Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I thought of the sign on the gate above the entrance to Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei. A deliberate work of artistic (demonic ironic) artistry. My response then was to think that the notion of an art of evil implies a knowing, conscious choice to turn evil into art. Not convinced of one’s rectitude but of one’s evil-doing. And so it came to me, something I hadn’t thought of before. Perhaps one illuminating way to characterize Hitler’s evil is to think of him in his own terms, to use his own rubric against him: Adolf Hitler: “Degenerate Artist.” A degenerate artist of evil.

  Postscript

  Noted without comment:

  On April 13, 2014, a long-time Ku Klux Klan hate monger shot three dead at a Jewish Center complex in Kansas City on the eve of Passover. From the New York Times story the following day: “[the suspect] Mr. Miller was taken into custody on Sunday afternoon at a local elementary school near Village Shalom, the police said. In video taken by KMBC, a local television station, the suspect yelled ‘Heil Hitler!’ while sitting in a police car.”

  NOTES

  Introduction: The Baby Pictures and the Abyss

  p. xi. “the survival myth.” See Donald M. McKale’s fascinating study. Hitler: The Survival Myth (New York: Stein and Day, 1981).

  p. xi. “Similarly suggestive . . . remains of Hitler’s cranium.” See the persuasive if not conclusive analysis in Ada Petrova and Peter Watson, The Death of Hitler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

  p. xii. “The mountebank Hitler of Alan Bullock’s initial vision.” See chapters 4 and 5 for an extended discussion of these differences.

  p. xii. “Dawidowicz . . . Browning.” See chapter 20.

  p. xii. “a controversial Russian autopsy.” This was first disclosed in Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).

  p. xiii. “culture, which produced Goethe . . .” Bill Clinton, speech at dedication of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 22, 1993.

  p. xiii. “Milton Himmelfarb.” See “No Hitler, No Holocaust,” Commentary 76.3 (March 1984): 37–43.

  p. xiii. “All that history . . .” Ibid., p. 37.

  p. xv. “remains a frightening mystery.” H. R. Trevor-Roper, interview with author.

  p. xv. “The more I learn . . .” Alan Bullock, interview with author.

  p. xv. “no representations of Hitler.” Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. xx.

  p. xvi. “theologian of the Holocaust.” See Hyam Maccoby, “Theologian of the Holocaust,” Commentary 74.6 (June 1982): 33–37.

  p. xvi. “There are some pictures of Hitler as a baby.” Claude Lanzmann, address to Western New England Institutes of Psychoanalysis, April 1990, published as “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” American Imago 48.4 (1991): 473–95.

  p. xvi. “a Hitler without victims.” Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler, p. 40.

  p. xvii. “The Hitler Nobody Knows.” Heinrich Hoffmann, The Hitler Nobody Knows (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1932), p. 3. The picture is identified as Hitler’s “first photograph.”

  p. xvii. “backshadow.” Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

  p. xviii. “You can take all the reasons . . .” Claude Lanzmann, interview with author.

  p. xx. “They sent to his widow, Sophie . . .” Johannes Steiner, statement to author.

  p. xxi. “near-ultimate evil.” Yehuda Bauer, interview with author.

  p. xxi. “If he isn’t evil . . .” Alan Bullock, interview with author.

  p. xxii. “transworld depravity.” See, for instance, Alvin Plantinga, “God, Evil, and the Metaphysics of Freedom,” in The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 164–93.

  p. xxii. “Hitler was convinced . . .” H. R. Trevor-Roper, interview with author.

  p. xxii. “a tendency first articulated.” Plato, Protagoras, trans. W. C. Guthrie (New York: Penguin Books, 1956), 345e–346a.

  p. xxii. “Hitler thought he was a doctor!” Efraim Zuroff, interview with author.

  p. xxiii. “If evil is defined as conscious wrongdoing.” Dr. Peter Loewenberg, interview with author.

