Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Nonetheless, I think I understand where this rage at explanation comes from: because to explain is (always, according to Lanzmann) to excuse—to exculpate. To displace guilt from Hitler to the metaphorical mosquito. To offer a reason for the unreasonable. A step down the path to “to understand all is to forgive all.” I don’t see that this necessarily follows or calls for stifling the human impulse to ask “why.”

  In any case, by the time I finished the book, I may have gotten too close to the contradictions in the explanations. All too sure of themselves, yet all too contradictory and often tunnel-visioned, they couldn’t all be true. My friend, the filmmaker, Errol Morris likes to cite what he claims was the dying declaration of the last survivor of an eccentric monastic community in nineteenth-century Ohio: “It just isn’t possible that all religions can be true, but it is possible they all can be false.”

  And so I may have, perhaps, been too confident in assuming that readers would not take the title Explaining Hitler without an ironic grain of salt. Especially with the subtitle, The Search for the Origins of His Evil.

  I still like the title, though I’m not sure now to whom I owe the credit. One of the editors I worked with at The New Yorker when preparing a ten-thousand-word early version of the Introduction, Robert Vare, Rick Hertzberg, or David Remnick? Still grateful to all of them.

  But it’s true I did have a moment of doubt when I wondered if it was a safe assumption that the irony would be apparent. I even talked my publisher (and Amazon, right before publication, in an unusually self-destructive move) into changing the title to The Search for Hitler, then changed it back to Explaining Hitler at the last minute.

  The great aphorism for many writers is from Gide: “Do not understand me too quickly.” For me, “do not misunderstand me too quickly.” Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the possibility of misapprehension. In fact, it was only when I undertook writing a new Preface and Afterword updating the book that I realized the explanatory subtitle was not on the cover, only on the inside title page.

  I’m glad this new edition has the subtitle on the cover. Just to remove the shadow of a doubt. Meanwhile, the search goes on and I’ll have more to say about new developments in the Afterword. But perhaps the best way to explain Explaining Hitler is that, at its deepest level, it’s an attempt to grapple with the project of explaining evil.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Baby Pictures and the Abyss

  In the realm of Hitler explanations, it’s come to be called “the survival myth,” and though no one believes it now, it struck a chord in the postwar popular imagination. The image of a Hitler who had escaped—escaped the Berlin bunker, escaped the flames that were said to have consumed him, escaped judgment—turned out to be a curiously seductive one, inspiring fantasists from the lowbrow (the legendary Police Gazette “Hitler Alive in Argentina!” series) to the highly cerebral (George Steiner’s challenging parable The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.). Seductive, perhaps, because it reflects a feeling that although Hitler did not escape us physically, in certain important respects he may have eluded us. The survival myth suggests a persistent anxiety that Hitler has somehow escaped explanation.

  Similarly suggestive is the debate that erupted in 1995 over the discovery of a few curved shards of bone reposing in a Moscow archive, said to be the surviving remains of Hitler’s cranium. The controversy over the identity of the skull fragments—an important one because they could perhaps tell us something about the circumstances of Hitler’s suicide, his final act of self-definition—may be a symptom of a more disturbing truth: Regardless of what became of his skull, a sure sense of Hitler’s mind has escaped us.

  The real search for Hitler—the search for who he was, who he thought he was, and why he did what he did—has been an expedition into a realm far more inaccessible than the rain-forest jungles of Argentina or the remote haciendas of Paraguay, supposed hideouts of the escaped Hitler in the survival myth. It’s not a search for where Hitler has hidden but for what he hid within him. It’s a trek into the trackless realm of Hitler’s inwardness. A realm disguised by his own deceitfulness, camouflaged by thickets of conflicting evidence, a tangled undergrowth of unreliable memory and testimony, of misleading rumor, myth, and biographical apocrypha. A terra incognita of ambiguity and incertitude where armies of scholars clash in evidentiary darkness over the spectral shadows of Hitler’s past and the maddening obscurities of his psyche.

