Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “The imp of the perverse?” I asked. “Isn’t that what Poe called it?”

  “Absolutely. And that’s been frequently described. Goethe tells us about him. You know, the little devil who comes up and says that. And I say, ‘Bugger off, babe, I’m all right, I really mean it.’”

  While I’m not quite convinced that Bullock’s imp of the perverse is in any way usefully commensurate with Hitler’s exterminationist urge, the dynamic Bullock was describing seemed more persuasive when he applied it to explain what he believes was the cause of Hitler’s ultimate wartime failure. The turning point, the real beginning of the end, Bullock believes, came for Hitler after—perhaps because of—his first heady victories on the Russian front in 1941.

  Before that, Bullock sees him as cautious and calculating enough—in 1936, for instance, he was ready to withdraw immediately if the French had shown any sign of military opposition to his reoccupation of the Rhineland. “Up to that point [in 1941], he’s hesitant and then ruthless,” Bullock said. “But once he gets the attack on Russia, then I think he thinks, you know, this is it.” At that point, he becomes so overcome with belief in himself, in his destined invulnerability, that, Bullock says, “The man destroys himself. Which is so interesting. I mean, making the German army stand in front of Moscow and not retreat, getting rid of all these generals, insisting they stand. If only he’d been flexible, you see, if only he had been prepared to come back at him, it’s quite conceivable Stalin could have made a compromise peace. That’s one of the things that’s a mystery. . . . But the extraordinary thing about this—and this is where the element of hubris comes into it—it’s when he gets to that point where he no longer manipulates his image but believes in it entirely, when he drops the manipulation, then he’s destroyed. He was destroyed by his own image. As long as he believed and manipulated, [he was successful,] but when he gets outside Moscow, he no longer manipulates, it’s Will and Will alone afterwards.”

  “He loses the practical vision of the cynic?”

  “All of that. Look, the man could have had half Russia on his side against Stalin. But look at the treatment of the Ukraine—ridiculous. [Foreign Minister] Ribbentrop sees this and remembers people saying it to him: ‘That’s the moment when he goes over. That’s the moment he destroys himself.’ Oh, it’s a very satisfactory Greek tragedy.”

  Satisfactory? Here again, Bullock seems to return to his classicist roots, to the impulse to conceive a tragedy within an Aristotelian framework, Hitler and the Holocaust as part of a continuum of human tragedy, part of the continuum of human nature. And yet, like his model of Hitler’s thought-world, he too flickers back and forth on the question: Shortly after his remarks about Hitler’s hubristic downfall being so satisfactory, he raises the question of whether, in fact, Hitler shatters the old, Aristotelian, framework.

  I’d asked him if his study of Hitler had resulted in a change in his view of the potential of human nature for evil.

  “A lot,” he said. “I mean, if you’re brought up as most of us are, we live in a very protected society and we’re confronted by that—I mean, I’ll never forget coming out of Yad Vashem,” he says of a visit to the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. “I was shattered. Shattered.”

  Does it require that we reconsider what the essence of human nature is?

  At first, he seems to affirm that Hitler and the Holocaust were something that the classical vision of human nature could have incorporated. “Is anything different? To go back in history—and also in scale—if you go back to some of the things that went on in antiquity, I think if you read Tacitus, if you read Thucydides, most of us who read these books haven’t had this experience.”

  “The slaughter of the helots?” I suggested, recalling Thucydides’ account of a Greek massacre of slave workers in Sicily.

  “Yeah—it’s on a different scale. But I think there’s a pretty grim story.”

  “And what about the thought-world of those who commit these crimes? Does the impulse to kill one thousand make one equally culpable as someone who kills ten thousand? Or does there become a point where—”

  “I think it’s a very interesting question. I think there’s an extra thing which comes into it when you mechanize it. Then it’s suddenly—the accountants working on the cost-benefit of this and that method of killing—this is the horror of the German Holocaust. This isn’t done in hot-blooded fury of battle or revenge, all that. It’s cold-blooded. The Jews were not a military threat. It’s cold-blooded. When the Russians committed atrocities—by God, they had provocation. That was revenge. This wasn’t revenge. This was cold-bloodedness.”

