Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But is Hitler adequately known? Before getting deeper into the way Bullock shifted from his classicist framework, I wanted to take him through the unresolved controversies in the field to get a sense of his view of the state of the art of Hitler explanation. At first, I was surprised at how often he felt attempts at explanation had failed, although since he was a believer in Incompleteness as a principle of being, perhaps that shouldn’t have been so surprising.

  “The true reasons for Hitler’s anti-Semitism?” he mused in response to my question. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody’s even begun. I mean, one supposes the metaphors in which he talks about that are so frequently sexual. One wonders if there’s something there . . .” But he drew back from pressing the point: “There are a lot of mysteries in life you could never be able to give an explanation for, and Hitler’s one of them. I think there are more things that are mysterious than people seem to think.”

  On the question of Hitler’s sexuality itself, however, Bullock did have some pronounced opinions. He described for me a strange encounter he’d had with Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s onetime confidant and foreign-press liaison, who’d recounted, after fleeing to the United States in the late thirties, a number of scurrilous stories about Hitler. Bullock recalled a strange hand gesture Hanfstaengl made to symbolize Hitler’s sexuality.

  “The man really was odious,” Bullock recalls of Hanfstaengl. “He really was unpleasant to be up close [to]. He was such a blackguard, he was a faker. At any rate, it so happens the studio in which we were conducting the interview, there was a piano there.”

  Hanfstaengl famously had established himself as one of Hitler’s most intimate late-night confidants with the way he played Wagner on the piano; there were times, it was said, when Hitler could not get to sleep unless and until Hanfstaengl was summoned from across town to come and soothe him with his Wagner stylings.

  Bullock continues: “I said, ‘Come on, play like you played for Hitler.’ My God, he played badly. And then suddenly he started this—” Bullock imitated Hanfstaengl’s hand gesture by holding out his hand with forefinger and pinky extended. “And he said, ‘You know, [Hitler] could only play on the black keys.’ Now, what did he mean by that? I think that he [meant that Hitler] was sexually incapacitated. And I think that’s plausible, because I suspect that what happened in the affair with his niece was voyeurism. I’m sure that Hitler was in some ways sexually abnormal.”

  If Hanfstaengl meant anything more explicit, Bullock didn’t press him. With Hanfstaengl’s death, the precise meaning, if there was one, of that hand gesture became the lost chord of Hitler explanation.

  Bullock returned to the subject of Geli Raubal and the questions raised about her death. Did he believe the official verdict of suicide?

  “Let’s say the evidence doesn’t incline one way or another. The plausibility is suicide, but the evidence is not persuasive, doesn’t move you one way or another. I think the odds are on suicide.”

  “That he drove her to suicide?”

  “I think he—especially after the affair she had with his chauffeur and then her wanting to go to Vienna and all the rest of it. . . . He was a real old monster. I mean, she just had to do what he wanted her to do, and, I think, love? Possibly, he wanted her to go through some kind of voyeur antics which she objected to. I think that’s what happened. I mean, women had to undress and do all sorts of things in front of him rather than screw him. And I think it’s . . . that’s my feeling about it. It fits better than the others.”

  “Better than?”

  “Well, better than—I don’t know what to say about him sexually, but it seems to me there’s something wrong there. Whether it was he contracted a venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute and then had become impotent and so all he could do was go through the motions, or he had the lust to do it but not the capacity—I think that could be the case.”

  It was the Jewish-blood question that brought from Bullock his most impassioned discourse on incompleteness and explanation.

  “[Franz] Jetzinger and Waite credit the Hans Frank story,” I began.

  “Yeah, they do. It’s a nice explanation. They want to explain. I can’t explain Hitler. I don’t believe anybody can. Because I think human beings are very mysterious. Let’s get straight what we can get straight. I mean, it’s pretty terrifying, and I think they want to explain it because they want to be more comfortable with it. Let’s have the rawness of it, which is the fact that he was a person like you and me in many respects.”

