done, singlehandedly, in so far as anyone can do so, inflicted on humanity what may very well remain the greatest, deadliest catastrophe in its long, bloody history. And whose name, more than that of anyone else, is bound to remain synonymous with evil as long as there are humans left on this earth. Isn’t that, or ought it not to be, the goal of any biographer worth his salt? There is only one difference. The method I chose was to try to get into his skin, as far as possible, so as to understand what made him tick. Even to the point of using the first person. Where there were gaps, I used what knowledge and understanding I thought I had in an attempt to close them.

  My books are one thing. I am another. In writing this one, my goal was not to set forth my own ideas. Instead, I tried to understand Hitler’s actions, views, and thoughts as I think he, observing the past and the present from Hell, would have explained them. So let the reader judge whether I have succeeded in this objective.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book was surprisingly easy. In fact, once I had made up my mind, it almost started writing itself. How come, I asked myself, such a simple idea had never occurred to anyone else? Still, I owe a debt of gratitude to a few people, one I am very happy to discharge.

  Mr. Uri Avnery, for many years a famous Israeli journalist and happy troublemaker, encouraged me to forget about my fears and to go ahead with the project. Prof. Avihu Zakai, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, was the first to listen to my early rambling. Later, having read the ms., he drew on his wide learning to make several highly useful suggestions as to what Hell might be like. Prof. Emeritus Moshe Zimmermann, also of the Hebrew University, read the manuscript. and made some very important suggestions. So did my friends at Munich University, General (ret.) Dr. Erich Vad and Prof. Martin Wagener. Colonel (ret.) Dr. Moshe Ben David, as good a friend as they come, discussed the ms. with me many, many times. Last, but not least, thanks go to our family physician, Dr. Mark Zimmermann, who was there for me at a moment of black despair.

  What can I say? Thank you all.

  Martin van Creveld

  October 2016

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