Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The kind of explanation that sees Nazism as merely an extreme variation of Western racism might be called the politically correct view of the origins of the Holocaust (although Browning, who buys into some of its assumptions, wouldn’t disparage it that way). It tends to broaden, to obscure the identity of the primary perpetrators and the primary victims of the Holocaust, Browning believes. Broadens it beyond German and Jew, tends to make the specific identity of the victims less relevant.

  The mainstream popularity of the Goldhagen book, with its thesis about eliminationist anti-Semitism, the all-powerful, all-explaining central model, is, Browning argues, a reaction against this scholarly tendency. A reaction that returns the focus once again to the primal duality of German and Jew.

  “People have lost their Holocaust,” Browning told me, in the supposedly sophisticated broadening explanation of contemporary scholars. “What Goldhagen is doing,” he says, using a somewhat patronizing if not deliberately offensive metaphor, “is re-ghettoizing it for them,” narrowing it to a story about Jews and the Germans, rather than about the West and the generalized Other.

  I suspect that Browning is overestimating the degree to which trends in contemporary scholarship have penetrated or even registered in mainstream popular consciousness, enough to provoke a counterreaction. Still, if it’s true, as he says, that Goldhagen’s thesis represents a kind of narrowing, my problem with it—and here is where displaced revenge might make itself manifest—is that Goldhagen does not narrow things enough. The eliminationist aspect of his thesis that troubles me most is its virtual elimination of Hitler from it.

  By portraying the German people as pregnant with inevitable, inexorable murder, by reducing Hitler to a marginal midwife role, Goldhagen’s thesis does what Browning’s more sophisticated explainers seemed to be doing: attributing the crime to an irresistible abstraction that overwhelmed ordinary Germans. In effect, he makes the perpetrators themselves a kind of victim—victims of ideological poisoning which robbed them of the power to resist, robbed them of agency, of choice, any possibility of pursuing another—any other—course than the one they’d been driven to. They weren’t following the orders of a Hitler, but, like Hitler, they were driven by the “orders” of an abstract impersonal idea that deprived them—deprived even Hitler—of responsibility and thus of culpability.

  Goldhagen’s insistence on the inevitability of the Holocaust—“if not Hitler someone like him”—on the irresistibility of the impersonal force that compelled ordinary Germans to do its bidding and made the genocide unavoidable, is challenged further by an illuminating recent book about the circumstances of Hitler’s takeover. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, by Yale’s Henry Ashby Turner, is a close examination of the political maneuvering in January 1933, the month that ended with Hitler being called to the chancellorship by Hindenburg.

  Turner follows Bullock’s footsteps in examining in telling detail just how precarious, contingent, that end result was—the extent to which Hindenburg’s fateful decision to call upon Hitler was the product of unpredictable factors of chance and personality, rumor and accident, rather than the inevitable product of historical abstractions. Turner focuses in particular on the rivalry between General Kurt von Schleicher, the manipulative chancellor in power before Hitler, and the even more manipulative ex-chancellor Franz von Papen, who maneuvered Hitler into power in the mistaken belief that he, Papen, would be the one pulling the strings (perhaps the single worst miscalculation, in every respect, in twentieth-century history).

  Turner’s account emphasizes just how much Hitler’s January 1933 nomination as chancellor was (as Yehuda Bauer put it) due more to his electoral failure two months earlier in November 1932, to his perceived slippage, to the (very real) sense that the forces of history were leaving him behind. Such a perception made him seem less threatening, more manageable to those like Papen who schemed to get him into the job as their cat’s-paw. Hitler’s triumph, Turner argues persuasively, was far from inevitably determined by historical forces and central models and the like: “To explain Hitler’s acquisition of power in deterministic terms is to rule out the question of responsibility for that disastrous development,” Turner writes. “If his appointment as chancellor was the inexorable result of impersonal forces beyond the control of the individuals involved, then it would obviously be unjust to hold any of them responsible” (emphasis added).

  Indeed, it could be said that if that was true, it diminishes Hitler’s responsibility: He becomes a cat’s-paw of historical inevitability. And I suppose that is where displaced revenge may well enter into my preference for Turner’s own contingent vision, which makes individual schemers, flesh-and-blood immoral agents—Hitler himself—responsible for Hitler’s crimes, rather than impersonal, inexorable forces of history.

  It’s not that I don’t feel an intellectual rationale for the critiques I’ve made, in the course of this book, of abstract inevitability theories (and I’m aware that historical causation always involves a complex interaction of factors, of abstract ideas and forces as well as personal agency). But I suspect that some of my predisposition to take a critical attitude toward the more abstract class of explanation—my drive to devote a book to the questions and agendas embedded in Hitler explanations and the ways in which some seem to permit Hitler to escape—may derive from a displaced-revenge impulse. Although I wouldn’t call it revenge upon Hitler so much as doing him justice. Not so much forbidding him a posthumous victory but forbidding him a posthumous escape.