  So, for Bullock, the state of mind behind the killing is one factor in the calculation of degrees of evil but not the only one. He returns to the question of scale. He’s had trouble, he says, getting contemporary students to comprehend the scale of devastation wrought by Hitler’s war and the death camps.

  “You can’t convince people. I mean, they’re so horrified of what’s going on in Yugoslavia. I know it’s ghastly, but that’s nothing compared to what was going on in Yugoslavia when Hitler was trying to destroy them.”

  “We have a tough time with comparative evil.”

  “It’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Scale—I’m afraid I think it does matter, but I resist that conclusion. And yet I think it’s true. I mean, I feel it’s somehow or other morally flawed, that judgment. And yet I do think if you see a million people killed, somehow or other it’s worse than if ten are killed. It’s troubling. But the Bullock philosophy is that there are a lot of troubling things in life that won’t be explained.”

  “Does that philosophy come from the study of classics?”

  “Yes. And from Machiavelli. Machiavelli was a moralist, you know.”

  But on the cusp of committing himself to the classicist view, Bullock raises the mystical question. “I must say I think the mystics have something to say on the question. I don’t make a claim to be a mystic myself. But I think about the questions they raise. Extraordinary, the fact that they occur in every culture, Tao, Sufi, Zen Buddhism, Catholic, Protestant, Blake, Plato, Plotinus—extraordinary. And roughly—although they’re so different, they all loved paradox: that which is and that which is not; that which is wholly united and that which is wholly divided.”

  It was his father who inspired his interest in the mystical path, and Bullock speaks movingly of his father’s unorthodox spiritual trajectory:

  “A Unitarian minister, he nonetheless came to feel after the [First World] war that religion was dying and that there were so many people on a sort of spiritual hunt he couldn’t reach. That he just couldn’t reach. So although he continued to preach, and a marvelous preacher he was, he did revive an old tradition, an alternative ministry. He completely severed himself from the church side of things, took a room which had no resemblance to a chapel—there was no ritual, no prayers, no hymns, he didn’t wear any vestments or anything. And he called them psychology lectures. And he went on for about twenty to thirty years. And there he brought home many of his religious beliefs, stated them in some nonreligious terms. A lot of people came to listen to him. Totally without recognition because this was a town in the north which no one had heard of—Bradford. And he said, well, my luck is to talk to forty or fifty people. And he never complained. I think in the nineteenth century he would have been a great preacher. And the late twentieth century, he’d be on television. And, well, he was a lovely man, he really was.”

  Is there a sense here in which he is implicitly contrasting his unsung preacher father with the malevolent street preacher he’s spent his life chronicling? He’s now working, Bullock told me, on a memoir of his father, which he says he hopes will help make amends to his wife for all the years he’s spent with Hitler and then Hitler and Stalin.

  “We’ve been married over fifty years,” Bullock told me. “I said to her, ‘I’ll see if I can make it up to you.’ She adored him [his father]. Wait till she sees I’m working on that [the m
emoir of his father]. She’s had Hitler and Stalin for the last seven years, she’s kind of tired of it.”

  It occurred to me, after my talk with Bullock, that his new vision of Hitler’s thought-world partakes of the mystical paradoxes his father was fond of: His revised Hitler, Bullock II, both is and is not an opportunist, both is and is not a possessed believer. Both qualities flicker back and forth like light on fast-moving water (the stream of consciousness), together forming a unifying conception. It also occurred to me that in his new synthesis Bullock is incorporating two sides of himself, two generations of Bullock: his own orthodox, classically trained vision and his father’s unorthodox, nonconformist, mystical inclination. It is a classic instance as well of a phenomenon I came to find recurring in my conversations with some of the most conscientious Hitler explainers: the way the search for Hitler, the search to find coherence in the fragmentary surviving evidence, frequently led to a kind of searching self-examination, a reassessment of world history and of personal history.

