Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  p. 183. “the OSS analyst’s memorandum of a debriefing.” “OSS Sourcebook,” interview with Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, pp. 656–62.

  p. 183. “extracts from the memoirs.” Frederick Oechesner, This Is the Enemy, cited in “OSS Sourcebook,” pp. 665–97.

  p. 184. “a figure of a very real interest to American intelligence agencies.” Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plots, 1933–1949 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), has extracted a fascinating narrative of her ambiguous role from various agency files.

  p. 184. “Princess Stephanie appears to have been.” Ibid.

  p. 184. “Wiedemann had been close.” Snyder, Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, p. 380.

  p. 184. “according to Princess Stephanie.” “OSS Sourcebook,” Hohenlohe debriefing, pp. 657–58.

  p. 184. “some intelligence analysts believed.” Higham, Trading with the Enemy, pp. 188–209.

  p. 185. “as Lord Rothermere’s personal representative.” “OSS Sourcebook,” Hohenlohe debriefing, p. 657.

  p. 185. “The anonymous OSS interviewer.” Ibid., pp. 667–68.

  p. 185. “Hitler at one point confesses.” Ibid., p. 658.

  p. 186. “have never reached the intimate stage of brüderschaft.” Ibid.

  p. 186. “A strange bond seems to hold these two together.” Ibid.

  p. 186. “Oechsner’s report on Hitler’s alleged nose job.” Ibid., pp. 685–86.

  p. 187. “a primitive hate typical of half civilized.” Ibid., p. 697.

  p. 187. “Der Führer is always greatly quickened in his anti-Jewish feelings.” Ibid.

  p. 189. “Even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.” See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), and discussion in chapter 19, below.

  p. 189. “Toland frames this remark.” Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 125.

  p. 190. “Hitler had an unexpected answer.” Ibid., pp. 125–26.

  p. 190. “like the philosopher Berel Lang and the historian Lucy Dawidowicz.” See chapters 11 and 20, respectively.

  p. 191. “the final paragraph of the Princess Stephanie debriefing.” “OSS Sourcebook,” p. 662.

  p. 191. “corroborates the analysis . . . by Lucy Dawidowicz.” See Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp. 100–104.

  p. 192. “Ronald Hayman . . . uses all three of these quotes.” Hayman, Hitler and Geli (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 215.

  p. 192. “the change must have been substantial.” Ibid.

  p. 192. “appetite for carnage grew monstrously.” Ibid., p. 216.

  p. 192. “Hayman even seems to fault Eva Braun.” Ibid.

  p. 194. “they were used to mood changes in Geli.” Frau Schaub, cited in ibid., p. 182.

  p. 195. “Hayman uses the fabricator of a missing year.” Waite, Psychopathic God, pp. 501–3, was the first and most thorough to discredit Bridget Hitler’s missing-year claim, which was first discovered and promoted by Robert Payne in The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Praeger, 1973).

  p. 195. “in our safe deposit box at the bank.” The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler, ed. Michael Unger (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 185.

  p. 196. “the evidence accumulated by Dr. Gerlich’s investigation.” Ibid., p. 102.

  p. 196. “In the summary of Gerlich’s . . . pamphlet.” Ibid., p. 103.

  p. 197. “Schaub’s two-decade-later recollection.” Cited in Hayman, Hitler and Geli, p. 182.

  Chapter 11: To the Gestapo Cottage

  p. 202. “Bormann announced with great fanfare.” The Obersalzberg and the Third Reich (Berchtesgaden: Verlag Plenk, 1982), p. 61.

  p. 207. “The German psychiatrist Helm Stierlin.” Adolf Hitler: Familien Perspektiven (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978).

  p. 208. “something both new and important being suggested.” Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  p. 208. “The History of Evil and the Future of the Holocaust.” Berel Lang, in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 90–105.

  p. 209. “Saul Friedländer . . . Cynthia Ozick.” Quoted on the back cover of Lang, Act and Idea.

  p. 209. “I wondered about that, too.” Berel Lang, interview with author.

  p. 210. “Socrates’ insistence in the Protagoras.” Specifically, “nobody does wrong willingly” because “virtue is knowledge.” Plato, Protagoras, 345b–e.

  p. 210. “one of the most famous statements.” Himmler’s secret address to SS officers at Poznan [alternatively Posen], June 10, 1943, cited in Lang, Act and Idea, p. 3.

