Recall that, in first defining her thesis about Hitler’s esoteric language, Dawidowicz proposed both that Hitler had made up his mind for extermination early—and that he’d begun the process of concealing it early as well.
“How does one advocate . . . an idea . . . whose novelty lies in its utter radicalism?” she asks of Hitler’s radical extermination idea. “One disguises it.”
The rhetorical inquiry raises a question about her method: How does she advocate a position (hers, on the decision) whose radicalism makes it so novel? In part, it requires her to argue from an absence: that Hitler’s failure to advocate extermination openly in the early twenties means he was concealing, esoterically, something that was there, rather than the alternative—that it wasn’t there in the first place.
She adduces the necessity of concealment in the years immediately after 1918 from Hitler’s concern over the “anxiety” of the Reichswehr, the largely demobilized German army with whom Hitler was still affiliated as a “political education officer” after his return to Munich in 1919: “Hitler’s oratorical talents and anti-Semitic presentations to the recruits were much admired by his superiors, [but] there was anxiety that these speeches would be characterized as ‘anti-Jewish agitation.’ Instructions were consequently given [by army superiors] for a cautious treatment and the avoidance of ‘plain references’ to the Jews.”
She looks at Hitler’s earliest speeches through this lens of enforced esoteric language, where, she argues, “the code words he used for Jews outnumbered the plain references. Code words like ‘usurers,’ ‘profiteers,’ ‘exploiters,’ ‘big capitalists,’ ‘the international money power,’ ‘communists,’ ‘social democrats,’ ‘November criminals.’” She is, in effect, saying the fact that he doesn’t call them Jews is proof that he was referring to the Jews.
Intuiting Hitler’s inwardness is a tricky business, particularly when she seems to be arguing from an absence. But one could also say she’s arguing from a deferred presence, the terrible reality of what Hitler ultimately did. And similarly, her opponents are forced to intuit from an absence as well, an absence of evidence that he did not conceive back then of what he would do so ruthlessly later.
I became fascinated by the often brilliant lengths to which Lucy Dawidowicz would go, the conjectural leaps she’d take, in her impassioned drive to vindicate her esoteric language thesis about Hitler and his decision. By the way she applied the literary-critical techniques from her English-major period—the search for subtextual ambiguities she pursued in studying Wordsworth—to the prose of Adolf Hitler. Agree or disagree, it’s a dazzling performance. As is her entire book, which, it should be noted, is not exclusively concerned with explaining Hitler, although that aspect of it is my concern here. In fact, more than half her book is devoted to the experience of Hitler’s victims, to the range of responses embattled Jewish communities of Europe mustered in the face of overwhelming and murderous force. As her friend and colleague Harvard professor Ruth Wisse pointed out to me, Lucy Dawidowicz felt strongly, at the time she wrote The War Against the Jews, that too much of the literature was dedicated to the war, too little to the Jews—a state of affairs her eloquent book helped alter.
She begins her analysis of Hitler’s duplicity about his plan for the fate of the Jews with an analysis of the words Hitler initially used to describe his “solution” to the Jewish problem: “Entfernung,” “Aufräumung,” and “Beseitigung,” which mean “removal,” “cleaning up,” and “elimination,” with increasing degrees of finality. She argues that “Hitler had from the beginning” resorted to language whose meaning he intentionally made ambiguous; to be understood both exoterically and esoterically. “‘Removal’ or ‘elimination’ could be understood to mean ‘expulsion,’ and no doubt some of Hitler’s followers thought” that’s all he meant.
But when Hitler wrote in a 1919 letter to a Munich man named Gemlich that “rational anti-Semitism . . . must lead to a systematic legal opposition and elimination [Beseitigung] of the special privileges that Jews hold. . . . Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal [Entfernung] of the Jews altogether,” Dawidowicz insists the “final objective” was clear in Hitler’s mind: extermination, however ambiguous or less drastic it might have seemed to some readers and listeners.
She cites a passage from a Hitler speech in which it seems he was, in a joking fashion, explicitly disclaiming extermination as a goal and finds, through her “esoteric” analysis, evidence that he was, in fact, communicating the intent to exterminate to those in the know.
In August 1920, for instance, Hitler told an audience he favored “removal [Entfernung] of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence—we congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company [great merriment], but because the existence of our own nation is a thousand times more important to us than that of an alien race.” Dawidowicz insists that the true import of the remark is the opposite of its face-value meaning. She suggests that the irony and the “merriment,” the laughter at it reported by the witness to the speech, was not at the ostensible “joke”—“We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their [the Jews’] company”—but actually at the previous phrase, “We do not begrudge them their existence.” This Dawidowicz suggests is an “inside joke” for party members who know the secret meaning: that in fact they do “begrudge,” they are dedicated to eradicating the Jews’ existence. To Dawidowicz, “the ambiguity is calculated.” Hitler was not disclaiming designs on the Jews’ existence, he was posing an either/or dichotomy: “their existence” versus “the existence of our own nation.”
