I finally got around to reading Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist, essayist, and novelist. I had ignorantly neglected it on the shelves for several years; I thought, wrongly, that it was a psychobabble assessment of Adolf Hitler that "explained" the anti-Semitic, war-making monster Hitler became later in life. In fact, the book is less an analysis of Hitler than an analysis of the various explanations that have been put forward to explain the Nazi dictator. The result is profoundly disturbing and important.
These analyses of Hitler range from the ridiculous to the plausible: his aggression can be explained by the overweening love of his mother and his lack of a testicle, or because of an abusive father; his anti-Semitism can be explained because he contracted syphilis from a Jewish whore, or because his grandmother had served as a maid in a Jewish household that paid for Hitler's father's upbringing - had his grandmother been impregnated by the 19-year-old son of the family? Hitler was extinguishing the Jew in himself by annihilating the Jews of Europe, this explanation suggests. Hitler's mother died of cancer in 1907 under the care of a Jewish physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch; perhaps Hitler wanted to kill all of the Jews for this reason? Some suggest that Hitler's abnormal presence in history and geopolitics can be explained due to sexual perversions, such as (undocumented except by hearsay) coprophilia and undinism. What of Geli Raubal, Hitler's half-niece upon whom he was fixated? Hermann Göring, the second-ranking man in Nazi Germany, said that after her death (ruled a suicide) in 1931, Hitler changed. Yes, he had never been a humanitarian, but after her death he shut off all human feeling. This is eerily similar to the mysterious suicide of Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died a year after Raubal; Stalin too was said to have shut off all remaining humanness he may have had after this incident. Did Raubal commit suicide because of Hitler's perversions, because of something abnormal about him? Did Hitler have her killed? These are interesting questions but the disproportionate emphasis placed on them by psychoanalysts and psychohistorians is absurd. The skeptical Rosenbaum, while wading in these theories and explaining them in detail, is similarly unconvinced.
Rosenbaum also dives into, in my opinion, more serious attempts to understand Hitler: was he convinced of his own rectitude, as per the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, or was he an actor who eventually became convinced of his own role, as per the historian Alan Bullock? Does Hitler represent an "eruption of demonism into history", as posited by theologian Emil Fackenheim, or was the Holocaust caused by German "eliminationist anti-Semitism" as per political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose thesis significantly minimizes Hitler's role in the Holocaust? Can we believe in a loving God, or God at all, in light of the Holocaust? When did Hitler decide to kill the Jews? Was it in November 1918, when he heard of the German capitulation while recovering from a gas attack at the military hospital in Pasewalk (as per historian Lucy Dawidowicz) or was it at some point in 1941, in reaction to either a) the initial victories in the Soviet Union or b) the setbacks in the Soviet Union that winter (there is no historical consensus, and this is a matter for enormous debate, but most historians place the decision to murder the Jews at some point in 1941, not decades beforehand).
The inability to "diagnose" Hitler is disturbing. Few people have had more ink spilled about them. Much attention has been paid to Hitler not only by scholars, but by novelists, filmmakers, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large. Hitler sells. Yet it seems we cannot begin to understand him. The range of arguments about what made Hitler Hitler, what made him commit his monstrous deeds, is a very telling indicator of this fact. The ratio of words written about and the attention paid to Hitler to the actual understanding of what made Hitler tick is astronomical. Indeed, some, most prominently the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, argue strenuously that even attempting to understand Hitler is to exculpate him from his crimes.
Lanzmann, absurdly, suggests that to try to understand Hitler or the Nazis is akin to Holocaust denial. He credits this stance to Primo Levi. Levi, the author of many important books and a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote a passage in his book Survival in Auschwitz that, raving from thirst upon his arrival in the camp, he grabbed an icicle dangling from a barrack. Before he could put it in his mouth, it was ripped from him by an SS guard. Levi, distraught, pleaded, "Why?" and the SS man responded, "Hier ist kein warum" (here there is no why). Lanzmann takes this cynical statement by a brutal SS man and proceeds to make it his worldview on how to approach studying and analyzing the Holocaust and the Nazis. Perhaps there is no why in a grotesque place like Auschwitz, but to silence the attempt to even ask the question (as Lanzmann has done, publicly and aggressively) is, ironically, totalitarian.
I have been reading about Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust for as long as I can remember. I can rattle off the hows, the whats, the wheres, the whens, and the who's. As disturbing as this all is, it is the whys that has kept me up nights. It is an eternal question that can never be answered, and for that reason is profoundly disturbing. Yes, we know that SS men clambered onto the short roofs of Birkenau's crematoria and poured in pellets of Zyklon B; we know the mechanisms of how Zyklon B entered the chamber and how the system of introduction was designed to make the killing more efficient; we know where this happened; we know when it happened; we know the identities of the men who poured the pellets, of the men who lied to the Jews and told them they were just being deloused, of the men who ran the camps and the entire extermination program. But why? The Jews represented no economic, political, or military danger to Germany. Yet they were hunted mercilessly in the cities, the villages, and the forests of Europe, so that every last one of them could be murdered. Heinrich Himmler made it a priority to visit Finland and ask that government to turn over the 200 Finnish Jews to be "resettled." This was, clearly, an ideological fear and hatred writ large. There was simply no economic, political, or military justification for demanding the deportation of these 200 Finnish Jews; they were to be murdered because they were Jews. This is chilling. This is something that I can never, and will never, understand.