  p. 211. “As early as 1919, Hitler wrote.” Adolf Hitler, letter to Adolf Gemlich, cited in Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp. 16–17.

  p. 212. “The discovery of the Jewish virus.” Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 269.

  p. 212. “Another key objection.” See Bullock, address to Yad Vashem Institute.

  p. 213. “He begins his journey.” Lang, Act and Idea, pp. 199–200.

  p. 213. “Which leads Lang to argue.” Ibid., p. 210.

  p. 214. “Many philosophers question whether this degree of evil.” A useful discussion of the degrees of conscious evil can be found in S. I. Benn, “Wickedness,” Ethics 95 (July 1985): 795–810.

  p. 214. “a passage from Hitler’s Table Talk.” Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 72 (October 25, 1941).

  p. 217. “As Gordon Craig points out, Thomas Mann.” Thomas Mann, “Brother Hitler,” cited in Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: Meridian Books, 1982), p. 67.

  p. 217. “a study of the architecture of Auschwitz.” Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

  p. 217. “as Yale’s George Hersey argues.” George L. Hersey, The Evolution of Allure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

  p. 218. “Hitler and Kafka were fellow artists.” D. M. Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), p. 228.

  p. 220. “the recent book on the German neo-Nazi movement.” Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss, Führer-Ex (New York: Random House, 1996).

  p. 220. “Heidegger . . . knew it happened.” See Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).

  Chapter 12: David Irving

  p. 221. “He’s a real rabble-rouser.” Bullock, interview with author.

  p. 222. “1991 dispatch by Gitta Sereny.” Gitta Sereny, The Independent, November 27, 1991.

  p. 222. “an interview with the Telegraph.” London Sunday Telegraph, January 12, 1992.

  p. 222. “Hitler’s War.” Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 1.

  p. 223. “The Jewish community in Argentina.” Irving, interview with author.

  p. 224. “A Munich court convicted him in 1992.” Verdict of the Munich District Court, Criminal Proceedings, no. 432, case 113, main hearing, May 5, 1992. Upheld on appeal, 1993.

  p. 224. “A spokesman at the Koblenz archives.” “Zu den ‘Eichmann Memoiren,’” statement to author, January 17, 1992, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz.

  p. 225. “I tried to apply the three criteria.” Irving, interview with author.

  p. 226. “According to a London paper.” London Sunday Telegraph, January 19, 1992.

  p. 227. “I wrote a book on the Dresden air raid.” David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963).

  p. 229. “the last sentence of the book.” Ibid., p. 257.

  p. 232. “no traces of cyanide compounds in the walls.” See the thoroughgoing refutation of Leuchter’s “science” in Truth Prevails, ed. Shelly Shapiro (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1990).

  p. 234. “‘Traditional enemy’ is Irving’s name.” See David Irving, Action Report, March 5, 1996, p. 1.

  p. 234. “in the somewhat schizoid biography of Goebbels.” David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (London: Focal Point Publications, 19
96).

  p. 234. “Auschwitz was not a place.” Ibid., p. 426.

  p. 236. “If this biography were simply a history . . .” Irving, Hitler’s War, p. 17.

  Chapter 13: A Tale of Three Kafkas

  p. 239. “Kafka moved in for the kill.” Rudolph Binion, interview with author.

  p. 240. “Bradley Smith’s 1967 study of Hitler’s childhood.” Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood, and Youth (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1967).

  p. 240. “his book Hitler Among the Germans.” Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976).

  p. 240. “Binion’s most recent work.” Rudolph Binion, Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts (New York: New York University Press, 1993).

  p. 241. “Holocaust-literature scholar Lawrence Langer.” See Lawrence Langer, “Kafka as Holocaust Prophet: A Dissenting View,” in Admitting the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 109–24.

  p. 241. “George Steiner, who, as we’ll see.” See chapter 17.

  p. 241. “Claude Lanzmann.” The cover band across the front of Les temps modernes 555 (October 1992), on which Lanzmann as editor promoted an essay attacking Binion by Sabine Prokhoris, read, “Rudolf [sic] Binion et Adolf Hitler: La Psychohistoire cache-misere du revisionisme?” (roughly, “Binion and Hitler: Psychohistory as Fig Leaf for Revisionism?” See chapter 14.

