Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Himmelfarb and I were sipping tea in the chilly kitchen of his large, drafty frame house in White Plains (a hardy sort, he kept the house largely unheated despite the deep freeze outside). His wife was kind enough to hook up a portable heater for us between the kitchen table and the stove, where he brewed tea. The afternoon light was dying, and the talk was about Stalin, and the scene had a kind of Russian, even Dostoyevskian, feel as we approached the question of hatred.

  We were discussing comparative evil, the relative status of Hitler and Stalin on the continuum, and what criteria one used to judge such impossible questions. I had recently read the historian Robert Conquest’s powerful account of Stalin’s crimes. No historian has been harsher in his judgment of Stalin. But Conquest would later tell me that—if forced to make a comparison between the two—he’d have to say, however hesitantly and subjectively, that Hitler’s degree of evil “just feels worse” than Stalin’s. While Himmelfarb is unsparing of Hitler, to say the least, he spoke scathingly that afternoon of those who still resist seeing the full dimensions of Stalin’s near Hitler-like level of evil.

  “The reason people refused to see Stalin for what he was,” Himmelfarb said, “may have been a question of professional deformation [Himmelfarb’s rather harsh translation of the more forgiving French phrase for a characteristic habit of thought—deformation professionelle]. They wanted to apply the universal political-science categories, economics categories, to what was going on, so that it was left to the Solzhenitsyns to tell you what the gulag was. But he was kind of dismissed—‘His books don’t have the methodological rigor,’ they said. ‘It’s anecdotal, it doesn’t tell us about the system.’”

  “Because what Solzhenitsyn was saying,” I suggested, “was something so much darker than ‘It’s a flawed system,’ or ‘Stalin wasn’t being true to Marxism.’ Solzhenitsyn was saying, ‘No, this is hell on earth,’ and the gulag, like the concentration camps, doesn’t fit into the explanatory categories which take the system seriously?”

  In response, Himmelfarb tells me a story of meeting “a poet named Shlomo Dykman, a Hebrew poet and a classicist who translated into Hebrew the Aeneid. And it wasn’t easy, because Hebrew doesn’t lend itself to—” He begins reciting from memory the opening lines of that epic (a tale of escape from a kind of ancient-world holocaust), in perfectly inflected classical Latin. “Dykman came to Israel as a refugee from a Soviet gulag, where he’d been imprisoned since the Russians took over eastern Poland. He spent many, many years in the gulag. He quoted to me the words of a Lubavitch Hasid whom he met in the gulag. The Hasid said in Yiddish, ‘This country is such a country! It would be a mitzvah to leave it by train, on a Yom Kippur that fell on a Saturday!’”

  Himmelfarb laughed. “I’m not sure how you translate this for a political scientist.” (It’s a dual violation to travel on a holy day Sabbath.)

  “It’s an exceptionalism he’s talking about, isn’t it?” I suggest. “It’s the kind of country so irredeemably horrible you make exceptions to the holiest commandments to leave it behind. And I guess that’s what you are saying about Hitler in ‘No Hitler, No Holocaust’: He was not just the product of a bad system or a bad country, he’s not just a manifestation of forces we’re familiar with—”

  “And it isn’t even that the Germans were an especially evil people or especially disposed to killing Jews,” he says.

  “It wasn’t that the Germans were the exception, it was that Hitler was the exception?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s my take on it. And I think it’s yours, isn’t it?”

  A good question. Until that moment I might not have been ready to acknowledge my allegiance to one party or another in this most primal of Hitler-explanation controversies—the exceptionalism question. But the moment Himmelfarb said that—“I think it’s [your position] too”—I sensed there was some truth to his observation. With some modifications: I might argue that if I’m an exceptionalist, it’s more by default than a metaphysical conviction that Hitler could never be explained by rational means. After spending nearly a decade examining the often ambitious and often inadequate claims by rival schools and scholars to have explained Hitler, I don’t think he has been explained, but, on the other hand, I’m not convinced he is, categorically, inexplicable. I tend to agree with Yehuda Bauer that we suffer from an absence of sufficient evidence on most key questions. Although I’m not sure I have Bauer’s confidence that if we did have sufficient facts we would be able to explain Hitler. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that even with all the evidence in hand we still might find ourselves as mystified by Hitler as Emil Fackenheim believes we would be.

