Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Can we imagine Hitler genuinely wounded by the imagined laughter of the Jews? Or is it the counterfeit of outrage? And is the laughter he conjures up so obsessively when he discusses the extermination of the Jews not so much the Jews’ laughter but his own?

  In an absolutely brilliant, utterly fascinating, nearly page-long footnote to her account of that speech—to my mind the single most thought-provoking footnote in Hitler-explanation literature—Dawidowicz, with her eagle eye for explicatory resonances, adduces no fewer than three further instances in which Hitler links the laughter of the Jews to their extermination. Instances in which, over a period of two years, Hitler paints the ongoing story of the extermination process in the esoteric language of laughter.

  It’s a portrait that emerges almost unremarked upon explicitly by Dawidowicz in her pursuit of one of her most impressive feats of explication. In it, she finds Hitler betraying the central truth about himself, the inmost motive for his war, in a series of curious “slips,” as she calls them. She adduces the slips to deal with a potentially troubling challenge to her grand thesis—that the war Hitler waged against the nations he invaded was really a cover for his real objective: the war against the Jews.

  The specific problem she’s addressing is again an apparent absence: In Hitler’s September 1, 1939, speech to the Reichstag, his declaration of war against Poland hours after the blitzkrieg had begun, he doesn’t declare war against the Jews. In fact, as she notes, “It was one of the few speeches in which he failed to mention Jews.”

  At this point, Dawidowicz discloses a remarkable strategy for explaining this absence: the “slips” in his future references to that September 1939 speech that disclose what he was really doing. No less than four times in the three years following the September 1939 declaration of war, “Hitler fixedly and repeatedly referred to this speech on this day [the one in which he omitted mention of the Jews] as the speech in which he had threatened the Jews with destruction in the event of a war, though he had made that speech on January 30, 1939.”

  She then proceeds to quote in that footnote from those four “slips” and goes on to conclude that “in [Hitler’s] mind he associated his declaration of war on September 1, 1939, with his promise to destroy the Jews.”

  But what stayed with me in the footnote, in which she quotes extensively from the “slips,” is not merely Hitler “fixedly and repeatedly” referring to the Jews in that speech when they weren’t there, but Hitler fixedly and repeatedly returning to their laughter.

  And so, on January 30, 1941, Hitler told an audience, “And I should not like to forget the indication that I had already given once, on September 1, 1939 . . . to wit, that if the rest of the world would be plunged into a general war by Jewry, then the whole of Jewry would have finished playing its role in Europe!” A threat he actually made seven months earlier, on January 30, 1939, when he threatened the Jews with extermination if there was a war. That seems to matter less to Hitler in this 1941 address than the laughter he still seems to hear echoing: “They may still laugh today at that, exactly as they laughed at my [other] prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that I also saw correctly here.”

  Then once again, a year later, on September 30, 1942, he fuses or confuses the date of the threat against the Jews and the declaration of war against the Poles:

  On September 1, 1939, I stated . . . at the meeting then of the Reichstag: . . .

  That if Jewry would plot an international world war for the annihilation of the Aryan peoples of Europe, then not the Aryan peoples would be annihilated, but on the contrary Jewry. . . . The Jews laughed once also in Germany at my prophecies. I do not know if they are still laughing also today, or if their laughter has not already subsided. But I can also now only assert: Their laughter everywhere will subside.

  And then, finally, a third time, the exact same slip, the obsessive reference to the laughter, the final, most chilling in a series of passages in which the dying of the Jews can be traced in the subsiding and dying of the laughter in Hitler’s ironic image of the slaughter. Here, once again, he refers to the Reichstag speech in which he says he

  declared: If Jewry perchance imagines that it can bring about an international world war for the annihilation of the European races, then the consequence will be not the annihilation of the European races, but on the contrary, it will be the annihilation of Jewry in Europe. I was always laughed at as a prophet. Of those who laughed then, countless ones no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so [emphasis added].