  p. xxiv. “thought-world.” Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery, from the first German edition [1906] (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

  p. xxv. “Gordon Craig and John Lukacs.” See Gordon A. Craig, The Germans, rev. ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1991), and “The War of the German Historians,” The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1987 (on the Historikerstreit); and John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), particularly chapter 3, “Reactionary and/or Revolutionary.”

  p. xxv. “Saul Friedländer and Ian Kershaw.” See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); and Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Hitler (London: The Longman Group, 1991).

  p. xxv. “David H. Fischer.” See David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).

  p. xxv. “Steiner describing with great candor.” George Steiner, interview with author (see chapter 17).

  p. xxvi. “Hyam Maccoby . . . sinister festival.” Hyam Maccoby, interview with author (see chapter 18).

  p. xxvi. “Emil Fackenheim . . . posthumous victory.” Emil Fackenheim, interview with author (see chapter 16).

  p. xxvi. “Gertrud Kurth.” Gertrud Kurth, interview with author (see chapter 8).

  p. xxvi. “Berel Lang.” Berel Lang, interview with author (see chapter 11).

  p. xxvi. “clean as a newborn babe.” David Irving, quoting Christa Schroeder, interview with author (see chapter 12).

  p. xxvii. “why not take a look.” Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985).

  p. xxvii. “Howard noted the tendency.” Michael Howard, in conversation with Thomas Powers, cited to author.

  p. xxvii. “In 1948, less than three years.” Irving Kristol, “The Study of Man: What the Nazi Autopsies Show,” Commentary (September 1948): 271–82.

  p. xxviii. “gone too far.” Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 3.

  p. xxviii. “His long-untranslated doctoral thesis.” Albert Schweitzer, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus [1913] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948).

  p. xxix. “Unsolved Mysteries.” “Diabolic Minds,” Unsolved Mysteries, show 423 (Burbank: Cosgrove Meurer Productions, November 1991).

  p. xxx. “Deadly Routine.” Dietrich Güstrow, Tödlicher Alltag (Berlin: Severin and Seidler, 1981).

  p. xxxi. “Consider the attempt.” Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), pp. 142–97.

  p. xxxii. “In his retrospective psychoanalysis.” Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).

  p. xxxiii. “A 1975 paper.” John H. Walters, “Hitler’s Encephalitis: A Footnote to History,” Journal of Operational Psychiatry 6.2 (1975): 99–112.

  p. xxxiii. “The post encephalitic moral imbecile.” A. Wimmer, “Zur Kriminalitaet der Encephalitiker.” Acta Psychiatrica (Copenhagen) 5 (1930): 2343, cited in Walters, “Hitler’s Encephalitis.”

  p. xxxiv. “Wiesenthal’s persistent if quixotic effort.” See Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance: Recollections, trans. Ewald Osers (New York: Grove Press, 1990).

  p. xxxiv. “Her Jewishness then becomes.” See Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File (London: Constable, 1993).

  p. xxxv. “Seductive Jewish Grandfather Explanation.” See chapters 1 and 2.

  p. xxxv. “Seductive Jewish Music Teacher Theory.” See chapters 7 and 10.

  p. xxxv. “Bungling Jewish Doctor Theory.” See chapter 13.

  p. xxxv. “Hitler’s own disingenuous effort.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943,
1971), p. 56.

  p. xxxvi. “the scholar Helmut Schmeller has pointed out.” Helmut Schmeller, “Hitler’s View of History” (Ph.D., Kansas State University, 1975).

  p. xxxvi. “A most recent instance.” Lukacs, Hitler of History, pp. 53–75.

  p. xxxvi. “Hitlers Wien.” Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien (Munich: Piper, 1996).

  p. xxxvii. “the claim by . . . Lanz von Liebenfels.” See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (Wellingborough: Thorson Publishing Group, 1985). This is the most responsible (and virtually the only) scholarly work in a field—Hitler and the occult—that is cluttered with myth and superstition. Goodrick-Clarke examines the evidence skeptically and concludes: “it seems most probably that Hitler did read and collect the Ostara, although Liebenfels’s 1951 claim of a personal encounter cannot be conclusively corroborated” (p. 198).

