Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But there’s something else impressive, even prophetic about Gerlich’s Mongolian-blood conceit. For some time after I’d uncovered Gerlich’s Mongolian-blood satire, I’d assumed the Mongolian aspect of it was more than anything an arbitrary conceit, that he had chosen it for its outré alienness, for the displaced suggestion, in its orientalism, of the far more commonly rumored Jewish blood.

  But then I came across, in historian Richard Breitman’s study of the Himmler-Hitler relationship (The Architect of Genocide), some startling indications that Gerlich’s Mongolian conception of Hitler’s mentality was far more prescient than I’d imagined. As it turns out, in the mind-set that produced the Final Solution, the specter of Genghis Khan and the murderous Mongol hordes were highly charged figures.

  Breitman calls attention to the 1934 publication in Germany of a two-volume biography of Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan: Storm out of Asia and The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Both books were taken up by Himmler, who ordered up a special one-volume edition of them for the SS. The Russian émigré author of the works described the Khan’s progression in murderous brutality from the execution of enemy leadership to the extermination of entire populations. He emphasized the Khan’s clinical, unemotional approach to the necessity of mass murder. He exterminated cities “as we destroy rats when we regard them as noxious.” The author saw the Khan as an exponent of the racial superiority of his Mongol warriors, as a conscious eugenicist who “improved” his horde’s genes by mating them with the strongest and most beautiful of the captive women.

  Himmler, Breitman reports, even came to believe that the Khan’s Mongols were not garden-variety Asiatics but descendants of émigrés from ancient Atlantis who may have been the forebears of Aryan Germans. While there is no decisive evidence on whether Hitler read this particular work as well, Breitman believes that at the very least he received a distillation of it from Himmler. And evidence exists that the Khan’s Mongolians were in the forefront of Hitler’s meditations about mass murder.

  In fact, the Khan and the Mongols are at the heart of a famous “secret speech” Hitler gave to SS troops shortly before he launched the invasion of Poland in August 1939, the invasion that would, for the first time, place millions of Jews in his hands. Here is what Hitler said:

  Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder. Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the east only my Death’s Head units with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or lineage. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks in our day of the extermination of the Armenians?

  I’d previously seen this speech referred to, but only the Armenian reference excerpted. I hadn’t realized that the context for this chilling assertion of forgetfulness as assurance of genocidal success was an invocation of Genghis Khan and Mongolian bloodshed. The Mongolian reference goes further than the Armenian: mass murder is not merely forgotten (as in the case of the Armenians) but becomes (in the case of the Khan) the foundation for an exalted reputation as “a state builder.” Hitler was then invoking Genghis Khan as a role model for the successful, triumphal mass murderer, the ur-precedent for genocide, the model he commended to the troops who would carry it out. Suddenly, Gerlich’s vision of Hitler’s “Mongolian soul” (which also invoked Genghis Khan as a progenitor) seems more than a mere satiric conceit but a powerfully intuitive insight into Hitler’s mind and soul.

  Breitman argues that Himmler and Hitler adapted a special genocidal technique from what they construed as the practice of the Mongol Khan: the creation of “blood cement,” the solidarity that comradely complicity in mass killing brought to those who got blood on their hands. Increasingly, studies of the question of Hitler’s role in the Final Solution emphasize the way he and Himmler relentlessly drew an entire upper layer of the SS leadership into active complicity with the genocide—reinforced their participation and their silence—with such blood cement and guilty knowledge, when abstract ideological enthusiasm alone might not be enough.

  But Breitman’s study of the Hitler-Himmler conception of the extermination suggests that the highly charged resonance of the Mongolian model served two superficially contradictory purposes in the minds of the murderers. Not only did Hitler and Himmler identify themselves with the Mongol killers, they also excused themselves, justified, legitimized wholesale murder by identifying their enemies with Mongol mass murderers.

