Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Trevor-Roper (by then Lord Dacre) played a pivotal role in the Hitler-diary affair, as a consultant brought in to assess them by Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London. He initially pronounced the fake diaries genuine on the basis of a brief exposure to a stack of them in a bank vault. And then, just as The Times was about to go to press with its first installment, with the eyes of a waiting world upon it, Trevor-Roper pivoted 180 degrees, called The Times and let them know he now had serious doubts.

  When word of Trevor-Roper’s shift was relayed to Murdoch, Murdoch’s response—as first reported in Robert Harris’s tragicomic account of the affair, Selling Hitler—has since entered the annals of newspaper legend. Reached in New York and told of Trevor-Roper’s switch, Murdoch shouted across the transatlantic lines: “Fuck Dacre! Publish!”

  The mystery is why Trevor-Roper believed the diaries in the first place. He maintains that he was conned deliberately by mountebanks on the German end of the transaction who falsely assured him that laboratory tests on the “diaries’” paper proved they were of pre-1945 origin, when the opposite was true, as real tests later showed. But it’s also true that at crucial moments when doubts came up, Trevor-Roper trusted in the sincerity of the Hitler-diary mountebanks.

  “I took the bona fides of the editors” of Stern, the German magazine whose reporter was a virtual accomplice of the forgers, “as a datum,” a given, Trevor-Roper told Harris.

  Later, challenged at the last moment by Times reporter Philip Knightley, who had doubts about the diaries, Trevor-Roper fell back on faith in those the next step up the ladder: “The directors of Stern,” he told Knightley, “one must assume do not engage in forgery.”

  If the directors of Stern were not directly engaged in forgery, they at the least seemed to have conned themselves into acting as front men for the mountebanks behind the scheme, who did engage in forgery. And the mountebanks behind the scheme, whose counterfeit Hitler seemed to owe much to the rhythms and the persona of the Table Talk Hitler Trevor-Roper had already authenticated, were clever enough to have counterfeited just the kind of Hitler, a sincere Hitler, that Trevor-Roper would be most likely to find authentic.

  When I listen to the tape recording of my conversation with Trevor-Roper and I hear him hammering again and again at “the mountebank Hitler,” the false Hitler of Bullock and others, it almost sounds as if he has a personal grudge against the mountebank image of Hitler. A grudge, I suspect, that may reflect the animus he still feels for the mountebanks who sold him on the counterfeit Hitler of the diaries. That bank vault where he fell under the spell of the forgeries was Trevor-Roper’s own bunker. And the most convincing evidence for the continuing power of Hitler’s spell is that someone as astute as Trevor-Roper could have succumbed to such a bad counterfeit, succumbed in truth to the Hitler spell that persisted even in that bank vault.

  Still, I think Trevor-Roper’s critique of the mountebank theory addresses an important inadequacy: that gap again, the abyss between the small-time film-noir grifter, the mountebank criminal the Munich Post reporters knew, and the magnitude of the horror Hitler created when he came to power in Berlin. But unbeknownst to Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, too, had begun to believe that his original mountebank explanation of Hitler was, as Trevor-Roper insisted to me, “just not enough.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Alan Bullock: Rethinking Hitler’s Thought Process

  In which the most prominent Hitler biographer changes his mind about Hitler’s mind and resorts to the mystical tradition to explain Hitler’s evil

  “If you ask me what I think evil is,” Alan (now Lord) Bullock was saying as we approached the soot-begrimed, gargoyle-encrusted facade of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, “it’s the Incomplete.”

  “The Incomplete?”

  “In the sense it has a yet-to-be-brought-into-being quality, yes,” he said.

  More than anything he disclosed to me, perhaps even more than the radical shift in his vision of Hitler’s thought process, this mystical streak of Bullock surprised me. He was, after all, an Oxford classics professor before he became a historian and Hitler biographer; he’d been a student of Thucydides and Tacitus. The hallmark of his work had always been judicious restraint, the scrupulous unwillingness to exceed the limits of the available evidence. In his published work, he’s the kind of writer who eschews overstatement, speculation, and certainly avoids mystical formulations about Evil and Incompleteness. But in person, Bullock is a veritable fount of provocative speculation, ranging from his notion of Hitler’s metaphysical incompleteness to rather earthy thoughts about Hitler’s physical incompleteness. Or, as Bullock put it, the “one-ball business.”