  p. xxxvii. “One piece of evidence.” See the ZDF documentary produced (in association with Arte and the History Channel) by Guido Knopp, The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, vol. 1, 1995.

  p. xxxvii. “All of which leads Lukacs to argue.” Lukacs, Hitler of History, p. 59.

  p. xxxviii. “the threefold ‘blackmail of transcendence.’” George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1983), p. 185.

  p. xxxix. “Ford’s contribution to Hitler’s success.” See the valuable discussion in Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), on the charge made by the vice president of the Bavarian Diet in a report to the German President in 1922: “The Bavarian Diet has long had the information that the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-semitic who is Henry Ford.” Lee says the question of whether and how Ford supported Hitler financially (aside from lending the prestige of his name to Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideology) “may never be answered completely,” but he believes that Ford did so is “highly likely” (p. 57).

  p. xxxix. “I would be very happy . . .” See Levy, Wiesenthal File, pp. 17–18.

  p. xli. “The Nazi genocide is somehow central . . .” Michael André Bernstein, TLS, March 7, 1997, p. 3, in a review entitled “The Lasting Injury.”

  p. xli. “So many modernist thinkers wish . . .” Robert Grant, “No Conjuring Tricks,” review of Enemies of Hope, by Raymond Tallis, TLS, November 14, 1997, p. 3.

  p. xlii. “an article . . . for The New Yorker.” Ron Rosenbaum, “Explaining Hitler,” The New Yorker, May 1, 1995, pp. 50–70.

  p. xliii. “According to the postwar biography.” Erwin von Aretin, Fritz Michael Gerlich: Ein Martyr unserer Tage (Munich: Schnell and Steiner, 1949).

  p. xliv. “There was a state’s-attorney inquiry . . .” Karl-Ottmar Freiherr von Aretin, statement to author.

  p. xliv. “in thinly veiled fictional form.” Ernst Weiss, The Eyewitness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

  p. xliv. “the German historian Ernst Deuerlein.” “There just had to be fact behind Weiss’s fiction about Hitler at Pasewalk, Deuerlein remarked” to Rudolph Binion; cited in Binion’s foreword to ibid., p. v.

  p. xlv. “the most important part [of Forster’s] records . . .” Ibid., pp. 184–85.

  p. xlv. “Hitler’s alleged pornographic drawings of Geli Raubal.” Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years [1957] (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994), p. 163.

  p. xlv. “the rumored ‘Austrian secret-police dossier.’” See, among others, Charles Wighton, Heydrich (London: Odhams Press, 1962), p. 132.

  p. xlv. “a smooth-talking ‘metabolic technician.’” Ron Rosenbaum, “Tales from the Cancer Cure Underground,” in Travels with Dr. Death (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991).

  Chapter 1: The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers

  p. 4. “People must not know who I am.” William Patrick Hitler, cited in John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), citing Paris-Soir, August 5, 1939.

  p. 4. “scion of the seigneurial house of Ottenstein.” Werner Maser, Hitler: Legend, Myth, and Reality, trans. Peter and Betty Ross (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 2.

  p. 5. “In all probability, we shall never know . . .” Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 24.

  p. 6. “It was in 1590.” Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories [1916] (New York: Signet, 1989), p. 161.

  p. 6. “We had two priests . . .” Ibid., p. 162.

  p. 7. “Sir Isaiah Berlin . . . borderland theory.” Sir Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 258.

  p. 8. “other blood must have entered.” Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler, trans. Lawrence Wilson (London: Oswald Wolff, 1961), p. 8.

  p. 8. “Family romance.” Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” (1909), in The Standard Edition, vol. 9, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 237–41.

  p. 10. “Gestapo officers made no less than four expeditions.” See Robert G. L. Waite’s summary of the Gestapo-Berichte in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 149–50n.

  p. 10. “an ingenious journalist published . . .” Rudolf Olden, Hitler (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), pp. 9–10. (The ingenious journalist seems to have been Willi Frischauer. See his letter to the London Sunday Telegraph, Dec. 17, 1972.)

