Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Silly as it might seem on the surface, the explanation does offer a kind of consolation on a couple of levels. For one thing, it makes Hitler a more familiar figure: We know serial killers, or feel we do by now; we’ve seen their families on Geraldo; they don’t spring out of some demonic abyss; some of us are charmed by Hannibal Lecter—if you set aside the cannibalism, he seems like good company. Hitler was far worse, we remind ourselves, but—the implication is—we know his syndrome. That alone, that he is a type, not a sui generis singularity, is to some degree comforting.

  And beyond that, he’s a type we know, we feel a bit sorry for—perhaps even identify with—painful feelings of low self-esteem and bad parental bonds being not uncommon. And even more consoling is the implicit premise that Hitler was a victim/product of a preventable syndrome. A better society with better parenting, self-esteem programs in schools, equals no more Hitlers.

  Another comic but instructive manifestation, really a kind of barnyard reductio ad absurdum of Hitler psychological explanations, is the Billy-goat Bite Theory, an extremely bloody variant of what might be called the Genital Wound school of Hitler interpretation, a mode of explanation that has at various times been employed to elucidate the prose of Henry James and the sanguinary appetite of Jeffrey Dahmer. It has led some to look for the source of Hitler’s evil or pathology in a putatively absent left testicle, in the aftereffects of a case of syphilis, or in a malformation of his penis. Some might say it’s the ultimate instance of phallocentric thinking to insist that whatever was wrong with Adolf Hitler had to originate with his genitalia. But genital-wound theories of Hitler have been rattling around in “Hitler studies” for decades.

  The billy-goat bite story first came to light in 1981 in a memoir published in Germany under the title Tödlicher Alltag (Deadly Routine). Its author, Dietrich Güstrow, who was then a prominent attorney in West Germany, and whose book was widely and respectfully reviewed, tells us that in 1943 he served as a military court-martial defense attorney for a certain Private Eugen Wasner before a secret military tribunal that tried the soldier for “maliciously slandering the Führer.” In fact, according to Güstrow, Private Wasner was being tried for an embarrassing explanation of Adolf Hitler. According to the lawyer’s memoir, the occasion of Private Wasner’s slander was a barracks bull session in which Wasner boasted that as a youth he had attended the same school as Adolf Hitler, in Leonding, Austria. Bitter about recent defeats on the eastern front, the private told his buddies, “Adolf has been warped ever since a billy goat took a bite out of his penis.”

  Wasner proceeded to give a graphic description of the bloody consequences of young Adolf’s attempt to prove he could urinate in the mouth of a billy goat—a preposterous story on the face of it. And yet Güstrow declares forty years later, “Regarding the truth of Wasner’s report, I never had any doubts.” (Subsequently, doubt has been cast upon Güstrow’s reliability.) But Güstrow goes further than merely vouching for the truthfulness of the story. He makes explicit the implication of Wasner’s report: the traumatic billy-goat bite as an explanation for Hitler’s subsequent derangement. To Güstrow, that billy-goat bite was—like the single “shudder in the loins” in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” like the single bite of the apple in Genesis—an act of appetite from which whole histories of sorrow and tragedy would ensue. In a sense, Güstrow’s own appetite—his hunger to find in this incident a single satisfying explanation for Hitler’s psyche—is more revealing than the uncorroborated, secondhand story he tells about the billy goat. It’s an example of the hunger for single-pointed explanation, the yearning to find some decisive turning point, some moment of metamorphosis that can explain Hitler’s crimes as the result of a terrible trauma that made him “crazy”—a moment of metamorphosis that could “engender” the Holocaust from Hitler’s “craziness” alone rather than his willful determination. Such a yearning tells as much about the explainer as about Hitler. For Güstrow, pillar of the postwar German Federal Republic, believing that a billy-goat bite explains Hitler, that a preposterous, obscene accident created Nazi Germany, can be seen as a way of absolving German society and culture—absolving himself—of implication in Hitler’s crimes. The billy goat becomes a kind of scapegoat upon which he projects—and thereby purges—his own guilt.

