Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  His most strenuous efforts are devoted to undermining the argument from rectitude: “Trevor-Roper buys into that,” Lang told me, “maybe not blindly, maybe not completely—that they really believed their own metaphors. That the Jews were parasitic, were a microbe. And that they believed the implications to be drawn from that—that it’s just as if they were doctors regarding germs that must be exterminated. And, here again, you have the Platonic tradition, which holds that people act in the name of what they take to be good. The question is whether this is an adequate explanation for all the instances of evil we find in the Nazi period. I mean, that’s the crucial question.”

  To attack this crucial question, Lang zeroes in on one crucial locus of the rectitude argument, on one of the most famous statements about the Nazi genocide, Himmler’s speech to SS officers at Posen on October 6, 1943. Essentially, this was a pep talk Himmler gave to the SS men directly responsible for organizing and executing the death-camp slaughter. This was a special group that, Himmler said, had to harden themselves against the human considerations that might call out to them from the mass graves, from the women and children:

  The hard decision had to be made that this people [the Jews] should be caused to disappear from the earth. . . . Perhaps at a much later time, we can consider whether we should say something more about this to the German people. I myself believe that it is better for us—us together—to have borne this for our people, that we have taken the responsibility for it on ourselves (the responsibility for an act, not just for an idea) and that we should take this secret with us into the grave.

  A chilling pronouncement, one that represents—in the absence of a signed order from Hitler—one of the most explicit statements on record of the intent and the mind-set behind the Final Solution. As such, it is often cited to refute the arguments of the so-called functionalist school, which holds that there was no central directive or determination to exterminate the Jews, that it just happened out of bureaucratic exigency—the difficulties of otherwise disposing of the millions of Jews in captured Polish and Soviet territory after the 1941 invasion; that it was cobbled together by middle managers rather than imposed from above.

  But Berel Lang focuses on this speech as the crux of the rectitude argument: It offers within it suggestions for and against the notion that the top Nazis were convinced of their own rectitude in pursuing the extermination of the Jews. It seems, on the one hand, that Himmler is arguing to the SS men carrying it out that he believes that what they are doing is a noble and elevated mission on behalf of mankind. But, on the other hand, could not the injunction to silence or concealment, the necessity of taking the secret “to the grave,” in fact come less from “noble” considerations than from Himmler’s consciousness of the criminality of their actions?

  It’s worth dwelling on the way Lang deals with the contradictory implications of the Himmler speech because it illustrates the manner in which he brings to bear the insights of both history and philosophy on the question of the intentionality of Nazi evil. He takes up first the rectitude question: the argument that Hitler, Himmler, and the planners of the Final Solution thought they were engaged in a noble crusade. The strongest and most inflammatory argument deployed in support of this proposition—that in their own minds, at least, the top Nazis were idealists—is the Pasteur/Koch analogy, the germ theory of Jewishness. In this view, we must credit the sincerity of the self-image propagated by Hitler and Himmler—that in exterminating the Jews, they were acting akin to idealistic, self-sacrificing doctors, healers, trying to save the human race from a plague.

  As early as 1919, Hitler wrote that “the effect of Jewry will be the racial tuberculosis of nations.” The implication: doctors treating a germ-caused disease do not seek to reform or educate the germs but to exterminate them for the sake of the life of the patient. For the sake of the life of the Aryan race—if the Jews are tuberculosis germs—such germs must be exterminated. Hitler made this analogy explicit in February 1942 as the programmatic extermination of the Jews had gathered momentum: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has been undertaken in the history of the world. The struggle we are waging is of the same kind as in the past century, that of [Louis] Pasteur and [Robert] Koch. How many diseases can be traced back to the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only when we exterminate the Jews.”

  Here, then, in its most refined form, is Hitler’s preferred self-image, his self-explanation. He is Doctor Hitler, the crusading, germ-fighting hero virologist, trying to save the human race from a plague of deadly infectious germs. The grotesque enormity of the image does not prima facie exclude the possibility that Hitler believed it or deceived himself into believing it, in which case it validates Trevor-Roper’s rectitude argument. While I am more inclined to see Hitler as a vicious, cold-blooded hater who fabricated, counterfeited a mask of rectitude for the sake of history and expediency, is there any way—aside from retroactive mind reading—to disprove this medical-crusader version of Hitler’s self-image?

  Lang scrupulously examines some of the weaker objections to the medical-rectitude model before going on to what I believe is his own stronger approach. Among the weaker objections is a policy shift that has become a famous crux in Hitler studies: the 1944 decision, when the eastern front against Stalin was on the verge of collapse, to withdraw railroad cars urgently needed to carry replacement troops to the besieged battlefront—in order to shift them instead to the task of carrying more Jews to the death camps.

  Lang portrays this as an argument against the rectitude defense. If Hitler’s idea was the preservation of the Aryan race and the German nation, it went against these alleged ideals to leave the front defenseless against a Soviet onslaught in order to pursue an apparently selfish personal passion (in this view) to kill Jews.

