Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The use of legal rhetoric, the language of trial courts, to describe this ongoing investigation is not my invention. In a survey of the debate over “The Holocaust as a Challenge to Belief” that appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, we find the terms “indictment,” “liability,” “perpetrator,” “complicity,” “aiding and abetting” used in regard to God’s role—as well as a remarkable line about “the spectator defense of God.” The spectator defense, the legal strategy used by “good Germans” who said they didn’t participate, they only stood by while the crimes were being perpetrated, has been attacked by Elie Wiesel and others who believe those who watched passively were just as guilty of murder as those who pulled the triggers. Therefore, the spectator defense, the Academy of Religion analyst remarks, “does not remove God from the dock” (emphasis added).

  God in the dock: On trial is not God’s existence—this is, for the most part, a more interesting controversy than the old one about whether God is “dead”—but his character, potency, and responsibility for the malignancy, the “radical evil” of Adolf Hitler.

  What Emil Fackenheim does is attempt to vindicate a continued if altered Jewish relationship to God in the light of the indictment against him framed by Yehuda Bauer. Fackenheim concedes the validity of the indictment by attacking the adequacy of any other Hitler explanation, other than one that places responsibility on God’s doorstep. But he does not concede the verdict.

  “How do you explain a person anyway?” Fackenheim asked me after we’d settled ourselves into the patio chairs on the veranda of the small apartment in Jerusalem he shares with his second wife and their eleven-year-old son.

  It was a hot June afternoon and Fackenheim, then an energetic sixty-seven, was dressed in Bermuda shorts, polo shirt, and sandals, looking a bit like an American grandfather at a kosher bungalow colony. He was speaking about the attempt to explain Hitler. But in revealing bits and pieces over the course of the afternoon, Fackenheim explained his explanation by explaining some things about himself.

  He began with a phone call on Kristallnacht and an encounter with a playmate of Reinhard Heydrich’s. On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, Fackenheim, then a twenty-two-year-old student of Old Testament studies and post-Kantian philosophy at the University of Berlin, called his parents’ home in the north German city of Halle. “My father had been taken,” he told me. “I told my mother I was coming. I came: I reasoned that the safest place was somewhere the Gestapo has already been. I forgot that they might have tapped the wire. They listened on the phone, and the next day they came for me.”

  “What was that like?” I asked him. “A whole squad?”

  “No, no,” he says, “just two fellows came and picked me up.”

  They took him to Sachsenhausen, the newly constructed concentration camp outside Berlin. It was there, Fackenheim has written, the SS invented what he calls “the groundwork of Auschwitz,” the fictive “work battalions” that maintained a transparently false illusion that the camps were about work. Not that they succeeded in disguising the darker fate: “The fiction was still maintained even when the secret was out,” Fackenheim says, making it “a Kafkaesque system in which there appeared to be meaning [but] was none. . . . Thus, a clear line of development leads from . . . Sachsenhausen in 1938 to the incredible and unprecedented legend on the gate of Auschwitz”—Arbeit macht Frei (Work will make you free).

  It is interesting he should single out as the essence of the cruelty of the camps the enforcement of meretricious meaning: false explanation. It was there in Sachsenhausen that his lifelong distrust of deceptive explanation was born. As an illustration of the easy explanatory truisms he detests, he cites the commonplace sentiment about “the Hitler within” he encountered not long after his escape from Germany.

  In 1939, he’d been released from Sachsenhausen and obtained an exit visa to Canada before the doors slammed shut on the Jews in Germany. He completed rabbinical studies in Canada, and it was as a fledgling rabbi that he first encountered the “Hitler within” explanation. “I was asked to speak to an interfaith group about Hitler,” he told me. “To support the war effort. And the thing that struck me as being pretty terrible—here we are at war, and these nice Christian ladies would come and say, ‘There is a Hitler in all of us.’ They’d say, ‘Christians are bound to say this. When we see other people’s sins we look at our own sins.’ I wanted to avoid just this,” he says. “It just isn’t true.”