  It’s not that the name “Hitler” needs to be blackened further in the popular imagination, although there has been a strain of misguided argument about Hitler’s “greatness” that tries to separate the history-making magnitude of the man from the kind of history he was making. And there are myths still about Hitler as a kind of supply-side economic genius—the way he is supposed to have solved the German unemployment problem as soon as he came into office. One additional virtue of Henry Ashby Turner’s book is that he demolishes that myth: He points out that the massive public-works program that reduced German unemployment by a full two million in the first half of 1933 was devised by Chancellor von Schleicher and signed just forty-eight hours before he was forced out to make way for Hitler’s appointment. Hitler, with his uncanny luck, still reaps the credit for it.

  But there is a different, perhaps more insidious strain of argument that emerges in even the most sophisticated recent Hitler-centered scholarship—particularly in the moment-of-decision controversy over when and why Hitler made the choice to proceed with total extermination. This line of thought doesn’t exculpate Hitler’s decision as the product of abstract historical forces, but rather gives us a Hitler who was almost too indecisive to make the decision at all. A Hitler whose mind defies explanation because he truly did not know his mind himself. A Hitler who allows himself to be pushed and pulled by conflicting advisers, conflicting forces of expediency, military exigency, and uncertain conviction. A Hitler who postpones for as long as possible making up his mind on the Final Solution. A figure I’ll examine in the following chapter. One who might be called, in caricatured terms, the Hamlet Hitler, or even the nebbish Hitler.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

  In which the dithering, Hamlet Hitler of Christopher Browning meets the contemptuous, laughing Hitler of Lucy Dawidowicz

  Did Adolf Hitler feel shame about his decision to murder the Jews? Is it possible to conceive of a Hitler capable of shame? Did he feel trepidation, doubt? Was he scared? These are some of the questions that emerged in my conversation with Christopher Browning about his account of Hitler’s decision. An account that represents the cutting edge of much contemporary scholarship on the question, scholarship that has given us the nebbish Hitler, the Hamlet Hitler, a Hitler who could not make up his mind.

  The question of Hitler’s “shame” emerged when I attempted to explore with Browning his surprising use of the word “enormity.” Less as a descrip
tion of the murder of the Jews than as an attempt to describe Hitler’s feeling—his trepidation, his personal apprehension—about his decision to murder the Jews, as Browning conceived it. I’d asked Browning where he stood in the touchstone dispute between Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock over Hitler’s “sincerity.”

  “I think he was a true believer,” Browning told me. “That he does believe Jews were the source of all evil in the world. But I also think he was aware of the enormity of what he was doing, and so what you get in fact is a kind of series of hesitations. My tracing of the final decision to go over the brink in the fall of 1941 shows that this is not a big-bang decision. That there are, in fact, a series of decisions. And that there is even hesitation at the end.”

  It’s an end, a final decision Browning still wants to place much later than even some of his “moderate functionalist” fellow scholars. One senses that in his heart of hearts Browning doesn’t see Hitler in his heart of hearts ever truly reconciled to the “enormity” of the decision. He sees a Hitler always shying away, retreating from the decision: Hitler as Hamlet.

  “People in August 1941 have come to Hitler and said ‘Can we begin the deportations?’” Browning is telling me. “And Hitler says, ‘No, not until the war is won.’” The deportations in question are, of course, the removal of Jews “to the East,” to their death.

  “Then,” Browning says, “in the middle of September 1941, you get Himmler’s letter to [regional leader Arthur] Greiser in the Warthegau [the captured Polish territory formally integrated into the German Reich]. In that letter, Himmler says Hitler has now agreed to deport all the Jews by the end of the year. You see, before that, both Heydrich and Goebbels have gone to Hitler in August and said, ‘Can’t we begin the deportations [of the Jews in Germany to the East]?’ Hitler says, ‘No, not yet.’ But finally, on September 18, you get the letter from Himmler to Greiser [signaling Hitler’s assent to deportation]. In the recent article by Peter Witte, he traces Hitler’s decision to the weekend of September 16 to 17.”

  Browning makes a bow to the notion of Witte’s article establishing a kind of end point for Hitler’s decision-making process—an end point for those who believe he was having trouble making up his mind. But clearly Browning believes the process of hesitation, of dithering, did not end even then, on that fateful weekend: “Himmler and others meet with Hitler that weekend. The meeting takes place at east-front headquarters. The letter to Greiser follows. The letter to Greiser may appear to be unequivocal. In it, Himmler informs Greiser, ‘The Führer wishes that the Old Reich and Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from West to East as quickly as possible.’”

  But having said the weekend before the Greiser letter was the moment of decision, Browning begins to adduce evidence of further hesitation, further wavering after that supposedly decisive weekend of September 16–17.

