CHAPTER 4
H. R. Trevor-Roper: The Professor and the Mountebank
In which a historian’s exposure to the Hitler spell prompts a suggestion of possession, and we find, in Hitler’s own “Hitler diary” hoax, his defining lie
The death sentence was postmarked Lisbon. Hugh Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre) remembers that detail well. Recalling it one autumn evening, in front of a fireplace in an upstairs common room of the Oxford-Cambridge Club on Pall Mall, he treats the threat, which he received not long after the 1947 publication of The Last Days of Hitler, as an amusing footnote now, although he seems to have taken it seriously at the time.
“It was from the Stern Gang,” he says, the Zionist underground guerrilla group that had demonstrated its seriousness by assassinating Mideast mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. The death sentence was their way of expressing their disapproval of Trevor-Roper’s vision of Hitler in The Last Days, he believes.
But it was more than a footnote, it was a signal, a symbol of how highly charged Hitler explanations were to become in the postwar period. And of what was really at stake: the nature of Hitler’s posthumous survival.
Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler is not only one of the most famous and influential postwar Hitler books—still in print a half-million copies and a half century later—it was one of the first. And it was the work of a man whose superb intellect would destine him to rise to perhaps the most prestigious post in his field, Regius Professor of Modern History, at Oxford. And so the narrow time frame of the title is somewhat misleading: While the last days in the Berlin bunker are the focus, in fact Trevor-Roper’s book offers a comprehensive vision of Hitler. A mode of explanation that constitutes one of the two opposing poles of Hitler interpretation in the first decades after the war. Poles that might be designated the Romanticist and the Classicist, or perhaps the Gothic and the Ironic. Visions of Hitler as monster or mountebank, believer or cynic, possessed or manipulator—these are some of the oppositions expressed in the dueling visions of Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock, two of the most highly respected pillars of the historian’s profession. An almost irreconcilable opposition until recently, as we’ll see, when Bullock shifted his position in a crucial way and produced a synthesis of the previous thesis and antithesis he and Trevor-Roper represented.
Trevor-Roper’s Last Days began as an intelligence mission. In September 1945, Soviet officials began deliberately to spread the lie that Adolf Hitler was still alive, perhaps even being harbored in the British zone of occupation in Berlin for nefarious future purposes. The Soviet decision to resurrect Hitler, one of the first harbingers of the bitterness of the embryonic cold war, fed what has come to be called “the survival myth,” the belief that Hitler had escaped alive from the bunker in Berlin in which his body was first reported to have been found. The confirmation of Hitler’s death had come first from Soviet troops, but the decision to spread the survival myth came from Stalin himself.
In any case, British intelligence took upon itself the task of establishing once and for all that Hitler was dead. Sir Dick White, then deputy director of MI6, dispatched Hugh Trevor-Roper to Berlin. Trevor-Roper brought to the task the skills of the professional historian and the abilities of an intelligence analyst familiar with the figures in the German high command through his wartime work monitoring the anti-Hitler elements among them.
Trevor-Roper proceeded to document meticulously the days, hours, and minutes of Hitler’s final months in the bunker from the eyewitness testimony of officers and aides who were there, including those who’d soaked the dead body with kerosene and set it on fire. He also succeeded in discovering—perhaps in rescuing from oblivion—a profoundly illuminating document: Hitler’s “final testament,” the one in which he enjoins his followers to continue to wage war on the Jewish “world poisoners,” a document that has become a touchstone in the debate over whether Hitler was an actor (as the theologian Emil Fackenheim argues and as Alan Bullock initially believed) or a true believer (as Trevor-Roper and Robert Waite, among others, insist) in his crusade against the Jews.
The irony of Trevor-Roper’s mission is that while he succeeded in his intelligence task, in documenting the fact of Hitler’s physical death, the book that he later wrote about Hitler’s last days ended up becoming an important source of Hitler’s metaphorical and mythic survival.