  Bullock has said two important and potentially contradictory things here. First is his critique of explanation. As I understand it, it’s a more modest one than Emil Fackenheim’s and Claude Lanzmann’s; he doesn’t rule out the possibility of explanation. Like Yehuda Bauer, he seems to feel the problem is incompleteness: a sufficient critical mass of facts are lacking that, if they were present, might well provide the missing explanation.

  But Bullock’s reservations about the possibility of explanation are belied to a certain extent by the words he used to describe those who crave certainty: “They want to be more comfortable with it. Let’s have the rawness of it, which is the fact that he was a person like you and me in many respects.”

  In declaring so offhandedly “the fact” that Hitler was “a person like you and me,” Bullock places himself squarely on one side of a great schism among Hitler explainers: those who speak of Hitler as “one of us,” of a “Hitler within” all of us, of a potential for Hitlerian evil in all human nature, in our nature—and those who maintain one of several varieties of Hitlerian exceptionalism. Exceptionalist arguments range from the belief that the magnitude of Hitler’s evil (however that magnitude is measured) surpasses that of previous malefactors of history to the more sophisticated theses of those like the philosopher Berel Lang who argue that it is the quality of Hitler’s intentionality, not the quantity of bodies, that makes the Nazi genocide a new chapter in a “history of evil.” Beyond that are the more metaphysical and theological arguments of Emil Fackenheim, who rejects the idea of a Hitler “within us,” who argues instead that Hitler is beyond the continuum, off the grid, not explicable by reference to any previous version of human nature. Rather, he represents some kind of “radical evil,” even an “eruption of demonism” into history, one so unprecedented it must cause us to reconsider our conception of God’s relationship to man.

  While such views seem extreme, it could be argued that seeing Hitler as a “person like you and me” is not necessarily a milder or more mitigating vision but a darker and more disturbing one. It’s a radically dark view of the potential of human nature that can find a Hitler, or Hitler-potential, even within Alan Bullock. In fact, that seems to be what Bullock’s saying when he says let’s have “the rawness of it”—the rawness inheres in finding Hitler not inhuman or demonic but in finding him somehow human. It’s a rawness that goes beyond Prospero’s saying of the fiendish Caliban, “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” at the close of The Tempest, because that still implies a kind of separation—a responsibility for, but not an identity with, the “thing of darkness.” Bullock pushes that further, in saying Hitler was “a person like you and me in many respects.” To a point where he almost seems to say, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge me.”

  It was at this point that I raised with Bullock the question about Hitler’s evil I’d raised with Trevor-Roper and other Hitler explainers: Did he see Hitler as consciously, knowingly evil? I raised it in the context of the Bulger case, which was in the London headlines that morning. James Bulger was a two-year-old boy who’d been lured away from his mother in a Liverpool shopping mall by two ten-year-old boys who proceeded to take him to a railroad crossing, beat him to death with bricks, and leave him to be run over, hoping to create the counterfeit of a “tragic accident” to cover their deed.

  I’d been struck by the language of the trial judge in delivering his guilty verdict. The words the judge used were shocking in the context
of discussions I’d had with Hitler explainers on the question of Hitler’s consciousness of evil. No, Trevor-Roper said, Hitler wasn’t consciously wicked, Hitler was “convinced of his own rectitude.” No, Dr. Peter Loewenberg, the psychohistorian at UCLA argues, Hitler wasn’t consciously evil, he was a captive of his unconscious drives and thus did not fully own his conscious impulses, was to that extent prisoner or victim of them, and thus not capable of conscious evil in the sense that a fully and successfully analyzed patient might be.

  Thus, the language of the judge calling the two boys “EVIL . . . WICKED,” guilty of “UNPARALLELED EVIL,” as the headlines blared, was almost shocking. The reluctance of the experts to call Hitler evil set off against a judge calling two prepubescent ten-year-olds evil was thought provoking, to say the least.

