Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The first disturbing element lies in the unstated, unexpressed corollary of Browning’s nebbish-Hitler analysis: This is a Hitler who just as easily might not have gone ahead. A Hitler whose indecision could have been resolved otherwise. A Hitler who might finally have shrunk from the enormity of what he contemplated. That, in other words, even as late as October 1941, the Holocaust as we know it, in its totality didn’t have to happen!

  It does what some might have thought impossible: It makes the phenomenon of the Holocaust even more painful to contemplate because it suggests powerfully an alternate possibility: that it could just as easily have been avoided if a wavering, indecisive Hitler had wavered back rather than forth. It’s painful to contemplate because in a sense it once again puts us in Hitler’s power, in Hitler’s hands, as he purportedly weighs the possibility of the act against the enormity of it. When we hear Browning impersonate such a Hitler’s conflicted contemplation of the possibility—“My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?”—when we hear Hitler wonder if it could be done, it is in a certain sense undone, made contingent again. And then, even more sickeningly, done again.

  In fact, however, the degree to which it is more or less painful or uncomfortable to contemplate should not confirm or disqualify Browning’s Hamlet-like conception of Hitler. A better way of assessing Browning’s Hitler is to see how it holds up under challenge from a powerful rival vision of Hitler.

  The most powerful and direct challenge to Browning’s vision of Hitler and his decision comes from a predecessor, the late Lucy Dawidowicz. In her important but now somewhat neglected 1975 study, The War Against the Jews, she fastens on exactly the same language, exactly the same moments of decision, of action and inaction, that Browning sees betraying hesitation, trepidation, a sense of enormity, a sense of doubt—and comes to the opposite conclusion. She finds Hitler using “esoteric language” and euphemism to create the false impression of hesitation and calculation, a false impression that concealed an unswerving, relentless, decades-long determination to exterminate the Jews. A decision she believes he made as early as 1918, rather than the fall of 1941, where Browning puts it. A decision, finally, that Dawidowicz believes was never in doubt.

  Reading Lucy Dawidowicz after listening to Christopher Browning on the subject of Hitler’s alleged dithering is the equivalent of a therapeutic slap in the face. In forceful but carefully footnoted prose, she makes the case that those who believe Hitler had not made up his mind as late as 1941 are ignorant of the true nature of Hitler’s intentions, have been taken in by a cunning con game Hitler played on all but his innermost circle when it came to the question of the Final Solution. Her challenge to the tendency of contemporary scholarship to give us a Hitler who dithered over his decision is not one of degree, not an argument about difference of months, even years; it’s an argument over decades. But more than that, it’s an argument about Hitler’s mind.

  So much has been written about Hitler and the Holocaust, so many arguments and controversies have come and gone since the publication of Dawidowicz’s book, that the importance of her argument may have been overlooked of late, even if its thrust has not been convincingly refuted or superseded. Her argument about Hitler’s mind, about Hitler’s decision, remains an extreme but powerful conjecture against which other interpretations must be measured and tested. One of the reasons I was driven to write this chapter was to try to restore the case she makes—the vision of Hitler, the method to his madness—to the place it deserves in the forefront of the explanatory wars.

  In her vision, beneath the esoteric language of concealment—the language of trepidation and hesitation, the “My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?” that Browning hears—is not a nebbish or a Hamlet Hitler but a Hitler crafty enough to create a hesitant persona to conceal his true intent, to cloak himself in deniability: an actor Hitler scripting himself as a Hamlet of indecision while ruthlessly and decisively stage-managing the drive to extermination.

  She sees, in other words, an actor Hitler, but one who is not precisely the same kind of actor postulated by Emil Fackenheim. He saw a Hitler whose act covered up an absence of conviction (like the cynical-actor Hitler Alan Bullock initially intuited). No, for Dawidowicz, Hitler’s acting inheres not in insincerity but in disguising his sincerity—in the counterfeit of indecision, in concealing his murderous intention under a cloak of hesitant, opportunist calculation. An important difference. And what’s more, she has painstakingly reconstructed the creation of the act, the process, the method, the language of the charade. It’s an extraordinarily well crafted act, she believes, an act that still has the power to persuade and deceive today.

