Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  What’s false here is not just Hitler’s teeth but the way Irving defines the two Hitlers: the true, flesh-and-blood, impressive-to-top-notch-secretaries Hitler, and the false Hitler “of Madison Avenue and Hollywood”—as if the flesh and blood of the fifty million casualties of Hitler’s war were an invention of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. A better description of the “other” Hitler would be not the Hollywood and Madison Avenue but the Dachau and Auschwitz Hitler. The bizarre logic of this attitude inheres in the allusion to Hilter’s “bad breath”—in the pretense that Irving is no slavish hero-worshiper but capable of seeing the unvarnished truth about Hilter’s flaws: not the mass murder, of course, but the poor oral hygiene.

  Here again, the question arose: Can Irving believe in the false logic of the two-Hitler argument, has he convinced himself of it? Or is he a cynical manipulator—a mountebank? The Bullock-versus-Trevor-Roper debate again, here not about Hitler but about the thought-world of his chief postwar defender. It was at this point that Irving told me a Hitler story I’ll never forget, one that may go further to explain him—and perhaps Hitler—than any I’d heard. It’s a story he heard from the woman who was his key to the Magic Circle, Christa Schroeder, a story about Hitler washing blood off himself.

  “I was talking with Christa Schroeder one morning about 2 or 3 A.M. over a bottle of wine, and she says, ‘You know, he [Hitler] could be quite cruel. I don’t think you’re right about Hitler’s Jewish problem. He could be very cruel.’ You sensed a story coming on. . . . Now, the problem with Christa Schroeder was I couldn’t take notes. If she saw a piece of paper come out she would clam right up. I had to go straight round to a café and download my brain onto a sheet of paper for hours. You can discipline yourself to do that,” Irving tells me.

  “And she said, ‘Well, you remember the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934? I was in Berlin, and the chief’—which she called him or ‘A.H.’—’phoned me and said I had to go to the Rhineland immediately to join him—something had come up. And I flew over to the Rhineland and Dr. Goebbels was there. On our way to the chief, we flew down to Munich that same night, and we drove out in his car up to Bad Weisee, and I was with him when he arrested Ernst Roehm and all the SA leaders. And I was with him when he drove back, and I remember how—how impressed I was that on the way back, he personally got out of this big supercharger and stopped the oncoming cars of the other SA generals and had them arrested, too, and no concern with the risk that he was taking. . . .

  “‘Anyway, at the end of all this bloody day, when they were going to take them up to prison to be shot, we flew back to Berlin and I’d lost sight of [Hitler] in the Chancellory for a while. And I went to the cafeteria and I got myself . . . you know it was quite late . . . but he joined me because we were both vegetarians. He came in an hour later, stood in the doorway and he says, “So Fräulein Schroeder, now I have had a bath and I am as clean as a newborn babe again.”‘”

  “‘Clean as a newborn babe’—meaning from the blood?” I asked Irving.

  “That’s right. It jangled around her brain for forty years until she found an Englishman she could repeat it to.”

  “And why did she find that particularly cruel?”

  “She found it symptomatic of the facility with which he committed mass murder,” Irving says matter-of-factly. “That he just had to have a bath and was as clean as a newborn baby.”

  “He leaves it behind in—”

  “Went down the plughole,” Irving assents enthusiastically, “like the blood in Psycho.”

  This is an astonishing story, but one I’m inclined to credit despite its source because it certainly does Hitler no credit. I’m not quite sure what Irving makes of this story, but I think it can be seen as a defining Hitler story—and a defining David Irving story. A defining Hitler story because it’s an image of Hitler in effect brandishing his own baby picture, pronouncing himself “clean as a newborn babe” and just as innocent in an utterly meretricious—almost knowingly meretricious—way: enjoying, laughing at the notion of himself as an innocent babe. Brandishing his baby picture to forge a counterfeit image of innocence, as the blood, the first trickle of oceans to come, spirals “down the plughole like the blood in Psycho.”

  And it’s a defining David Irving story because he’s made it his mission to wash the blood off Hitler’s image, to restore him to history as a (relative) innocent, certainly one innocent of the blood of genocide.