  p. 242. “Gertrud Kurth.” Kurth, “The Jew and Adolf Hitler,” pp. 11–32.

  p. 244. “Several decades of medical warnings were defied.” Binion, Hitler Among the Germans, p. 16.

  p. 244. “Such a Hitler.” Ibid., p. 16.

  p. 244. “Bloch would say later.” In the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, cited in ibid., p. 18.

  p. 244. “Hitler’s experience of his mother’s last illness.” Binion, Hitler Among the Germans, p. 18.

  p. 244. “He cites telling examples from Hitler’s rhetoric.” Ibid., pp. 24–35.

  p. 245. “Abusing ‘the Jew.’” Ibid., p. 19.

  p. 245. “Dr. Kafka brought to my attention.” Dr. John Kafka, telephone interview with author.

  p. 245. “the advance description of . . . Binion’s thesis.” Flyer read to author by Dr. John Kafka. I came to admire Dr. Kafka’s impassioned defense of his uncle.

  p. 246. “a scholar in his own right.” See Dr. John Kafka, Multiple Realities in Clinical Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  p. 248. “a terrifyingly complicated . . . response.” Photocopy provided to author by Rudolph Binion.

  p. 249. “One German researcher.” Ernst Günter Schenck, Patient Hitler (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1989).

  p. 249. “George Kren.” See, for instance, George M. Kren and Rodler F. Morris, “Race and Spirituality: Arthur Dinter’s Theosophical Antisemitism,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6.3 (1991): 233–52, a valuable study of a now nearly forgotten early shaper of Nazi Party anti-Semitic consciousness; and George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).

  p. 249. “Kren’s mother had called Binion’s book.” Cited by George M. Kren, interview with author.

  Chapter 14: Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why

  p. 251. “He called the filmmaker’s behavior.” Dr. Louis Micheels, interview with author.

  p. 252. “There is no why here.” Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz [1947] (New York: Collier Books, 1993), p. 29, cited by Lanzmann in “Hier Ist Kein Warum,” Nouvelle revue de psychoanalyse 38 (Autumn 1988).

  p. 252. “Consider the introductory description.” Remarks by Shoshana Felman recorded in “The Obscenity of Understanding,” 473–95.

  p. 252. “Lanzmann’s unquestioning adoption.” Lanzmann’s most dramatic survivor-witness testimony in Shoah comes from the barber at Treblinka who shaved the heads of the women in the camp about to be gassed. He made a point of not letting them know they were being prepared for death rather than for delousing, thus denying these women the choice of how they might wish to react to the truth. It was a decision defended on implicitly paternalistic grounds—the barber knew what was best for the women (keeping them in ignorance of their imminent fate). A policy that is presented as noble—and perhaps it was, although the element of self-interest is never alluded to: namely, the barber preserved his job and his life by keeping the women in the dark, sparing the camp administration any possible disruption of the killing process that telling the truth might provoke. Lanzmann’s refusal to see any complexity in the barber’s choice might also have a component of self-interest—he has made it clear in interviews that the barber of Treblinka is the “star” of Shoah, one who gave Lanzmann as a filmmaker his most memorably dramatic moment.

  p. 253. “his published attack on Steven Spielberg’s film.” Claude Lanzmann, review of Schindler’s List, Le Monde, March 3, 1994.

  p. 253. “No, my researcher insisted.” Author’s conversation with Alexander Stengel.

  p. 254. “Thou shalt not grant Hitler posthumous victories.” In Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982).

  p. 254. “some disturbing transcripts and memoirs of that episode.” See “The Obscenity of Understanding,” and letter from Dr. Louis Micheels to Cathy Caruth, redactor of the event.

  p. 254. “According to the laudatory introduction.” “The Obscenity of Understanding,” p. 474.

  p. 254. “One observer of the crusades.” Dr. Sean Wilder, telephone interview with author.

  p. 254. “His reply to a questioner at a seminar at Yale.” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 94.

  p. 255. “an acolyte’s vituperative assault on Binion’s book.” Sabine Prokhoris, “Une histoire en quête de Führer,” trans. Masha Belenky, Les temps modernes 555 (October 1992): 92–109.

  p. 255. “A blood-red banner across the otherwise sedate cover.” Rudolf Binion et Adolf Hitler: La Psychohistoire cache-misère du revisionisme? Ibid., cover.