  It is possible, then, to reconstruct Hitler’s personal portrait of his extermination of the Jews in the progression of his chilling images of laughter—the extermination of the Jews in the extermination of their laughter.

  We begin with his January 30, 1939, speech, in which the “resounding” laughter of the Jews is now resoundingly choking in their throats. In 1941, he imagines the laughter of the Jews still sounding, if not resounding, but “the coming months” will change that. And twelve months later, he professes no longer to know if the Jews “are still laughing.” But whether they are or not, he says he’s confident “if their laughter has not already subsided,” it soon “will subside” everywhere. And, finally, he confirms for us that not only the laughter but those who once laughed have been exterminated: “Countless ones no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so.”

  Dawidowicz cites these passages for the “slips,” not for the laughter, for Hitler’s retrospective fusion of the January 30, 1939, threat to annihilate the Jews with the September 1, 1939, declaration of war that launched his armies east and made Auschwitz possible. But it might be argued that the laughter imagery is itself a kind of slip, the kind of slip that vindicates Dawidowicz’s thesis about Hitler more powerfully than his confusion or conflation of dates of declarations and speeches. It seems to vindicate her vision of Hitler as someone who knew always what he wanted to do with the Jews, not someone who hesitated and doubted and suffered nervousness about the enormity of the idea. Rather someone who knew what he was doing and laughed about it.

  The unspoken displacement in these passages is, I’d suggest, not so much from one speech date to another, but from one species of laughter to another. The laughter Hitler incessantly conjures up dying in the Jews’ throats is reborn in his own. The laughter suffusing those passages is not the Jews laughing but Hitler laughing. It’s not the laughter of someone suffering from trepidation about what he’s doing. It’s not the laughter of someone who still, at an even later date, could think, “My dear Heinie . . . Would it be possible?”

  It’s the laughter of someone who knows what he’s doing and relishes it to the bone, relishes the coded way he speaks of it, relishes the fact that the relish of the joke is only shared by an esoteric few. It’s the very same relish with which he and Heydrich and Himmler, the three architects of the Final Solution, relish their ostensible dismay at the scurrilous “rumor” that the Jews are being exterminated, in that passage in the Table Talk in which the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust share a private joke about both their complicity and their cover-up.

  Nor is this the laughter of someone “convinced of his own rectitude,” as Trevor-Roper would have it. It’s the laughter of someone savoring a secretive triumph, whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature, whose pleasure can only be truly savored by the cognoscenti aware of the magnitude of the illicit acts that are concealed by esoteric references to mass murder as “subsiding laughter.” This is not something whose “enormity” Hitler feared, but something he relished, with obscene gleefulness.

  Once, I heard a parable about a Jew going into battle who asks a rabbi what he should do if he’s captured by the enemy and his only alternative to starvation is to eat pork. The rabbi counsels him that, yes, to save his life he can do what would otherwise be a transgression, an enormity: He can eat the pork. But don’t,
the rabbi adds, relish it: “Don’t suck the bone.” With his laughter, the laughter he sucked from the dying Jews’ throats, Hitler was expressing his obscene relish at the enormity of his transgression. With his laughter, Hitler reveals extermination is not a matter of rectitude to him, a difficult task done for a stern ideal. With his laughter, Hitler reveals he is both aware of and wallowing in the illicitness of his transgression, his conscious evil. With his laughter he is “sucking the bone.”

  And what exactly is he relishing so deeply? Not merely the thing in itself, the mass murder, but the delicious—to him—irony of it, the exquisite—to him—literary irony that those who laughed are now having their murders measured out in the sound of their subsiding laughter by the very one they laughed at. In a way, it is a confirmation of Berel Lang’s thesis that it is in the savoring of the slaughter as an aesthetic experience, in the perpetrators’ relishing its piquant artful ironies, that the highest degree of conscious evil discloses itself.

