It’s worth noting that when Lanzmann tells us “there are some pictures of Hitler as a baby,” Hitler’s baby picture has an interesting history as a pawn in the politics of Hitler’s image making, his stage-managing of his self-presentation. The baby picture appeared publicly first in a photo book published by Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, in 1932, a book disingenuously titled The Hitler Nobody Knows.
Despite the title’s seductive intimation of confidences revealed, The Hitler Nobody Knows was in fact designed to counter the subcurrent of scurrilous speculations and gossip, the whispered Hitler apocrypha, the rumors fueled by Hitler’s Austrian-born foreignness, by some indefinable alienness he radiated, a sense of strangeness and peculiarity, the vague impression of unwholesomeness he made on many Germans, a sense exacerbated by rumors about his private life, his confirmed bachelor status, and the well-known sexual scandals among his closest aides. Hoffmann’s book of photos was a bait-and-switch tactic, a strained attempt to make the point that the real hidden Hitler, the Hitler nobody knew, was—surprise!—a paragon of family-values normality, of wholesome German comradeliness: It was Hitler’s own, preferred, Hitler explanation. In a sense, it could be said Hitler’s strategy has succeeded: He remains a figure that in some profound ways nobody knows.
The baby picture served a special purpose in this strategy. Along with the formal, somewhat mournful shots of his parents, it was designed at least in part to counter rumors that Hitler was illegitimate (it was not he but his father who was), that there was some shameful mystery about his family origins, perhaps “Jewish blood.” The particular baby picture in question looks like it was taken when Hitler was less than two years old. In a snowy white, Dr. Denton-type outfit, complete with white booties, we see a round-faced, ruddy-cheeked child, a mildly pensive cherub. We could, considering what we know of what became of him, “backshadow” (the useful term coined by the scholar Michael André Bernstein to characterize this dubious but hard-to-resist habit of thought) into his dark, questioning eyes, into those lips pursed into what looks like a pout or a frown, a premonitory, melancholy, even a haunted and hurt expression. We could project upon that impressionable baby face the stirrings of some deep emotional disturbance in embryo. But we could just as easily see there not incipient demonism but a kind of gentleness and sensitivity. We could just as easily predict this child would turn out to be Albert Schweitzer.
One can sense why Lanzmann finds in the impressionable plasticity of the baby pictures a fatally alluring invitation, an invitation that lures the unwary into the seductive labyrinth of ratiocination, the deceptive and dangerous promise of understanding. Dangerous perhaps because at the heart of the labyrinth, the forbidden fruit on this particular tree of knowledge, lurks the logic of the aphorism “To understand all is to forgive all.” To embark upon the attempt to understand Hitler, understand all the processes that transformed this innocent babe into a mass murderer, is to risk making his crimes “understandable” and thus, Lanzmann implies, to acknowledge the forbidden possibility of having to forgive Hitler.
It shouldn’t be done, Lanzmann insists, it can’t be done: Pacing the floor of his office, Lanzmann declaimed: “You can take all the reasons, all the fields of explanation . . . and every field can be true, and all the fields together can be true. But . . . even if they are necessary, they are not sufficient. A beautiful morning you have to start to kill . . . massively.”
No, Lanzmann insists, you can’t get from there to here. You can’t “engender the killing, the mass murders, the destruction of six million people,” from the baby picture. No finite number of explanatory facts—psychological traumas, patterns of bad parenting, political deformations, personal dysfunctions—can add up to the magnitude of the evil that Hitler came to embody and enact. No explanation or concatenation of explanations can bridge the gap, explain the transformation from baby picture to baby killer, to murderer of a million babies. It is not just a gap, Lanzmann argues; it is an abyss.
Fritz Gerlich’s Bloody Spectacles
This is a book about those who have searched for a way to bridge that abyss. About the passion of those who construct explanatory bridges, about those who seek to burn them, about the images we project upon the surface of the abyss, about those who become lost in it searching for Hitler. Some have been lost, literally, to memory. I’m thinking in particular of the First Explainers, as I’ve come to think of them. The heroic anti-Hitler Munich journalists who from 1920 to 1933 (when many were jailed or murdered) bravely went about the daily task of attempting to tell the world about the strange figure who had arisen from the Munich streets to become leader of a movement that would seize power and inscribe a new chapter in the history of evil.