  It almost seems as if Bullock’s love and respect for his father is what licenses him to look beyond the classical framework, the Oxford skepticism about such matters, to raise the question of faith, the questioning of God that Hitler has catalyzed in others. Over lunch at St. Catherine’s Fellows’ table, for instance, he surprised me when, in response to a reference I’d made to something he’d written about Hitler perhaps being “an expression of the Hegelian world spirit,” he shifted the frame of reference from philosophy to theology, leaned over, and whispered to me in a genuinely impassioned tone, but one he evidently didn’t wish the other fellows to hear, “Some days I ask God: ‘If you were there, why didn’t you stop it?’” It’s the problem Hitler and the Holocaust pose to theodicy—the attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the persistence of Evil.

  He returned to the question again as we left St. Catherine’s to cross the river Isis and headed toward the Ashmolean, where he was due at a meeting. It was on this walk that he first raised the notion of Evil as Incompleteness and then went on to advance a notion of God as incomplete. As the pillars of the Ashmolean loomed before us, Bullock expanded upon this vision of evil with reference to Jesus and Judas.

  “The paradox of Jesus embracing Judas!” he exclaimed. “That’s fascinating. You read it in the Bible, your hair stands on end! He kissed him on the lips!”

  It took me a bit of time to parse out the relationship between Bullock’s vision of evil as incompleteness, the embrace of Jesus and Judas, and Bullock’s conception of Hitler. But there is a unity there. Consider first seeing evil as incompleteness. Evil then is not an alien, inhuman otherness as the Manicheans see it but a less highly evolved form of humanness. Lower, far lower on the Great Chain of Being but still part of the same continuum of creation that gave birth to us and emanates from or evolves toward God. Thus, even the most consciously evil figure in the New Testament can be embraced as part of creation, albeit the most singularly incomplete element of it. (For a far different vision of the Judas figure, see Hyam Maccoby’s thesis in chapter 18.)

  Bullock never goes so far as to suggest that Hitler must be embraced, but the unspoken assumption of his explanation of Hitler is that he, too, however extreme his evil, is on the same continuum of incompleteness that, in effect, embraces the rest of humanity. Hitler, that thing of darkness, was, then, one of us; can be explained as human, however incompletely so; requires neither Trevor-Roper’s “more than human” formulation nor Fackenheim’s “eruption of demonism.” And where does Bullock’s vision of evil leave God? As Himself a figure of incompleteness: “The one thing I would never say about God is that he’s omnipotent,” he told me. “He’s botching along. Just trying to subdue the chaos that is still there.”

  I mentioned the conversation I had with Yehuda Bauer on this question: “Bauer told me one can’t believe that God is both all-powerful and good because if he’s omnipotent, then he’s Satan for not having intervened.”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Bullock said. “Never believe God is omnipotent.”

  If, in Bullock’s belief, we need to acknowledge our kinship to evil and evildoers, he still believes evil should be confronted and combated. And, in fact, when in his early eighties, he nonetheless girded his loins and reentered the lists to take on the Holocaust deniers. It’s a fascinating late development in his long career: the man whose biography defined Hitler for more people in the English-speaking world than anyone else in the past half century taking on not just the outright deniers such as David Irving was at the time, but also those who acknowledge the Holocaust but deny Hitler much personal involvement or responsibility—those among the “functionalists” who believe that the Holocaust was a kind of spontaneous combustion borne of bureaucratic exigency “from below” with complicity not extending above Himmler and Heydrich to Hitler.

  He was summoned back to battle, Bullock says, after he published a review article in the Times Literary Supplement praising Christopher Browning’s book (Ordinary Men) about the members of a Nazi police battalion and how they become mass murderers. This had come to the attention of the Holocaust Study Center at London’s Yad Vashem Institute, which was engaged in combating the latest wave of Holocaust-denier publicity stirred up in Britain by David Irving.

  Irving—long a controversial historian from the time he asserted in Hitler’s War (1977) that since no written order for the Holocaust had been found with Hitler’s signature on it, Hitler probably never ordered it at all—had, in the late eighties, shifted to the view that not only was it never ordered by Hitler, it never happened at all. Yes, Irving conceded, there were maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths due to disease, starvation, and scattered eastern-front atrocities, but no one was gassed because there were no gas chambers “worthy of note.”

  “Did they want you to respond to David Irving?” I asked Bullock.

