Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Sincerity is not an excuse, an exoneration for the crime of genocide. Not in Trevor-Roper’s mind. But in the eyes of Anglo-American jurisprudence, sincerity can mean mitigation. It was not long after I spoke with Trevor-Roper that I thought I heard his language about Hitler echoed in a California judge’s charge to the juries in the first trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. In his explanation of what the two juries would have to believe to convict the brothers of a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter (rather than murder) for killing their parents, the judge told them that if they believed the brothers were honestly but mistakenly convinced that their parents were going to kill them, then killing their mother and father could be considered an “imperfect” form of self-defense, not murder. Half the jurors in the first trial voted to let the brothers off on the lesser offense because they believed the brothers were, in effect, “convinced of their own rectitude.”

  By that logic, if Hitler had survived to be put on trial for murder in California, say, he might theoretically have been able to argue that he was “honestly convinced” the Jews were trying to destroy him and thus had to be destroyed in self-defense. This is literally an absurd reductio from Trevor-Roper’s argument (although not entirely dissimilar from the tack taken by neo-nationalist German historians in the mid-eighties, some of whom argued—in the famous Historikerstreit, “the historians’ battle”—that Hitler’s atrocities were a kind of preemptive self-defense against genocidal Stalinist atrocities and a supposed Jewish “declaration of war” against Hitler).

  Trevor-Roper certainly did not intend his provocative remark about Hitler being “convinced of his own rectitude” to be taken that far. But he clearly, sincerely believes that Hitler was a sincere believer. He traced for me the origin of his belief in Hitler as a true believer to a moment in 1938. He spoke of an essay by a British diplomat, Sir Robert Ensor, in the Spectator.

  “In the course of this article,” Trevor-Roper told me, “Ensor said that he had the advantage, which was rare, in having read Mein Kampf in German. Hitler wouldn’t allow Mein Kampf to be published in English. Or in any foreign language. There was a very highly abbreviated authorized text, but that was for propaganda. And Ensor used the words, ‘To read Mein Kampf in German is the beginning of wisdom in international affairs.’ So I thought I’d better read Mein Kampf in German. And I did.”

  What Mein Kampf revealed about Hitler to Trevor-Roper was something that few took seriously before the war and even after: “a powerful, horrible message which he had thought out, a philosophy. He obviously took it very seriously. He was not, as Bullock calls him, an adventurer. Hitler took himself deadly seriously—all this comes out in Mein Kampf. He considers that he was a rare phenomenon such as only appears once in centuries. And reading it in 1938—I’d been in Germany, and I couldn’t help but being impressed by the fact that Mein Kampf had been published in 1924 or ’25 and he’d done all these things that he said he would do. And it was not a joke he was selling. It’s a serious work.”

  “Not a joke he was selling: That is, he was not a mountebank?”

  “Well, the conventional wisdom about Hitler was always—before the war, at least until Munich—that he was a sort of clown, that he was taking off from the music hall. He looked ridiculous. He had this Charlie Chaplin mustache and he made these ranting speeches and people couldn’t take him seriously.”

  It occurred to me as Trevor-Roper conjured up the Chaplinesque prewar film footage of Hitler how much the accelerated speed of prewar newsreel footage must have helped create the burlesque, comic, Chaplinesque impressions of Hitler. Herky-jerky, sped-up newsreels made him almost impossible to take seriously, and contributed to the deadly serious error of underestimating the threat he posed.

  “And when, after Munich they had to take him seriously, the opinion changed. And then it became the demagogue and the menace. The point is that he was still really not taken seriously. He was a figure of fun. That’s perhaps being a little extreme. But even after the war, when it was all over, he was regarded as an adventurer who had led Germany spellbound into the war. He was not regarded as a man of genius. He was seen as powerful, no doubt disastrous—but not as a man to take seriously.”