My fascination with these largely forgotten figures, the reporters who were the first to investigate the political and personal life, the criminality and scandals of Hitler and “the Hitler Party,” as they astutely called it, began to grow as I first began to pick up echoes and traces of their struggle with Hitler, buried in the footnotes of postwar historians, those attempting to somehow get past the nearly impassable barrier of the Auschwitz Hitler to the Munich Hitler, the Weimar Hitler from which the mass murderer evolved.
My fascination deepened when I came upon a nearly complete collection of flaking and yellowing, seven-decade-old back issues of the anti-Hitler Munich Post moldering away in the basement of Munich’s Monacensia library archives. They’ve since been transferred to microfilm, but there was something about communing with the actual crumbling copies of the newspaper Hitler’s party called “the Poison Kitchen,” issues in which Hitler was a living figure stalking the pages, that served to give me a painfully immediate intimation of the maddeningly unbearable Cassandra-like frustration the Munich Post journalists must have felt. They were the first to sense the dimensions of Hitler’s potential for evil—and to see the way the world ignored the desperate warnings in their work.
As a journalist, I felt simultaneously a growing awe at what they’d accomplished, how much they’d exposed, and how completely they’d been forgotten. Theirs was the first sustained attempt to fathom the depths of the Hitler phenomenon as it began to unfold. One of the things I hoped to accomplish with this book was to begin in a modest way, at least, to rescue them from the limbo of historical oblivion, to begin to restore their vision of Hitler, a vision that has been, perhaps understandably, obscured by the post-Holocaust retrospective view that focuses primarily on the Berlin Hitler, the Auschwitz Hitler. The vision of the First Explainers was the vision of the men and women who were critical witnesses to the now-lost spectacle of Hitler becoming Hitler.
In addition to the courageous reporters and editors of the Munich Post, there were others such as Rudolf Olden, Konrad Heiden, and Walter Schaber, the last still alive at age ninety-two and living in Manhattan’s Washington Heights when I interviewed him. And Fritz Gerlich, a strange, enigmatic figure of brilliance, courage, and contradiction. The iconoclastic editor of a conservative anti-Marxist, anti-Nazi opposition paper called Der Gerade Weg (the right way, or the straight path), celebrated as a journalistic nemesis of Hitler in his time, largely forgotten now, Gerlich was murdered in Dachau for attempting to print a damaging exposé of Hitler five weeks after the Nazis had seized power and crushed the rest of the opposition press. A fascinating figure, Gerlich, a scathing Swiftian satirical scourge of Hitler, he possessed an uncanny insight into the racial dynamics of Hitler’s pathology. A skeptical historical scholar, Gerlich, nonetheless, came to believe in the prophetic powers of a controversial, probably fraudulent, Bavarian stigmatic and found in her a source of the faith that led him to gamble his life on a last-ditch effort to bring Hitler down with his pen and printing press. With an exposé to end all exposés of Hitler, he hoped: one final story that would shock the public and cause President Paul von Hindenburg to depose the newly installed Chancellor Hitler before it was too late.
It was a desperate gamble that failed. On March 9, 1933, sto
rm troopers burst into Gerlich’s newspaper office, ripped his last story from the presses, beat him senseless, and dragged him off to Dachau, where he was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. The nature of the exposé he’d been about to publish—some said it concerned the circumstances of the death of Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal in his apartment, others said it concerned the truth about the February 1933 Reichstag fire or foreign funding of the Nazis—has been effectively lost to history; it is one of the evidentiary trails I’ve pursued to the bitter end.
But there was a moment in the course of that pursuit that crystallized for me what I was trying to accomplish with what might seem like a quixotic pursuit of a quixotic lost Hitler exposé: what I wanted to recover as much as the lost exposé. I had managed to track down in Munich one of Gerlich’s last living colleagues, Dr. Johannes Steiner, a retired publisher in his nineties who had been a partner in Gerlich’s doomed anti-Hitler attack sheet Der Gerade Weg. Dr. Steiner’s memory of that awful time, particularly the last days of Gerlich, when they were all on the run, was fragmentary. But there was one moment, one memory he’d preserved with frightening clarity for six decades: a memory of the Gestapo and Fritz Gerlich’s spectacles. Gerlich’s steel-rimmed glasses had become a kind of signature image for the combative newspaperman among those who knew him in Munich, an emblem almost of his steely determination and clarity of vision.
