Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But there is something echt Hitler, one might say, in the spiteful focus on a single hapless wandering Jew guilty of nothing more than wearing traditional garb; in the maliciously spiteful delight he takes in making it seem that there might be, somewhere still living, perhaps reading his words, a single Jew who bears responsibility for his murderous hatred, who made Hitler Hitler. It is a cautionary instance, a warning against the perils of shifting the responsibility for Hitler’s hatred from Hitler himself to some person, trend, or tendency supposedly responsible for it.

  A most recent instance of this explanatory tendency focuses on the behavior of a few Jewish Bolsheviks in Munich back in 1919. It is an inference about Hitler’s “crystallization,” as John Lukacs calls it in The Hitler of History. It’s an inference Lukacs draws from some recent studies of Hitler’s behavior in the murky nine-month period after he returned to Munich from the army hospital in Pasewalk in January 1919 and before he joined the embryonic Nazi Party in September 1919 and emerged transformed into an electrifying charismatic hatemonger.

  Most Hitler explainers have him undergoing a transformation, metamorphosis, crystallization, whatever you choose to call it, before he returned to Munich in 1919: as far back as Vienna during his “lost years,” or in any case not later than November 1918 at Pasewalk, where Hitler himself claimed he received a visionary impetus to redeem Germany’s betrayal by Jews and Bolsheviks. But a recent book by an Austrian scholar, Brigitte Hamann’s Hitlers Wien, argues strenuously from an exhaustive study of the extant testimony that there is little reliable evidence of Hitler expressing anything but friendly feelings for Jews during his sojourn in Vienna (contradicting those historians who believe the claim by the anti-Semitic pornographer Lanz von Liebenfels—that Hitler visited his Vienna offices in 1909 and personally expressed to him his admiration for Liebenfels’s scurrilous anti-Semitic hate sheet Ostara).

  But certain recent, ambiguous discoveries in Munich archives have led some scholars to argue that when Hitler returned to Munich in early 1919, he still lacked the passionate intensity of the sort he did not display until the autumn of that year when he joined what became the Nazi Party. One piece of evidence adduced for this view documents Hitler’s successful candidacy for a position on the soldier’s council in a regiment that remained loyal to the short-lived Bolshevik regime that ruled Munich for a few weeks in April 1919. Another is a piece of faded, scratchy newsreel footage showing the February 1919 funeral procession for Kurt Eisner, the assassinated Jewish leader of the socialist regime then in power. Slowed down and studied, the funeral footage shows a figure who looks remarkably like Hitler marching in a detachment of soldiers, all wearing armbands on their uniforms in tribute to Eisner and the socialist regime that preceded the Bolshevik one.

  Hitler a designated mourner for a Jewish socialist? Even if true, does his presence in that army detachment or his candidacy for a loyalist regimental post prove anything about his convictions or lack of them at the time? Does it prove that—if he wasn’t a sympathizer with Jewish socialists—he was at least still an empty vessel lacking the hate-filled rage at Jews and Marxists he manifested a few short months later? Was Hitler still a man without qualities at that late date?

  John Lukacs views evidence such as this as testament to his belief that Hitler’s ideas were still “inchoate” as late as March 1919 and that he lacked passionate conviction until something happened to “crystallize” it in April: the brief bloody advent of the hardline Bolshevik regime in Munich that succeeded the murdered Eisner’s democratic socialists and that, also, prominently featured Jewish leaders. This short-lived Bolshevik regime became notorious for the summary execution of some prominent right-wing nationalists (members of the wealthy occult racist Thule Society who bankrolled the birth of what became the Nazi Party). A regime that was itself overthrown by right-wing militia forces who visited even more bloody reprisals on the Bolsheviks.

  All of which leads Lukacs to argue that “it is at least possible (in my opinion probable)” that what crystallized Hitler the inchoate into Hitler the hatemonger and scourge of Jews “were his experiences during the winter and spring of 1918–1919: the German collapse, but even more, his witnessing of the ridiculous and sordid episode of the Munich Soviet Republic with its Jewish and lumpen intellectuals et al.”