  “It just isn’t true”: Fackenheim’s conviction, one that he elaborates on in his theory of “radical evil,” is that one cannot find an explanation for the horror perpetrated by Hitler on the familiar continuum of human nature. To say that Hitler was just a very, very, very bad man (or as Alan Bullock would have it, an incompletely good one) and that some version of that same badness, one that differs only in degree, is to be found in ourselves, diminishes the radical evil Hitler represented. Such evil cannot be explained, Fackenheim insists, by his having had a very, very, very mean father, or a very, very extreme manifestation of the same inclination to evil that is in all of us.

  Fackenheim’s strong reaction to the “Hitler within” argument is at the heart of what has become a radical stance that has defined one pole of the debate over explaining Hitler: that there is a radical disjuncture between human nature and Hitler nature—a disjuncture with human nature akin to the one that Fackenheim and others later came to insist obtained between the Holocaust itself and the rest of human history.

  Even more radical was a subsequent decision Fackenheim made: twenty years of silence. Shortly after the war, after the magnitude of the tragedy became apparent, Fackenheim decided that to speak or write about Hitler, even to mention his name, could only magnify him, give him a posthumous life. And so, for twenty years, while becoming a much-laureled professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, while publishing a much-admired synthesis of Hegelian philosophy and twentieth-century Jewish theology, he maintained a determined silence on the twentieth-century Jewish tragedy, believing that to discuss Hitler was somehow to perpetuate him, that to speak his name was to broadcast an incantation of radical evil.

  Then, in 1967, in the tense run-up to the Six-Day War, Fackenheim changed his mind and changed his life. The specter the possible destruction of the state of Israel raised of a second Holocaust convinced Fackenheim he needed to break his silence on the meaning of the first—on the implications of the radical evil it had introduced to the world. It was that year that he formulated the now widely known “614th commandment,” the single sentence for which he has become most famous, the “post-Holocaust commandment” regarding Hitler, which Fackenheim felt compelled to add to the traditional 613 rules of worship and conduct in the Orthodox Jewish canon. He phrased it this way: “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.”

  Later in our conversation, he would disclose the deeper role this commandment plays in the trial of God. Back then, however, in 1967, he decided that one practical way to fulfill the mandate of the commandment was to uproot himself from his comfortable Canadian exile, move to Jerusalem, and begin to study Hitler.

  The immediate cause of his decision was an exchange of letters with writer Terrence Des Pres. Des Pres is the author of The Survivor, about the experience of the death camps. “I wrote him a letter in which I said it’s a wonderful book,” Fackenheim tells me, “but it’s only half the story.”

  “Half the story?”

  “The story of the survivors is half. But I told him now you have to write a book about the [something].”

  “About the what?” I said, not making out his last word because of his still-pronounced Central European accent.

  “About the criminals! The Nazis, the murderers!” he exclaimed, looking at me to see if I was deaf. “You know, Hitler!”

  But really knowing Hitler was a kind of peril, Des Pres warned Fackenheim.

  “He wrote me that the way to try to understand them is to identify with
them. And the danger is you might like them—no, become like them. So he said he refused to write about the criminals as a lot of people have. And one particularly shocking case is that fellow David Irving, who wrote volumes about Hitler’s war because he sympathized. This is the danger, once you try to explain it.”

  If there’s a peril to empathy, a danger of explanation, the counterpart, he told me, “is the danger of objectivity. If you try to explain it clinically like Hannah Arendt does . . . the more you detach yourself—you can collect all the objective facts you want and explain less and less.” He cited a “good German historian [Jäckel] who has a chapter which refers to ‘the biological insanity of the Nazis.’ That explains absolutely nothing! Insanity is the smallest explanation of what went on.”

  How then does one—how then did Fackenheim—avoid this Scylla and Charybdis of empathy and objectivity?

  “You have to make a double move,” he told me.

  A double move?

  Fackenheim then introduced a remarkable notion that reveals, if nothing else, how fraught the very idea of explaining Hitler is for him and for us. “There has to be an epistemological rejection, a resistance to explanation,” he insists.

