Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I would reject, however, one argument put forward in the comparative-evil discourse by apologists such as the postmodern Marxist-sophist Slovoi Žižek. He has argued that Stalin’s crimes are less deplorable than Hitler’s because they sprang from communism’s “good intentions” gone awry while Hitler’s were merely from racism. Alas, Hitler, too, saw himself as someone with “good intentions,” someone “convinced of his own rectitude” as Trevor-Roper put it. He saw himself as a savior of the human race from a plague, a disease. The Jews were “a bacillus” and he was a heroic Dr. Pasteur. Himmler called the SS exterminationists not an army of racist genocidal murderers but “courageous” for having to do the “hard task” of eliminating the infection. Žižek’s arguments are that of a rationalizer of mass murder.

  If the question of comparative evil is a worthy if perhaps unresolvable one, the search for the origin of Hitler’s evil, as adumbrated in the subtitle, has not turned up much that can be called illuminating since publication of the book. In fact, I’ve felt as though I’ve had to play a kind of “whack-a-mole” with old discredited Hitler theories that kept resurfacing.

  For a time after this book’s publication it seemed like I’d become the designated default debunker for various documentaries on cable channels about “new” Hitler theories. Yes, I spoke about the questions I thought important on the BookTV channel, on Charlie Rose, on NPR, and in a Peter Jennings documentary on the twentieth century that I remember as particularly well done.

  But every year or so, one of the Hitler myths would crop up and I’d go on a cable doc to discredit it: the “Jewish blood,” the “gay Hitler,” the “one-testicle theory,” the “survival in Argentina myth”—the evergreen tale that took new life from some declassified FBI documents from the late ’40s, which seemed to take seriously an “eyewitness” who thought he’d seen Hitler and Eva Braun holed up in a hotel in Argentina. (As I’ve written, some of these tales, like the survival myth, are of emblematic or anthropological value: Hitler has survived in some respects, but as a dark presence in some southern hemisphere of our brain.)

  Someone has to do it. But I do draw the line. As I was writing this Afterword I was contacted by a French documentarian who said he was preparing a Hitler film that he said would examine, “with great prudence,” the myth that as a youth Hitler had spent a year in Liverpool, England, with his half-sister, a myth based on a fabrication by Hitler’s “black sheep” half-nephew William Patrick Hitler. One that had been utterly discredited. I sought to explain to the French documentarian that this would be like examining “with great prudence” the belief the earth was flat.

  Perhaps the most poignant consequence of a misreading (or myth-reading) of an aspect of my book was the case of Norman Mailer and Geli Raubal. According to Mailer’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon, “Rosenbaum’s book turned Mailer’s head.” He quotes Mailer as saying that “long after the details had faded from my mind the feeling of the book remained.” Until then “I was absolutely intrigued with the idea of Montaigne as a Jungian.” I suppose it’s possible to say that I should feel some satisfaction in sparing us Mailer’s unlikely attempt to prove Montaigne was a Jungian. But here is where the story gets poignant. Mailer decided on the basis of reading Explaining Hitler that he would focus on the murky Geli Raubal relationship (about which, I should reiterate, I concluded there was unlikely to have been a sexual relationship nor did Hitler murder or have her murdered, though he may have driven her to suicide). Nonetheless, this was going to be the core of a vast three-novel Mailer trilogy, the first of which, The Castle in the Forest, he completed before his death, the second of which he was working on when he died. As it happened, Mailer and I had shared an editor at Random House, David Ebershoff, who was up in Provincetown when Mailer passed away and told me he’d discovered, on Mailer’s writing desk the day he died, an open copy of Explaining Hitler next to Mailer’s reading glasses. Sad.

  The Baby Picture

  If explanations—or most—were unsatisfying, incomplete, or reductive, it can be said they were often worth examining for the fears they projected and reflected: what they told us about ourselves and our culture.

  And all were really seeking an explanation for the Baby Picture.

  I’ll never forget Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, the nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, shouting at me, accusatorially, in his Parisian flat: “There is even a baby picture of Hitler!” Virtually aghast at the very idea that there could be such a picture, because it would insidiously ensnare people into the evil enterprise of trying to explain why—why that innocent infant evolved into a genocidal monster.

