Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “This is my photocopy of them,” he says, indicating a stack of papers. “I gave the original to the German government, but I made a good photocopy before I gave it to them.”

  I asked Irving if he could show me the bombshell “Führer order” passage that’s been tormenting him ever since he came across the alleged Eichmann memoirs. He flips through the stack to a passage flagged by a yellow Post-It note.

  “It’s rather mind-boggling. He [Eichmann] refers on many occasions to a discussion he had with Heydrich at the end of September or October 1941 in which Heydrich says, in quotation marks, these two lines [which Irving quotes from the manuscript]: ‘I come from the Reichführer [Himmler]. He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews.’”

  It’s fairly unequivocal and, more disturbing to Irving, it appears in a memoir he believes written before Eichmann’s capture and trial testimony.

  “He keeps coming back to it,” Irving tells me. “Comes back to it again and again. These flags . . .” he indicates the Post-It notes with which he’s marked other places where Eichmann recalls the order for the Final Solution.

  “When did you first come upon this?” I asked him.

  “Christmas Eve 1991,” Irving recalls. “It gave me—it rocked me back on my heels frankly because I thought ‘Oops!’” He laughs, trying to make a joke out of his discomfort. “How do you explain this one away?”

  A good question. The quote, if authentic, knocks a hole not only in Irving’s then-current no-Holocaust position but also in his earlier no-Hitler-involvement-in-the-Holocaust position. It was deeply disturbing, Irving admits. “I had to tell myself, ‘Don’t be knocked off your feet by this one.’”

  The obvious solution was to declare the Eichmann memoirs a forgery, consigning their revelations to the trash bin with the Hitler diaries. But Irving was committed to the authenticity of the Eichmann find, and furthermore, he claims, the authenticity has been verified by the German Federal Archives at Koblenz. (This is only partially true. A spokesman at the Koblenz archives told my researcher that the “memoirs” appear to be cobbled together from interviews with Eichmann by a sympathetic journalist and other sources.) Irving’s reputation as recoverer of lost Hitler treasures probably can’t stand another flip-flop. In the 1983 Hitler-diaries affair, Irving at first denounced the purported diaries as forgeries and then at the last minute switched and pronounced them real, precisely reversing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s switch but landing, unfortunately, on the wrong side.

  Now, with the Eichmann memoirs, Irving portrayed himself as torn between his desire for vindication as a digger-up of authentic diary treasures and his position as a Hitler exonerator. He shared his dilemma with the London Sunday Telegraph in 1992 in a quote that made it seem as if he might be retreating from his no-gas-chamber position to a revision of his Revisionism: “Quite clearly this has given me a certain amount of food for thought and I will spend much of this year thinking about it. They [the memoirs] show that Eichmann believed there was a Führer order. . . . It makes me glad I’ve not adopted the narrow-minded approach that there was no Holocaust. I’ve never adopted that view. Eichmann describes in such very great detail that you have to accept there were mass exterminations.”

  By the time I saw him, however, Irving’s year of reflection on the subject was over, and he was once again very close to denying the truth of the Eichmann memoirs rather than conceding Hitler had a role in the Holocaust. He unveils for me a strategy to discredit the Eichmann extermination-order statement without discrediting the memoirs as a whole: They aren’t counterfeit, but Eichmann could have been lying when he wrote them. Irving’s come up with a rather flimsy conceptual framework on which to hang his desire to disbelieve Eichmann’s words: the Suez crisis.

  “I tried to apply the three criteria that Hugh Trevor-Roper thought were indispensable to reading documents,” Irving tells me. “Three questions you ask of a document: Was it genuine? Was it written by somebody who was in a position to know what he’s writing about? And why does this document exist? The third one is the crucial one with the Eichmann papers. He’s writing in 1956 at the time of the Suez crisis; we know because he refers to it. And 1956—he’s aware that any day now his cover may be blown and he may be arrested.”

  It took me a while to figure out why the Suez crisis would suddenly cause Eichmann to believe his cover might be blown, but I believe Irving envisions Eichmann thinking that an Israeli conquest of Cairo (or capture of high-ranking Egyptian officers) might put Israelis in possession of intelligence files on the fugitive-Nazi network, from which Egypt had recruited scientists and weapons technicians—and thus lead them to Eichmann’s location.

  From this far-fetched projection of Eichmann’s paranoia, Irving deduces that Eichmann “must have had sleepless nights, wondering what he’s going to do, what he’s going to say to get off the hook. And though he’s not consciously doing it, I think his brain is probably rationalizing in the background, trying to find alibis. The alibi that would have been useful to him in his own fevered mind would be if he could say that Hitler—all he did was carry out [Hitler’s] orders. And I’m certain that at some time Heydrich would have said something like that to assure him—Der Führer habt richt der Ausrottung der Juden befohlen—which is a typical Hitler phrase. When Hitler used the word ‘Ausrottung,’ it didn’t carry the connotation which the word ‘Ausrottung’ carries [now]. Which is very important to know. I’ve got a whole card index on Hitler’s use of the word ‘Ausrottung.’ But of course ‘Ausrottung’ means extirpation—weeding out something and discarding it. Get rid of it.”