But after a year in Dachau, after the Gestapo had dragged him out of his cell and shot him in the head on the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s thugs chose a cruel and chilling way to notify Gerlich’s wife, Dr. Steiner recalled. “They sent to his widow, Sophie, Gerlich’s spectacles, all spattered with blood.”
It’s an arresting image, an acknowledgment perhaps of Gerlich as a man who’d seen too much, who knew too much to live, a token of how much his vision was feared and hated by the Hitler inner circle, for having seen through them. Something about that image stayed with me, once I’d heard it, kept me in Munich for weeks paging through the last fragile copies of Gerlich’s newspaper and those of the Munich Post. It made me want to know more intimately—as much as possible across the abyss—these men who knew Hitler most intimately. It made me want to begin to restore to light the vision they had: the view of Hitler through Fritz Gerlich’s bloody spectacles.
The Escape Artist
In a sense, this book is as much about the spectacles, the explanatory lenses through which we look at Hitler, as it is about Hitler. About the way those lenses color, distort, and shape our perceptions. About the way explanatory lenses often project our own preconceptions and agendas upon the shadowy shape-shifting images of Hitler. About the way what we talk about when we talk about Hitler is often not the Hitler of history but the meaning of evil. Not evil as some numinous supernatural entity but evil as a name for a capacity of human nature. To what degree does Hitler represent some ultimate, perhaps never-before-seen extension of that capacity? Or does he represent not a qualitative leap in that capacity but rather a figure whose distinctiveness and importance in this regard have been inflated by the quantity of his victims?
In many ways, it doesn’t matter what word we choose to apply to Hitler. The use or nonuse of the word “evil” changes nothing about what happened, about how many died. The choice of the word does not change a fact of history, but it is a fact, a facet, a reflection of culture: How we think about Hitler and evil and the nature of Hitler’s choice is a reflection of important cultural assumptions and divisive schisms about individual consciousness and historical causation, the never-ending conflict over free will, determinism, and personal responsibility.
That some choose to use the word “evil” for Hitler’s choice (no one doubts the deeds were evil in the sense of being horrifically, inarguably bad, but it’s the nature of the mind and motivation of the perpetrator that’s in contention) and some choose not to use the word doesn’t make the former more virtuous or the latter less. Some historians, such as John Lukacs for instance, exhibit a positive aversion to the discussion of the word or its implications in relation to Hitler. While others, even an atheist such as Hebrew University’s Yehuda Bauer, widely regarded as the most authoritative historian of the Holocaust and a polemical foe of “mystification,” have little hesitation in using the word “evil.” Yehuda Bauer told me he believes Hitler represents “near-ultimate evil,” and his choice of the words “near” and “ultimate” are as carefully considered as his choice of the word “evil” is.
I found such choices, the reasons behind them, the assumptions they reflect as worthy of pursuit as the contentious debates over Hitler’s ancestry and sexuality, say. In fact, I found the debates over Hitler’s ancestry and sexuality worth pursuing because they were, beneath the surface, enactments of debates about exactly these questions—the way in which we explain or explain away evil—in disguised form.
In any case, at the very least the word “evil” turned out to be useful in a heuristic sense: as a catalyst, as a Rorschach test, as a way of bringing to the surface crucial distinctions and defining schisms.
One thing that surprised me in the course of speaking to Hitler explainers was that Yehuda Bauer turned out to be in a distinct minority among scholars. I found remarkable, at least at first, the pronounced reluctance of so many of them to call Adolf Hitler evil. It sounds strange even to say that, Hitler having become such an icon, an embodiment, a stand-in for ultimate evil in popular discourse. But that reluctance exposes the imprecision of our thinking on the subject of evil, reflects the difficulty we—both philosophers and laymen—have in defining what evil is, despite an intuitive sense that it exists and must exist in Hitler.