Dawidowicz goes to impressive lengths of ratiocination to find, even in the denial or the elision of a reference to extermination, a determination to exterminate. For example, she cites an April 1922 speech in which Hitler declared, “there can be no compromise—there are only two possibilities: either victory of the Aryan or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” Noting that Hitler omitted from the paired antitheses “annihilation of the Jews,” Dawidowicz argues this very elision was a “signal to the cognoscenti” of what Hitler meant to say. Then she reconstructs Hitler’s actual quote to read what she believes is being said esoterically: “Either victory of the Aryan and annihilation of the Jew or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” While it might seem at times she is striving to find evidence for her thesis in the very absence of it, Ruth Wisse emphasized to me that Lucy Dawidowicz’s contention about Hitler’s intent and concealment of it does not depend on the ingenuity of Straussian esoteric analysis. “She understood, as a historian,” Wisse wrote me, “that events as enormous as the destruction of one people by another have their roots in history and must be the culmination of an extended process.” Her thesis grew out of history, Wisse argues, and her esoteric analysis was a way of exposing “that which Hitler and others had been keen to obscure” with esoteric duplicity.
The Dawidowicz argument gathers strength as she analyzes the self-conscious language Hitler used to describe his methods and his intentions once he assumed power.
Consider a fascinating address Hitler made to party insiders in April 1937 (about the very same time Lucy Dawidowicz was staring out her college seminar-room window at Columbia and realizing Wordsworth was not enough, with her world in flames). In his speech to a regional Nazi Party meeting, Hitler “addressed himself to the Jewish question [and] referred contemptuously to the insistent demands within the party for more action against the Jews, Dawidowicz writes. He assures them no one is more qualified to think about the disposition of the Jews—he knows where he’s going, but he must employ Machiavellian tactical considerations to make sure he gets there: “The final aim of our whole policy is quite clear for all of us” (emphasis added), Hitler says,
Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will perhaps have to retreat, and not to take a step that will harm us. I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk, b
ut never beyond. For this you need to have a nose more or less to smell out: “What can I still do.” . . . In a struggle against an enemy[,] I do not summon an enemy with force to fight. I don’t say: “Fight!” because I want to fight. Instead I say, “I will destroy you! And now, Wisdom, help me to maneuver you into the corner that you cannot fight back, and then you get the blow right in the heart.”
It’s a passage in which Hitler seems to be confiding to his insiders exactly the exoteric-esoteric two-track strategy Dawidowicz has conceived of him employing. There is no doubt, no hesitation, no wavering around his final goal: the destruction of the enemy. But he discloses to his confidants his intention to conceal from outsiders, from the enemy, the ultimate goal in order to take, one after another, cautious, intermediate steps toward it. Steps that will appear hesitant only to those not in the know; caution that will seem like trepidation only to those it’s designed to deceive.
It is in this light, I believe, that the chief objection to the Dawidowicz thesis must be examined: the apparent seriousness with which Hitler allowed lower-echelon Nazi officials to proceed with plans for forced emigration and expulsion (rather than outright murder) of German Jews up until the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. As her literary executor Neal Kozodoy (now editor of Commentary) suggested to me in a discussion of this question, Lucy Dawidowicz was not portraying Hitler as oblivious to the need for caution, for craftiness, but as someone who sought the most radical solution feasible while carefully nurturing and often disguising his unchanging ultimate goal.
Of course, one could raise the question, Is Lucy Dawidowicz picking up on Hitler’s actual master plan and his carefully calculated Machiavellian method of achieving it, or is she accepting at face value his self-aggrandizing posturing as a grand strategist—in which he tries to present what actually might be a less disciplined or decisive way of proceeding to his associates—as if he had a carefully calibrated grand design? But her account of the events of the year that follow that 1937 talk, the series of gradually escalated restrictions, deprivations, and indignities visited upon Germany’s Jews (culminating in what she rightly regards as the deeply sinister decree requiring all Jews to assume the first names of Israel or Sarah—a constriction and extermination of individual Jewish identity to the point at which all Jews become the same Jew), paints a picture not of haphazard hostility and hesitant half-measures but rather of a relentless, carefully calibrated death by a thousand cuts.
It was a process she sees culminating in November 1938 in the notorious Kristallnacht nationwide mass pogrom. It’s an event that some historians still see as a spontaneous outbreak of anti-Semitic violence, or one that was incited by Hitler’s underlings without his full knowledge or approval. It’s an event Dawidowicz sees as a perfect paradigm for the way Hitler’s decisive but partially hidden role in the Holocaust was shrouded in deniability. As with the extermination to come, there was no written Hitler order for the Kristallnacht pogrom and no direct testimony of a verbal Hitler order either. But she sees the purportedly unexpected/unplanned outbreak of bloody violence against Jews in November 1938 serving a strategic purpose in Hitler’s long-range calculations. And she sees his carefully hidden hand controlling the supposedly out-of-control violence.