  Himmler was particularly fond of describing the Soviet foe as “Asiatic.” In a 1942 speech to SS troops, Himmler spoke of an ideological battle and a struggle to the death between Aryan Germans and Soviets whose “physique” is so mongrel-like “one can shoot them down without pity and compassion. . . . When you fight you are carrying out the same struggle against the same subhuman, the same inferior races that at one time appeared under the name of Huns and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and his Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism.”

  If Hitler and Himmler did not have actual Mongolian blood, they were in one way or the other mesmerized by Mongolian bloodshed. They identified with the Mongol aggressors and with the victims of Mongol aggression; they sought to find the Khan within and to fight the Khan without. They became Mongols in order to exterminate the Mongols.

  What’s even more remarkable is the continuing potency, even today, of the Mongol/Asiatic signifier first adumbrated by Gerlich. It was taken up three decades after Hitler’s death by the neonationalist historians of the German Historikerstreit—the battle of the historians over reconceptualizing Hitler and Germany’s guilt over the war and the Holocaust. It was the historian Ernst Nolte who first introduced the “Asiatic” rationale for “normalizing” German history. The Hitler slaughter must be looked at not in isolation as an unprecedented act of evil, Nolte argued, but as a response to the “Asiatic” methods of Stalinism that exhibited themselves, long before Hitler began shedding blood, in Stalin’s extermination of the kulaks, in the mass killings of the purges in the thirties, all of which, in Nolte’s view, were precedents if not exactly excuses for the Hitler mass murder. Once again, the Asiatic/Mongol specter of Stalin as Khan is invoked to excuse Asiatic methods adapted by Germans in response to the “Mongol” threat.

  The Hitler-Genghis Khan comparison continues to be a highly charged one, serving as a kind of Rorschach-test image upon which conflicting visions of Hitler are projected. Consider two recent instances. In January 1996, a member of the Iranian Parliament, incensed by a recently disclosed U.S. plan for covert operations, denounced the United States as “a renegade government whose logic was no different from Genghis Khan or Hitler.” While in the very same week, in an article on waning Jewish identity, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, was quoted saying, “to the next generation, Hitler might as well be Genghis Khan.”

  In the former instance, Hitler is linked to the Khan; in the latter, he is distinguished from him. In the former, the linkage has the effect of “historicizing” Hitler, of making him one of a company of barbaric rulers, rather than a uniquely murderous creature. To liken Hitler to Genghis Khan before the war, before the Holocaust, before he even took power, as Gerlich did, was to take a figure with few murders to his credit and prophetically assert his true kinship with one of the greatest murderers in all history up till then. But to link Hitler to Genghis Khan after the war, after the Holocaust, Foxman is saying, is a conscious choice to diminish and distance him. To diminish him by historicizing him, making him just another bloody ruler, as opposed to the novum, the new thing many post-Holocaust philosophers insist on defining him as. Particularly in the case of the German historians, it is a way of distancing him from German culture by defining him as some orientalized Other, attributing his unprecedented murderousness to an oriental precedent, to an Asiatic rather than German element in his thought if not h
is blood.

  Fritz Gerlich was employing the Mongol metaphor to try to change the minds of Germans about Hitler, to save their souls by redefining the Germanic soul. The postwar German historians who sought to relativize Hitler were using the Asiatic rhetoric not so much to change the mind of Germany as to change its image.

  If Gerlich was, as it turned out, unsuccessful in changing enough minds, he was nonetheless more successful than almost any other Weimar-era explainer in capturing the nature and complexity of Hitler’s mind. In giving us his own far more revealing vision of “the Hitler nobody knows,” in giving us the Hitler with the Mongolian nose, he was the first to explore a dynamic that has come to preoccupy many postwar explainers: Hitler’s racial hatred as a manifestation of displaced self-hatred: the argument that the disparity between Hitler’s metaphysical idealization of Nordic nature and his own non-Nordic physical appearance was more than a matter of mere irony but somehow a motive force in Hitler’s psyche, the secret engine of his hatred in a poisonous dynamic in which he projected upon the external non-Nordic polar opposite (the Jew) the hatred he felt for the non-Nordic Other he knew or feared himself to be.

