Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In any case, I decided to ask Trevor-Roper what I feared might seem a simplistic question but turned out to be a gateway to the entire realm of the philosophy of evil and its theodicy: “Do you think Hitler knew,” I asked Trevor-Roper, “that he was doing wrong when he committed his crimes?”

  “Absolutely not,” Trevor-Roper said with asperity. “He was convinced of his own rectitude.” The logic of this, traceable back to Socrates, is that evil is impossible because those who commit evil acts always believe they are doing good, however mistaken they might be. Only in literature, in Iago (“motiveless malignancy”—Coleridge) or Richard III, do we find those who commit evil for the pleasure of it, for the hell of it. Many of my encounters in the book are taken up with the ramifications of this question. Since writing the book, I’ve come to believe more strongly that evil is not a concept to be dispensed with, but that what we call evil inheres in ideas, in ideologies that motivate the commission of evil acts, under the guise of providing for the collective good. The real question is what heightens susceptibility to evil ideas? More on this, but first:

  What We Can Learn from the Downfall Parodies

  One critic described Explaining Hitler as, in part, about “the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history.” How have we succeeded and failed since Explaining Hitler was published? How has the image of Hitler (and our perception of the reality) evolved? Forgive me, but I must begin with what can only be called a meme.

  I’m speaking of what may be the single most replicated moving image of Adolf Hitler on the planet. For the past five years, for better or worse, it has been the most frequent way that Adolf Hitler has been brought back to life in the new century: as a YouTube parody meme, the one based on a four-minute clip from the German film Downfall, featuring Bruno Ganz as Hitler in a raving, demented, and deluded rant delivered in the Berlin bunker when he finally realizes all hope for military survival is lost.

  If you’re not among the half billion or so viewers of one of the scores of variations of this meme, the parody aspect comes from the fake subtitles Photoshopped onto the clips. The new subtitles have Hitler raging, not about the crumbling of the Russian front, but about, shall we say, lesser things. Things of more contemporary and trivial relevance. To cite a few examples, there are parodies with titles like “Hitler Rants About New PlayStation 4 Defects,” “Hitler Rants About Being Taken by a Nigerian E-mail Scam,” and “Hitler Rants About Kanye West Interrupting Taylor Swift’s VMA Acceptance Speech.”

  The demonic reduced to the trivial. But the genius of the parodies is that they trivialize the trivialization. For their effect they depend on Hitler occupying a preeminent place in the hierarchy of evil, and in some peculiar but effective way they restore “the real Hitler” to a place beyond capture by pop culture or web snark. Even Bruno Ganz has praised their “creativity.”

  “The Real Hitler.” Of course, that is the problem. That is the question without a satisfying answer. Something we may not fully know but something upon which we project our worst conception of humanity. Even if we know not the explanation, we know there is something there that has to be contended with, incorporated into our view of history and human nature. But at a perhaps irrecoverable distance from ourselves. In its place, the place of a purported “real Hitler,” we project upon him, as in a Rorschach, “a cultural self-portrait in the negative,” I’d called it.

  The YouTube parodies are not a trivial development. Cultural processing is going on here! The parodies are no mere “viral” memes, most of which have the lifetime of mayflies. The Downfall parodies have, on the contrary, become a sturdy go-to trope, a communal way of perpetuating a running commentary on how trivial so many of the concerns of our culture are. A virtual medium unto itself. Which paradoxically, it seems to me (some may disagree), doesn’t diminish Hitler. They depend on, for their apparently robust continued effect, placing Hitler in a separate category, thus preserving him as a category of one.

  They’ve lasted decades in Internet time. The fact that they are so robust may be less an example of processing than of our culture’s continuing inability to “process” Adolf Hitler. Just the fact that we can somehow contain him by caricaturing him and caricaturing the caricature demonstrates a desire to distance ourselves from facing whoever the “real” Hitler might be.

  Which, in a way, is a good thing. That Hitler still resists “processing,” resists being made an exemplar of some system, whether psychological, sociological, ideological, hypnotic, or epidemiological (the post-encephalitic syndrome). That he has not been successfully subject to reductionism, the real target of my skeptical analysis of Hitler explanations.

  The Spell

  The recent (non-parodic) history of Hitler explanations has been mixed. Evans’s essay, which restores to primacy a way of looking at Hitler that has been obscured of late, is important. But as far as learning more about Hitler himself, his “thought world,” there have been valuable, massive biographical/historical studies, all worthy, by Ian Kershaw, Saul Friedländer, and Evans himself, all of which add depth of detail but, as they often admit, leave a black hole in the center, a Hitler-shaped shadow.

  There are a few works I’d like to single out among those I’ve read (by no means a comprehensive survey). Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library, an especially thoughtful study, adds to the familiar list of Henry Ford’s The International Jew and its source, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another name whose prominence I’d missed.

  In an admiring review of Ryback, Jacob Heilbrunn cites “the one book among Hitler’s extant prison readings that left a noticeable intellectual footprint in ‘Mein Kampf’: a well-thumbed copy of ‘Racial Typology of the German People’ by Hans F. K. Günther, known as ‘Racial Günther’ for his fanatical views on racial purity.”