  The following weekend, Browning points out, “Hitler meets with Himmler and Goebbels and Heydrich on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth [of September 1941]. He says he wants to clear the cities out [of Jews]. We can begin as soon as the military situation clarifies. He’s still hesitating! Even after Kiev falls, after the complete encirclement of Vitebsk and Bryansk on October 6, Hitler says we can go ahead with this—as soon as we have the transportation. In other words, even after he’s supposedly made the decision, he still seems to be hesitating. . . . In principle he’s agreed, but he still hasn’t given the green light to implement it. The decisions are piecemeal ever since he begins talking about a ‘war of destruction’ with Goebbels in February [1941]. The final green light doesn’t seem to come until October 10.

  “My sense,” Browning concludes, “is he hedges and he wants to [begin exterminating the Jews], but it’s not a big-bang goal; it’s this extraordinary slow process of edging up to the brink.”

  At this point, I tried to probe what Browning considered the source of these hesitations; was he suggesting a Hitler contending with a conscience? “You say it’s a sense of the ‘enormity’ of the decision. ‘Enormity,’ you know, has two meanings: magnitude, bigness, and also great, horrific transgressiveness, right?” I asked him.

  “Well, those two are not mutually exclusive. But enormity, here it does seem to mean it was not a casual decision. It was not a decision he had set out long before, as others say, so that when the opportunity came, he just said, ‘Go with it.’ It’s a decision, I think, he didn’t make until he was confident of the victories in hand, thinks there’s no more inhibitions in the way, so he really can turn fantasy into reality. The enormity inheres into the fact he realizes this isn’t an everyday decision, this isn’t like the Nuremberg Laws. I mean, even the earlier decision to approve the systematic mass murder of the Russian Jews by setting up the Einsatzgruppen [special killing squads]—they get vague orders.

  “My feeling is that they’re told . . . Everybody who goes to Russia knows they’re not going to get in trouble for killing Jews, but there isn’t an explicit order saying kill every last Jew down to women and children. You can kill Jews and communists, you can kill Jews in party and state positions, but no one quite yet says, ‘Kill every last Jew. Down to the infants.’ And that signal seems to come in mid-July 1941 when Hitler gives this euphoric speech about [how] we’re going to turn this land into a Garden of Eden.

  “And my feeling is that at that point, he turns to Himmler and says, ‘My dear Heinie, what about the rest of them? Would it be possible?’ And Himmler goes back and has to create a feasibility study. This is what the Göring letter basically says. You know, when Heydrich goes in to Göring, the Göring Auftrat [memo/order] at the end of July then says, ‘You’re authorized to draw up the study to coordinate things and to come back to me with a plan as soon as possible.’ This isn’t an order. This is an authorization to draw up a plan.”

  “My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?” There is something arresting about Browning’s evocation of a Hitler pleading, imploring, overwhelmed by the magnitude of a dawning opportunity to realize a dream he’d never dared contemplate, yet humbled by the vast implications and consequences. “My dear Heinie . . .” Here is the voice of the nebbish Hitler brought to life. A kind of comic-pathetic Hitler, almost a comic-opera Hitler.

  “My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?” Browning’s Hitler is a man of Hamlet-like procrastination. “There are these hesitations, there is this uncertainty,” he says. “And then there’s this ‘Yes, but,’ this ‘Yes, if only,’ and finally—’Yes.’” He makes it sound like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of graduated surrender to a longed-for, yet feared, final yes.

  “Now, what does that mean?” Browning asks me. “To me, that means there was hesitation. There was . . .” He pauses and hesitates himself, not willing to go over the threshold to attributing it to self-doubt or scruples of conscience. “ . . . a sense that in the end he was scared of what he was doing. Now I interpret that as he didn’t think it was wrong, but he was aware that he was now doing something that had never been done before. Stepping into new territory. Could it be done?”

  My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?

  “It’s in that sense I use the word ‘enormity,’ not was it right or wrong—because he ultimately believed it was right—but could it actually be done?”

  “You’re suggesting his trepidation is not moral but—?”

  “Well, part of it’s logistical and practical—will it work?—you know, in August of 1940 he had to call off the euthanasia program because of popular reaction against it. So he can’t not be aware there might be some problems: Will the German people do it? Will others do it? Will he reach a point [where] others don’t rush to do it anymore? And what he finds out, unfortunately, is that they do rush to do it. And that is one of the most humanly devastating things about this, that where there ought to have been a bump in the road, there doesn’t appear to have been one. But he couldn’t have known that, given what had happened with the euthanasia program.

  “So he had to be concerned about
that: Can he in fact carry this off? I think that—imagining here again—he must also have realized that this, in a sense, was going to define his destiny. This was how Hitler was going to go down in history. And it must have been intoxicating in one sense, but it had to have been scary on the other hand.”

  Scary? Trepidation? Hesitation and doubt? Is this der Führer or Hitler, Prince of Denmark? There are (at least) two troubling aspects of Browning’s vision of the nebbish Hitler, beyond its problematic status as a historical portrait of Hitler’s hesitant inwardness.