  Gerlich stops short of asserting that Hitler was conscious of the disparity between himself and the Nordic ideal; it’s almost as if he wants to make Hitler conscious of it, however, to rub Hitler’s nose in nose typology, hold up the mirror of his own racial science in which Hitler would have to see his true self. Gerlich desperately wants to force Hitler to realize that he must reject the “science” or himself—that each is the refutation of the other. Gerlich’s brilliant analysis raises an unanswerable but provocative question about Hitler’s thought-world: Beneath the subterfuge and media manipulation of What Does Hitler Look Like and The Hitler Nobody Knows, how conscious was Hitler of the disparity between his own features and his racial ideal—and how did he rationalize it? Did he become a murderer to exterminate the sense of the Other he feared he was?

  Gerlich’s is one of the first in what would become a persistent tradition in the subsequent debate over the origin and nature of Hitler’s hatred, one that tends to suggest a complex dynamic Hitler was unaware of, or at the very least couldn’t face—it was literally self-refuting. But the magnitude of Hitler’s hatred does not necessarily require a corresponding magnitude of complexity, a highly complicated psychogenesis. It is also possible to suppose that such a murderous hatred might have a primal, obdurate primitive quality not easily analyzed or sourced but no less virulent.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Shadow Hitler, His “Primitive Hatred,” and the “Strange Bond”

  In which the author explores his own lost safe-deposit box

  Before conceding defeat in my effort to resolve definitively the riddle of Geli Raubal’s death, there was one more carton of documents I felt I had to get to the bottom of: a carton I’d come to think of as my own personal lost safe-deposit box—one I began to realize served a similar function for me as those folkloric safe-deposit boxes in Switzerland that were said to have held (or still hold) crucial lost documents that might somehow explain what was otherwise inexplicable about Hitler: the Pasewalk case notes, the Fritz Gerlich exposé, the Austrian secret-police dossier on Hitler’s ancestry. Documents that embodied the very inaccessibility of Hitler’s inwardness that they purported to explain—because we’ve lost the account number, the key to unlock their inwardness.

  The carton reposing so long in a corner of my office was not strictly speaking inaccessible. Far from it, it was, rather, one whose depths I had been strangely reluctant to plumb to the very bottom, blocked, I suppose I should say, for nearly three years for reasons that were for some time obscure to me. The contents of the carton were a thousand or so pages of printouts from microfilms I’d obtained from the National Archives, microfilm copies of the raw files of what’s known as the “OSS Sourcebook” on Adolf Hitler, what I’d come to think of as the lost safe-deposit box of the Shadow Hitler realm.

  The Shadow Hitler. I take the term from Thomas Powers, from his book Heisenberg’s War—an attempt to find the locus of Werner Heisenberg’s inwardness, to divine from ambiguous clues just what the brilliant German physicist’s intentions were in his role as director of Hitler’s atomic-bomb development program. (Did he deliberately stall it or dutifully, if unsuccessfully, advance it?) Powers evokes the subterranean world of rumor, myth, and speculation about Heisenberg’s intentions, the cloud of uncertainty that cloaked the truth about the position of the author of the Uncertainty Principle. A nimbus of doubt that nonetheless was, or became, a fact of history, because the Allies had to make decisions about those inaccessible intentions—decisions such as the one to send an agent to attempt to assassinate Heisenberg.

  If we want to know the truth, Powers writes in a chapter entitled “What Happened?” at the close of his five-hundred-page investigation, “if we want to know what Heisenberg actually thought about the bomb at the time, we must turn to the shadow history of the war—what he and his friends said to each other in the small hours of the night, as recorded in memoirs, private letters, diaries, remembered conversations and the files of intelligence services” (emphasis added).