  Add to this one unexpected, almost forgotten, work. I’d been asked to write an introduction to a fiftieth-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a longtime bestseller when published in 1961, that had shaped my and subsequent generations’ picture of Hitler and the war for some time thereafter. (It was completed just before Eichmann’s capture.) It was a work I had read long before writing this book and, probably would not have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction. But I found myself impressed with Shirer’s reporter’s eye. For Hitler. For the still inexplicable power of the “spell.”

  Even for Eichmann before he became Eichmann, the icon of evil, and of controversy over evil. Before his capture, when he was known to Shirer as Karl—his rarely used first name. Shirer had his number in a way Hannah Arendt never would. He found the key damning document that recorded the testimony of a fellow officer who quoted the Lord High Executioner of the Final Solution toward the end of the war. Eichmann not experiencing any regret or any of the misattributed “banality.” Instead, with a vengefully triumphant snarl (he knows who’s really won the war), Eichmann declared “he would leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” O happy Eichmann.

  Of course, not the Eichmann of Hannah Arendt (“the world’s worst court reporter,” as I’ve described her), who credulously bought into his “poor schlub” pen pusher defense—just following orders, moving things along deep within the bureaucracy, “nothing against the Jew” facade. Just doing a job, according to Professor Arendt, equally credulous about her feverishly devoted “ex-Nazi” lover Heidegger, for whom she used her influence to help in his sham postwar “de-Nazification.”

  Subsequent definitive discrediting of the “banality of evil “ cliché by David Cesarani’ s Becoming Eichmann and by Bernard Wasserstein’s revelations in the Times Literary Supplement on how often Hannah Arendt depended on overtly anti-Semitic sources in her work should have put to bed that antiquated and meretricious “banality of evil” phrase. (Although it does deepen the mystery of how someone
as brilliant as Arendt undeniably was could have been so willingly misled.) Not that banality doesn’t exist, it just didn’t exist in any respect in Eichmann’s case.

  But the larger lesson of Shirer’s prescience here is that somehow those who were eyewitnesses, those who were ear witnesses as well (like George Steiner, who tells me in Chapter 17 that he was so transfixed just from hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio in 1930s Vienna, that he knew); they all somehow knew something beyond the ken of those who experienced it secondhand.

  There is a phrase I neglected to use in the first edition: Führerkontakt. The transformative personal charisma that turned his rival, Berlin-based Goebbels, into a gibbering sycophant in a single meeting, according to Goebbels’s own diary. Führerkontakt that had mind-scrambling effects on august German General Staff strategists and radiated out from the inner circle to all those tens of thousands in Sportzplatz- and Nuremberg-style rallies within the sound of his voice, the access to his appearances in real time. Different, almost incomprehensible, to those of us consigned to a remote viewing.

  This is one reason why I found the first-person perspective of the courageous Cassandra-like reporters of the anti-Hitler Munich Post (to whom I pay my respects in the “Poison Kitchen” chapter) so invaluable. Sifting through the crumbling original issues of the paper I found in the basement of a Munich archive, seeing the rise of Hitler through their eyes, I felt an almost palpable sense of that spell. I still feel not enough recognition has come to their efforts to investigate and publish the truth about Hitler, particularly from the world of journalism for whom there are few greater models of heroism. I still recall the chill I felt when I came across their September 9, 1931, issue that published excerpts from a secret Nazi Party document that first used the word for “Final Solution”: Endlossung. The fact that few seemed to realize its implications does not excuse ignoring their achievement. It’s true that has begun to change—one of the things I’m most proud of about this book. Indeed, a former mayor of Munich did his Ph.D. thesis on them and at least one entire book (albeit in Portuguese) has been inspired by my account. Yes, Woodward and Bernstein took on Nixon, but those reporters took on Adolf Hitler and the entire Nazi Party.

  Distance does not always give wisdom but can create a fog of obfuscation as the once fashionable, bureaucratic, or “functionalist” school of the relation between Hitler and Hitler’s Holocaust was reduced to calling the murder of the Jews a mere matter of logistics. More economically efficient to work them to death and then dispose of them than to feed them or relocate them.

  Comparative Evil

  Moving beyond Hitler, there are concentric circles of controversies about the consequences of Hitlerism and how to put the Holocaust in perspective. Consider for instance two books that deal not with what happened but with how to integrate—or separate—two overlapping mass murders. Hitler’s murders of the Jews and Stalin’s murders of just about everyone.

  Two of the most interesting writers on these questions, Alvin Rosenfeld and Timothy Snyder, have differing, though not necessarily contradictory, ways of talking about the Holocaust, its centrality, and its uniqueness.

  Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands expands the timeline of what is conventionally known as the Holocaust years, usually thought of as 1939 to 1945.

  Snyder contends that the time span should be extended back to the early thirties, and defined more geographically than ethnically. Which means including what is now regarded as Stalin’s deliberate mass starvation of the Ukrainian peasant populace (the “kulaks”) beginning in 1931. A series of decrees caused mass starvation in the millions and even cannibalism among the desperate, decrees most historians have come to characterize as deliberate attempts to murder the recalcitrant “bourgeois” peasant farmers of the Ukraine. The Ukrainian atrocity has become a major subject of historical study and has been given by some its own Holocaust-related name: “the Holodomor.” The darkness of the crime still shadows that bloody land.