  Again and again in the course of our conversation, Trevor-Roper returned to the attack on what he believed was the wrongheadedness of the mountebank adventurer Hitler he believes Bullock bequeathed the postwar world. Almost as if Bullock’s Hitler, the false Hitler, was the real enemy. “He was not an adventurer,” he repeated to me at one point. “At the end of the war, the Allied line was Hitler was an adventurer, an irresponsible opportunist—it’s just not enough.”

  Why would the postwar “Allied line” favor this Hitler over Trevor-Roper’s or other Hitlers? For one thing, it was more convenient. Faced with the cold-war task of legitimizing a West German regime, most of whose citizenry had happily followed Hitler, it was more convenient to believe they’d been tricked into it by a mountebank than that they’d shared the poisonous delusions of a true believer.

  But this is “not enough” for Trevor-Roper. “The notion arises: Would the Germans follow a mere irresponsible opportunist? Could he have gone so far? And the fact is he nearly won the war. It was by a whisker he didn’t. If he had won the war—and I think there were three or four moments when he really could have won it—historians would be saying to you he was, as he saw himself, this great historical figure.”

  I found it fascinating Trevor-Roper could become so impassioned on the subject; it seemed more than an embattled academic position, more like an article of faith. Hitler explanations offer contradictory comforts. For Emil Fackenheim, it is important to believe Hitler was insincere and opportunistic precisely because he doesn’t want to exempt Hitler from the gravest degree of responsibility, from conscious, premeditated knowing evil. Perhaps for Trevor-Roper, that degree of knowing evil, evil without the fig leaf of rectitude, is inconceivable or unbearable to contemplate.

  In any case, Trevor-Roper’s predilection for believing in Hitler’s sincerity is nothing if not consistent. It’s certainly there in what is otherwise his most illuminating essay on Hitler, the one entitled “The Mind of Adolf Hitler,” which appeared as the introduction to the so-called Secret Conversations, also known as Hitler’s “Table Talk,” the transcripts of his wartime pontifications.

  “You believe,” I asked him, “that the Hitler of the Table Talk is the real Hitler, that he’s not posing.”

  “Oh, it’s the real Hitler. Oh, yes, oh, yes, no doubt about it,” he told me unequivocally.

  My response to the Table Talk is far more equivocal, that at best it’s the real counterfeit Hitler: That even though the words are (for the most part) really Hitler’s, nonetheless it’s almost as false a creation as the “Hitler Diaries.” In a sense, the “Table Talk” is Hitler’s own Hitler-diary hoax.

  First of all, while the Table Talk seems to be Hitler’s words, the best that can be said of it is that it’s an edited reconstruction of Hitler’s speech. It’s worth recalling the way the process of reconstruction verged on fabrication. Beginning in mid-1941, when Hitler established his underground command post for running the war on the eastern front, his nightly routine was highly consistent. After midnight, tea and cakes were served, and Hitler relaxed with his personal staff, including several young secretaries, a couple of congenial aides, and a guest or two from the outside world. Then, beginning around 2 A.M. and sometimes continuing until dawn, when he finally went to sleep, Hitler would hold forth to his captive audience for hour upon hour, pontificating upon the world situation, history, art, philosophy, literature, opera, culture, and, above all, his vision of the Brave New Aryan Future.

  Prevailed upon by the flattery of his increasingly powerful aide, Martin Bormann, to permit a stenographer to attend these sessions so that none of the pearls of wisdom he dispensed would be lost, Hitler relished the idea that he was speaking for history. Bormann would then take the transcripts from the stenographer and knit together
the raw flow of Hitler’s words, editing, refining, polishing, constructing a testament to Hitler’s thought process—his stream of consciousness as he wanted history to see it.

  Consider, for instance, the counterfeit of piety Hitler gives us in the entry for October 24, 1941, when he piously declares, “The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there is no refutation. These precepts correspond to the irrefragable needs of the human soul; they’re inspired by the best religious spirits.”

  Is this a Hitler “convinced of his own rectitude” or a Hitler consciously, deceitfully posing as someone convinced of his own rectitude, the charade or counterfeit of the real thing? Perhaps the best answer to that comes in the Table Talk entry for the very next evening, an extremely telling and revealing discussion of the Final Solution that might be Hitler’s consummate lie.