  Irving doesn’t use the image of washing blood off and newborn babes, but he does use the rhetoric of cleansing—“stone cleaning,” he calls it. One can trace his evolution from respected amateur historian to sporadic Holocaust denier in the way he redefines “stone cleaning” from erasing grime to erasing crime. The “stone cleaning” image came up when I asked Irving if his sympathetic attitude toward Hitler might be a reflection of his captivation, if not captivity, by the Magic Circle. “Is it possible there’s a kind of ‘Stockholm syndrome’ going on?” I asked him.

  He professed himself unfamiliar with the phrase; I explained its origin in the report of a Swedish bank robbery that turned into a prolonged siege after which hostages held by the robbers emerged from captivity speaking remarkably sympathetically of their captors.

  “In the same way, did they [the Magic Circle] gain your sympathy and—”

  “Oh, undoubtedly,” he said without hesitation. “Every time I’ve written a biography, you find you become close to the character you’re writing about because you’re his ambassador then. You’re his ambassador to the afterlife. Or to the next generation. And if you do your job conscientiously, then you bend over backward to do it.” After a pause, he adds, “I don’t think it should lead you to adapt an unobjective position,” although it’s hard to see how being Adolf Hitler’s self-anointed Ambassador to the Afterlife conduces to objectivity. “I think that people who say I’m whitewashing Hitler,” he continues, “or that I’m a Hitler apologist—these words I find deeply offensive. I’m stone cleaning, not whitewashing.”

  “Stone cleaning?”

  “Cleaning dirt off.” It’s an English expression which, he says, came into use after the limitations on sulphurous coal burning cleaned up London’s grime-affixing smog: “The buildings are being cleansed of sulfuric grime,” he tells me. Similarly, with Hitler, he says, “There’s been a lot of slime poured over him, both during and after the war.”

  For Irving, however, stone cleaning has meant far more than that. The turning point in the evolution of his views on the question of gas chambers and the extermination came in 1988, he tells me. Until then, he’d always adhered to the line that Hitler hadn’t ordered extermination by gas. Then he came to question whether there had been any extermination or gassing at all. The occasion was the 1988 trial of Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Irving had come to testify there had been no Führer order. But “I was shown the reports on the tests on the walls of the gas chambers at Auschwitz”—these were tests performed forty-five years after the fact by America’s self-proclaimed electric-chair expert Fred Leuchter, an engineer rather than a chemist—“and I became quite satisfied having studied forensic chemistry at university that this is an exact science and that there’s no traces of cyanide compounds in the walls of those gas chambers.” That was enough to convince him: “That was the turning point for me. That’s when we decided we had to cut the word ‘gas chamber’ out of my book.”

  Irving says he doesn’t “regard myself as a Revisionist because I’m not a Holocaust specialist.” But he seems happy to take credit for the recent high visibility of Revisionism, arguing that his claim in Hitler’s War that an absence of a written Führer order for extermination became the basis for a Revisionist view which denied that the killing process ever happened.

  “So what started out as a historical footnote in my Hitler’s War in 1977 has now become so important that prime ministers and presidents have to [denounce] it,” he says proudly. He’s proud, but surprisingly he’s also somewhat ashamed, as
hamed at least of some of the company he keeps in the Revisionist camp.

  “Let me ask you about that,” I said. “You know historians often speak of you as someone who’s dug up a remarkable number of important documents, speak of that with great respect, but—”

  “Then they say, ‘Pity he flipped’?” he asked me almost plaintively.

  “Well, they probably do say that in one way or another, but aren’t you uncomfortable with the kind of people who are drawn to support you, many of whom are not interested in evaluating this objectively but are flat-out anti-Semites who would—”

  “Yes—” he began, as our voices overlapped.

  “—would, if there was no Final Solution, have wanted one anyway?”

  To my astonishment, he said, “You’re absolutely right. The word ‘uncomfortable’ I think is an understatement. I find it odious to be in the same company as these people. There is no question that there are certain organizations that propagate these theories which are cracked anti-Semites.”

  He then proceeds to make another amazing assertion: He’s only using these “cracked anti-Semites” cynically. He plans to jettison them as soon as he can find more respectable forums.