  Synder places this slaughter on the continuum of subsequent Stalinist mass-murder frenzies including the Great Purges of the mid-’30s, which cost millions their lives in summary executions and gulag starvation. And then the meshing of two mass-murdering nations in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, which led to the almost immediate murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles and the beginning of the murder of millions of Jews.

  It is hard not to read Snyder’s work without trying to deny that human nature could give rise to such insane, relentless slaughter. But one can’t.

  It is true that Snyder’s conflation of the Holodomor, the Purges, and the murder of the Poles tends to make the Holocaust of the Jews part of a continuum rather than a stand-alone horror. It raises profound questions about how we establish a hierarchy of evil acts. Is an order about agricultural administration that seems to deliberately seek starvation the same as rounding up and gassing Jews in a hands-on way?

  Alvin Rosenfeld has some concerns about this. Not about Snyder’s work specifically, but about whether the Holocaust should be conflated with other mass murders. And about the denatured domestication of the Holocaust. In the way its memory is transmitted. In his dramatically titled but always incisive work The End of the Holocaust, Rosenfeld takes on what might be called the ahistorical cultural assimilation of the Holocaust into the anodyne language of “man’s inhumanity to man,” “intolerance,” and the like. Formulations that manage to elide the rather significant and distinct aspect of Hitler’s extermination: anti-Semitism.

  I’ve called this sense of the dilution of the particular meaning of the Holocaust a kind of Faustian bargain, in which the sometimes specious “universalizing” of the Holocaust, or incorporation into a generic “mass murder” category, is achieved by denaturing its actuality.

  Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently, easier to be . . . normalized.”

  What are those weighty moral and intellectual demands? For one thing, I think the Holocaust demands of us that we not lose sight of the fact that it was not just another tragedy in war-torn Europe and clashing nationalisms. At the heart of Rosenfeld’s argument is that anti-Semitism has a two-millennium-long history (at least), one that has produced a continuous slaughter of Jews, and Hitler’s holocaust should be seen in that light, as not an aberration but a culmination of a disease of Western civilization that transcends ordinary violence. And that the Holocaust portended not an end but a beginning.

  Rosenfeld quotes Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor and novelist: “Before Auschwitz,” Kertész writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.”

  That chilling last sentence tempts me into a discussion of the contentious “second Holocaust” controversy, one I stirred up when I wrote an essay essentially saying what Kertész was saying: No matter how many times and how many Jews (and non-Jews) aver “never again,” it can happen again. The only thing that has changed is that now we know that it can happen at all.

  But when I wrote the words “second Holocaust” (a phrase I found in Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock), some were horrified that anyone could imagine—even utter—such a phrase. “Ethnic panic,” shrieked Leon Wiesel-tier, who regards himself as the Holocaust discourse police. A fear
of facing the possibility, of even uttering the phrase, a fear I characterized as “second Holocaust denial.”

  In fact Rosenfeld, a far more learned figure on the subject, devotes the final section of his book to taking up and elaborating upon the necessity of confronting the potential for such an atrocity. As has the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who mordantly observed that “this time” a second holocaust would be much easier to accomplish: A single thermonuclear weapon could kill 6 million Israeli Jews in six seconds with a strike on Tel Aviv, rather than the six years it took Hitler.

  One recurrent question the Snyder and Rosenfeld books cause us to face again is the question of comparative evil. Hitler vs. Stalin: It’s not a competition, but it can be a way for us to evaluate what we think is worst about what human beings are capable of. What we talk about when we talk about evil.

  Do we measure it by body count? A case could be made that Stalin’s death toll (and indeed Mao Zedong’s) is greater than Hitler’s (unless we add to Hitler’s ledger the 50 million deaths from the war he started in 1939). Or do we also have to factor in the question of deliberation, intent, “agency”? Hitler’s murder of the Jews could be said to be more “hands-on” (machine-gunning and gassing, the Death Marches), while Stalin’s engineered starvation of the Ukraine (like Mao’s massive famines during “The Great Leap Forward”) was more a remote-control manipulation (and denial) of resources that caused a populace to shrivel and die (amidst the horror of cannibalism) without hands-on killing. Hands-off killing can be just as bad or worse. But as the first great exposer of Stalin’s crimes, Robert Conquest, one of the first English writers to document even in a preliminary way the massive death tolls from Stalin’s purges and starvations, said to me, “Hitler’s just feels worse.” After reading Snyder’s Bloodlands, one acolyte of Conquest said to me that it still “feels” a little worse, but by a little less.

  I’ve tended to believe that it doesn’t diminish Hitler’s evil or the horror of the Holocaust to acknowledge crimes of equal magnitude but of different methods. Indeed I believe that if we err we should err on the side of seeking commonality with victims of other genocidal horrors, mass murders, and the like (Rwanda, Native Americans, African slavery, etc.) rather than seek to find differences that separate us from their suffering.