  This chapter began with the question, Did Hitler feel shame, or did he at least, as Browning seems to believe, display an awareness of the enormity of his decision, an awareness that expresses itself in “sincere” hesitation, trepidation? In fact, one comes away from immersion in Lucy Dawidowicz’s powerful argument feeling that shamelessness rather than shame, that shameless laughter rather than trepidation, is what Hitler experienced inwardly (and outwardly as well: The Goebbels diaries are replete with entries reporting how the two of them shared laughter at the fate of their enemies). And that it might not be an exaggeration to think that, had he known how some scholarship a half century after his death had come to portray him—as a sensitive, trepidatious soul—he might enjoy one final shameless laugh.

  How does one react to the laughing Hitler, to the degree of shamelessness and knowingness, the obscene delight he appears to take in relishing the prospect of extermination, one strangled laugh at a time?

  It might be argued that a half century’s attempts to “explain” Hitler have served in some sense to avoid confronting the specter of that Hitler, the laughing Hitler, a Hitler fully conscious of his malignancy. A half century of efforts have added to, broadened, deepened, contextualized, historicized our vision of Hitler in many valuable—though also contradictory—ways. But in doing so, they may also have distanced and distracted us from his person, from his personal responsibility, his desire, the fact that, as Milton Himmelfarb put it, he didn’t have to kill the Jews, he wasn’t merely compelled by abstract forces—rather, he chose to, he wanted to.

  The tendency of contemporary explanation has been to explain away Hitler’s personal responsibility, his conscious agency (as academics like to call it these days), to explain it away by postulating either that his will wasn’t decisive (if he hadn’t done it, deep forces in history would have compelled someone else like him to do it). Or that he didn’t really have the will. He didn’t make the decision, or he wasn’t sure of the decision, or he shrank from making the decision, or he felt conflicted, awed into Hamlet-like impotence by the enormity of the decision. Or that the decision was “produced” or spontaneously “generated” somehow by “others,” by “his inner circle,” by the “bureaucracy,” or by the exigency of underlings who forced it on him “from below.”

  All are sincerely held beliefs, and I’ve found many of them at times more or less persuasive on their own terms. But stepping back from them, one could also say they serve as consolations, ways of avoiding having to face the inexplicable horror of a knowing, laughing Hitler. By diminishing Hitler, by explaining him as a pawn of “deeper,” more abstract forces, as an automaton programmed by ideology, bureaucracy, or dialectical materialism, programmed to embody and carry out “the inevitable,” his laughter at our expense is less woundingly triumphal, more the deluded laughter of the ventriloquist’s dummy whose strings are being pulled by abstract forces—who gives the false impression of being in control. Alternately, a more hesitant, conflicted Hitler might be easier to live with because we “know” he suffered doubts, was racked by indecision, tormented by trepidation. He couldn’t really be laughing so triumphantly, aware as he was of the enormity of what he was doing, more fearfully awed than laughingly exhilarated by the crime he was committing.

  It may not be that those who diminish Hitler and Hitler’s agency do so in order to comfort themselves. It might just be that the tendency of intellectual effort expended on any enigmatic subject will always be to complexify until everyone and everything is responsible and no one person, not even Hitler, is.

  One response to this is Claude Lanzmann’s extreme rejection of all explanation as ultimately exculpating. Another might be the employment of Emil Fackenheim’s “double move”: to pursue explanation as far as it takes us but at the same time, at another level, to resist explanation, or at least the kind of explanation that would give Hitler a “posthumous victory” by exculpating him, blaming his evil on a bad family, a bad society, a Jew in his past, a perversion in his sexuality, malignant ideas, malign historical forces.

  Fackenheim’s notion of “posthumous victory” suggests that, much as we would like to understand Hitler, it is important to realize that we should in some sense also still be at war with him. And there might be some value to continuing to resist, even to hate, the enemy. Is hatred of Hitler still a legitimate response, or is it the kind of crude, debased emotional reaction that explanation and understanding should ideally lead us upward from? Is it bizarre, out-of-bounds, a sign of an unevolved sensibility, for a civilized, educated citizen of the post-Holocaust world to hate Adolf Hitler? Put another way: Would it be a bizarre moral failure not to hate Hitler?