  “What else can I do?” he said, but speak at the gatherings of these “cracked anti-Semites” for the moment. “If I’ve been denied a platform worldwide, where else can I make my voice heard? As soon as I get back onto regular debating platforms I shall shake off this ill-fitting shoe which I’m standing on at present. I’m not blind. I know these people have done me a lot of damage, a lot of harm, because I get associated then with those stupid actions.”

  Fascinating: association with cracked anti-Semites experienced by Irving as the minor discomfort of ill-fitting footwear. Fascinating as well his candor about the manipulation he claims to be practicing upon the cracked anti-Semite allies he plans to discard like an ill-fitting shoe. He’ll use them, these vile true believers, use them, manipulate them to give him a platform for his views and then when he—it’s not clear how—becomes respectable again, he’ll drop them. Why did this somehow remind me of a certain historical figure proclaiming himself “clean as a newborn babe again”? Perhaps it’s the assumption that the taint of whipping up the cracked anti-Semites will all wash off, presumably just like the blood spiraling “down the plughole” in Psycho.

  I must admit I found Irving’s reasoning difficult to take seriously; it didn’t make sense either as cynical, calculating opportunism (it seemed too pitifully transparent and inept to succeed) or as genuine, heartfelt rationalization of his behavior. I could not even find a Bullock-like synthesis of calculation and sincerity to make this argument seem coherent, especially (or because) he was confiding it to one of the “traditional enemy.” (“Traditional enemy” is Irving’s name for Jews in his Action Report newsletters, which seem to cater to his “temporary” cracked anti-Semite allies and Holocaust deniers. Therein one can find reports from enthusiastic home-experimenter Holocaust-deniers on their “scientific” experiments in which, for instance, they subject chickens and rabbits to diesel-exhaust gas in an attempt to disprove the possibility that such gases were used to kill Jews.)

  Similarly, Irving’s stance in relation to Holocaust denial has seemed to waver confusingly back and forth in the time since I encountered him in his supposed moment-of-truth deliberation over the Eichmann Führer-order revelation. In his controversial 1996 biography of Goebbels, which he was hard at work on when I spoke to him, Irving seems to argue that the Holocaust, or at least mass killings of Jews, did happen, but that it was the evil Goebbels who was more responsible than Hitler, still virtually innocent “as a newborn babe” of that blood. Or at least of deliberate killing, of premeditation.

  That was the position he maintained when he spoke to me: that there was some deliberate killing of Jews, perhaps a hundred thousand or so, but mainly wildcat, unauthorized actions in the blood heat of the fighting on the eastern front. And as for the concentration camps, they were really there for concentration, not killing. It’s a position he seems to hold in the somewhat schizoid biography of Goebbels: There was a systematic effort to eliminate Jews, but Auschwitz was not a place specifically designed to gas and kill, merely “the most brutal of all Himmler’s slave labor camps and the one with the highest mortality rate”(!).

  “What happened in the camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka,” he told me, “was not murder except in the kind of generic sense that people were sent to camps where it was likely they would die” of starvation and disease.

  “Generic murder” might qualify as one of the great evasive euphemisms of the late twentieth century. Irving makes it sound somehow less culpable than real murder, although its victims are just as dead. “There was a climate of hatred,” he concedes, against Jews. “There was an atmosphere of brutality and mass murder” on the eastern front, an “atmosphere” whose origin he prefers to attribute to Allied bombing raids on the German homeland. As a result of the “atmosphere,” there might have been a hundred thousand or so Jews killed there in spontaneous outbreaks by troops on the eastern front.

  “You wouldn’t apply the word ‘criminal’ to even one hundred thousand, or ‘evil’—”

  “Unquestionably a criminal action,” he said. “But the criminal action, to my mind, wasn’t genocide.”

  He finds an even more peculiar rationale for distinguishing the murder of Jews, even hundreds of thousands, from actual genocide. “To my mind, the crime wasn’t killing Jews. The crime was killing innocent Jews. And it was the innocence that made it a crime rather than their Jewishness that made it a crime. But this is what the word ‘genocide’ is meant to blanket out. Because as soon as you abandon the word ‘genocide’ and call it ‘innocenticide’ instead, the Jewish community would oppose that.”