  Is it conceivable, more than half a century after Hitler’s death, after all that’s been written and said, that we’re still wandering in this trackless wilderness, this garden of forking paths, with no sight of the quarry? Or, rather, alas, with too many quarries: The search for Hitler has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions. Hitlers who might not recognize each other well enough to say “Heil” if they came face to face in Hell. The mountebank Hitler of Alan Bullock’s initial vision might well not see himself in the possessed true believer, the mesmeric occult messiah of H. R. Trevor-Roper. Nor would the contemptuously laughing Hitler Lucy Dawidowicz limned in the seventies find much in common with the dithering, hesitant Hamlet Hitler of Christopher Browning, the state-of-the-art Hitler of the nineties.

  Yes, an enormous amount has been written but little has been settled. And certain things have been lost and forgotten. Just to touch upon that which has not been settled: There is the question of the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the degree of its “sincerity.” (Was he a true believer, as H. R. Trevor-Roper has always insisted, or a cynical opportunist who merely manipulated hatred of Jews for his own advancement, as Alan Bullock and the theologian Emil Fackenheim have argued?) There are unsettled issues about such basic questions as Hitler’s ancestry (did he fear he was “infected” by Jewish blood?), his sexuality (its relation, if any, to his political pathology), and the moment of his death. (Did he die “a soldier’s death,” shooting himself with his own hand? Or was it a coward’s death—a kind of assisted suicide with the help of cyanide and a valet—as a controversial Russian autopsy report argued?) If his end is in doubt, so is the question of his advent and his success: Was it inevitable or resistible? Were Hitler’s crimes the consequence of irresistible historical forces or an implacable personal will?

  At the heart of these questions is the elusive, perhaps unfathomable object of the search for Hitler: the nature of Hitler’s “thought-world.” Was he “convinced of his own rectitude,” as Trevor-Roper firmly insists—did he believe in some deeply deluded way that he was doing good? Or was he deeply aware of his own criminality, as the philosopher Berel Lang has gone to great lengths to establish? Beneath this vexed question is the even more vexatious debate over Hitlerian exceptionalism—is Hitler on a continuum with previous and successive mass murderers, explicable within the same framework, on the extreme end of the same spectrum of the human nature we supposedly share with Jeffrey Dahmer and Mahatma Gandhi? Is there a potential “Hitler within” all of us, as some like to say? Or is he off the grid, beyond the continuum in a category of his own as Emil Fackenheim—who rejects the “Hitler within” notion—argues.

  Then there is the question of Hitler’s precise role and his degree of personal responsibility for the Holocaust. Powerful tendencies in contemporary scholar ship have cumulatively served to diminish the decisiveness and centrality of Hitler’s role. There is, first, the predisposition to look upon Hitler as the pawn of larger, purportedly “deeper” and more profound forces of history and society, forces that made the Holocaust “inevitable” with or without Hitler’s agency. It’s a predisposition expressed by the president of the United States, when at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, Bill Clinton spoke of the way the German “culture, which produced Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, then brought forth Hitler and Himmler”—Hitler as cultural product rather than (im)moral agent.

  And there is a concomitant tendency to regard
anything that hints of a “Great Man” theory of history as unsophisticated compared with the resort to explanation by Great Abstractions such as “Western racism,” “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” or even (still) “dialectical materialism.” The Great Abstraction theorists are certain that if it hadn’t been Hitler—given the historical circumstances of Germany—such forces would have produced someone like Hitler to execute the Final Solution.