  There are a couple of problems with this conjecture. First, there is no need to believe that Hitler’s “allegiance” to the socialist regime was anything more than pro forma. His presence as a designated mourner could be little more than a case of a soldier—in a phrase that later became infamous—“following orders.” Either that or acting in an undercover intelligence capacity on behalf of right-wing officers in the army, a role he might have been playing when he ran for a position on the soldier’s council, since he proceeded to inform on his “comrades” to the nationalist regime that succeeded the Bolsheviks. He was, of course, playing an undercover role in September 1919 when he first visited a meeting of what soon became the Nazi Party.

  The other problem with Lukacs’s conjecture—that Hitler didn’t “crystallize” until April 1919 when he witnessed the “ridiculous and sordid” behavior of Jewish Bolsheviks—is the unspoken implication. It’s one Lukacs himself is too sophisticated to endorse explicitly, but it’s there in the tone of his condemnation of the “ridiculous and sordid” behavior of Jews and intellectuals in the brief reign of the Munich Soviet regime: that what crystallized Hitler was something deplorable done by Jews. That if those “Jewish and lumpen intellectuals et al.” had only behaved better, Hitler might not have become Hitler. That up until that point he might have gone on mildly disliking Jews, but the horrors of the Jewish Bolshevik rule (barely three weeks! a handful of casualties!) gave birth to a genocidal monster. Made Hitler’s transformation from mildly anti-Semitic slacker to mass murderer of Jews at least “understandable.” It is this kind of understanding that makes Claude Lanzmann’s crusade against all explanation—emotionally at least—“understandable.” Particularly when we repeatedly find attempts to explain Hitler focusing not on what Hitler did but on what Jews did.

  Some of the more sophisticated postwar explainers avoid the tactic of trying to find a Jew who personally affronted or aggrieved Hitler but instead find reasons to point fingers at Jews Hitler never knew. George Steiner, for instance, in his disturbing novel, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., aroused angry attacks from some fellow Jews over the way his fictional Hitler explains himself as the product of what might be called Jewish mental inventions, those of three Jews in particular: Moses, Jesus, and Karl Marx. Steiner’s Hitler argues that the tolerance, the secret approval, the permission he received from the rest of the world to exterminate the Jews can be explained by the universal hatred mankind has for the Jewish “invention of conscience,” for the torment inflicted on man by the ethical demands of Moses, Jesus, and Marx, three Jews guilty of the threefold “blackmail of transcendence.”

  (What’s striking about the efforts to find a Jew to “blame” is the neglect it entails of a far more obvious class of suspects as decisive sources of Hitler’s anti-Semitism: other anti-Semites. While Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners offers an exhaustive array of nineteenth-century German anti-Semitic predecessors to Hitler, there is perhaps an even more important American source of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. A crucial source of his vision of a Jewish world conspiracy and a perhaps crucial source of funding for Hitler’s own conspiracy to seize power in Germany: Henry Ford. It’s remarkable how easily—or conveniently—Ford’s contribution to Hitler’s success has been lost to memory in America. It wasn’t lost to Hitler, who demonstrated his gratitude by placing a life-size oil portrait of the American carmaker on the wall of his personal office in party headquarters in Munich and by offering, in the twenties, to send storm troopers to America to help Ford’s proposed campaign for the presidency. The worldwide publication of Ford’s vicious anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, which Hitler and the Nazis rha
psodically read, promoted, and distributed in Germany, the influence of Ford’s work and fame—he was an icon of the Modern Age in Germany—helped validate for a gullible German public Hitler’s malignant vision of the sinister “Elders of Zion” Jewish conspiracy.)