  I’d take a more cautious position, steeped in the doctrine of “negative capability” and epistemological skepticism: that we cannot be sure that, even with all the facts in the world in our hands, Hitler might not still in some way escape us, escape comprehension. That there’s no way for us to know whether Bauer or Fackenheim is correct about Hitler’s knowability. That we may forever be consigned to a deeply disturbing sense of doubt, forever haunted by Hitler’s elusiveness.

  Still, if we can’t say for sure whether Hitler is metaphysically explicable, it’s hard to deny he is exceptional, in the sense that, as of now, he has not been pinned to anyone’s grid.

  How does one react to an exception like Hitler? I asked Himmelfarb his thoughts on the question of demonization. The failure, the impossibility of explaining Hitler in terms of human nature led Fackenheim to characterize Hitler as “an eruption of demonism into history.” Certain scholars have disparaged what they call a tendency to “demonize” Hitler, to make him an ultimate exception to historical explanation. The charge of demonization is sometimes hurled at any attempt to examine Hitler’s personal responsibility, which is sometimes regarded as an unsophisticated response, one that ignores powerful systemic, historical explanations that make Hitler less a powerful figure of evil than a pawn of those forces.

  I asked Himmelfarb what he thought of those who disparage “demonizing.”

  “What do you mean ‘demonize’?” he exclaimed. “You mean he’s a run-of-the-mill bad guy and we give him a tail and horns?”

  In a sense, I said: “It means putting Hitler in some unique exceptional category of evil, beyond precedent.”

  “Well,” he said, “those who call that demonizing are simply accepting some version of A.J.P. Taylor’s thesis that Hitler was a statesman with goals like any other. Or the political scientists who say he was an accidental agent of the necessary transformation of German society. And that to focus on him personally is to lose sight of the larger truth, don’t be distracted by personalities. But I don’t think he was a statesman. I don’t think he was an accidental agent. I think he was an evil man, an evil genius.”

  “Some people are reluctant to use the word ‘evil.’”

  He responds by telling me a story about Leo Strauss, the political philosopher. “I was not a disciple of Strauss, just met him a few times, but a philosopher friend of mine told me this story. How he’d told Strauss he was going to Germany—this was after the war. And he told Strauss he was going to see—what’s his name?” Himmelfarb asks me, feigning (I think) forgetting the name in order to take malicious delight in phrasing the question this way: “You know, Hannah Arendt’s Nazi boyfriend?”

  “Heidegger?”

  “Yes. My friend told Strauss that Heidegger had written him inviting him to visit.” This was even before the full extent of Heidegger’s Hitler-era sycophancy and his unrepentant stance after the war were fully known. “And Strauss told my friend, ‘Don’t go!’ Now, there was no more subtle mind than Leo Strauss. But he hated Nazis!” says Himmelfarb, voice rising nearly to a shout. “He wasn’t sophisticated about it. He hated Nazis! He was a Jew. That was one very important reason why he hated Nazis. He was a political philosopher, but he was a Jew, and he hated Nazis! That doesn’t detract from his sophistication.”

  Himmelfarb almost seems to be saying that it
is, in fact, the culmination of a truer sophistication to be able to hate Hitler, a sophistication that doesn’t fall prey to the pseudosophisticated snares of explanation as exculpation, of explanation as abstraction away from Hitler’s personal agency. Hatred as not that which one starts with, rather as something one ends up with: the product of a deeper understanding. A less inflammatory word than “hatred” might be “resistance.” It’s the word Emil Fackenheim used when he described the “double move” one must make in attempting to explain Hitler: to seek explanation but also to resist explanation.