  “I didn’t attack David Irving,” Bullock insists. “I don’t play his game.”

  What Bullock did was deliver a lecture at London’s Yad Vashem Institute that was a methodical evidentiary assault against the two strains of denial. The lecture had a wide impact beyond the small hall in which it was delivered: A widely watched television segment on Bullock drew widespread attention to his stance (and hate mail as well, he told me).

  In a sense, the address, entitled “Hitler and the Holocaust,” is Bullock’s final testament. And central to it is that quotation from Nietzsche about the mountebank who succumbs to belief in his own con game—Bullock’s revised view of Hitler’s thought process. (“No one,” Bullock says in the address, “has described the charismatic power with which Hitler could project [his] belief to a German audience better than Nietzsche in a passage written with the insight of genius, more than ten years before Hitler was born.”) A vision which, in fact, is central to his method of disposing of the “problems” raised by the deniers.

  Hitler was, Bullock says in the lecture, “every bit as much a politician as a visionary: It was Hitler’s mastery of the irrational psychological forces in politics which catches the eye [i.e., Trevor-Roper’s Hitler], but it was . . . an opportunist’s ability to conceal, disguise, and defer his long-term objectives” that was responsible for Hitler’s “successes.”

  Here, Bullock, while insisting on the importance of both aspects of Hitler, seems to place greater emphasis on his earlier vision, the opportunist adventurer, the “mountebank” image Trevor-Roper rejects: Because what Bullock emphasizes in his analysis of Hitler’s relationship to the Final Solution is the creation of a counterfeit detachment from the killing process.

  Yes, Bullock believes killing the Jews was a central concern to Hitler (although he does not go as far as Lucy Dawidowicz, who viewed it in The War Against the Jews as virtually Hitler’s only concern from as early as 1918). Bullock more tentatively says, “There may well have been the evil dream of a final solution [early on, but] this remains speculation. . . . What is clear is that, whenever he may have first conceived the idea, Hitler’s
judgment of what was practical in carrying out his fantasies . . . meant [that the idea for the Holocaust] developed by stages [and] was not programmatic but evolutionary.”

  Bullock, in what, to me, is the least convincing aspect of his thesis, pictures Hitler trying to placate two camps in the path to the Final Solution: his original “rabid or violent anti-Semite” supporters and the “much wider section of the German people” who were less concerned with going beyond discrimination and expulsion of the Jews to murder. (The evidence that Hitler was a relative moderate in his hatred compared to others is spotty to say the least.)

  Bullock acknowledges that Hitler’s programmatic anti-Jewish ideology was the sine qua non of the Final Solution, but, he argues, Hitler was not so utterly possessed by it, not so “convinced of his own rectitude” that he didn’t feel the need to hide it. Bullock cites instance after instance in which Hitler, despite being “the moving spirit of this radical solution both in word and deed” (as Goebbels put it), nonetheless sought to preserve deniability, the deniability contemporary Holocaust deniers still assert on his behalf. It was not Hitler but Göring who wrote to Heydrich to arrange the massive organization of the Final Solution. It was Himmler who “prepared a report for Hitler on the progress made with the Final Solution during 1942,” but it was also Himmler who, upon returning that note to Adolf Eichmann, wrote on it: “The Führer has taken note: destroy”—erase the evidence of Hitler’s involvement.

  Destroy any note of Hitler taking note to preserve the counterfeit of detachment. “Even in the 1930s,” Bullock writes, “Hitler distanced himself from the execution of measures against the Jews; [in the forties,] he was still mindful of the lesson of the euthanasia program and the importance of his image . . . [and] could not afford to let his image be sullied by association with the dirty work of systematic mass murder.”

  It is in the very charade of distance, the counterfeit of detachment that, Bullock’s argument suggests, we find the most damning evidence for the degree to which Hitler was consciously, knowingly evil. The degree to which he was not “convinced of his own rectitude” as Trevor-Roper believes, but committed the crime knowing it was a crime, suggests he did it out of a pure hatred that masked itself with the illusion of idealistic rectitude—and that he covered it up with a counterfeit of detachment like the conscious criminal, the “political counterfeiter,” first defined for posterity by the reporters of the Munich Post.