  What makes this lie so astonishing is that it is delivered to the two men who are in the best position to know what an enormous falsehood it is—the “special guests” in the command post that night, the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, and his chief accomplice in mass murder, Reinhard Heydrich. To them, Hitler’s two closest confederates in carrying out the Final Solution (which in the preceding months had accelerated to programmatic mass extermination), Hitler, in an obviously staged performance, delivers himself of these chilling reflections:

  From the rostrum of the Reichstag, I prophesied [in 1939] to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.

  This is not the language of a man “convinced of his own rectitude” in exterminating Jews. This is a man so convinced of his own criminality that he must deny that the crime is happening (it’s only a “rumor” which, though “salutary,” is not true); a man who must surround that backhanded denial with disinformation (we are merely “parking” the Jews in the marshy parts of conquered Russian territory, not murdering them en masse and burying them in pits); a man who must preface that disinformation with a justification for the act disingenuously denied (“That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead”—and therefore if the “rumor” was true, the killing would be just). It is perhaps the supreme Hitlerian counterfeit.

  One can imagine the glances that Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich must have exchanged during the orchestration of this elaborate charade for the stenographer, perhaps even the silent laughter. The three Holocaust perpetrators here become the first Holocaust deniers, establishing the pattern for the “Revisionists” who followed: The Holocaust didn’t happen, but if it did, the Jews deserved it. If this is “the real Hitler,” as Trevor-Roper declares, the realness is to be found in his slippery, conniving falseness, not in the sincerity that Trevor-Roper persists in finding in him.

  But Trevor-Roper believes in the Table Talk and enjoys telling the tale of intrigue entailed in bringing the Table Talk manuscripts to light. It’s a cloak-and-dagger document hunt that found him enmeshed with Nazi-sympathizing mountebanks, one that in a way foreshadowed the Hitler-diary fiasco and might have predisposed him to his initial disastrous misjudgment of those counterfeits.

  From his reconstruction of the last days in the bunker, Trevor-Roper was familiar with Hitler’s nightly habit of expounding to his flunkies for Bormann’s stenographic record. He’d assumed the transcripts of these sessions had been lost or destroyed, and so he was intrigued when—after the publication of The Last Days of Hitler—suggestive-sounding excerpts from what appeared to be Table Talk discourse surfaced in Germany.

  “Then I discovered that Bormann’s whole text existed in the hands of a rather curious Swiss citizen called François Genoud, a businessman, very secretive. I know him quite well; Genoud [who committed suicide in 1996] is a Nazi sympathizer. He had a picture of Hitler in his house, and Genoud at the end of the war came to the rescue of some of the Nazi leaders, and he made bargains, and he bought Hitler’s copyright, if it existed, which was very dubious, from Hitler’s sister [Paula]. He also bought Bormann’s copyright from Frau Bormann. He also bought Goebbels’s copyright from, I think, his sister. And so Genoud has been sitting for nearly fifty years on these valuable copyrights. And whenever anyone attempts to publish anything by Hitler, Goebbels, or Bormann, suddenly Genoud pops up and says, ‘Hi, I own the copyright,’ and he does. He has to be bought out.

  “Anyway, I discovered Genoud, and I went and saw him. And he showed me the text [of the Table Talk]. He wouldn’t part with the German text for good reasons: There was always a question who owned Hitler’s copyright. Hitler’s property was confiscated by the state. Was it owned by the Austrian state or the German state? The sister was an Austrian. That was one question. Then did confiscation of his assets include copyright? That’s another question. So Genoud rushed out a French translation to establish a copyright. You can claim copyright to a translation, but he wouldn’t let the German text out.”

  What followed was more hugger-mugger, mountebanks galore. Trevor-Roper’s publisher, Macmillan, was leery of the copyright problems. Trevor-Roper enlisted George Weidenfeld, who hired a translator who, Trevor-Roper believes, ended up collaborating with Genoud behind Trevor-Roper’s back. Instead of translating the German manuscript into English, he translated the French translation of the German into English, a subterfuge Trevor-Roper didn’t twig to until he found a curious locution in the Table Talk in which Hitler supposedly said, “I feel quite confused about” something.