  I must admit with the introduction of the “innocenticide” concept, I lost the ability to fathom what Irving was talking about.

  I tried to get past the semantics of “generic murder” and “innocenticide”: “Setting aside the name genocide—” I began.

  “The criminality is beyond doubt,” he concedes. “These are innocent people being killed. And I even take it one step further than a lot of people [presumably he means a lot of people in the Revisionist camps or a lot of his crackpot anti-Semite followers]: If somebody’s put in a camp where they’re likely to die of typhus, this, too, is a crime, even though what happened to people who died isn’t prima facie murder. Anne Frank died of typhus. She wasn’t murdered. But it’s still a crime. And if I’m writing a book about Adolf Hitler, I still have to absolve him of that particular crime. Because it wasn’t—what’s the word?—premeditated. Any more than the killing of all the people who died of starvation in Buchenwald wasn’t premeditated at the end of the war. Emaciated corpses that television loves to show us. This wasn’t premeditated. Hitler didn’t go around saying, ‘Okay, let’s emaciate these guys.’”

  But didn’t how “these guys” got there to die in the first place have something to do with Adolf Hitler? I found myself fascinated by the kind of hair-splitting Irving indulged in, always with the aim of cleansing the blood from Hitler. It was somehow important to absolve Hitler of the charge of murder in Anne Frank’s death from typhus, even though if typhus hadn’t gotten her, one of Hitler’s crematoriums would have. It was, ultimately, horrifying: It was like watching the Hitler spell in action as Irving tied himself in knots making a magic circle around the absent figure of the perpetrator, the Hitler he wants to envision “clean as a newborn babe.”

  I tried one final time. I quoted Irving’s own words to him from something he’d written in the introduction to Hitler’s War: “If this biography were simply a history of the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich, it would be legitimate to conclude: ‘Hitler killed the Jews.’ He after all created the atmosphere of hatred with his speeches, [which] even though never explicit, left the clear impression that ‘liquidate’ was what he meant.”

  “Exactly what I said to you toda
y,” Irving told me.

  “But is there a practical difference between creating the atmosphere for extermination . . . and leaving the ‘clear impression’ he wanted liquidation?”

  “Oh, I think a court can find the difference,” he said cheerfully.

  “A moral difference though?”

  “It would be rather like killing somebody by negligence,” he said. “Hitler was negligent in not realizing that this would be the outcome of his speeches. That would be one way of looking at it.”

  Holocaust by negligence; extermination as unintended consequence.

  A big “oops!” by the newborn babe.

  PART SIX

  THE WAR OVER THE QUESTION WHY

  An inquiry into “the obscenity of understanding”

  CHAPTER 13

  A Tale of Three Kafkas: A Cautionary Parable

  In which the perils of pressing a Hitler explanation too far are explored with a professor haunted by the descendants of Franz Kafka

  Kafka moved in for the kill . . .

  Kafka will not give up!

  And I said to George, “Can’t you stop Kafka?”

  Kafka will get you if it takes his last dying breath!

  Gazing at these lines I copied out of the transcript of my interview with Professor Rudolph Binion, it occurred to me that Kafka didn’t just haunt the story of Binion’s Hitler explanation, he stalked it.

  In addition to the real Franz Kafka and a mysterious lodger in Hitler’s Munich apartment named Kafka, the story features a relative of Kafka who was Hitler’s mother’s doctor; a friend of Kafka who rescued the story of Hitler’s mysterious “nerve doctor” from oblivion. And a distinguished American psychoanalyst named Kafka, also a distant relative of Franz, who has become—in Binion’s mind at least—the academic equivalent of a stalker. A Kafka who’s been hounding Binion and his supporters at scholarly conclaves, relentlessly seeking to discredit Binion’s Hitler theory—Binion’s claim to have discovered, in the coded casebook of Hitler’s mother’s Jewish doctor, the secret source of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Or, to put it in more Kafkaesque terms, the source of Hitler’s metamorphosis.