The source of this resurrection, however inadvertent and certainly unintentional on Trevor-Roper’s part, was something he discovered in the ruins of the bunker, in his interviews with the defeated followers of Hitler, something he hadn’t expected to find, a deeper mystery than whether Hitler survived: the survival of the Hitler spell. While one might have expected to encounter the power of the spell when Hitler was a demagogue on the rise or after he’d become the triumphant Führer, Trevor-Roper was surprised at the extent to which the spell still held sway even after ignominious defeat.
“Even in the bunker,” he told me, “with all the buildings of Berlin falling down on top of him. Even when he was dead, they carried out his wishes. They stayed behind—they stayed there until he was dead, and when he was dead they exposed themselves [to bombs] carrying out Hitler’s last wishes.”
“People have described this as a mesmeric power,” I said. “Do you think it’s literally mesmerism?”
“I don’t know. He certainly had an extraordinary power. It didn’t work on everybody; it didn’t work—to put it crudely—on the aristocrats or people who were sensitive to the vulgarity of his behavior or surrounding. But when he wanted to mesmerize, he did have the wherewithal.”
Despite this flash of what might seem like snobbery, Trevor-Roper is humble enough to concede that even someone who was his peer, a virtual aristocrat, could have succumbed to the spell: Albert Speer, for instance. His encounter with Speer struck him with particular force, he says, because Speer was a man for whom he felt a certain admiration, even a kind of identification.
“He wasn’t much older than me, he was only a little over forty-two at the time. I felt that we had a level conversation in which he talked to me like a rational person. He was a man highly intelligent, educated, but a man who was obviously, deeply still under Hitler’s spell. Even when Speer was out of power, when the war was lost—he’d known the war was lost since December 1943, and he regarded Hitler as having caused all the wreckage. He’d got out of Berlin on the twentieth, I think, of April [1945] and yet made a special journey back to Berlin, when it was cut off, in order to take formal leave of Hitler. And that’s an instance of the extraordinary spell which he exercises. And if you read Goebbels’s diaries, you’ll find the same. Goebbels periodically had doubt or has cold feet and becomes impatient with Hitler, and yet every time Goebbels goes back and sees Hitler, he’s spellbound. ‘Hitler’s so wonderful, he’ll pull something out of the bag. I am filled with confidence.’ Every time, right up to the very end.”
What Trevor-Roper sought to do in The Last Days was describe the spell as an inescapable fact of any account of Hitler’s life. He does not try to explain it so much as evoke it. And yet by evoking it so eloquently, he came to be accused of perpetrating, indeed of falling under, the spell, of giving it, giving the Hitler myth, a posthumous life.
Now Trevor-Roper is, in every respect, the last person one can imagine falling under some gothic romantic spell of a dead dictator. To look at him is to see skepticism elegantly embodied: From his waspish donnish demeanor (thin as a rail in his Oxbridge tweeds, with a dyspeptically skeptical squint to the brow beneath his snow-white thatch of hair) to the tart, eloquently acerbic, bone-dry ironies of his speech and the touch of world-weary cynicism he might have developed from serving in wartime British counterintelligence, he does not seem the sort to have been easily mesmerized.
But, as he says, in an essay revisiting The Last Days of Hitler in a 1988 issue of Encounter, “I have been accused of having exalted Adolf Hitler and having created a public image of him as a genius of National Socialism. Indeed,” he adds, “
of being the prime author of that myth, almost a positive successor to Dr. Goebbels” (emphasis added).
I read him that quote and asked him who had accused him of that.
“Uh, well, I was condemned to death by the Stern Gang for one thing. And it was clear that this was the assumption [they’d] based the death sentence on, I was out of their reach, of course. The sentence of death was sent to me by airmail from Lisbon. It was signed Wilhelm ben Israel.”
A sentence of death for writing a book about Hitler? It should be stressed that in no way is Trevor-Roper’s book a defense of Hitler or sympathetic to him. His distaste for Hitler and his deeds is obvious throughout. No, it’s not that he praised or exonerated Hitler but that in carrying out his mission to prove him dead, he was too successful; as a writer, he brought him back to life again.