  But, in fact, the opposite conclusion could be drawn: Hitler was so deeply, “sincerely” committed to the view that Jews were an infectious plague on humanity that he was willing to sacrifice the existence of the German nation itself as an independent state in order to preserve the “idealistic” goal of saving the Aryan race from the Jewish infection for all time—lose the war against Stalin, but win the war against the Jews. Which would make the 1944 train transfer evidence in support of the rectitude argument.

  Another key objection to the rectitude argument, one made by Bullock among others, is the evidence of concealment and shame. Hitler and the Nazis went to great lengths to keep secret the Final Solution, which proves that they knew it was wrong, that they were ashamed of what they were doing—which would certainly contravene the view they were convinced of their rectitude. On the other hand, there’s nothing intrinsic in the fact of concealment to make it a necessary conclusion that concealment came from shame as opposed to, let’s say, “idealistic” prudence. The kind of self-sacrificing, forbearing, idealistic prudence that Himmler purports to exhibit and urge on his troops in the Posen speech: We are the only ones with the strength and rectitude to see that our ideals require us to take radical, horrific-seeming measures before the rest of the population is fully aware of their idealistic necessity, their “medical” urgency, the ultimate healing goal of the killing.

  These difficulties that Lang raises to his attempt to prove consciousness of wrongdoing (rather than rectitude) on the part of the top Nazis, ultimately, I believe, strengthen the case he does make. A case that goes beyond arguing that they did what they did despite knowing it was wrong, to considering the possibility that they did what they did because they knew it was evil.

  He begins his journey to that remarkable conclusion by suggesting the “surprising” notion that “there may be differences among wrong doers in respect to the measures of humanity they acknowledge in victims.” Acknowledging someone’s humanity makes it more difficult to deprive that person of his humanity or his life. Which leads Lang to argue that the Nazi dehumanizing process, “the systematic brutality and degradation” inflicted on the death-camp inmates—inst
ead of killing them right away, they first tried to reduce them to subhumans to make them less troubling to kill—“by a cruel inversion testifies more strongly even than extermination itself to the essentially human status accorded the Jews to begin with” (emphasis added).

  Here is a refutation of the Hitler-as-Pasteur argument, that the Final Solution was executed by those with a self-image as idealists: In fact, they didn’t think of Jews as infectious germs, embodiments of disease—they first had to deliberately, consciously reduce them to that subhuman state in order to make the subsequent killing “palatable” to humans.

  Knowingness, deliberation, consciousness of the process of wrongdoing, these are the elements that for Lang mark the dehumanization process as evidence of conscious evil. One can conceive of a doctor killing germs, or, say, killing contagion-carrying rabid dogs out of some service to humanity, defending humankind; but a doctor who took what he regarded as a healthy human being and deliberately reduced him to subhuman level and then killed without compunction or moral scruple, or who claimed moral worth by virtue of that kind of killing, cannot be called anything but consciously evil.

  “The process of systematic dehumanization requires a conscious affirmation of the wrong involved in it,” Lang says, “that someone human should be made to seem less than human; here the agent of the act is voluntarily choosing to do wrong as a matter of principle—what is wrong by his lights” (emphasis added).

  Wrong even by his own lights. This is the state of mind that the Protagoras argues is impossible; wrongdoers chose wrong out of delusion, from mistaken views of what was right, not from a clear view that they were doing wrong. Proof the Nazis knew what they were doing was wrong by their own lights can be found, Lang believes, in the stages of deliberation required for the carrying out of genocide: deciding that individuals are to be judged not by their merits but as a contaminated group, deciding that the contamination is an imminent threat, and finally, a third stage in which the decision is made that only extermination can avert the danger. “Each of these stages requires reflection, denial of the evidence against it, thoughtfulness and deliberation.”

  The dehumanization process is, itself, an elaborately staged one, requiring not just a highly conscious awareness of what is being done but an intention to provide false covering, false color for the subsequent killing—killing that might have looked wrong before dehumanization but “right” afterward.

  It is at this point that Lang makes a leap in his argument that few historians and philosophers have been willing to make. The leap from saying that the perpetrators of the Final Solution did evil despite knowing it was wrong, to the suggestion that they did it because it was wrong.

  Many philosophers question whether this degree of evil, this kind of person, exists at all, outside of literature, where we do have Milton’s Satan vowing, “to do ill [will be] our sole delight,” for instance, and Richard III and Iago rub their hands in glee over the evil they design. But even Iago offers a kind of explanation, feels he needs to excuse his evildoing: He’s heard it whispered about that Othello had been sleeping with Iago’s wife. Iago admits he doesn’t necessarily believe it; rather transparently he concedes that this “explanation” is protective coloration for his delight in doing evil for evil’s sake. But still, he’s fictional; in real life, even Satanists reflect a kind of inverted morality, a need to explain: They believe God is the Evil Usurper, Satan a misunderstood force for human liberation and good. “To do evil despite knowing it’s evil is one thing,” I said to Lang in his West Hartford living room. “But to do it because it’s evil is quite another, isn’t it?”