  If the Billy-goat Bite Theory is a reductio ad absurdum of the search for Hitler, the range of purportedly more sophisticated psychological explanations is often not much more impressive. Consider the attempt of the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller to portray Hitler as a victim of an abusive father. It was Miller’s “book on Hitler’s childhood” that so incensed Claude Lanzmann, triggered his tirade on the baby pictures, his incendiary attack on explanation, in my encounter with him. While I would not characterize it as “an obscenity as such” as Lanzmann does, the fifty-five-page Hitler explanation Miller included in For Your Own Good, an otherwise admirable plea against corporal punishment of children, had raised serious problems in my mind as well.

  In seeking to advance her crusade against the evil of corporal punishment, Miller strains to prove that Adolf Hitler’s evil can be traced to brutal corporal punishment by his father. Unfortunately, to accomplish this she employs dubious evidence. (We have mainly Hitler’s self-pitying word for it that he was the victim of savage paternal beatings, an account contradicted by some who remembered his father as a far milder sort. In addition, harsh corporal punishment was widespread at the time—Chekhov suffered from paternal beatings, for instance—and only Hitler grew up to be Hitler.) Miller proceeds to use dubious evidence in the service of dubious psychologizing: She takes at face value the controversial, unproven theory that Adolf’s father’s father was a Jew; she argues that Adolf’s father’s beating his son and the son’s subsequent anti-Semitism can be attributed to self-lacerating rage about this putative “Jewish blood.” And a final leap from explanation to exculpation actually sees her rising to the defense of Hitler’s veracity. In seeking to swat away the doubts raised by some about the portrait of Hitler’s father as an abuser, she dismisses evidence to the contrary by saying, “As if anyone were more qualified to judge the situation than Adolf Hitler himself.”

  Yes, and who more deserves our trust and confidence? I recall being stunned when I came across that passage. Here Adolf Hitler himself has been appropriated into the rhetoric of victimology used on behalf of kids talked into accusations of satanic ritual abuse: Believe the Children. Believe the child even if he’s Adolf Hitler, even if the account of abuse comes not from Hitler as an innocent child but from the adult hatemonger who spoke about his childhood beatings not in some tearful therapeutic confessional but in the Führerbunker. Believe him because he was once that innocent in the baby picture.

  An inadvertently parodic counterpoint to Miller’s demonization of Hitler’s father can be found in the work of Erich Fromm, an equally respected and even more renowned psychoanalytic thinker, who singles out not Hitler’s father but his mother, Klara. Fromm’s version of father Alois is not the abusive monster Miller gives us. Fromm assures us that Alois was a well-meaning, stable fellow who “loved life,” whose devotion to his honeybees was admirable, and who was “authoritarian” but “not a frightening figure.” Instead, Fromm tells us, Hitler’s mother Klara was the catalyst of his neuroses. In his retrospective psychoanalysis of Hitler (published in his 1973 book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness), Fromm confidently assures us that Hitler can be explained by Fromm’s own “necrophilous character system” theory, which postulates a love of death and dead bodies and, consequently, the inclination to commit mass murder. Fromm asserts that this “necrophilous development” had its origins in the “malignant incestuousness” of Hitler’s attachment to his mother. “Germany became the central symbol for mother,” Fromm writes. Hitler’s fixations, his hatred for the “poison” (syphilis and Jews) that threatened Germany, actually concealed a deeper, long-repressed desire to destroy his mother.

  Fromm’s serene confidence in
these grandiose abstractions and his unsupported leaps of logic based on them are breathtaking as he proceeds to his conclusion: Hitler’s deepest hatred wasn’t Jews—it was Germans! Germans symbolized his mother. He made war against the Jews because his real goal was to ignite a worldwide conflagration in order to cause the destruction of Germany—to punish his mother.

  Theories of Hitler as a victim of bad parenting (the Menendez defense of Hitler, one could say) are extensions of the common, careless attempt to explain (or explain away) Hitler as a victim of a mental disease, dysfunction, or syndrome—Hitler as “madman,” “psychopath,” “demented,” “criminally insane.” All of which tend to exculpate if not excuse the crimes he perpetrated on grounds of what the courts call “diminished capacity,” an inability to know right from wrong. Popular notions of Hitler as “the carpet chewer,” the thrower of frothing fits, a man not in control of himself but in the grip of some madness, suggest he is someone to be pitied rather than reviled, someone who could have been rescued by therapeutic intervention.