  Not to resist all or any inquiry, not to resist thought, but to resist the misleading exculpatory corollaries of explanation. To resist the way explanation can become evasion or consolation, a way of making Hitler’s choice to do what he did less unbearable, less hateful to contemplate, by shifting responsibility from him to faceless abstractions, inexorable forces, or irresistible compulsions that gave him no choice or made his choice irrelevant. To resist making the kind of explanatory excuses for Hitler that permit him to escape, that grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh.

  AFTERWORD TO THE UPDATED EDITION

  Why Hitler Lost the War. Or Did He?

  The debates over the “true nature” of Hitler and Hitler’s crimes may never come to rest. They haven’t in the fifteen years since Explaining Hitler was first published. But if I had to choose the most significant—and dramatic—recent contribution to the most central debate, it would be an essay on Hitler’s war aims by Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich at War, who has become one of the most authoritative sources on the subject.

  Published in the December 12, 2013, issue of the New York Review of Books, Evans’s essay reasons its way back from Hitler’s conduct of the war, and the German military defeat, to say something important about who Hitler was. Something that had been, in essence, argued by Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lucy Dawidowicz, as one can read in this book. But Evans sharpens the point and reminds us of what I think some historians and intellectuals have lost sight of.

  Evans’s essay is entitled “What the War Was Really About” and you could think of it as Evans’s Hitler explanation. One that puts him at one side of what has been perhaps the longest-running schism in “Hitler studies” as Don DeLillo called the field.

  Ostensibly it’s a review of a book by Yale’s Paul Kennedy—one that claims the key to the Allied victory had less to do with some flaw within Hitler, in the Nazis, or in their war plans, than with Allied superiority in technology (Kennedy’s title: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War). Evans offers respect to many of Kennedy’s observations but advances a very different thesis, one that takes us to the very cutting edge, the state of the art of the argumentation about Hitler.

  Evans goes beyond the Kennedy thesis to look at other, rival, explanations for Hitler’s military defeat, and in so doing reveals just how unresolved so much about the interpretation of Hitler and the Holocaust still is. Was it the Allies’ superiority in economic resources that gave them victory? Evans joins Kennedy in rejecting “the crude economic determinism” of that claim. Was it the Allies’ remarkable success in cracking the German military codes with the now famous “Enigma” machine? Again, that played a part, Evans believes, but code-breaking has been given a glamorous triumphalist history which, he points out, ignores Allied intelligence failures and German intelligence successes. Was it the Allies’ weapons and technological superiority, as Kennedy suggests? “In the end this made little difference,” Evans asserts. “German science and technology were second to none in their capacity to innovate,” Evans argues.

  Then what was it? Evans points to one factor more than any other: the often misunderstood nature of Hitler’s war aims. He states his conclusion with finality: For Hitler this was not an ordinary war, “This was a racial war in which the extermination of six million European Jews, not dealt with at all in Kennedy’s book because it did not seem to belong to the normal arsenal of military strategy, was a paramount war aim.”

  “A racial war”: In other words, what the late Lucy Dawidowicz called “the war against the Jews” (in her book of that title) was of greater importance to Hitler than the war against the Allies. That was “what the war was really about.” And that, according to Evans, more than anything was why Germany lost the war.

  The most cited instance of the practical effect of this assessment of Hitler’s mind-set was Hitler’s continued refusal to allow redeployment (to resupply his crumbling front lines) of the trains crammed full of Jews rolling ceaselessly, relentlessly, to the death camps. (An affirmation of the remarkably prescient insight of the late historian Raul Hilberg: that so much of the truth of what went on can be found in the railway schedules.)

  For Hitler, it was not a matter of making the trains run on time so much as making the trains never stop running to Auschwitz and Treblinka. One relatively new aspect of Holocaust study is the horror that happened when the trains finally did have to stop running because the Russians were about to overrun the mainly Polish-based camps. The full story, much of which was new to me, can be found in Daniel Blatman’s 2011 work, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Harvard University Press).