  Lanzmann rejected any such “understanding,” preferring a Hitler who sprang full-blown like a demon in our midst. Almost like Macbeth, not “of woman born,” Hitler not of human formed. A hostility to the baby picture, almost disclaiming the picture’s right to exist because of its misleading potential. All of which led, after the French publication of the book, to my clash with Lanzmann, which the Parisian magazine Le Figaro called “L’Affair Rosenbaum.”

  Of course, it is true, many explanations become exculpations, but I would suggest that does not deny, prima facie, the validity of the search to know more than we do. Or entail forgiveness no matter how much we know. Maybe we will never know all, never know enough, but it won’t necessarily be because we’re dealing with a supernatural creature beyond human explanation. It may be because human nature has more profound depths than we imagined. Or it may be that we lack some crucial piece of his personal history.

  But something or some things made Hitler want to do what he did. It wasn’t a concatenation of impersonal, external forces, a kind of collective determinism. It required his impassioned desire for extermination, even at the potential cost of defeat for Germany. It required him to choose evil. It required free will.

  It required Hitler to make a continuous series of choices, the ultimate source of which may always be shrouded in mystery. We will likely never know, for instance—barring some discovery in a “lost safe-deposit box”—what went on between Hitler and the alleged hypnotist, Dr. Forster, said to have treated him at the time of the World War I German surrender. We have only Ernst Weiss’s fascinating novelistic speculation to go on, and it can’t be counted as proof, although it may be my favorite unsolved Hitler mystery (see Introduction). In fact, we lack proof, and the most salient clues might be lost in the mists of history. We just may never know with certainty what made Hitler Hitler. And worse, we may never know why we don’t know: whether it’s because of a missing piece of biographical evidence, or an inability to evaluate the evidence we have. It’s beyond frustrating not knowing whether we might. Yes, the phrase made famous by Donald Rumsfeld: “unknown unknowns.”

  A phrase that must make us content with what Keats called “negative capability”—the ability to live with uncertainties without an “irritable” reaching for certainty. That word “irritable”: such a stroke of genius in characterizing the doggedness the most single-minded explainers display in defense of their certainties. (A phrase, by the way, that Fitzgerald cribbed from Keats when he declared “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind” without needing to embrace one or the other. Only two? With Hitler, there are dozens, or at least a dozen worth holding in mind and considering.)

  A Regret

  One regret I have about the original edition: I did not deal with the deeply misguided regard for Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, perhaps the most fraudulent aspect of the conventional wisdom about what might be called “Hitler culture.”

  Chaplin’s meretricious and in fact genuinely, historically damaging The Great Dictator is a film I’d seen long before focusing on this book and had taken for granted the conventional wisdom and knee-jerk approbation. And forgotten it. But its “courage” is one of those myths that really needs re-examining because it persists to this day. The myth that The Great Dictator was a bold challenge to Hitler or t
hat it somehow damaged his cause. Quite the opposite.

  It may be too late, but I feel an obligation to set the record straight. I’m recalling now how shocked I was when, after being invited to “present” a showing of it at the Harvard Film Archives, I actually watched it for the first time in years.

  It was shocking on two levels. First, the fact that in his alleged anti-Hitler satire, who does Chaplin blame for the hostility his Hitler character has for the Jews? Jewish bankers! Jewish bankers turned down the Great Dictator and it’s all about getting even with those Jews. The Jews’ misfortune was their own fault, in effect. That’s Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler explanation. That’s what he told America at that crucial moment in October 1940 when the film was released. People seem to forget this when they get all misty-eyed about how great The Great Dictator is. Which is why I believe it needs to be dealt with, and what better place than here?

  It’s fascinating that the film-buff community is so blinkered by apolitical estheticism they never speak of this when heaping unwarranted praise on this mendacious film. Or do they just not want us to notice the “Jewish banker” moment so we can appreciate the great genius without reservation?