  The notion of hatred, the question of whether hating Hitler and explaining Hitler are mutually contradictory, arose in a fascinating conversation I had with Milton Himmelfarb, whom I sought out after discovering the laughing Hitler figure in Lucy Dawidowicz’s footnote.

  Ever since I came upon it back in 1984, I had been impressed by the thought-provoking power of Himmelfarb’s “No Hitler, No Holocaust” polemic in Commentary. It was responsible, as much as any work, for impelling me to look more closely at how we conceive of Hitler, and I’d wanted to ask him what had prompted him to take that stance—Hitler killed the Jews not because he had to, not because he was driven by “deeper” forces, but because he wanted to—at that particular time.

  In the living room of his White Plains, New York, home, in his characteristically earthy, no-nonsense manner, which masks a subtle and discerning intellect, Himmelfarb told me he’d been troubled back then by an emerging tendency in the Hitler literature, even—particularly—among Jews. A tendency to downplay Hitler’s personal animus against Jews as the motive engine of the Holocaust, to “broaden” and “universalize” the tragedy. He thought that what was really at work beneath this was a kind of embarrassment among Jews at being singled out for such murderous hatred, a reluctance to accept explanations that were, in Himmelfarb’s colorful phrase, “too Jewy.” There was, he believed, a desire instead to conceive of it as a more universal tragedy, Hitler’s hatred as another horrific instance of man’s inhumanity to man, as the saying goes—rather than a very personal, very specific hatred of Jews.

  The question of whether Jews, whether anyone, should hate Hitler arose toward the end of our conversation in the context of a larger discussion of the question of “exceptionalism”: the deep divide in Hitler-explanation literature between those who argue that Hitler can be explained by or integrated into systems of explanation we’re already familiar with, systems used to explain other tragedies in history. And those who believe Hitler is a singularity, an exception not explicable in terms of what has been experienced before. The argument over “exceptionalism” can be found throughout intellectual history. “American exceptionalism” is the belief or the sentimental hope that the American experience would not have to recapitulate the sorrows of European history, become a predetermined consequence of that past, but could be a fresh start. Shakespearean excepti
onalism is the argument that there is something distinctive about Shakespeare that elevates his work above the rest of great literature.

  Emil Fackenheim, as we’ve seen, makes an exceptionalist argument about Hitler and human nature: You cannot locate Hitler on the ordinary continuum of human nature; you cannot merely say that he is a very, very, very, very, very bad man, perhaps the most wicked yet, but still explicable as the product of the same human nature, the same psychological forces that produced, say, the next-worst human being and the next and the next until we reach ourselves. No, Fackenheim says, Hitler is off the charts, off that grid, in another category of radical evil entirely.

  Himmelfarb arrived at the subject of exceptionalism—and hatred—in the course of a discussion not of Hitler but of Stalin, the historical figure many place next to Hitler on that continuum of evil. Stalin remains a figure of some importance in Himmelfarb’s own political evolution. When I spoke with him, he was seventy-six, still scrappy, still intellectually combative in the inimitable manner of that famous core group of Jewish leftists in the thirties, the Trotskyites and Stalinists who later renounced their dialectical materialism and became the core group behind the anticommunist liberalism of the 1950s and the neoconservatism of the seventies and eighties. Himmelfarb had been a Marxist as a youth, although he later joined his sister Gertrude Himmelfarb, now an influential social historian, and her future husband, Irving Kristol, in the ranks of the neocons.

  Himmelfarb had been even more of an enthusiastic leftist partisan than his future brother-in-law, he told me. He had been a devotee of the ultimate abstract system of “scientific” historical explanation, dialectical materialism, in which nothing could be considered an exception. Every phenomenon in history and human consciousness was an almost mathematically determinable product of its place in the dialectic of the class struggle. Hitler, then, was a necessary stage of the consolidation and ultimate collapse of capitalism, which would inevitably produce, or midwife, the dictatorship of the proletariat whose advance guard was embodied in Stalin’s Russia.