  It was only in reading over the transcript of this discourse that it occurred to me how transparently Irving was projecting his own dilemma about the Führer order onto his image of Eichmann’s thought-world during the Suez crisis: “He must have had sleepless nights wondering what he’s going to do, what he’s going to say to get off the hook. And although he’s not consciously doing it I think his brain is probably rationalizing in the background trying to find out alibis . . . in his own fevered mind.”

  As Eichmann confronted the possibility of discovery and capture, so in his “sleepless nights,” in his fevered mind, David Irving confronted the possibility of refutation by his Eichmann discovery.

  And the conclusion about the memoir he offers me now derives from his Suez fantasy: “The first thing one has to say, it’s not a document with sufficient evidentiary value to weigh very much in the balance against the other documents from the other direction, which are of evidentiary value. It’s one which gives me pause for thought, but having thought about it, I am inclined to say that it’s not enough on its own to tilt the balance.”

  The pose, the rhetoric are that of the serious historian weighing “evidentiary value” in the balance, and yet the pose may be a counterfeit. According to a London paper, Irving confided that he is simply trying to manipulate the media. The balance has already been tilted. When he speaks of these “other documents from the other direction,” he implies the existence of documents that somehow prove or state Hitler did not issue an extermination order. But, in fact, those who take that position argue not from other documents but from an absence of documents—the unavailability of a signed, notarized Führer order for the Final Solution—an absence that in any case might only prove Hitler’s desire to conceal.

  How did David Irving get to this point, tying himself into knots to exculpate Hitler? Some—not all—of the historians I’d asked about Irving spoke respectfully of his work in the seventies in unearthing previously unseen Hitler-era documents. I mentioned this to him.

  “They think I’ve really gone round the bend now?” Irving half asked, half stated. He still has a peculiar concern for his reputation with other historians, a reputation which, as he put it to me, is “down to its uppers, but hasn’t yet worn through to the street.”

  How did Irving go round that bend? From the way he described it to me, the crucial development was his a
ttempt to break into the inner circle, or “the Magic Circle,” as he characterized it to me, of surviving former Hitler confidants. Once inside that Magic Circle, he encountered—he became a living example of—the continuing power of the Hitler spell.

  There were, however, stirrings of skepticism about the conventional vision of Hitler as early as his wartime childhood, he tells me. “Unlike Americans, we English suffered great deprivations” during the Second World War, Irving tells me. He was born in 1938, and “we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people’s armies.” (The alternative to this irritating state of affairs, of course, was to live on an island occupied by Hitler’s army.)

  What disturbed Irving, he tells me, was not the deprivation but the rationing of truth. “We saw the losses in Allied air fleets by watching the formations take off and return with great gaps in them” after bombing missions, he said. “You know these things, but they wouldn’t report them in the press.” And in the papers, there were the caricatures of the Nazis which led him to question official truths. “There was a magazine at that time rather like Life but in England called the Picture Post. And every issue had a caricature box rather like ‘Doonesbury’—that kind of layout—and it was called ‘Arthur Ferrier’s Search Light,’ a box of various little caricatures usually dominated by the Nazi figures. There was fat old Göring and Hitler with his postman’s hat, and there was Dr. Goebbels, who was shorter and had one leg shorter. And it seemed to me at that time, as a youngster, there was something odd in the fact that these cartoon characters were able to inflict so much indignity and deprivation on an entire country like ours. I said to myself, If they’re such ludicrous people, then why are the Germans doing it for them?”

  It’s interesting that Irving raises the same objection here to the caricature Hitler as Trevor-Roper does to the pawn and mountebank theories: Such a diminished figure can’t bridge the abyss between Hitler’s apparent petty-criminal character and the unimaginable magnitude of the crimes he did perpetrate, the power of the spell he cast over the German people.

  “And so,” Irving continues, “I began to be skeptical, and emerging from university rather footloose and feckless with no particular aim, I became a steelworker in Germany. To help me learn the language. Then finding out about Dresden, which at that time was totally unknown in the outside world. Nobody had ever heard of the Dresden air raid,” he says, exaggerating somewhat. “And I wrote a book on the Dresden air raid [The Destruction of Dresden] which imported Dresden into the vocabulary of war atrocities. People now speak about Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Dresden, and that’s thanks to me. So I decided to be a writer. And I went to my publisher and he said, ‘What are you going to write next?’ and I said, ‘I’ve decided to pick Adolf Hitler.’

  “And he said, ‘Well, there have been lots of books about Hitler. How are you going to justify yours?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to tell it from the inside. The way I did with the Dresden book.’ You couldn’t get access to the air-ministry records of the Dresden raid, so I circumvented that by advertising in the newspapers in Germany and in Britain and America for people who had taken part on one end or another of the air raid. And I’ll do the same with Hitler. I’ll spend five years interviewing all the Hitler people.”

  At this point Irving’s wife, Suzie, a young woman from Denmark, entered and asked if we’d like tea or coffee. After we made our requests, Irving returned to the story of how he got entrée to the Magic Circle. In return for collecting documents for the archivist of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, Dr. Anton Hoch, Hoch “gave me a lot of help identifying to me the important people and all the addresses of Hitler’s private staff, who at that time kept their heads very, very low. They kept down. They were a small circle of very frightened people who were putting up with grave indignities and who had a very tough time. Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, had been held in prison by the Americans for three or four years, and that’s a very unpleasant experience for a young girl.”