  When the camps were disbanded, the large SS and native Polish and Ukrainian guard troops feeding the gas chambers were not redeployed to stave off the Russians. Instead they were ordered to take all the living and half-dead captives on the road in what became the final phase of the Final Solution: the Death Marches. Hundreds of thousands closely guarded, mercilessly beaten, and shot when they couldn’t keep up, starved to death while being harried along icy roads to . . . where? There was no sanctuary left safe for killing, but the killing had to continue at all costs. In some ways at least as, if not more, disgusting than at the camps themselves, the Death March commanders didn’t have to “follow orders.” They had incorporated Hitlerism so deeply, they wanted to follow orders. As Evans argues, killing Jews was more important than military objectives. They risked their own lives to continue the murder.

  What’s worse, Blatman reports, is that not just military men but civilians along the way who gleefully took part in murdering the half-dead Jews. For those, like me, who thought it impossible to be further shocked by Hitler’s willing accomplices, reading about the Death Marches introduced a new level of horror.

  It is a testament to how deeply dyed the souls of the killers were. Hitler was possessed, some might say, but he was the cause of possession in others. It seems to me a remarkable vindication of what Trevor-Roper argued in the immediate aftermath of the war when he described Hitler as more than anything a messianic “true believer” in his anti-Semitism. A position at first countered by Alan Bullock and others (such as A.J.P. Taylor), who tried to see him as more a cynical “mountebank,” an actor, a charlatan, a “realist politician” even (Taylor), who merely used his Jew-hatred opportunistically for popular support.

  Though Bullock conceded to me that he had eventually come round to a version of Trevor-Roper’s position: Hitler was an actor who came to be possessed by his own act to the point of self-destruction. Bullock also adduced a connection between Hitler’s messianic vision of himself as racial savior and the loss of the war. Hitler’s suicidal prohibition against even a tactical retreat, such as the one that might have saved his Sixth Army from capture at Stalingrad, was—Bullock believed—a self-inflicted defeat entirely due to his delusion of a messianic destiny that would not be denied or even countenance the idea of a minor tactical retreat. He fell under his own spell.

  Yet astonishingly there are those such as Kennedy who somehow think the Jew-hatred—the continent-wide messianic project of extermination “not dealt with at all in Kennedy’s book”—was irrelevant to Hitler’s conduct of the war.

  There is one respect in which I would take Evans’s characterization further. A point that Lucy Dawidowicz makes in Chapter 20: Hitler didn’t lose the war. Not the war Evans, I’d say persuasively,
argues was most important to him: the racial war. He won that war. Six million to one. Yes, he committed suicide at the end. (And yes, 50 million others lost their lives so he could win the part of the war he cared about most. Collateral damage.)

  Thinking about that suicide now, in the light of 9/11 and the subsequent exaltations of suicide bombing on messianic, theological grounds, does in fact offer a radical new way of characterizing Hitler. In retrospect at least, it’s tempting to argue that Hitler was, if not the first, then by far history’s greatest single suicide bomber. He blew up Europe to kill the Jews in it, even if it meant killing himself and tens of millions of others in the end.

  Thinking about Evans’s essay, I couldn’t help recall a watershed moment for me in writing this book, the one that made me realize how the attempt to explain Hitler involves the attempt to explain evil itself.

  It was in the midst of my conversation with Trevor-Roper at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler has remained a landmark early study of the man. It was a retrospective view built upon the physical evidence and the eyewitness testimonies to Hitler’s “spell”—what fatal magnetism kept so many down in the doomed bunker to the bitter end? In the process of interviewing the survivors (scouring the bunker and Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the defeat), he conjured up a vision of a strange mesmeric talent and a single unshakable mission. He found, among other documents, Hitler’s “Last Will and Testament,” which he described as a defining document. It called on the German people to never cease fighting “the eternal poisoners of the world,” the Jews, thus defining himself with his last words as a man who held one mission above all else.