This differentiates the Nazis' genocidal onslaught from previous or subsequent genocides. The Nazis did, in a sense, believe the Jews to be a fifth column because they were obsessed with the (false) memories of the last days of the First World War: how the Jews had, in their eyes, stabbed the German Army in the back and thus forfeited German honor. This was not to happen again. However, the universalization of this notion, absurd to begin with, to include men, women, and children from the entire European continent and the relentless determination to murder them all, unless if they were temporarily useful for the German war effort: this is unique. Jewish men were considered a Bolshevik menace; they had to be killed. If their women were left alive, they would not be able to provide for themselves, and would be a headache to the Nazi state; they had to be killed. The children could not be separated from their mothers in a "tidy" fashion, and in the future they would represent the avengers of their parents; they, too, had to be killed.
I have been ruminating over the nature of Hitler for the last several days, and I find myself not knowing what to believe. I do not know if he was a convinced anti-Semite from his bohemian days in Vienna, or if he became one once immersed in the postwar chaos of Munich. I do not know if he foresaw the extermination of the Jews from his younger days or not. I do not know why he thought what he thought, which remained remarkably consistent from 1919 Munich, through Mein Kampf (composed in 1924), through the Machtergreifung of 1933, the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the beginning of the wholesale murder of Jews in the summer of 1941, all the way to his suicide in the otherworldly Führerbunker in April 1945. I do not know if Hitler was a raving lunatic in his private life, as he was in his harangues in the Nuremberg rallies, or if this was just an act, and he shed his skin upon returning to his private quarters (I lean toward a fusion of the two, which is cheating, I know).
Even how one analyzes the Holocaust is inseparable from how one analyzes Hitler. Did Hitler always intend a Holocaust, although not necessarily the one that occurred? Or did he just want the Jews "out" but had to improvise due to wartime contingencies? Did the Holocaust come from top-down orders (i.e., Hitler to Himmler/Heydrich to Eichmann downward) or was it the culmination of organic, grassroots processes to "solve" the "Jewish question"? Historians argue vociferously about what time in 1941 the go-ahead for the extermination of the Jews was given, as mentioned above. This also reflects one's view of Hitler. Was it before the invasion of the Soviet Union and inseparable from that ideological conflict? To follow up from this: Did Hitler make the decision due to the euphoria that came with the victories in the early stages of the invasion? Did the decision come when the Nazis failed to take Moscow and Leningrad, and then did not know what else to do with the Jews that they had cooped up in the ghettos of Poland, other than murder them? This last theory makes Hitler and the Nazis much less ideological in their pursuit of exterminating the Jews and more "pragmatic": there was not enough food to go around, and there was the danger of disease, so the Jews needed to be killed. Or did the decision come in December 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack, after the war truly became global in scope? Because in January 1939, Hitler had made a "prophecy" that in the event of a world war, the result would not be the victory of international Jewry ("and therefore the Bolshevization of the earth") but the destruction of the European Jews. Was it time now to make this prophecy a reality?
Again, I take the Goldilocks position. I believe that Hitler was necessary for the Holocaust to have happened, and that not just anyone in his position would have done the same(to take the title of the 1984 Milton Himmelfarb essay in Commentary, "No Hitler, No Holocaust"). Would a Nazi Germany headed by Hermann Göring have embarked on what became the Holocaust? Obviously, I don't know, but I don't think so. Hitler's ideology and hatred suffused the Nazi leadership as well as the middlemen in the bureaucracy and lower-ranking individuals of the SS, the army, and the police. It gave them the general parameters in which to work. However, unlike the popular conception of the Nazi regime as streamlined and centralized, it was rather decentralized and chaotic. Hitler, the Social Darwinist who was obsessed with "survival of the fittest", made his regime a jungle in which his ministers were constantly fighting for his favor. Rosenberg clashed with Goebbels, Himmler with Göring, Bormann with everyone; the SS was pitted against the civilian bureaucracy and the army; within the SS, the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA, or Economic and Administration Office) and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office) clashed for influence; and so on. In the words of historian and Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, Nazi officials "worked toward the Führer": they had an idea of what he wanted and they took the initiative to act upon it. Those who put forward the idea closest to Hitler's heart (usually the most radical of initiatives) were successful: Himmler and Heydrich were particularly successful in this arena. So, the Holocaust was the fusion of a top-down, Hitler-driven, ideological approach and a bottom-up, proactive, sycophantic approach. While historians have been biting each others' heads off about these issues since the Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") of the 1970s, they are not, in my opinion, mutually exclusive. I am not persuaded by the arguments of the exclusively intentionalist ("Hitler always intended to exterminate the Jews") or the exclusively functionalist ("The Holocaust was the product of initiatives by middle-ranking bureaucrats largely driven by self-interest").
Where do I place Hitler? Was he dithering, hesitant in giving the green light to the Final Solution? Was he a laughing maniac who delighted in the annihilation of the Jews, as concluded by Rosenbaum? Somewhere in between? Somewhere else? I don't know. That is the insane thing about Hitler. As I wrote before, for as much as has been written about him, he is a mystery. The more I read about him, the less I know or understand about him. Should I even bother understanding him? The attempt is challenging and very, very disturbing. What does Hitler say about the capacity of humans to do evil? Or was he beyond the range of human capacity, off the charts, standards of deviations away from even the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world? The last is the view of the theologian Emil Fackenheim, and I have to disagree. As profoundly disturbing as it is to contemplate, Hitler was human, just as human as you and me. But that is not enlightening in and of itself. Okay, great, he was human. So what? The more interesting questions are: Why? Why did he embark on such destruction? And what was his motivation? He was anti-Semitic, sure, but there are lots of anti-Semites. There was only one Hitler.
This post consisted of a lot of questions. But that is indicative of the matter at hand. For all that is written about Adolf Hitler, I still think there are more questions than answers.