  It’s remarkable how easily Irving’s sympathies are aroused for a young woman who spends three or four years in an American prison, and yet he can appear so unmoved by the hundreds of thousands of young women who died in concentration camps. But Christa Schroeder was the key to the Magic Circle.

  He pursued Christa Schroeder like a suitor. “Even with her, it took me a couple of years to get through her front door. It took a lot of patience. But the entrée to the circle, the Hitler circle, was when I translated the memoirs of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who was the head of the German high command and hanged at Nuremberg.”

  He tracked down the field marshal’s son and asked him about ellipses and omissions in the published versions of his memoirs. “And he obviously valued the fact that I had taken this trouble to do that, because he was indignant at what the German publishers had done to this book. And because I’d taken that trouble, on the second occasion I visited him, in about 1967, he said, ‘If you like, I will introduce you to Otto Günsche.’ Still alive. The only one of Hitler’s adjutants still alive, living near Cologne. His significance was that he was the SS adjutant on Hitler’s staff who burned his body at the end. That’s where he comes in. He was Hitler’s most faithful bulldog. And he has never spoken to anybody except me. I got ten hours of recordings of Günsche, which he’s never given to anybody else.”

  With Günsche, Irving was at last home free: “That was the entrance to the Magic Circle. It was a magic circle. They met at the graveside. When one of them left”—his curiously euphemistic word for dying—“they would meet at the graveside. And to get into that magic circle was almost impossible.”

  Irving lost no time exploiting his entrée: “Having got into the ring, the next problem is winning their confidence. They had stories to tell, and a lot of them had private papers. This wasn’t so easy but . . . half the battle was won because I was the Englishman who had written the book on the Dresden air raids that was, by this time, a big bestseller in Germany.” While it’s undoubtedly true that part of the success of the Dresden book was attributable to the way it helped buttress a moral-equivalence slaughter-on-both-sides complacency in postwar Germany, I was surprised to discover that Irving didn’t encourage this view at the time he wrote his Dresden book. In fact, in the last sentence of the book Irving calls Dresden “a massacre carried out in the cause of bringing to their knees a people who, corrupted by Nazism, had committed the greatest crimes against humanity in recorded time.”

  But the more time Irving spent with the Magic Circle, the less he seemed to focus on these “greatest crimes in recorded time,” the more he seemed to succumb to the spell. Irving describes himself as laboring to gain the confidence of the Magic Circle, but another kind of confidence game seemed to be at work—one in which Irving was, if not conned, then taken so far inside their confidence, so far inside the Magic Circle, that he could no longer look at it from without. Within the charmed circle, the Hitler spell still held sway, and Irving had fallen victim to it.

  “I was talking to these people in ’67, ’68, and ’69. I carried out major interviews with all these people on tape. I went into enormous detail with them. And what struck me very early on . . . is that you’re dealing with people who are educated people. [Hitler] had attracted a garniture of high-level educated people around him. The secretaries were top-flight secretaries. The adjutants were people who had gone through university or through staff college and had risen through their own abilities to the upper levels of the military service. So they were educated people with insight.”

  I recall wondering at the time where this praise of the Magic Circle’s résumés was leading. I didn’t have long to wait: “This is the point. These people, without exception, spoke well of him. Coming as I did with an as-yet-unpainted canvas, this was really the seminal point, the seminal experience—to find twenty-five people of education, all of whom privately spoke well of him. Once they�
�d won your confidence and they knew that you weren’t going to go and report them to the state prosecutor, they trusted you. And they thought, well, now at last they were doing their chief a service.”

  I believe Freudian slips are often overrated as tools of analysis. Nonetheless, Irving’s slip here—“Once they’d won your confidence” when clearly in the context he means “once you’d won their confidence”—gives away the true nature of the confidence game going on. Irving’s reasoning is fairly suspect on several other counts. First, his claim that he approached his Magic Circle sources with “an as-yet-unpainted canvas” is unconvincing—unpainted, perhaps, but not uncolored by that time.

  More important, his claim to have been thunderstruck that people with excellent résumés still spoke highly of Hitler should scarcely come as a revelation. (He also tells me without a trace of irony that they told him Hitler was well loved by children and dogs.) More important than their degree of education in shaping their postwar view is their degree of association with Hitler: It serves their own self-image far better if the Hitler they present to the world, the Hitler they served so faithfully, is the congenial gemütlich host of the post-midnight dinner parties rather than the mass murderer of millions. All that happened outside the bunker, outside the Magic Circle’s purview.

  But Irving still maintains he was just absolutely astonished to find all this goodwill from the secretaries and flunkies: “That’s what convinced me that obviously there was a book to be written here. That there were two Adolf Hitlers. There was the Adolf Hitler of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. And there was the Adolf Hitler that these people had experienced in flesh and blood. That he was a walking, talking ordinary human being with bad breath and largely false teeth.”