If the Stern Gang (or whoever signed “Wilhelm ben Israel” in their name) was Trevor-Roper’s most dramatic critic, the most thoughtful and thoroughgoing critique of The Last Days of Hitler comes from Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, the author of Imagining Hitler, a study of postwar fiction featuring Hitler. Trevor-Roper, of course, is not writing fiction, but Rosenfeld argues that the dramatic, cinematic image of Hitler in The Last Days was the defining image of Hitler, the ur-Hitler for the decades of fiction that followed, and the chief source of the overheated gothic, demonic vision that has dominated postwar literature, pulp, and film.
The essence of Rosenfeld’s critique of Trevor-Roper and of his influence on the pop-culture vision of Hitler he helped create is that, in attempting to describe Hitler’s spell, the historian fell under it. In trying to explain how this happened to the respected, skeptical Oxford scholar, Rosenfeld himself seems drawn to a subdued version of the occult rhetoric of possession he criticizes in Trevor-Roper: “The fiction writer within the scholar seemed to come alive” (my emphasis), as if some dark being within was awakened by exposure to the Caligari Hitler and took possession of the otherwise scrupulously rational historian.
Rosenfeld argues that in the process of describing Hitler in his “inspired, almost celebratory prose,” Trevor-Roper “could not altogether resist the symbolic lure of his subject, and he was to contribute his share to some of the more striking aspects of the Hitler legend . . . [a] legend [that] was to be shaped . . . by a fascination with the most irrational sides of Hitler’s personality.”
The irrational sides: the mesmeric occult Svengali, the possessed, somnambulist Hitler. In describing the irrational mode of Hitler’s appeal, Rosenfeld believes, “Trevor-Roper took recourse not only to the language of biblical theology and Middle Eastern and oriental legend but to the special language of the occult sciences. Thus Hitler is described repeatedly as a ‘wizard’ and ‘enchanter,’ a leader who could command unconditional obedience from his subjects because of ‘the mesmeric influence’ he had over them.”
Rosenfeld cites in particular a Trevor-Roper description of Hitler’s hypnotic eyes, the eyes of the Caligari Hitler: “The fascination of those eyes, which had bewitched so many seemingly sober men. . . . Hitler had the eyes of a hypnotist which seduced the wits and affections of all who yielded to their power. . . . This personal magnetism remained with him to the end; and only by reference to it can we explain the extraordinary obedience which he still commanded in the last week of his life, when all the machinery of force and persuasion had disappeared . . . and only his personality remained.”
While Rosenfeld objects to Trevor-Roper’s language, I feel it’s his logic that is the real problem here. Trevor-Roper maintains that “only by reference” to Hitler’s hypnotic, mesmeric eyes can his hold on the inner circle in defeat be explained. Was it his eyes, or was it the warping effect of proximity to absolute world-shattering power? Those in Hitler’s Munich circle in the twenties—those who knew him before he came to power—often mock the self-conscious Svengali mannerisms Hitler adopted, the “penetrating” stare, the self-induced trance frenzies. Once in power, however, once at the center of the greatest drama in history, it was his armies, not his eyes, that counted. Even in defeat, he was a titan to those around him, a demigod, a celebrity beyond parallel. And those in his orbit could not help but be overcome: It was the so-called Stockholm syndrome in spades. It was not that he was nothing without his spell; they were nothing without believing it. Or worse than nothing—the gullible dupes of a defeated mass murderer. But if they kept the faith, then even in defeat, they could believe they were living out a noble Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.
That they should continue to be under the spell even after the war shouldn’t have surprised Trevor-Roper as much as it seemed to, but it did. And it was clear from my conversation with Trevor-Roper that, despite the death threat and the attacks, he has not backed down from his belief that there is something irrational at the heart of Hitler’s appeal, something not explicable by the ordinary tools and methods of rational historical and psychological analysis. The words he used to describe his belief in the failure to explain came as a jolt in the midst of the comforting firelit surroundings of his club: “Hitler remains,” he told me, “a frightening mystery.” Nor does he apologize for his resort to the language and imagery of the occult in describing Hitler, although he qualifies the connotation somewhat.
“You use the term ‘demonic’ repeatedly,” I said to him.
“By ‘demonic,’” he said, “I mean having demonic energy, having more than human power. I’m not using moral language.”