  The truth concealed beneath the act, she insists, with a conviction powerful and virtually unique in the literature about Hitler’s decision, is that Hitler conceived a mission to murder the Jews en masse—not drive them out, expel, harass, exile, defeat them, but murder and exterminate them—as early as November 1918, in the sanitarium at Pasewalk. Conceived it in that feverish moment he learned of the German defeat and then made it his mission to avenge the Jewish stab in the back he believed responsible. Thus, all his apparent hesitations, his zigs and zags, his doubts and trepidations, were an actor’s Machiavellian disguise—tactical shifts to further the esoteric strategy, to conceal his own responsibility.

  But before proceeding to Dawidowicz’s remarkable and powerful conception of Hitler’s mission and his method, let’s briefly look at how she came to her mission, a rather remarkable story in itself. She was, first of all, an American Jew who made an unusual reverse pilgrimage that brought her to Hitler’s Berlin in the fateful, world-shaking month of September 1939. Born in 1915 in New York City, she was initially a resolutely secular New Yorker, “an English major who read Wordsworth and wrote poetry,” she told Diane Cole, a writer who interviewed her in 1983. (Dawidowicz died in 1990.)

  But then there came a moment in 1937, when, as a graduate student, she was sitting in a Columbia University seminar, “hearing the professor drone on about Wordsworth. It was a time when it seemed that the world and in particular my Jewish world was going up in flames. I looked out the window and thought, ‘What is Wordsworth to me at this time?’”

  She did more than think about it; she radically changed her life. She began what she called “a reverse journey, reverse in the sense of the track of history,” to Vilna, the impoverished, dilapidated, but still-thriving heart and repository of the centuries-old “golden tradition” of Yiddish learning and literature in Poland. She went there to immerse herself in that past, to help preserve it, and to share the terror of the onrushing future.

  “I was there for a year, and that experience changed everything,” she told Cole. She was speaking of experiencing Vilna’s glory and its impending eradication, of being there in the final moments before the Final Solution exterminated all but the memory of that golden civilization. It changed everything for her by focusing her attention ever after on its existence and those who exterminated its existence.

  But there was another experience on her journey home from the doomed city that might have “changed everything” in a different way, shaped the very way she looked upon the perpetrators of the war against the Jews—shaped in particular the almost surgical precision with which her historical analysis biopsied the malignant tissue of their language and their lies.

  In August 1939, as the shock of the Hitler-Stalin pact and preparation for war and invasion caused turmoil in Poland, Lucy Dawidowicz, then twenty-four, began a dangerous and difficult journey west from Warsaw to Copenhagen, a journey that would take her into the heart of the beast: into Berlin.

  “Leaving Warsaw was a journey of great drama,” she told Diane Cole. “Poland was mobilizing everything that moved. . . . The Polish port of Gdynia was closed. So I decided to go to Copenhagen, but to get there I had to change not only trains but stations in Berlin. And then somewhere near the Polish/German border, probably at Posen, a German consul got on the train and sat in my compartm
ent. We started talking in English. I told him I was an American; he didn’t know I was Jewish. When we arrived in Berlin, a frightening city—everywhere soldiers, the military—he helped me get a taxi.”

  That taxi ride between stations, along boulevards draped with blood-red swastika flags, was her closest brush with Hitler’s war machine as it prepared the war against the Jews.

  There seems to be—particularly in light of her later distinctive take on Hitler—something paradigmatic in this still-strong memory of her encounter with the German consul. Something in the tenor and subtext which left a lasting impression.

  Consider the contrast between the spoken and unspoken levels of their encounter: polite and civil on the surface, yet deceptive on both sides. Dawidowicz concealing her Jewishness (as well, we can intuit, as her contempt and hostility), the German consul concealing . . . We cannot be sure exactly how much he knew, but his return to Berlin from Poland the week before the invasion suggests he knew the horror that was about to happen: the invasion, the beginning of the extermination.