  His response to my question stunned me because it had not been suggested explicitly in his book; it was one I could not have imagined, but one that changed the way I’ve looked at the question ever after. It has something to do with the notion of evil as an art, the art of evil.

  Lang introduced the subject by referring to the sheer inventiveness of Nazi lies about the genocide. We had been talking about a passage from Hitler’s Table Talk I’d been fixated upon, the passage in which Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich are ostentatiously debunking the “rumor” (which they know to be true) that the Jews are being exterminated. It’s silly that people should say such things, Hitler piously avers, when we’re only “park[ing the Jews] in the marshy parts of Russia,” although he adds that if it were true, it would be no less than the Jews deserved.

  It seemed to me a transparent charade, in which the three architects of the Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers, the first “Revisionists,” so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive, winking and nodding way. It’s evidence both of concealing and revealing this charade, isn’t it? I asked Lang. Concealing it for the record, but revealing, almost reveling in it, with those in on the “joke.”

  “That would be my take on it,” Lang said. “The inventiveness seems to me in some ways really to come to the heart of the matter, even though it’s subtler than the brutality. Primo Levi used the phrase ‘needless violence,’ which is not quite what I’m saying; it’s the element of gratuitousness, but it’s more than the gratuitousness. There seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms and which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness, of an overall design.”

  An artistic consciousness in the design and enactment of evil? Yes, he says, in part because the notion of an art of evil implies a knowing awareness of wrongdoing. If the locus of evil is in the degree of consciousness of the evil nature of an act, artistic consciousness is almost, by definition, the most elaborate, the deepest kind of consciousness.

  “It’s the role of the imagination in the elaboration of their acts,” Lang suggests, that indicates an artistic consciousness of evil at work in the perpetrators of the Final Solution. “Brutality is straightforward, it’s not imaginative. This isn’t just brute strength. It seems to me that there is a sense of irony constantly—the sign [over the entrance gate to Auschwitz], you know, ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ [Work will make you free]. It’s like a joke, it is a joke. The orchestra playing as these people go out to work.” Ironic consciousness, artistic consciousness imply contemplation, deliberation, knowing elaboration. It’s there in Hitler’s ostentatiously artistic falsehood in the Table Talk about the “rumor” they’re exterminating the Jews.

  I had an intimation of a connection I thought Lang might be driving at: If the signature of self-aware evil in the genocide project was the artistic consciousness that went into its elaboration, execution, and concealment, might one source of that be Hitler’s own lifelong conception of himself as an artist? Or, as I put it haltingly to Lang: “The notion that artistry or artistic imagination is what is distinctive about Nazi evil. . . . It makes sense in a way of what I hadn’t been able to put my finger on. But when you spoke of the art of it, I found myself wondering—Hitler as an artist, was this the source, he thought of himself as—”

  “Well, there is no question that in some ways, some very obvious ways, he was an artist,” Lang replied. “I mean, those rallies and his presentation of himself in his speeches. Those are nothing if not art. Now as to whether at its depth, whether one could speak of the whole as artistry, I couldn’t have a judgment on that.”

  But he then began to speak in a fascinating way about similarities between the thinking process of the artist and that of the conscious evildoer.

  “There is an element of deliberation and pride. We think of style in art-work as presupposing the choice among alternatives, a systematic series of choices which excludes some and includes other alternatives and then builds on each other. And where moral issues are at stake, then one has to say, well, I mean one could speak of moral style using the moral as an aesthetic; there has to be at least the consciousness of evil which plays its role: consciousness of the road not taken, awareness that the road taken is one that’s believed to be evil. And the presence of inventiveness, imaginati
on.”

  This is not to say that at the level of the killing squads and the extermination chambers there was an artistic sensibility (although in the latter, there was a diabolical art of deceit). It is rather a sensibility that inheres in the minds of the designers and architects of the elaborate system.

  Lang brings the point home dramatically with his critique of the now overly familiar but not clearly defined notion of “the banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt introduced in her book on the Adolf Eichmann trial. “Arendt says that Eichmann demonstrates the lack of imagination in evil. But I think it’s there, an imagination in his acts. One doesn’t require genius to have imagination. Nobody is so banal as to be without imagination.”

  While Arendt tries to define evil as “thoughtlessness,” heedlessness of moral questions, Lang sees it as thoughtfulness, in the sense of literally being full of thought (of the roads taken and not taken), of deliberation, and imagination—at least in the case of the Nazis. Evil not as lack of imagination, but as too much, too artistic an imaginative consciousness of wrongdoing.

  Let’s consider provisionally what viewing Hitler’s evil as an aspect of his self-image as artist might entail. We know he defined himself in his childhood as an artist; we know his assertion of that identity set him in conflict with his powerful father, who disapproved, and brought him closer to his mother, who encouraged the sensitive-soul side of young Adolf. We know that after his father’s death he felt liberated enough to set out for Vienna to pursue his artistic dream—only to be brutally disillusioned when he was rejected as lacking the talent even to study art at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. It was a rejection that was to have a shattering and lasting impact on his life.