It is, then, not demonism in the sense of Satanism; it’s rather, he seems to be saying, demonic in the sense William Blake used the word: the Romantic exaltation of unbounded energy for its own sake. And by “more than human,” he’s affirming the implications of his imagery: that the “frightening mystery” of Hitler’s psyche exceeds the powers of ordinary psychological analysis to grasp.
“I despise psychohistory,” he told me, and while he has an arsenal of academic objections to it, his deeper objection may be his conviction that the psychological tools to analyze human behavior are inadequate to grasp a “more than human” Hitler.
But the thrust of Trevor-Roper’s defense against the criticism of his vision of Hitler consisted—at least in my conversation with him—of a counter-thrust: an attack on the rival school of Hitler explanation embodied by fellow Hitler biographer Alan Bullock. In fact, Trevor-Roper returned repeatedly and vigorously to what he believes is the key inadequacy of the Bullock school: the belief that Hitler can be understood by certain preexisting models of rational historical explanation.
To be fair to both Trevor-Roper and Bullock, neither Trevor-Roper nor I was aware at the time how dramatically Bullock had shifted his view of Hitler to incorporate the irrationally possessed aspect. So Trevor-Roper’s attacks on Bullock’s views are really aimed at the vision of Bullock’s first book, of the 1952 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, still (in its 1962 revised form) the single most popular and influential Hitler biography ever written.
“It’s a good book,” Trevor-Roper says, politely prefacing his critique of Bullock with mild praise. It’s the explanatory tradition it grows out of that he objects to: the mountebank adventurer vision.
“This was influential right after the war,” Trevor-Roper told me, “from Sir Louis Namier, who was a great historian and who really understood Central Europe—he was a Polish Jew. And yet after the war, he wrote an essay which was actually about Napoleon III” (the self-made adventurer who created himself Emperor of France in the mid-nineteenth century and whose Machiavellian cunning and ambition made him the target of the satire that later became the template for the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
“Namier,” said Trevor-Roper, “described Napoleon III as the first mountebank dictator, the implication being that he regarded Hitler as a mountebank dictator. And in Alan Bullock’s book, he described Hitler as an opportunist who was solely concerned with acquiring power. I felt that none of these people had read or understood Mein Kampf.”
“Mountebank”
is a word little used these days (although it does seem to be the root of the cardsharp street hustle known as “three-card monte”)—which is unfortunate because it does have an expressive power to conjure up a whole worldview, a whole thought-world as well. Derived from the old Italian phrase for “mounting on a bench,” a mountebank is defined by the OED as “an itinerant quack who from an elevated platform appealed to his audience by means of stories, tricks, juggling and the like.” More generally a mountebank is “an impudent pretender to skill, a charlatan, one who resorts to degrading means to obtain notoriety.” A mountebank is a grander, more pretentious figure than a mere con man or a charlatan—he’s a figure of public life, often a politician, one who practices his charlatanry from a public platform.
What’s essential about the mountebank characterization is the core of cynicism and manipulativeness. The mountebank may pose as a true believer, as one possessed by vision, conviction, a grand mission, but it is all “tricks, juggling and the like”—there is no real conviction. This is the actor Hitler that theologian Emil Fackenheim insists on (see chapter 16).
But the essence of Trevor-Roper’s vision of Hitler is that he was not an actor but a believer, above all else a man of conviction, however wicked those convictions were, a man who was not a cynic but horrifically “sincere.” It’s a view Trevor-Roper articulated most strikingly when I asked him whether he thought Hitler knew that his actions were evil.
“Oh, no,” Trevor-Roper said firmly. “Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude.”
Convinced of his own rectitude. One has to hear Trevor-Roper pronounce the word “rectitude” with such plenitude of rectitude himself; he almost succeeds in endowing a sincere belief in genocide with a kind of dignity. This is not intentional, of course. He certainly means—but does not feel it necessary to say—that Hitler was dreadfully, mistakenly convinced of his own rectitude. But nonetheless, sincerely, honestly convinced the Jews were the deadly enemy of the Aryan race and needed to be destroyed for the superior race to survive.
Explaining Hitler Page 16