  The “one-ball business” came up in the context of a question I’d asked Bullock about the death in 1931 of Hitler’s young half-niece, Geli Raubal. In his biography, Bullock had stated his belief that Hitler “was in love” with Geli, that they’d shared a tormented relationship plagued by his jealousy and possessiveness. But Bullock does more than depict Hitler in love with Geli; he asserts that her still-puzzling death—an apparent suicide in her bedroom in Hitler’s Munich apartment—was “a greater blow than any other event in his life” (a remarkable statement, considering what the life encompassed). Over a glass of wine in the common room of St. Catherine’s College, I asked Bullock if he still believed that Geli’s death was a moment of transformation for Hitler.

  “Well, it seems so—I mean, the keeping of the room, the sentimentality,” Bullock told me, referring to the Miss Havisham-like shrine to Geli which Hitler ever after maintained untouched in the room in which she died. Bullock then turned to the nature of their relationship. “But what did he want her to do?” he asked. “What did Hitler want from Geli he couldn’t get, or she couldn’t give? Did he want her to marry him? Be his mistress? But could he perform? I mean, it was suggested actually, I understand he, sexually . . .” Bullock at first appeared somewhat uncomfortable with the subject. “I mean, you come back to the one-ball business.”

  I asked him whether he believed the 1945 Soviet autopsy report that no left testicle had been found in Hitler’s charred body.

  “Oh, there’s no question,” Bullock replied.

  In fact, certain questions raised by the Russian autopsy about Hitler’s last moment of life have not been laid to rest—questions ranging from those about the one testicle that the Russians claim was missing to those about the one bullet that passed through Hitler’s head. A long-standing dispute between Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper over the circumstances of Hitler’s suicide reflects once again their profound disagreement about Hitler’s essential character.

  Most authorities agree that on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, with Soviet troops advancing on the bunker, Hitler and Eva Braun entered their private suite with two revolvers and some cyanide capsules. Shortly thereafter, a single gunshot was heard, and Hitler’s aides carried the two dead bodies to a bomb crater just outside the bunker, soaked them with petrol, set them on fire, and then buried the charred remains in a shallow grave. Shortly thereafter, Soviet troops captured the bunker, dug up the remains, and called in pathologists. With the help of dental records, they identified Hitler’s body and performed an autopsy. The results of the autopsy were kept secret by the Soviets until 1968. Before then, almost all historians agreed with the scenario that Trevor-Roper had pieced together from his interrogations and published in The Last Days of Hitler. According to that account, Eva Braun killed herself by crushing a cyanide capsule in her mouth, while Hitler chose the traditional death of a defeated German officer who wished to avoid being captured alive—shooting himself in the head with his service pistol. The crux of Trevor-Roper’s view of Hitler’s death is once again his unshakable faith in Hitler’s sincerity. “Of Hitler at least it can be said that his emotions were genuine,” he wrote in The Last Days—he died a soldier for the cause.

  The Soviet autopsy findings, which came to light in The Death of Adolf Hitler, a 1968 book by the Russian journalist Lev Bezymenski, to
ld another story. Soviet pathologists reported finding crushed glass shards of a cyanide capsule clenched in Hitler’s badly burned jaw and thus concluded that he had died from cyanide poisoning. Bezymenski argued, on the basis of the pathologists’ report and a story attributed to Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, who was just outside the death chamber, that Hitler died not a soldier’s death but a “coward’s death.” According to Bezymenski, Hitler, lacking the courage to pull the trigger on himself, bit down on a cyanide capsule: after Hitler’s death, Linge entered the suite and fired Hitler’s pistol into his head to create the illusion that the Führer took the soldier’s way out.

  But Trevor-Roper contends that the Soviet autopsy report shouldn’t be taken at face value, that it was a political as well as a medical document, designed to diminish Hitler for history. Seen in that light, the Soviet report of Hitler’s genital incompleteness could also have been concocted as a crude way of further denigrating Hitler. The missing testicle would then become the objective correlative of the lack of manliness that the Soviets imputed to his style of suicide.