  It’s a view that tends to deprecate or make relatively irrelevant the motive and psychology of the Hitler we did get. It’s a tendency heatedly disputed by (among others) the influential polemicist Milton Himmelfarb, who took arms against Great Abstraction theories in a powerful 1984 essay entitled “No Hitler, No Holocaust.” Himmelfarb’s particular target in that essay was the theory that singles out Christian anti-Semitism as the true source of the Holocaust. Himmelfarb argues that abstract ideological or theological animus is not sufficient: “All that history [of Christian persecution of the Jews] could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews. He could more advantageously have tightened the screws of oppression, as anti-Semitic tyrants had done in the past,” without pushing for (and nearly achieving) utter extermination. That decision was Hitler’s alone, Himmelfarb insists: “Hitler murdered the Jews not because he had to,” not because he was impelled by abstract historical forces toward an inevitable end but because of his own personal will and desire, “because he wanted to” (emphasis added).

  He wanted to. It’s a bit surprising that Hitler’s desire should have become so controversial, but in fact it is another one of the cruxes that has embroiled Hitler explainers, particularly in the last decade: Just how badly did Hitler want to proceed with the extermination, and just when—on what day, in what week, or what year—did he give an irrevocable signal to proceed with the Final Solution?

  The controversy over timing is more than a mere pettifogging squabble over days and weeks; those who argue different decision dates for the final authorization are in effect proposing different Hitlers, differently motivated, possessed by altogether different priorities and substantially dissimilar mentalities. Here again the tendency of contemporary scholarship has been to diminish Hitler as a motive force, to downplay his personal zeal for the slaughter, to portray him as a reluctant, indecisive, even dithering figure, inhibited by conflicting wartime priorities—perhaps even by timidity in the face of the “enormity” of the crime, as Christopher Browning suggested to me—from giving the final go-ahead.

  This recent tendency runs directly counter to the powerful argument elaborated by the late Lucy Dawidowicz in The War Against the Jews back in 1975: that Hitler had made mass murder his mission, his highest priority as far back as November 1918 in an army hospital at Pasewalk on the western front, where, in the throes of a still-mysterious episode of (depending on whose account you believe) gas blindness, a nervous breakdown, hysterical blindness, a hallucinatory episode in which he heard “voices,” or a providential vision from on high (Hitler’s version), he resolved to avenge the “stab in the back” he believed caused the German defeat by exterminating the Jews he held responsible, all of them.

  The controversy over the episode at Pasewalk is itself a subset of a larger schism among Hitler’s explainers over two distinct modes of explanation: evolution or metamorphosis. Is it possible to find in the thinly distributed, heatedly disputed facts of Hitler’s life before he came to power some single transformative moment, some dramatic trauma, or some life-changing encounter with a Svengali-like figure—a moment of metamorphosis that made Hitler Hitler? It’s a search impelled by the absence of a coherent and convincing evolutionary account of Hitler’s psychological development, one that would explain his transformation from a shy, artistically minded youth, the dispirited denizen of a Viennese homeless shelter, from the dutiful but determinedly obscure army corporal, to the figure who, not long after his return to Munich from the war, suddenly leapt onto the stage of history as a terrifyingly incendiary, spellbinding street orator. One who proceeded to take a party whose members numbered in the dozens and used it to seize power over a nation of millions; made that nation an instrument of his will, a will that convulsed the world and left forty million corpses in its wake. Missing, metaphorically then, is something that will help us explain Hitler’s baby pictures.

  Those baby pictures: If I had to choose a single defining moment in the course of researching and thinking about the search for Hitler, it might have to be that evening in Paris when I witnessed—when I was on the receiving end of—French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s angry tirade over Hitler’s baby pictures. When I witnessed the way the acclaimed director of Shoah, the nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, metaphorically brandished the baby pictures, brandished the scandalizing idea of the baby pictures in my face as weapons in his personal, obsessive war against the question “Why.” It was a moment that exposed both the passion behind the controversy over the problem of explaining Hitler—and the question at its core.

  It might come as a surprise to many that the very notion of attempting to explain Hitler should seem not merely difficult in itself but dangerous, forbidden, a transgression of near-biblical proportions to some. And, in fact, Lanzmann does represent an extreme position, the end point of a continuum, what I would call third-level despair over explaining Hitler. The point at which the despair turns to outright hostility to the process of explanation itself. The point at which the search for Hitler doubles back on the searchers.