  The shadow history of the war: Powers’s definition of the nimbus of shadow surrounding Heisenberg can be extended to a similar Cloud of Unknowing, a cloud of fact, fiction, and contradiction that surrounded the elusive figure of Adolf Hitler and the inaccessible truths about his inwardness. The Shadow Hitler was embodied in fragmentary rumors, second- and third-hand hearsay, whispered speculations and slander, questionable documents, counterfeit anecdotes, the fevered imaginings of suspect sources.

  But unlike the Shadow Heisenberg Powers had to painstakingly re-create from recovered fragments, in the case of the Shadow Hitler we are fortunate (and in some ways unfortunate) to have what amounts to a historic snapshot, an X ray, or, if you prefer, a frozen fossil record of the Shadow Hitler at a certain crucial moment: a raw file that culled and sampled the visible evidence of the Shadow Hitler, both fact and apocrypha, as it existed in 1943, drawing on sources that ranged from intelligence reports and confidential diplomatic memoranda to the debriefing of a suspect Austrian “princess” in a Texas detention camp. One that includes documents exfiltrated from Germany (such as the report by Hitler’s parole officer in 1924, warning against his early release for fear of his inevitable return to rabble-rousing politics) and transcripts of cozy chats in wartime Hollywood with émigré directors who recalled tales told by Berlin actresses about nights in the Reichschancellery with Hitler. All collected and preserved in unevaluated and apparently indiscriminate order under top-secret seal until the late 1960s on spools of microfilm in the OSS section of the National Archives in the “Hitler Sourcebook” file.

  The Sourcebook should not be confused with the more widely known, book-length analysis, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, the one psychoanalyst Walter Langer prepared, largely based upon the Sourcebook materials, the Shadow Hitler universe. Although both figure and ground, so to speak, have been declassified, only the Langer book has been published. Some who have written about the Langer analysis have assumed that Langer’s work is a distillation of the Sourcebook, but in fact it’s rather a distortion of it, in that Langer has reduced all ambiguity, collapsed all contradiction in order to lash the numinous Shadow Hitler to a Procrustean couch of Freudian significance. While indicating only mild awareness of the dangers of trusting his sometimes dicey sources, Langer falls headlong for the two great temptations of Hitler explainers: the alleged “undinism” perversion story and the alleged Jewish grandfather/Jewish blood legend. But Langer neither exhausts nor reflects accurately the more protean shape-shifting of the Shadow Hitler in the Sourcebook.

  Physically, the Sourcebook is very raw material. When I had the microfilm spools (which I purchased from the National Archives) printed out, the result was a thousand-page-plus file of poorly typed extracts from blurry photostats of documents that vary widely in source and value. The indiscriminate and haphaza
rd catchall quality of the Sourcebook is captured by this excerpt from the somewhat casual index, under the heading of WOMEN: Hitler

  . . . relation to

  . . . not attracted by

  . . . abstinence

  . . . immune to human weakness

  . . . no proof Hitler ever slept with one

  . . . accused of excessive intercourse.

  That last index couplet—“no proof Hitler ever slept with one” followed by “accused of excessive intercourse”—fairly well sums up the state of unresolvedness characteristic of the Shadow Hitler, an unresolvedness that persists today.

  There are many reports, rumors, and speculations about Geli Raubal in the Sourcebook, of course. So familiar did she become to the OSS analysts compiling the index for the Sourcebook that they rather casually list her alphabetically under G for “Geli” rather than by last name as Hitler’s other rumored paramours are.

  The microfilm printouts were fascinating to read though difficult to trust, and at a certain point—about 650 pages into the thousand or so total—I found I had to stop. Cumulatively, the experience of reading the Sourcebook was to pile Pelion on Ossa, rumor upon speculation upon hearsay, leaving one, if anything, less certain about any assertion about Hitler, because for any assertion (“no proof Hitler ever slept with one”) there was likely to be an equal and opposite contradictory speculation (“excessive intercourse”). One can still find in much of the current Hitler literature second-, third-, and fourth-generation traces of anecdotal adumbrations that had their origins in the Shadow Hitler, a kind of evidentiary game of Telephone played with historical reality.