“If he isn’t evil, who is?” Alan Bullock exclaimed to me. It’s a somewhat backhanded endorsement of the idea, one that suggests a kind of definitional desperation in which Hitler is summoned to rescue a term that can’t be defined or defended without him. And yet Bullock’s exclamatory affirmation is an exception to the logic of most modes of contemporary discourse on both Hitler and evil, modes in which Hitler, ever the escape artist, escapes the category of evil. Yes, Hitler has become a personification of evil in popular culture, to the point where philosophers take pains to deplore what is now called argumentum ad Hitlerum—the resort to Hitler to end discussion on everything from capital punishment (“Well, Hitler deserved it, didn’t he?”) to vegetarianism (“It didn’t improve Hitler’s character, did it?”).
But in the realm of scholarship, it’s remarkable to discover how many sophisticated thinkers of all stripes find themselves unwilling to find a principled rationale for calling Hitler evil, at least in the strict sense of doing wrong knowingly. The philosophical literature that takes these questions seriously makes a distinction between obviously evil deeds such as mass murder and the not-always-obvious nature of the intent of the doer, preferring the stricter term “wickedness” to describe wrongdoers who do evil deeds knowing they are doing wrong. I was drawn to the philosophical literature on the problem of wickedness (such as Alvin Plantinga’s symbolic-logic discourse on the theodicy of “transworld depravity”) by another defining moment in my encounters with Hitler explainers: my conversation in London with H. R. Trevor-Roper, former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, one of the first and most widely respected postwar Hitler explainers. I’d asked him the deceptively simple question I’d begun asking a number of the Hitler explainers: “Do you consider Hitler consciously evil? Did he know what he was doing was wrong?”
“Oh no,” Trevor-Roper declared with great firmness and asperity. “Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude.” Hitler was wrong, in other words, dreadfully wrong to be so convinced; his deeds were evil, but he committed them in the deluded but sincere belief that he was taking heroic measures to save the human race from the deadly plague he believed the Jews to be. In taking this position, Trevor-Roper is doing no more than affirming the tendency of twenty-three centuries of Western philosophic thought on the question of evil. It is a tendency f
irst articulated in Plato’s Protagoras, in which it is argued that no man does wrong knowing he’s doing wrong but does so only out of ignorance or delusion.
And Trevor-Roper is not alone. Perhaps the most unexpected echo of his “rectitude” argument—evidence that it’s more than an academic quibble—is one I found in the excited rhetoric of the chief Nazi hunter in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem headquarters. When I asked Zuroff, a big, tough, outspoken Brooklyn-born Israeli, whether Hitler was conscious he was doing wrong, he was even more emphatic than Trevor-Roper. “Of course not!” he practically yelled at me. “Hitler thought he was a doctor! Killing germs! That’s all Jews were to him! He believed he was doing good, not evil!” To Zuroff, real evil is something he reserved for certain of the war criminals he was hunting, the middle managers of the Holocaust, the ones who participated in mass murder without conviction, for reasons of career advancement, not “banality” but selfish viciousness, cold-blooded personal ambition.
But the most characteristic contemporary escape from calling Hitler evil, escape from calling him a knowing, responsible agent, is the therapeutic evasion, in which Hitler is seen less as consciously evil than as an unconscious victim. If evil is defined as conscious wrongdoing, UCLA psychoanalyst and psychohistorian Dr. Peter Loewenberg (who’s written cogent and influential studies of the mass psychohistorical trauma afflicting the German populace after the World War I defeat) told me, Hitler can’t be said to be consciously evil, because he was so much a prisoner of his unconscious impulses—the dark, chthonic, unanalyzed forces that drove him to mass murder. The unspoken implication is that Hitler was himself a kind of victim, a helpless prisoner or pawn of those unconscious Freudian drives. Only a person who has fully owned, made conscious his unconscious impulses can choose evil freely, Loewenberg told me—although I’d suggest this implies that only fully and successfully analyzed clients of Freudian psychoanalysts are capable of committing evil.
Explaining Hitler Page 3