  To these mental-illness theories can be added a strain of explanation that attributes Hitler’s state of mind to a physical illness, thus removing him even further from conscious culpability. One of the most seriously argued recent versions of these might be dubbed, in view of the Oliver Sacks title: the encephalitic “awakening” hypothesis about Hitler.

  A 1975 paper in the Journal of Operational Psychiatry, “Hitler’s Encephalitis: A Footnote to History,” reviewed the widespread reports of “post encephalitic sociopathy” in the medical literature of the 1920s and 1930s, when the phenomenon began to show up. A number of English and European physicians had noted profound personality changes in war veterans who had been stricken with Epidemic Encephalitis in the trenches. Years after they had recovered from the physical symptoms of the disease, they suddenly began to manifest disturbing personality shifts. The literature of the time used terms such as “moral insanity” and “moral imbecility” to describe these post-encephalitic sociopaths. They also noted that these sociopaths weren’t classic loners but often were possessed of a manic charisma. The journal cites a 1930 article, “Zur Kriminalitaet der Encephalitiker” in Acta Psychiatrica, for instance:

  The post encephalitic moral imbecile is often possessed of cleverness and brilliance . . . an exceedingly plausible and ready liar . . . devoid of all moral and altruistic feelings . . . knows neither shame nor gratitude . . . [displays] viciousness and maliciousness with a gloating over the misfortunes of others . . . a coldly egotistical, vengeful, base, vile impertinence . . . truly explosive outbursts . . . criminal actions . . . wanton destructiveness . . . murder . . . arson . . . mythomania . . . cruelty as well as fraud . . . malicious denunciations . . . grandiloquent and ecstatic states . . . inclination to lie . . . to confabulate past adventures . . . to simulate and deceive.

  The author of the 1975 paper is convinced he’s found The Answer: He’s explained Adolf Hitler’s charismatic political persona as product of reawakened disease. However dubious that conclusion, the doctor’s list of symptoms captures uncannily well the central contradiction in attempts to explain the duality of Hitler’s thought-world: the apparently simultaneous presence of spell-like, unconscious possession (“explosive outbursts . . . ecstatic states”) and conscious calculation, cynical manipulation—a dichotomy that the two great English-language Hitler biographers, Alan Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper, have debated for decades after Hitler’s death.

  The 1975 review article takes seriously the notion that Hitler’s charisma, the spectacular mass appeal that transformed him from obscure grumbler in the trenches to world-bestriding conqueror, was the product of an infection: “The newly acquired charisma made such individuals, if as gifted, able and ambitious as Hitler, a mortal but as yet unfathomable danger to society.” An unfathomable danger but in some ways a more comforting, easier-to-live-with one. The germ theory of Hitler suggests that the source, the magnitude of evil manifested in him, comes not from his humanness (thus implicating ours) but from an external microbial intervention. Unfathomable evil becomes, if not fathomable, diagnosable—indeed, perhaps curable, or at least preventable. The encephalitic-sociopath theory of Hitler is a paradigm of explanation as consolation: the impulse to find a way to avoid facing the possibility that Hitler chose to be who he was, that he was a deliberate perpetrator rather than a victim.

  But encephalitis is not the only microbe to have been diagnosed as the true explanation of Hitler’s criminal derangement. One of the most curious and revealing Hitler explanation quests has been Simon Wiesenthal’s persistent if quixotic effort to explain Hitler’s psyche as the product of a case of syphilis. For decades, Wiesenthal, famed as the preeminent hunter of Nazi war criminals, tried to track down the spectral spirochete he believed responsible for Hitler with the same relentless determination he applied to tracking escaped SS men in South America.

  Wiesenthal’s devotion to this of all possible Hitler-explanation theories is puzzling at first glance, because the syphilitic explanation of Hitler, while a frequent feature of prewar rumor and speculation, had long fallen into neglect until Wiesenthal attempted to revive it in the 1980s. His persistent propagation of it is puzzling also because of the particular variant of the story he chose to pursue: one in which the putative source of Hitler’s infection was not just a prostitute in the Viennese lower depths (as in some versions of the story) but a specifically Jewish prostitute. Her Jewishness then becomes Wiesenthal’s explanation for the elusive grail of Hitler studies—the origin of his anti-Semitism. And the syphilis—the mentally deranging effects of the final, tertiary stage of the disease—becomes the source of the deranged virulence of his Jew-hatred. Which makes Wiesenthal’s syphilitic-Hitler theory an example of both the Hitler-as-victim trend and the concurrent tendency to find a Jew to explain his derangement.