Dawidowicz puts Kristallnacht in the context of the Munich Agreement two months earlier, in September 1938. Widely regarded as a diplomatic triumph for Hitler, it nonetheless meant that his undiminished drive for war as a final solution had stalled—“misfired,” as she put it. She sees him seeking an opportunity for taking “drastic, but less visible, action against the Jews” when “an unexpected opportunity . . . opened up with the assassination on November 7, 1938, of Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary in the German embassy in Paris, by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish student, Herschel Grynszpan.” Grynszpan’s parents had been expelled into a stateless no-man’s-land between Germany and Poland, where they were held in virtual concentration-camp conditions, a cruel imprisonment that drove their son to violence.
Just as with the absence of an extermination order, there is an absence of a Kristallnacht order: “Hitler himself never uttered a word publicly on vom Rath’s assassination or on the events of the Kristallnacht,” Dawidowicz notes. But while some have taken that public silence to indicate Hitler’s ignorance, detachment, or disapproval of the violence that followed, while others have focused on conflicts among Göring and Goebbels and Himmler over how much to license or limit the destruction, Dawidowicz finds in Hitler’s absence the hidden hand of a guiding presence.
She locates him in Munich at the Nazi Party’s anniversary celebration of the 1923 putsch, having dinner on the night of Kristallnacht “with his old comrades . . . seen in prolonged conversation with Goebbels. Hitler usually delivered the main speech on this occasion, but this evening he left early. He had been overheard to say that ‘the SA should be allowed to have a fling.’”
But she finds, once again, proof in absence: “His absence from the festivities was planned to exculpate him—and the government—from responsibility for the subsequent events. . . . Goebbels delivered an inflammatory exhortation to the assemblage, calling for ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations . . . and SA men took Goebbels’ hints as he intended them to be taken: Jewish blood was to flow for the death of vom Rath.”
The pattern, to Dawidowicz, is clear: Hitler’s absence, the absence of a Hitler order, concealed beneath an official exculpating surface the esoteric truth: Hitler’s instructions to Goebbels to see to it that Jewish blood was spilled. Most historians have taken the exculpatory scenario at face value and have focused on a cabinet meeting in Berlin shortly thereafter, where, in the face of outraged world reaction at the primal violence, Göring and others express how shocked, shocked they were at the extent of the damage, the irrationality of the violence. The finger-pointing among underlings in the aftermath masked, Dawidowicz argues, Hitler’s decisive role as instigator and his little-known but decisive intervention as the violence spread: When SS chief Himmler sought to intervene to moderate Goebbels’s incitement of the thuggish SA, Hitler stopped Himmler from interfering and permitted Goebbels to continue to fan the flames, fulfilling Hitler’s deniability-screened desires.
With Kristallnacht’s absent presence as a model, Dawidowicz proceeds to examine the deadly chain of euphemism that has similarly, she believes, continued to deceive historians about Hitler’s intentions and Hitler’s role in the Final Solution decision. She proceeds to make her case that the war Hitler prepared to launch in 1939 was not a war against the Poles but the first step in his larger objective: the war against the Jews. She begins with a little-known private declaration she’s unearthed in her search of the archival and memoir sources: a remarkable quote from Hitler, a declaration he made privately in early January 1939 to Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky of the Nazi-puppet Czech government, in which Hitler flatly stated: “We are going to destroy the Jews.” A remark which Hitler follows by tracing his determination to do so to the decision date Dawidowicz favors: “They [the Jews] are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come.” This is a remark made in confidence, an esoteric disclosure that did not come to light until after the war.
It must be remembered that there is a powerful school of thought (best exemplified in A.J.P. Taylor’s book The Origins of the Second World War) that seeks to see Hitler as a somewhat more fanatic but still basically conventional European statesman whose goals in the period leading up to the 1939 war were “traditional ones”: power, expansion of territory and influence, and access to markets. But here in Hitler’s remark to the Czech minister is the key linkage Dawidowicz clearly believes vindicates her belief that Hitler formed his intention in 1918—and that his real goals were not traditional foreign policy ones, with war as a last resort. But rather, that his goal was always war—war against the Jews.
The esoteric truth he confided to his Czech puppet was confidential, but twenty-nine days later, she poin
ts out, Hitler made a now-famous speech in which he made public a threat to destroy the Jews, a destruction he linked to the beginning of a war about to come, one that focused on, of all things, the Jews’ laughter.
In a speech to the Reichstag in Berlin on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, Hitler made what Dawidowicz calls his “declaration of war against the Jews”:
And one more thing I would like now to state on this day memorable perhaps not only for us Germans. I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state and thereby of the entire Volk and then, among many other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem. I suppose . . . the then resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany is now choking in their throats.
Today I will be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequences will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe [emphasis added].
One senses in this focus on laughter something very close to Hitler, something at the heart of the way he personalized his war against the Jews. It’s there in the savage satisfaction he feels in imagining, quite graphically, the “resounding laughter of Jewry . . . now choking in their throats.”
And, one wonders, which Jews were laughing at Hitler? Some might have underestimated him, thinking of him as a provincial pogromist rather than a world-bestriding figure. But was there, really, a lot of laughter among Jews, whom all-too-recent history had taught that even provincial pogromists (like those in Poland and Russia) can succeed in slaughtering innocent families?
Explaining Hitler Page 61