  The double move then: Use the technique of empathy to understand the processes that produce evil in Hitler but at the same time resist the idea that an explanation can explain away his personal responsibility for evil.

  “I read people like the Auschwitz commandant [Rudolf] Höss,” he says by way of example (Höss is the author of memoirs called Death Dealer). “Höss is full of self-excuses, and all of them are lies, but I’m not sure whether he’s conscious of the fact they’re lies.”

  But resisting the “sincerity” of Höss’s self-explanation was just a warm-up, he told me. “Then, finally, with a deep breath, I read Mein Kampf.”

  In fact, Fackenheim does not sound as if he experienced much difficulty in finding reasons to resist empathy with the Hitler of Mein Kampf. He seems to have first seized on Hitler’s claim to be what Fackenheim really is, a philosopher in the grand tradition: Hitler’s assertion in Mein Kampf that he possessed what post-Kantian German philosophy exalts above all else—a weltanschauung, a comprehensive, philosophically consistent worldview.

  “The book is all so self-inflating,” Fackenheim says contemptuously. But especially so “when he says he found his weltanschauung in Vienna. What does this mean? How did he find it? He became suddenly a philosopher in his own mind and a kind of philosopher that has a weltanschauung and everything fits. Never again would Hitler doubt.”

  But Fackenheim’s certainty on this question is not shared by all Hitler explainers. The issue of whether Hitler did have a coherent worldview—an ideology if not a weltanschauung—has, like every other issue in Hitler studies, become a battleground. The seventies saw the emergence of two opposed schools of Hitler explanation. There was the “psychohistorical,” which explained Hitler’s actions as pathological irrationality, the product of mental disease if not madness. And there was the “ideological” school, which attempted to demonstrate that Hitler’s actions could be construed as “logical,” in the sense that they proceeded from a coherent structure of beliefs, a weltanschauung, and responded to a coherent if wicked analysis of actual German historical realities and an accurate assessment of the sentiments of the German populace.

  Many of those who attempt to make this case are German Hitler explainers, but not all. J. P. Stern, for instance, the Czech-born British historian (who heard Hitler as a boy in Munich and escaped to England with his Jewish family in 1938) is one of those who took issue with Fackenheim’s dismissal of Hitler’s intellectual pretensions. In Hitler: The Führer and the People (1974), Stern contended, “the attempt to offer a fuller understanding of the Hitler myth does involve a new look at his intellectual equipment. With fuller evidence of his studies in Vienna and Munich it becomes clear that (to quote Bullock’s phrase) to speak of Hitler as a ‘moral and intellectual cretin’ is no longer justified.”

  There is still a gulf, of course, between saying Hitler is not an intellectual cretin and crediting him with a coherent philosophical worldview, but Fackenheim has no doubt on that question: He calls the notion Hitler had a weltanschauung “a transparent lie.”

  But the big lie in Mein Kampf, the biggest lie about Hitler, Fackenheim believes, is the one he told about himself and the Jews. Not the obvious lies about Jewish evil—no, this was one of those moments in my conversation with Fackenheim in which one of his observations pulled the rug out from under certain familiar ways of thinking about Hitler to reveal not a floor but an abyss of uncertainty beneath; it occurred to me that this is why people used to pay attention to philosophers.

  He broached the subject of the biggest lie by recalling something once said about Hitler’s final words, his deathbed testament, which Fackenheim believes was actually his final, defining lie. “You know Robert Waite’s book?” he says, referring to Waite’s psychohistorical study, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. “It’s a very good book,” Fackenheim told me, “but I think he made a few mistakes. One thing Waite says is, ‘Nobody goes to his death with a lie.’”

  “Nobody goes to his death with what? . . .”

  “With a lie!” (What Waite actually wrote is that the deathbed testament is the “quintessential Hitler.”)

  Waite, Fackenheim explains, makes this remark in discussing Hitler’s famous final testament, the one he wrote in the bunker before his suicide, the one in which, even in the midst of the destruction he’d brought upon his own people with his war against the Jews, Hitler enjoins them and their successors to continue the war to the death with the “eternal poisoners of the world,” the Jews.