  With Steiner’s threefold “blackmail of transcendence,” we’ve come a long way to a far more rarefied and sophisticated realm of explanation than the billy-goat and encephalitic-sociopath theories. But I am not sure all would agree it’s brought us closer to satisfactorily explaining Hitler. Still, there is an earnestness in Steiner’s search for an answer I cannot gainsay—an earnestness, a near desperation apparent in the work of a number of the explainers I respected, however skeptical I might be of their explanations. I found myself empathizing in particular with Simon Wiesenthal, in his eighties when I spoke with him, taking time away from his restless hunt for the last living escaped Nazi war criminals to try to hunt down the last, lost traces of that syphilitic Jewish prostitute story, the supposedly historical episode that Wiesenthal believes can prevent Hitler’s escape from explanation.

  It’s clear that Wiesenthal desperately wanted to believe in this phantom woman, this spectral Jewish succubus purportedly responsible for Hitler’s metamorphosis, despite the lack of any real evidence for her existence. If he could find the proof for it, he once told an interviewer, “I would be very happy because this would give the whole story of Hitler and the Jews a different picture.” Would it really, even if it were true? What’s the explanation for his focus on such a shaky conjecture? Even if he found the phantom Jewish prostitute, somehow identified her as the carrier, the bearer of the germ of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, what could be the point? Wouldn’t it inevitably tend to do something utterly unjust: make it seem as if the whole weight of the Holocaust should come down on the fragile shoulders of one poor woman of the streets?

  One answer is that, yes, it is utterly unjust, but that, for someone like Wiesenthal who faced the horror in person, felt the horrific force of the hatred that killed millions all around him, it might in some way be preferable to have an unfounded explanation of that hatred than an utterly inexplicable hatred. Perhaps for him bad logic, a flawed explanation for an unbearable tragedy, is preferable to no logic. The Jewish prostitute story might be cold comfort but some consolation.

  The Lost Safe-Deposit Box

  In taking note of agendas beneath the surface of explanations, I don’t wish to seem unsympathetic to explainers who seek solace in some certainty rather than none. Indeed, the hope of finding some satisfactory way of explaining Hitler was what initially drew me to the literature, an impulse similar to Simon Wiesenthal’s—the hope that I could track down something, somewhere, something buried in some archive, in some dying witness’s memory, in some long-lost unpublished memoir, in some document never seen before, in some connection never made before, at the end of some tantalizing evidentiary trail never exhaustively explored before, a glimpse of some truth, some answer to the question “What made Hitler Hitler?”

  Two factors, two progressive realizations, led me to shift course. First, there was a recognition, a concession to the reality of evidentiary despair, the evidentiary impoverishment Yehuda Bauer had described: the fact that there are certain crucial Hitler questions that, because of the incompleteness of the evidence, might never be resolved with any certitude. And second was my growing curiosity about another, contradictory phenomenon: the remarkable confidence, despite the shakiness of the evidence, of so many schools of explanation. And not just among scholars: I found it fascinating how many educated people cited Alice Miller’s Hitler explanation as gospel, for instance, despite its dubious premises; remarkable how often, in discussing the subject with nonspecialists, how confident so many seemed that they’d figured Hitler out, usually citing one book they’d read, such as Miller’s or Erich Fromm’s or one apocryphal theory such as the “Jewish blood” or the sexual-perversion story. My own experience had been that the more I looked into such stories, into the range of explanations and the evidence to substantiate them, the less certain I became. But it began to seem to me that the less people knew, the more important to them it was to seem certain about Hitler, to be able to dismiss any mystery with simplistic pronouncements such as “he was a paranoid” or a pawn of big-business interests—much the way he had been dismissed and disparaged and underestimated before 1933. I became fascinated with this phenomenon, with the recurrent abandonment, when it came to Hitler, of “negative capability” (the quality first defined by John Keats as the ability to tolerate uncertainty without “irritable reaching” for certainty). I was stunned by what seemed to be a compulsive assertion of certainty, or of contradictory certainties, by the psychohistorians in particular. It was Hitler’s father! No, it was Hitler’s mother who caused the trouble! It was his missing testicle! No, it was a primal scene! “Irritable reaching” devolved into a desperate lurching after a single answer, a single person, none of which on closer examination was nearly sufficient or convincing.