  They must know. The Chaplin groupies have seen it all too many times. It’s shocking in another way if you consider it in the context of history. When I tried to point out Chaplin’s “Jewish banker” Hitler theory on a “social media” thread, the film’s defenders didn’t seem disturbed by this. When I pointed it out at the Harvard Film Archives, the emblematic response was from a film theory–addled questioner who posited that the entire film was really about Chaplin’s resistance to the end of silent films. Seriously!

  But the real damage of this alleged satire was done at the time of its release, in its successful trivialization of Hitler. Chaplin trivialized his “Great Dictator” by “revealing” what a sentimental, foolish softy he was, dancing with a globe balloon. Nothing to be seriously alarmed by. Not a threat that required resistance. Just the Little Tramp being a little bit mean to the Jews.

  The film was released at a time when the appeasers and America Firsters, many of them anti-Semitic and pro-fascist, were trying to keep the United States out of the struggle against Hitler. Another fact overlooked by the Chaplin groupies: The film won an award from the right-wing pro-appeasement Daughters of the American Revolution, because of Chaplin’s mistakenly celebrated “pro-peace” speech, a speech, which was really at that time, in that context, an argument not for peace but instead for not fighting Hitler. It called on the soldiers and workers of the world not to take up arms against anyone (including Hitler), which was why it was also celebrated by the Communist Party, then promoting the odious Hitler-Stalin pact, which also argued against the anti-fascist struggle (until the Soviet Union was attacked, of course). Hitler was murdering people, and Chaplin was telling the world not to resist, the Stalinist line at the time.

  Godwin’s Law and “Feel-Good” Holocaust Stories

  One of the fascinating things I discovered in the course of writing this book was the reluctance of scholars and savants to use the word “evil” in regard to Hitler. Some years after writing the book and studying the question of evil, on a fellowship at Cambridge where I got to converse with scientists and theologians on this tormentingly complex matter, I ended up writing a long essay I called “Rescuing Evil.” It was an attempt to find a rationale for rescuing the idea of freely chosen “wickedness” (the technical philosophical term) from the determinists and materialists who would instead explain away evil as the purely neurochemical, physiological product of the brain.

  “Neuromitigation” the great contrarian writer Raymond Tallis called it in an essay in the London Times Literary Supplement, and alas that is the way “scientific” studies of evildoers are heading. Blame it all on a brain defect. Neuro-scientists would have a field day with their fMRI machines and Hitler’s brain. Sooner or later they’d claim to find some fragment of gray matter responsible for it all. Instead, we have a gray area, a fog, a Night and Fog, to cite Alain Resnais’s groundbreaking Holocaust movie, that we may never penetrate, and physics alone my never explain.

  Does Hitler’s apparently unequalled evil entail certain linguistic obligations? That is the question raised by Godwin’s Law, whose Internet ubiquity I was not aware of when writing the initial edition.

  Godwin’s Law is something that’s come into prominence with debate about the devolution of discourse on websites. For those unfamiliar, Godwin’s Law has now entered the Oxford English Dictionary, but here since it is an Internet phenomenon is a somewhat more expansive (and net-native) Wikipedia entry: “Godwin’s Law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies) is an assertion made by Mike Godwin in 1990 that has become an Internet adage. It states: ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.’”

  I’m sure you’ve seen examples of such comparisons: bans on high-fructose sodas are “just like Nazi Germany,” so-and-so politician “adopts Hitler’s technique of the big lie.” As I write, a bill has been introduced into the Israeli Knesset, of all places, to ban the use of the words “Hitler,” “Nazi,” or their variants as disparagement because they denature the reality. While I can see the logic of the proponents—that the usage has trivialized the originals—I just find it wrong in most cases to ban speech of any kind.

  No Hitler analogies then? Yes, they can trivialize, but on the other hand, a blanket, ironclad rule denying the use of Hitler or Nazi analogies removes them from significance in contemporary discourse entirely. It consigns Hitler to the YouTube parody realm and virtually sacralizes Hitler analogies by prohibiting them, like Claude Lanzmann prohibiting Hitler explanations. Yes, such comparisons are most often hyperbole, but the value of a concept like hyperbole is that it at least acknowledges that there may in fact be some ultima Thule, some distant but real mark of the existence of ultimate evil. A dark pole star.