  I asked Bullock if he felt the barriers Trevor-Roper and Loewenberg did to calling Hitler consciously evil.

  “If he isn’t evil, who is? That’s all. I mean, if not he then who? The only defense you could make,” he said, thinking out loud, “is that he believed it.” He considered the question in relation to Heydrich: “He didn’t believe . . . ”

  “You don’t think Heydrich . . . ”

  “He didn’t believe anything. Curiously, Hitler chose him as the man who might succeed him, while Himmler was almost ridiculous in his belief. He yearned to believe. Heydrich did, I think, quite enjoy cruelty.”

  “And Hitler also?”

  “No evidence of it. Never went near it [meaning the death camps]. He never saw it. He never went near a concentration camp, he never went near a death camp. He took no actual part in it. He didn’t actually organize it. He left that to Himmler and Heydrich.”

  But, Bullock said, if it comes to a question of responsibility, Hitler was conscious of his responsibility. “He was the inspirer of it all. The only man who—he would take the responsibility. He was willing to. . . . So if he isn’t evil, then the word has no meaning.”

  I asked Bullock about a curious phrase he used in his first book to describe Hitler’s mind: “moral cretinism”—which, depending on how one reads it, is either a disease metaphor for immorality or a moral symptom of a disease, something like the post-encephalitic theory of Hitler’s hatred. To most, I believe, “moral cretinism” would sound like a kind of diminished-capacity defense of Hitler, making him as much victim (of a morally incapacitating syndrome) as perpetrator.

  Bullock seemed a bit unsure himself how he used it but cheerfully reached up to a shelf above him (we were in his St. Catherine’s study now) to bring down a dictionary. “I suppose there’s a notion,” he said, flipping through the Cs to find “cretinism,” “of the cretin as a person who is so undeveloped that he has no notion of good and evil. And I think one of the things that is extraordinary about Hitler—maybe he protected himself from it.” The “it” he is referring to is the reality of the actual death camps and killing chambers Hitler refused to see. He took responsibility for them, “but he seems to be unmoved by the idea of it. And one hears this description of people whose emotions are dead inside them. They are literally cut off from any sense of compassion. I suppose that’s what [moral cretinism] means. I suspect I was using it not very precisely, I don’t think I say that in my second book.”

  He finds the page in the dictionary and reads the definition of “cretin”: “‘Person of deformity and mental retardation caused by thyroid deficiency’—well, he wasn’t suffering from mental underdevelopment. He was functionally too damned clever.”

  “But suffering from moral underdevelopment?”

  “Yeah, that’s what one means by it—moral retardation.”

  This doesn’t completely clarify the ambiguity in moral cretinism: Is it a willed, a conscious refusal to develop a moral sense, or a congenital deficiency, or a traumatically induced one, for which one is not “responsible” but merely born or afflicted with? But this is not necessarily Bullock being imprecise so much as being of precisely two minds on the subject. In fact, his new vision of Hitler’s thought-world is about Hitler’s own double-mindedness—a synthesis of two seemingly contradictory visions of Hitler’s thought-world.

  The first hint I had of how pronounced his change was came in Bullock’s response to Emil Fackenheim’s actor theory of Hitler. I’d mentioned something Fackenheim had told me in Jerusalem, his insistence that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was, like all his professed convictions, a cynical opportunistic act.

  I’d assumed that Bullock might tend to agree. I’d assumed, indeed, that Fackenheim had derived his actor theory, at least in part, from a reading of Bullock’s first Hitler biography with its vision of Hitler as a cynical, calculating politician, the adventurer with the itch for power for whom beliefs, like people, were only instruments.

  But Bullock’s response surprised me.