  Their double-leveled conversation—the polite, euphemistic surface concealing the bitter truths—is an instance of the kind of euphemistic bilevel “esoteric” communication Dawidowicz came to believe was the signature, the method of those Hitler insiders who knew but concealed the plan to murder the Jews.

  Dawidowicz’s esoteric-language thesis begins with an underlying argument about the timing of Hitler’s decision. One that places her at the earliest edge of the decision-theory continuum.

  “The Final Solution had its origins in Hitler’s mind,” she writes.

  In Mein Kampf he tells us that he decided on his war against the Jews in November 1918, when, at the military hospital in Pasewalk, he learned, in rapid succession, of the naval mutiny at Kiel, the revolution that forced the abdication of the Emperor, and finally the armistice. “Everything went black before my eyes,” he wrote. In the ensuing “terrible days and even worse nights,” while he pondered the meaning of these cataclysmic events, “my own fate became known to me.” It was then that he made his decision: “There is no making pacts with Jews; there can be only the hard: either-or. I, for my part, decided to go into politics” [emphasis added].

  She suggests that Hitler decided “then, in November 1918, on the destruction of the Jews as his political goal,” but she allows the possibility that “the idea remain[ed] buried in his mind until it took shape in Mein Kampf, which he wrote in 1924.” She thus makes 1924 the terminus ad quem, the date beyond which we needn’t go, but returns to the matter to argue that it could “indeed go back to November 1918, as Hitler himself claimed.” Clearly she favors the belief that when Hitler referred to the “hard: either-or” back then, he was referring explicitly to extermination, either of the Aryan race by the Jews or the Jews by the Aryans.

  If, as she believes, Hitler had made that decision as far back as November 1918, she also believes that he made another decision when he entered politics the following year: the decision to conceal his ultimate goal. She asks,

  How does one advocate publicly an idea or a program whose novelty lies in its utter radicalism? No matter how anti-Semitic the Munich of 1919 and 1920 was, the explicit transformation of a slogan like “Juda verrecke” [The Jews must perish] into a practical political program would have brought on the censorship of the local authorities and discredited the incipient National Socialist movement even among conventional anti-Semites. In this situation Hitler availed himself of a time-honored device—the use of esoteric language. In all periods of history, when government or society has put limits on public discussion, those who wish to circumvent censorship resort to the use of esoteric language. Exoterically understood, the text is unexceptional, but to the insiders who know how to interpret the words, the message is revolutionary and dangerous to the status quo [emphasis added].

  She is in effect applying to Hitler the kind of analysis of esoteric communication that the influential philosopher Leo Strauss became famous for applying to philosophers and thinkers such as Plato and Machiavelli. In doing so, she is staking out two rather heretical positions on Hitler, heretical certainly in the light of the contemporary consensus Christopher Browning represents. First, she argues that Hitler made his decision to murder the Jews en masse far earlier than almost anyone else has him making it, nearly a quarter century earlier. Second, she makes a case that what others see as Hitler’s fitful, wavering, opportunistic commitment to Jew-hatred (the term Dawidowicz favors over anti-Semitism) did not reflect absence of conviction or the presence of conflicting priorities, as later, more “sophisticated” interpretations of his behavior have it. Rather, she argues the apparent dithering was a deliberate disguise adopted to shield an absolutely unwavering commitment.

  Let’s look first at her belief that Hitler conceived of murdering—not opposing, expelling, restricting, or harassing but murdering—the Jews, all of them, as early as 1918. Almost no other scholar or historian makes such a strong claim, and she is unable to offer conclusive proof—eyewitness testimony, an overheard conversation—unless one counts Hitler’s own words pinpointing Pasewalk in 1918 as the moment he conceived his “mission.” So her conjecture is often cited as defining the extreme (subtext: impossible) end of the spectrum of debate on the decision question.