  All of which led me to shift my focus—with Schweitzer’s Quest as a model—from a search for the one single explanation of Hitler to a search for the agendas of the searchers, an attempt to explain the explainers. From hoping I could find some previously unknown ultimate truth about Hitler to the more modest hope of critically assessing the claims of some explainers and seeing what I could learn from the struggle of those I admired. Finding in the efforts of scholars and explainers of all sorts if not the truth about Hitler, then some truths about what we talk about when we talk about Hitler. What it tells us about Hitler, what it tells us about ourselves.

  “The Nazi genocide is somehow central to our self-understanding,” Michael André Bernstein has written. It could be said as well that one’s way of understanding or explaining Hitler can reflect a characteristic way of understanding the nature of the self. In particular, a position on the decisiveness of Hitler’s personal role in the Holocaust frequently reflects a position on the possibility or relevance of autonomous agency, of free will, of freedom to choose evil, and responsibility for the consequences of such a choice.

  “So many modernist thinkers wish to persuade us,” Robert Grant, a lecturer on political philosophy at the University of Glasgow, has written, “that our subjectivity,” our ability to choose, our reasons for choosing a course of action, are “wholly contingent, a mere epiphenomenon, historical deposit or social construct, in short an illusion and the real source of our actions and motivations lie elsewhere.” Elsewhere in Great Abstractions, in deeper “inevitable” forces of history that make Hitler, that make us, nothing but particles borne forward on waves of powerful forces that make our power to act or choose on our own a virtual illusion. And absolve Hitler, absolve us, of responsibility for such illusory choices.

  It might be said that the marginalization of Hitler in contemporary thought is an analogue of the “death of the author” vogue in contemporary literary theory: the Holocaust as a “text” produced not by human agency but somehow, autonomously, inevitably, by culture and language.

  Even among some “intentionalists” who believe Hitler’s desire to commit genocide was decisive, that intention is often portrayed as less a knowing choice than something shaped, dictated to him, by irresistible internal or external pressures beyond his power to resist to intend otherwise.

  Of course, Hitler’s will, his intention and choice alone were, if necessary, not sufficient for his success. As sophisticated explainers such as Saul Friedländer and Ian Kershaw emphasize, his success was the product of multiple factors—of the interaction and interrelationship between Hitler and other historical figures and forces including the Nazi Party, the German people, and the complicity and passivity of those in power inside and outside Germany.

  But those forces, too, are necessary but not sufficient, and the tendency of much recent literature has been to deny and diminish Hitler’s freedom to choose, to have chosen, the murderous course he did. Denying him that freedom permits him ano
ther kind of escape, an escape from responsibility.

  In examining these questions, in thinking about my own role, I’d cite a remark made to me by Milton Himmelfarb. In an article I wrote for The New Yorker on Hitler theories and the Bullock/Trevor-Roper dispute over Hitler’s “sincerity,” I’d referred to him as “the scholar, Milton Himmelfarb.” When I met the author of the important—indeed, defining—polemic “No Hitler, No Holocaust” in his White Plains, New York, home, he gently and with great humility suggested he’d like to amend the record. No, he told me, he didn’t think of himself as a scholar. He was attached to no university. Rather, when he thought of how he’d describe himself, he conjured up for me the name of a discount-clothing chain in the New York area called Syms, one that heavily advertised itself with the slogan “an educated consumer is our best customer.” With a wry grin, Himmelfarb told me he thought of himself less as a scholar than as “an educated consumer of scholarship.” What I’ve attempted in this book is to approach not all but certain aspects of Hitler scholarship with the eye of an educated consumer. This is a selective and subjective study, focusing on certain currents and subcurrents, certain thinkers whose work I was drawn to exploring in depth and often in person. I have many regrets about others I would have liked to have spoken directly with, and several more volumes of this kind could well have been written without exhausting the subject, although not without exhausting this writer.