  “Ah!” he said. “He was the great actor who believed in the part. That’s the unique thing about him. He’s a great actor but he—there’s a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche which I have . . . ”

  From another bookshelf in his office, he drew down a volume of Nietzsche and read aloud the passage (from Human, All Too Human) that, in fact, embodies Bullock’s revised view of the dynamic of Hitler’s thought-world:

  Men believe in the truth of all that is seen to be strongly believed. In all great deceivers a remarkable process is at work to which they owe their power. In the very act of deception with all its preparations—the dreadful voice, the expression, the gestures—they are overcome by their belief in themselves, and it is this belief which then speaks so persuasively, so miracle-like to the audience. Not only does he communicate that to the audience but the audience returns it to him and strengthens his belief [emphasis added].

  The mental process he describes here is complicated, a kind of dynamic. It begins with what seems like a cynical, opportunistic calculation: What is most important is not to believe but to be seen to believe; that is, the acting of belief is more important than the sincerity. But if there is calculation behind the act initially (the calculation which for Fackenheim is essential to preserve a sense of Hitler as consciously evil), what follows is “a remarkable process” in which the actor-deceiver becomes carried away, possessed, overcome by his own act, a believer in his own deception. Possessed by himself.

  Bullock’s revised dialectical vision of Hitler’s thought process, then, begins with his original vision of a calculating Hitler, call it Bullock I (a crafty, calculating actor-deceiver who has much in common with the calculating criminal counterfeiter envisioned by the Munich Post writers), then proceeds to incorporate the possessed, spellbinding “sincere” Hitler of Trevor-Roper, and, finally, through a meshing of thesis and antithesis, arrives at a synthesis, the Hitler of Bullock II: the actor who comes to believe sincerely in his own act.

  The key change in his thinking, Bullock told me, was in his view of the role of ideology in Hitler’s thought-world—Trevor-Roper’s preoccupation. “I changed my mind about Hitler in that I originally took him as solely interested in power. . . . I now think the ideology is central. I think it’s what armors Hitler against remorse, guilt, anything. Hitler was unmovable on this ideology, this belief that he was the man sent by providence. The belief in himself—I think I have brought that out much more in the second book [Hitler and Stalin] than I did in the first. In the first I was very much . . . I didn’t grasp that.”

  I was impressed by Bullock’s humility but still not absolutely clear about whether this new, more complicated model of Hitler’s thought process didn’t contain a contradiction.

  “Are you saying,” I asked him, “that there is calculation which then leads to a possession that is then authentic and not merely acted?”

  “I think it’s exactly the same with Stalin,” he said. “Stalin was very different in many ways. Because he was no speaker, he’d absolutely no charisma, but the Stalin cult which he manipulated, he made sure that he’s praised and all this praise is synthetic, it’s not spontaneous. To begin with
. It became spontaneous with a lot of people at the end. And with him, he is aware that he’s doing it [creating a cult of his own genius], yet at the same time he’s aware he’s doing it, he knows that it’s true—that he is a genius.”

  “Simultaneously?”

  “I find nothing difficult in that,” he said. “Men are perfectly capable in public life of holding two incompatible beliefs. And most of the day, I do.”

  “But can one be sincere and insincere at the same time?”

  I thought I might have had him there, but he trumped me with a visual metaphor and a story about a funeral.

  “It’s like fast-moving water, isn’t it?” he asked me.

  Fast-moving water? I thought of light flickering off the peaks of rapidly moving waves. There was something intuitively convincing about the image, the flickering back and forth of calculation and belief in the fast-moving stream of consciousness.

  As for the funeral, it took place that very morning, he said. A colleague had drowned in a swimming accident—in fast-moving water. Bullock had spoken at the interment that morning. “I experienced it this morning when I was speaking,” he told me. “I was speaking with my whole heart, because I really was very distressed. The wife who had gone through this appalling experience was in front of me, looking at me. And at the same time I was saying to myself, ‘Are they listening to me? Am I being a success?’ I’m being frank with you. I don’t think I’m an insincere man, but I’m perfectly aware of what I do, and I wanted to be a success. There’s an element of the actor in many people. I mean, I know there’s a little devil in me which will come up and say. ‘Oh, you believe that do you? Aha, but you do rather well out of it, don’t you?’”