  Until recently, Bullock has adhered steadfastly to the findings of the Soviet autopsy on the suicide method in part because they validated his original conception of Hitler as a schemer up until his final moment—an actor even in his final act. But some time after I visited him, evidence in a new book, The Death of Hitler by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson, caused Bullock to alter his view. “What the book shows is that Linge’s story is ruled out,” Bullock now says. “This is what Trevor-Roper said from the beginning.” Bullock now accepts Petrova and Watson’s view that Hitler bit down on a cyanide capsule and then almost simultaneously fired a bullet through his head.

  Bullock remains fascinated, however, not just with the conclusions of the Soviet autopsy but with the autopsied organs. He told me that he had added material to the paperback edition of his 1991 dual biography, Hitler and Stalin, to include an account of the bizarre odyssey of Hitler’s organs, based on interviews with the Soviet soldiers who had disposed of Hitler’s remains. “On Stalin’s orders . . . Hitler’s organs, which had been placed in jars during the autopsy, were removed to the Kremlin,” Bullock wrote.

  “Stalin had the organs sent to him in Moscow?” I asked Bullock at St. Catherine’s.

  “Yes, he had them sent,” Bullock replied. “Ah, marvelous! But did he eat them is what I want to know!” he asked, grinning, as he conjured up a horrific primal communion between the two dictators. “I’m sure some psychiatrist is going to say, ‘Yeah, he ate Hitler’s ball.’ I must say, his one and only ball. Just think of what they’ll make of that one. Poor old Waite—he’d really go overboard on that one.” In The Psychopathic God, Robert Waite built an elaborate castle of Freudian interpretive analysis on the slender foundation of Hitler’s purportedly half-empty scrotal sac. Bullock doesn’t buy Waite’s Freudian theorizing about the one-ball business, but he does seem to believe it was a signal absence, a token of a larger incompleteness in our vision of Hitler.

  One might say that Bullock has found an incompleteness of a similar sort in his original Hitler explanation. The Hitler who emerges from his 1952 volume, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, is a deliberately diminished and deflated figure, metaphorically one-balled. And the new vision of Hitler he disclosed for me could be described as a shift from oneness to twoness, or duality.

  It’s rare for a scholar to speak so frankly about changing his mind so completely. Bullock is not repudiating his first book entirely, although he did show flashes of irritation when I brought up questions based on it: “But I’ve changed, don’t you see!” he exclaimed at one point. To appreciate the nature of the change, it might help to recall the context in which his initial thesis emerged.

  Bullock can still describe with enthusiasm the experience of plunging into the research for the first book, shortly after the end of the war. “All of us, I think, came back wanting to know why,” he told me. Before the war, Bullock had been primarily a historian of ancient wars, conflicts chronicled by Thucydides and Tacitus. But after the invasion of Poland, he says, “I spent the war in London during the blitz, building up the broadcasting to Europe, so I was sensitized in a big way to the politics and history of Europe of that period. I think all historians in one way or another who were drawn into the war, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hugh Seton-Watson, came back with the question ‘Why?—How did this happen?’”

  What galvanized him to attempt to explain it was the transcript of the Nuremberg trials. “Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, sent me twenty-six volumes of verbatim testimony from the trials. And I reviewed every one of them. And I became intensely excited about them because—you can argue whichever way you want about whether it’s justice or not—but from the point of view of the historian the Nuremberg trials were an absolutely unqualified wonder. I mean, the greatest coup in history for historians. The capture of the records of the most powerful state in the world immediately after the event! So I became involved with the publication of those, and then out of the blue came an invitation to write the life of Hitler.”

  He went to Germany, and what he remembers most vividly was the silence: “I went there immediately at the end of the war. I was in Germany a lot, and I remember going to the Ruhr—this was the heart of Europe as far as industry was concerned. There wasn’t a single smokestack. There was silence everywhere. There were no cars, no trains. Long lines of foreign workers wending their way home. It was like a remote agricultural country except for the ruins. I couldn’t believe what happened. I mean civilization was destroyed.”