  “Now, Hitler was never confused about anything,” Trevor-Roper told me, “but he was subject to embarrassment and I realized [the translator] must have mistranslated [the] French ‘confuse,’ which is ‘embarrassed,’ not ‘confused.’ And I looked up the German text, which by that time was a little more available, and I found that was true. He had only been allowed to use the French translation.”

  I was impressed by Trevor-Roper’s confidence in his grasp of Hitler’s thought-world—that he could be certain Hitler was a man never confused but sometimes subject to embarrassment—that he was willing to credit Hitler’s profession of the latter sincere. I was impressed as well by his confidence that, in a translation of a translation of a heavily edited transcription, Trevor-Roper was sure he’d found “the real Hitler.” Perhaps it’s the pride of discovery, of being the first to authenticate—perhaps the same impulse that led him to his own episode of confusion and embarrassment thirty years later when he pronounced the “Hitler diaries” genuine—this time confusing genuine forgeries with the forged genuineness of the Table Talk.

  Forged genuineness—the way Hitler strains in the Table Talk to seem the intellectual bon vivant, the generous dispenser of wide-ranging conversational gemütlichkeit, the grating graciousness—it rings false to me. But I believe that a close reading of the Table Talk does reveal something authentic, something unacted, but something that emerges only inadvertently, in bits and pieces, an awareness pushing itself up from beneath the surface of Hitler’s words: a growing, progressively alarmed apprehension beneath the surface of denial that the tide of war has turned, that victory is slipping away, that the architecture of the future, the cloud castles he’s so grandiosely constructing for the entertainment of his guests, are melting away.

  If it could ever be said that one could derive pleasure from reading Hitler—and I’m not sure “pleasure” is the right word—it is in seeing the way the bad news about the war impinges on Hitler’s self-serving monologues in the Table Talk, which begin saturated with self-satisfaction and slowly become more plaintive, more defiant, as he tries unsuccessfully to conceal the anger, bitterness, disappointment, the betrayal of his hopes that haunt him.

  Still, Hitler’s voice in the Table Talk never seems
anything but an act. And except for occasional flashes of abstract hostility toward “the Jews,” it’s an act that is always concealing something beneath the bonhomie: the actual slaughter he’s presiding over.

  That’s what’s surprising about Trevor-Roper’s faith that this is “the real Hitler,” that what we hear in the Table Talk is the true unguarded “Mind of Adolf Hitler” (as Trevor-Roper called his introductory essay preceding the Table Talk) when it’s more like—to mix metaphors of tyranny—a Potemkin village of Hitler’s mind, about as truthful to the reality within as the sign on the gates of Auschwitz that proclaims “Arbeit macht Frei” (work will make you free).

  Yes, one can weave together a coherent ideology from the self-infatuated philosophical passages in the Table Talk. So brilliantly does Trevor-Roper do so in his introductory essay that it has become the foundation document of an entire school of Hitler explanation: the ideological school that gained popularity and had occasional impressive expositors (J. P. Stern in England, Eberhard Jäckel in Germany) in the 1970s. A school which emphasized the importance of taking Hitler’s ideas, his Weltanschauung, his philosophic worldview, seriously—very seriously. As if the possibility of finding coherence in the logorrhea of the Hitler corpus meant that his thought-world was coherent—and that he took his ideas as seriously as the ideological school does.

  Trevor-Roper is a master at finding coherence, but that’s another thing entirely from finding belief. But he insists on belief as well, on Hitler’s belief in his own rectitude, and hammers theorists who deny it, almost as if they were the mountebanks. His faith in Hitler’s good faith (for want of a better phrase) and his habit of finding sincerity in Hitler’s words are perhaps the very things that made him vulnerable to the mountebanks who were peddling the counterfeit Hitler diaries in 1983.