  p. 10. “It is difficult to imagine . . .” Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 5.

  p. 11. “Not two months after Hitler invaded . . .” Franz Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 24.

  p. 11. “Maser . . . argues that it was the Russians.” Maser, Hitler, pp. 7–8. But see the statement by Wehrmacht General Knittersched, the commanding general of the Döllersheim Military District, who described preparations for a 1938 bombardment of Döllersheim, in Waite, Psychopathic God, p. 186.

  p. 13. “As John Toland describes it.” Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 6.

  p. 14. “Hitler’s peculiar ecstasy over . . . the Hirsch case.” Waite, Psychopathic God, p. 149.

  p. 14. “the bastard son of a Jew . . .” Ibid., citing Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitlers zweites Buch (Stuttgart, 1961). Waite points out that Hitler’s “facts” about Erzberger’s Jewish father were incorrect, making his obsession all the more peculiar.

  Chapter 2: The Hitler Family Film Noir

  p. 16. “One translation of Jetzinger’s.” Maser, Hitler, p. 8.

  p. 17. “those who are obviously uncomfortable . . . such as . . . Fest.” See Joachim Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clare Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1974). Fest doubts the credibility of Frank’s factual discovery but calls his report of his findings to Hitler “psychologically of crucial importance.”

  p. 17. “Bullock.” Interview with author.

  p. 18. “a thousand years shall not suffice.” Nuremberg statements cited in Joseph Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 323–25.

  p. 18. “a secular confessor, the American psychologist.” See G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary [1947] (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).

  p. 19. “These people must not know . . .” W. P. Hitler, Paris Soir, August 5, 1939, cited in Toland, Adolf Hitler.

  p. 20. “One day, it must have been . . .” Hans Frank, “In the Shadow of the Gallows,” typescript, English translation in John Toland Papers, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. (pp. 330–31 in original German manuscript).

  p. 23. “admonitory stories in Der Stürmer.” See, for instance, those cited by Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1983), p. 145.

  p. 23. “The first products of such cross-breeding . . .” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 400.

  pp. 24–25. “an archivist named Nikolaus Predarovich.” See Maser, Hitler, p. 352, n. 51.

  p. 25. “a different version of Frank emerges.” Niklas Frank, In the Shadow of the Reich, trans. Arthu
r S. Wensinger with Carole Clew-Hoey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

  p. 25. “the tape of the interview Gilbert gave.” The Toland Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

  p. 26. “While he was prone to exaggerate . . .” Ibid.

  p. 26. “That Adolf Hitler certainly had no Jewish blood . . .” Ibid.

  p. 27. “Walter C. Langer . . . seized on the Rothschild rumor.” Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 107–9.

  p. 27. “partly spurious memories of industrialist Fritz Thyssen.” Typescript of a critique of the Thyssen memoirs sent to author by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.

  p. 27. “Chancellor Dollfuss had ordered.” Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. 107.

  p. 28. “certainly a very intriguing hypothesis . . .” Ibid., pp. 108–9.

  p. 29. “The psychoanalyst Norbert Bromberg.” Norbert Bromberg and Verna Volz Small, Hitler’s Psychopathology (New York: International Universities Press, 1983), p. 29.

  p. 29. “a rather wild story.” Fest, Hitler, p. 15.

  p. 29. “These facts were so well known . . .” Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 150.

  p. 30. “Was Hitler a Jew?” Letter to the Saudi Gazette, cited in the Jewish Press, 1984.

  p. 31. “The two great figures . . .” George Steiner, interview with author.

  p. 32. “the Caligari Hitler.” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene (Germany, 1919). It should be noted that at the end of the film there is ambiguity over whether Dr. Caligari is a brilliant doctor or a mountebank, but the name “Caligari” has come to embody the dark Gothic expressionism of Weimar romanticism.

  p. 33. “The debriefing took place.” “OSS Sourcebook,” National Archives, Washington, D.C., pp. 926–27.

  p. 33. “John Toland hinted.” Phone conversation with the author, 1984.