  One thing Bullock didn’t do was retrace Trevor-Roper’s steps and focus on the people in Hitler’s inner circle. “Everybody you might want to interview,” he said, “was either dead or in prison.” While that sounds like a bit of an overstatement, it might help explain why Bullock ended up with a book, with a vision of Hitler that did not dwell on the uncanniness of the spell Trevor-Roper encountered in reflected form from the inner circle, a spell some say he perpetuated. Not that Bullock’s book is devoid of drama: His reconstruction of the final months of 1932 and the first month of 1933, the final weeks and days of high-stakes, high-tension maneuvering that led to Hitler’s capture of the chancellorship, is a tour de force of historical narrative, one whose subtext—how often, how close Hitler came to failing—goes directly against the grain of Trevor-Roper’s emphasis on how close Hitler came to winning the whole war.

  Bullock’s is an enthralling account of near failure by a distinctly nonenthralled narrator. Indeed, one can almost calibrate the degree to which an author is in the thrall of the Hitler spell by the amount of time he or she has spent with the possessed of that inner circle. Bullock, at the furthest remove, analyzes Hitler’s appeal in terms of his cold-blooded, Machiavellian manipulativeness—his own detachment matches that of the mountebank Hitler he gives us in his first book. Trevor-Roper spent time with the inner circle. He was in it but not of it, able to be among the possessed and to recapitulate the power of the spell in his prose with awe but distaste. And then there is David Irving, who (as we’ll see in chapter 12) entered into the inner circle, called it “the Magic Circle,” and, it seemed to some, never really reemerged.

  Bullock’s book was an instant success on publication, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic; it’s sold three million copies so far, he estimated, and remains in print in a 1962 revised edition. I asked him about a remark he made about A Study in Tyranny: how in writing the original version he deliberately set out to combat the embryonic form of the “Hitler myth,” the occult messiah myth Trevor-Roper helped create.

  “The book struck a chord,” Bullock told me. “I think, if you ask me what chord, I remember very much [the reception] in the popular press: ‘Now we know Hitler wasn’t a madman, he was an extremely astute and able politician.’ I think that really did surprise people.”

  Not a madman but a politician. It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, shocking, but in the context of the time
it was a defiantly contrarian view. As the terrible reality of the Holocaust became more and more a fact of shared consciousness, Hitler became more than the hated enemy leader, a figure like the Kaiser, say, after World War I. He grew to something closer to evil incarnate. New words were being coined—genocide, Holocaust—to describe his crime, and the dimension of his persona became grotesquely inflated to match the grotesque dimensions of the slaughter. Bullock’s Hitler, in that context, seems to be a deliberately deflated figure, particularly in contrast with the irrational, demonic Hitler Trevor-Roper had given the postwar world. Bullock’s Hitler was, if not a rationalist, then a man of shrewdly rational calculation, a human-scale schemer, an astute and able politician, not a monster of madness or an evil genius of theological dimensions who burst the bounds of previous frameworks of explanation.

  In fact, Bullock’s book is more than a biography, it’s a valiant effort to somehow fit Hitler into the more comforting or at least more familiar framework of classical historical portraiture. Literally classical: Bullock even defiantly affixes to the book an epigraph from Aristotle: “Men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold.”

  “Lovely remark,” Bullock says when I asked him why he chose it. “Well, I’m a classics scholar and Aristotle’s Politics is a wonderful book that I just thought has to be brought to bear.”

  But what about the significance of that particular line? I asked him.

  “All right: Men become tyrants because they wish to exercise power. It is not for material betterment or comfort, but because they have an itch for power.”

  “The love of power for its own sake?”

  “That was my view of Hitler then. It’s changed, you know.”

  The original view, then, is one that envisions Hitler as an extreme case, but an extreme case of something comprehensible, something that fits into the explanatory framework of such foundational documents of Western thought about power and tyranny as Aristotle’s Politics, something that has precedent in Suetonius’s description of a bloodthirsty Caligula, say—an extreme manifestation of something known.