  Almost every other decision-theory conjecture envisions a Hitler who evolved, a Hitler whose aims became more radical the more power he acquired, a Hitler whose solution to the Jewish question was “radicalized” finally by the opportunity the 1941 eastern-front war created. That until the exigencies of the battlefield forced him to solve the “problem” of the millions of Jews who were suddenly in his power, he was still thinking of forced expulsion, forced emigration to Madagascar, that kind of thing. Until suddenly in 1941 it dawned on him: He could murder them all. Dawned on him first as a glimmer of fantasy—“My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?”—and then, only after many hesitations and trepidations, as a reality.

  The seminal book of the functionalist scholars, the ones who believe that the Holocaust was in effect forced on Hitler from below, from bureaucrats who pressed for a decision on what to do with the Jews on their hands, is Karl Schleunes’s The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Even most intentionalists who believe Hitler himself made the decision, imposed it from above, believe there was in effect a twisted road within Hitler, within his psyche, a twisted road around his own doubts, competing demands, conflicting impulses, and, above all, caution signs.

  But those who advance this purportedly more sophisticated model of Hitler’s decision have no more solid evidence than Lucy Dawidowicz does for her model. Perhaps even more treacherously, they rely on taking Hitler at his word about the meaning of his apparently hesitant steps up to the decision. Taking Hitler at his word is a risky proposition, particularly when, as Dawidowicz has adduced, there are occasions when Hitler disclosed his deliberate use of disingenuous and deceptive language.

  And when we know the enormity of what Hitler actually did, is she really asking us to believe the impossible when she suggests that in November 1918 a feverish, gas-blinded, shell-shocked Corporal Hitler, perhaps in the midst of some full-blown hysterical nervous breakdown, reacted to the news of the shattering defeat by vowing to make the Jews—all the Jews—pay for his suffering? Is it too much to believe that he could have said to himself: I will make the Jews pay, pay with their lives, every one of them.

  Of course, he could have said this in a metaphoric way—it could have been a passing fantasy, a feverish wish, not a plan. He could have thought it but not meant it literally, not thought of translating it into a long-range plan to accomplish it (as Dawidowicz believes he did).

  On the other hand, considering the fact that he did accomplish it, can we rule out the possibility that he said it and meant it literally and that he dedicated the rest of his life to making it come as true as it did?

  I’d suggest that the fairly widespread dismissal of Dawidowicz’s notion of a 1918 origin of Hitler
’s extermination decision is not as carefully considered as it might be. That it’s a rejection that comes less from evidence to the contrary than from a preference for seeing historical figures as complex, as sensitive to conflicting forces, as historians themselves. A preference for believing that people don’t act “that way”—don’t conceive an enormity of an idea and spend a quarter century creating the circumstances to enact it. And it’s true, people in general don’t. Ordinary people don’t orchestrate mass murder. But some fanatics have. And Adolf Hitler did.

  Still, historians prefer to imagine that extermination was an idea that dawned on Hitler slowly. This requires them to ignore the occasional obtrusive outburst, such as the comment Hitler made to one Josef Hell in Munich in 1922 in which he spoke of hanging Jews from lampposts until he exterminated them all. Or the reference to the “stab in the back” Hitler made in 1921 in which he argued that “gassing tens of thousands” of Jews back in 1918 might have saved Germany from that betrayal. Or if such excrescences are acknowledged, they are seen as exceptions to the more moderate mainstream of Hitler’s thought process about the fate of the Jews, a mainstream that muddled along on a more temperate, pragmatic course, often ignoring the Jewish question for long periods, or speaking mainly of legislative remedies, restrictions on immigration and citizenship rights, or expulsion at most. Never swerving to mass murder, at least as a practical “solution,” until 1941.

  The fact that Dawidowicz’s thesis is not easily or intuitively disprovable does not mean it is easily provable either. But I found her attempt to make a very serious case for a 1918 or 1924 Hitler decision (in her heart of hearts, I think she believed 1918) fascinating, and, at the very least, one of the most powerful and polarizing conjectures in the Hitler literature, well worth close scrutiny in itself. And particularly important because buried in her analysis of the question, buried in a long footnote, there lurks a remarkable latent image. A unique image she surfaces for other reasons, a surprising specter I’d never seen adumbrated before, but one that’s haunted me ever since: the figure of the laughing Hitler.