  But Wiesenthal was deadly serious in his search for the source of Hitler’s putative syphilis. He first heard about the story, he says, from a now-deceased expatriate Austrian doctor who told him that he’d known another doctor from Austria whose father might have actually treated Hitler for syphilis. While the thirdhand evidence for the truth of this is sketchy at best, the evidence for the existence of a Jewish prostitute who had sex with Hitler is nearly nonexistent. Yet Wiesenthal seems to abandon the strict standards for evidentiary identification he applies even to despised war criminals to convict—virtually to create—this alleged Jewish whore. How does he know she was Jewish? Even if the source was Hitler (perhaps in a statement to the phantom doctor), must we take his word here? Is she supposed to have identified herself as Jewish to him in the act? But Wiesenthal accepts it and even suggests it as an explanation for another unresolved mystery in Hitler’s biography: the mysterious death of his half-niece Geli Raubal. She killed herself, Wiesenthal told one writer, because Hitler infected her with the syphilis he’d gotten from the supposititious Jewish prostitute.

  Consider these other instances of what seems to be the proliferation of Jewish suspects singled out by various explainers as the true source of Hitler’s metamorphosis, most often as the true origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

  Among them we find:

  The Seductive Jewish Grandfather Explanation: The conjecture, which has been the subject of a bitter, unresolved debate among historians and biographers for four decades now, that Hitler believed a spectral Jewish seducer impregnated his paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, fathering Hitler’s father and engendering in Hitler a pathological fear that he was poisoned by “Jewish blood”—and a need to exterminate that doubt by exterminating the Jews.

  The Seductive Jewish Music Teacher Theory: The belief that the true cause of his half-niece Geli Raubal’s death was Hitler’s discovery that she was engaged to or impregnated by a figure variously described as a “Jewish music teacher” or “a Jewish violinist” she met in Vienna, whereupon Hitler either drove her to suicide or had her murdered. The corollary of which is that grief or guilt for he
r death led to his transformation into a grim murderous figure obsessed with vengeance against the Jews. In other words, to parody this interpretive tendency: After Geli’s death, it was No More Mr. Nice Guy.

  The Bungling Jewish Doctor Theory: The belief that the defining trauma of Adolf Hitler’s life was the agony of his mother’s death in 1907 when he was eighteen, an agony Hitler witnessed firsthand, an agony caused and prolonged, some believe, by the well-meaning but misguided ministrations of Dr. Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor whose alleged malpractice, in one caricature of this explanation, “caused the Holocaust.”

  Of course, Hitler’s own deeply disingenuous effort to trace the origin of his anti-Semitism to a single Jew should not be neglected. In Mein Kampf he claims that until he came to Vienna in 1907, when he was eighteen, he had little or no contact with Jews and that he looked upon anti-Semitism as a rather vulgar, déclassé prejudice. Until a kind of revelatory, visionary conversion experience: his first sight of, he asks us to believe, or the first time he came face-to-face with, an Ostjuden, an Eastern European Jew in shtetl garb: “Once, as I was strolling through [Vienna’s] Inner City,” he tells us, “I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black earlocks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought . . . but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?”

  The claim that this shocking apparition, this one Jew, suddenly, powerfully jolted him, opened his eyes to some truth about Jews, into seeing them, as he hadn’t before, as alien and threatening—impelled him into searching out the dark truth about their malign influence on the world in anti-Semitic literature—does not survive close examination. It seems, in fact, to be a forged, retrospective construct designed to give the impression that there was some powerful, unmistakable, intrinsic evil essence emanating from this Jew that shocked Hitler into awakening out of a previous innocence about Jews in general. When, in fact, the scholar Helmut Schmeller has pointed out the presence in Linz, where Hitler had spent his youth before Vienna, of a rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper, the Linzer Fliegende Blätter, which featured malicious caricatures of caftaned and earlocked Jews. It’s likely, then, that, had there been any such first encounter in Vienna, it would have been construed, seen through the lens of Hitler’s previous familiarity with sinister caricatures of Ostjuden.