  Godwin’s Law may suggest that no comparison to Hitler or Nazis is ever valid, which removes them from referentiality entirely. Removes them from having any validity as comparison, when for instance in fact the reason the world does have plutonium atomic clocks (or however they keep Greenwich Mean Time now) attests to the value of having some absolute standards by which we can measure things.

  Another way of dematerializing Hitler’s crime, another development, another means of “cultural processing” I had not anticipated when I wrote this book is the rapid growth of what might be called the “Feel-Good Holocaust Genre.” Ones that may not have you leaving the movie theater humming the tunes, so to speak, but which “lift the spirit,” demonstrate the noble side of human nature in the face of evil. Do we need these demonstrations if they end up giving us the message that Hitler shouldn’t disturb our faith in human nature? That Holocaust stories should somehow make us think better of our fellow human beings? Dammit, Hitler should disturb our faith in human nature. If he doesn’t, he’s not Hitler, or you’ve erased and effaced him and made him serve as a convenient talisman for your self-congratulatory, self-serving “humanity.”

  The shock of the moral and historical idiocy of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful “heartwarming” Holocaust fantasy still remains with me. (I wrote an essay about Chaplin and Benigni, whose triumphalist clowning at the Oscars, dancing not just on the chairs but, metaphorically, on the graves of the dead, I still find disgusting beyond belief. I called it “The Arrogance of Clowns.”) It was probably Spielberg’s Schindler’s List that opened the floodgates for teary, uplifting Holocaust tales. As someone put it, Spielberg made a movie about one Christian saving 400 Jews instead of a movie about a continent of Christians killing 6 million. Not that the Schindler story shouldn’t be told, but that one, the one that climaxed with a teary, colorful celebration of the Schindler survivors in the land of Israel, was given preeminence. A happy ending to a Holocaust movie!

  Afterward, the cheap and tawdry feel-good Hol
ocaust books and movies came surging in like a flood. Some were complete fabrications. Some, like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, trivialized the reality of the death camps to create a “Holocaust Lite,” a Child’s Garden of the Death Camps.

  And then, to cap it off, there was the pop-sophistry of Malcolm Gladwell’s uplifting Holocaust story. The world’s leading purveyor of oversimplifications about human nature offers us, in David and Goliath, a supposedly heartwarming story of poor villagers who protected some Jews during the war. Gladwell’s lesson: “It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.”

  You know what we need reminding of, Malcolm Gladwell? Setting aside the ahistorical generalizations about who did and didn’t do what for the Jews under what circumstances. What we need to be reminded of, what the French people finally needed to remind themselves of, is how most of them happily collaborated with the Nazis in serving up the Davids to the German Goliath. That this fact is more important than some spurious lesson about “the limits of evil” you toss in as if we know what “the limits of evil” are.

  The Holocaust wasn’t It’s a Wonderful Life, an event to be exploited for heartwarming anecdotes. Life was not beautiful and human nature, if anything, exceeded all imaginable expectations of evil’s limitlessness. The lesson of the Holocaust should be to question whether there are any limits to human evil.

  In this connection, I would like to add a corrective, or rather an extension, of a remarkable defining statement about the Holocaust by the German writer W. G. Sebald. He’s most well-known for his book about the firebombing of Dresden—someone I had thought was part of the exculpatory “moral equivalence” tendency in postwar German culture. But then I came upon that remarkable statement. When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, Sebald said, “No serious person thinks of anything else.” A line meant to shock, yet shock value is not always valueless. It was a kind of hyperbole, of course. We all think about lunch and dinner, too, but it’s clearly meant to signify that this was an overwhelming change in how we should think about human nature, a change whose nature and extent need careful if not constant consideration from those who take the nature of human nature seriously. To which I would add, “No serious person takes these pathetic little reassurances about human nature (such as Gladwell’s) seriously. They are the consolations of fools, and those who peddle them should be ashamed of themselves.”