  p. 255. “Binion believes the misspelling.” Rudolph Binion, interview with author.

  p. 256. “Binion . . . had to drop the suit.” Ibid.

  p. 256. “the ruling enterprise of Binion is obscene.” Claude Lanzmann, interview with author.

  p. 256. “The obscenity of this question is stressed by Claude Lanzmann.” Prokhoris, “Une histoire en quête de Führer,” 93.

  p. 256. “catalogue of insults.” Ibid., pp. 93–109, trans. for author by Masha Belenky.

  p. 257. “method as final solution.” Ibid., p. 109.

  p. 258. “There are some pictures of Hitler as a baby too.” “The Obscenity of Understanding,” p. 480.

  p. 259. “I don’t say that the Holocaust is an enigma.” Claude Lanzmann, interview with author.

  p. 260. “the question of ‘why’ is a fundamental human function.” Dr. Sean Wilder, interview with author.

  p. 261. “deploring the ‘mystification’ of the Holocaust.” See Yehuda Bauer, “Is the Holocaust Explicable?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5.2 (1990): 145–55.

  p. 262. “described in a New York Times story.” Roger Cohen, “Book on Nazi Murder Industry Stirs French Storm,” The NewYork Times, October 28, 1993, p. 3.

  p. 262. “Klarsfeld . . . called the Pressac book.” Ibid.

  p. 263. “Lanzmann wrote in the weekly Le Nouvelle Observateur.” Cited in ibid.

  p. 263. “his own staged and crafted catharsis.” In Shoah, Lanzmann persuaded the long-retired barber from Treblinka to cut hair in a barbershop setting while Lanzmann hectored him into tearful recollections.

  p. 263. “(The Times reporter told me he stood by his story . . .).” Author’s phone conversation with Roger Cohen.

  p. 263. “Yehuda Bauer told me.” Interview with author.

  p. 264. “in an essay entitled.” Yehuda Bauer, “On the Place of the Holocaust in History,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2.2 (1987): 209–20, at p. 210.

  p. 264. “a collection of essays o
n Shoah.” Au sujet de Shoah (Paris: Belin, 1990).

  p. 265. “the locus classicus of his attack on explanation.” Lanzmann, “Hier Ist Kein Warum.”

  p. 265. “a story he takes from Primo Levi’s memoir.” Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 29.

  p. 265. “here is what Lanzmann makes of this story.” Lanzmann, “Hier Ist Kein Warum.”

  Chapter 15: Dr. Louis Micheels

  p. 268. “Micheels’s . . . memoir.” Dr. Louis J. Micheels, Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  p. 268. “a documentary film about Dr. Wirths.” Produced in the Netherlands by Rolf Orthel and Hans Fels.

  p. 268. “Our feeling of love.” Micheels, Doctor #117641.

  p. 269. “I thought Munch was important.” Micheels, interview with author.

  p. 269. “These are questions Robert Lifton addresses.” Robert Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

  p. 269. “Dr. Micheels’s wife told me.” Interview with author.

  p. 270. “I’ve read the transcript of the public clash.” “The Obscenity of Understanding.”

  p. 270. “Lanzmann conceded that he was ‘violent, very violent.’” Ibid., p. 480. (He means verbally.)

  p. 270. “began with Dr. Micheels speaking about.” Interview with author. His speech was not reprinted in “The Obscenity of Understanding.”

  p. 271. “Lanzmann told the audience.” “The Obscenity of Understanding,” pp. 479–80.

  p. 272. “He cites a discussion between Elie Wiesel.” Ibid., pp. 481–82.

  p. 273. “the film was . . . a hoax.” Dori Laub, ibid., p. 494.

  p. 273. “one member of the audience rose.” Ibid., pp. 489–90.

  p. 274. “He confined himself that night.” Ibid., pp. 490–93.

  p. 275. “I found I had an ally in Tzvetan Todorov.” Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996).

  p. 275. “Primo Levi spent forty years . . .” Ibid., p. 277.

  p. 275. “something he’s written on the subject.” Micheels, letter to Cathy Caruth, cited to author.

  Chapter 16: Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer

  p. 279. “For Bauer, Hitler’s murderousness.” Yehuda Bauer, interview with author.