  “So, therefore, since Hitler went to his death with his famous testament of hating Jews, that must have been the true Hitler. But it’s completely false! . . . I mean, it may be the case . . . [But] it may have been that Hitler, who posed all his life, who could never believe anything until he had the crowd before him to cheer him, went to his death like an actor. For posterity.”

  In other words, Hitler’s deathbed testament was a big lie to maintain his pose of authenticity, the pose as a crusader who died for a passion he believed in, rather than a failed opportunist who believed in nothing but his own ambition and used Jew-hatred to advance it.

  Hitler as actor. Actor as in liar/cynic/mountebank, whose biggest lie was that the apparent utter authenticity of his passion, which J. P. Stern calls the source of his appeal, was never real, only calculated. Hitler as an Iago whose “motiveless malignancy” was all cynically manipulative sleight of hand, not even faintly “redeemed” by a sincerity, however pathological.

  “Look at his marriage,” Fackenheim continues. “His wedding half an hour before his death. What does that mean? It was all a performance,” says Fackenheim, who later told me he “had no doubt” Hitler was “a strange sexual pervert.” The deathbed marriage was then also a lie, “theatrical from beginning to end.”

  I asked the implicit question: “Are you saying he didn’t even believe in his anti-Semitism?”

  “I don’t think he knew the difference between acting and believing.”

  He goes on to recall a detail from one of the Hitler-crony memoirs, the fact that “Hitler would pose before a mirror before his speeches.” He cites footage of an early rally in which “Hitler started out with a questioning look, and then he gets sincere approval, and then relaxes and smiles. Here was a man who was considered a nobody when he was with private people, especially women. And became a big god in front of the masses.”

  The public Hitler, he maintains, was a joint creation of actor and audience. “Of course,” Fackenheim adds in a devastating fillip, “it’s a shocking thing to consider that six million Jews were murdered because of an actor.”

  What I found particularly shocking coming from Fackenheim was not just his belief that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews wasn’t sincere but his almost casual dismissal of any certainty on the question.
The deathbed testament is “completely false,” he said first, and then added, “It may be the case.” In other words, we have no basis for knowing one way or the other. For the foremost post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher and theologian to assert that after a half century we still can’t come even to this basic conclusion about Hitler’s thought-world was stunning enough when I first heard it that afternoon in Jerusalem. But it was only a year later, after a third reading of the transcript of my talk with Fackenheim, that I began to understand what was really behind the black-humored irony of that remark about six million “murdered because of an actor.”

  It was Fackenheim’s ultimate effort to rescue Hitler from explanation, to preserve him for evil.

  By characterizing Hitler’s apparently implacable hatred of Jews as merely an actor’s trick, by thus denying him the “virtue” of passionate sincerity (or the pity perhaps due to a victim of a pathological mental disease), Fackenheim deflects, even derails one entire project of Hitler explanation—the focus on finding the psychological source of the white-hot virulence of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews—by contending that the passion was not white-hot but pure, cold, calculated invention.

  And, thus, all the more evil. Evil for evil’s sake, evil inexplicable by pathology or ideology and all the more inexcusable. “Radical evil”: a term Fackenheim uses to define a phenomenon that goes beyond the quantity of the victims, a new category of evil.

  While it might seem at first glance not terribly controversial to call Adolf Hitler evil, Fackenheim was the first to make me aware of a fault line in the Hitler literature: the surprising reluctance of those who have written about him to consider Hitler himself as consciously evil. The argument against explaining away evil in Hitler is central to Fackenheim. His notion of radical evil (which is not the same as Arendt’s or Martin Buber’s use of the term) differs from the traditional Jewish conception of evil, which postulates not an absolute principle but an “evil inclination” within that can be overcome. It differs from the traditional Christian conceptions of evil, which vary from defining it as nonbeing (the absence of good), to personifying evil in a demonic personage, as the prince of darkness struggling for the possession of the soul.