  The depth and extremity of despair I encountered in the course of talking to Hitler explainers was one of the most surprising things I discovered in the process of writing this book. I began to get an intimation of what might be called first-level or evidentiary despair in some remarkable pronouncements by mandarins in the field such as Alan Bullock and H. R. Trevor-Roper. After fifty years, Trevor-Roper avers, Adolf Hitler “remains a frightening mystery.” After fifty years, Alan Bullock could only say, “The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain.” Jewish-studies scholar Alvin Rosenfeld is even more definitive: “No representation of Adolf Hitler has seemed able to present the man or satisfactorily explain him.”

  But no one summed up the case for evidentiary despair more briskly and conclusively than Yehuda Bauer, a founder of the discipline of Holocaust Studies and widely regarded as the most authoritative historian of the Holocaust. Hitler is not inexplicable, at least in theory, Bauer told me in his Hebrew University office in Jerusalem. It’s not impossible to explain Hitler, but it might just be too late. Too late, because too many crucial witnesses have died without giving testimony, because too many crucial documents have been destroyed, too many memories have faded, because all too many gaps in the evidentiary record will never be filled, too many ambiguities can no longer be resolved. “Hitler is not inexplicable” in theory, Bauer told me. “But the fact that something is explicable in principle does not mean that it has been explained.”

  It was in Jerusalem as well that I was initiated into second-level despair, not evidentiary but a deeper, epistemological futility, by Emil Fackenheim, perhaps the foremost “theologian of the Holocaust” (as an essay in Commentary characterized him). Fackenheim argued, contrary to Bauer, that Hitler is not explicable even “in theory,” that even if we had all the facts, Hitler was in some way beyond explanation. That no amount of biographical and psychological data about a difficult childhood, a dysfunctional family, no concatenation of trauma and deformation, no combination of bad character and evil ideology, could add up to enough. Enough to explain the magnitude of Hitler’s crimes. The systems of explanation, historical and psychological, that we employ to explain ordinary human behavior, however extreme, cannot explain Hitler, who represents, Fackenheim believes, a “radical evil,” an “eruption of demonism into history” that places him beyond even the extreme end of the continuum of human nature. Fackenheim sees Hitler as more than just a very, very, very bad man, in the sense of ordinary human badness, b
ut something else again entirely, something beyond that, the meaning of which we need to search for not in psychology but in theology. The explanation for which, if there is one, can be known or fathomed only by God.

  But Claude Lanzmann goes further even than that, goes deeper to a third-level despair—to a revolt against explanation itself, to a personal war against the question Why. For Lanzmann, the attempt to explain Hitler is not merely futile but immoral—he calls the very enterprise of understanding obscene.

  “There are some pictures of Hitler as a baby too, aren’t there?” he has said. “There is even a book written . . . about Hitler’s childhood, an attempt at explanation which is for me obscenity as such.”

  Obscenity? I tried to explore with Lanzmann the strength of conviction that would compel him to use “obscenity” as a term of abuse for investigators who, however misguided they might be, were at least well-intentioned. Why should the maker of a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on Hitler’s death camps become so incensed about a book on Hitler’s childhood? What was it about the baby pictures? I sensed they disturbed, they scandalized him not because they conjure up a specific theory of Hitler’s childhood, but because they give us Hitler as an innocent, Hitler before he becomes Hitler, “a Hitler without victims,” as the phrase coined by the scholar Alvin Rosenfeld has it. A Hitler whose baby-faced innocence lures us down the path Lanzmann condemns, seduces us into constructing explanations for the evolution of innocent child into mass murderer—explanations that are, Lanzmann argues, inevitably obscene rationalizations, not merely exculpations, but virtually justifications for Hitler’s behavior.