Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

If I had to choose the most significant--and dramatic--recent contribution to the most central debate, it would be an essay on Hitler’s war aims by Sir Richard Evans... [who] say[s] something important about who Hitler was... that had been, in essence, argued by Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lucy Dawidowicz.... But Evans sharpens the point and reminds us of what I think some historians and intellectuals have lost sight of....

Evans... reveals just how unresolved so much about the interpretation of Hitler and the Holocaust still is. Was it the Allies’ superiority in economic resources that gave them victory? Evans joins Kennedy in rejecting “the crude economic determinism” of that claim. Was it the Allies’ remarkable success in cracking the German military codes with the now famous “Enigma” machine? Again, that played a part, Evans believes, but code-breaking has been given a glamorous triumphalist history.... Was it the Allies’ weapons and technological superiority, as Kennedy suggests? “In the end this made little difference,” Evans asserts. “German science and technology were second to none in their capacity to innovate.” 

Then what was it? Evans points to one factor more than any other: the often misunderstood nature of Hitler’s war aims. He states his conclusion with finality: For Hitler this was not an ordinary war, “This was a racial war in which the extermination of six million European Jews, not dealt with at all in Kennedy’s book because it did not seem to belong to the normal arsenal of military strategy, was a paramount war aim.”... That was “what the war was really about.” And that, according to Evans, more than anything was why Germany lost the war.... For Hitler, it was not a matter of making the trains run on time so much as making the trains never stop running to Auschwitz and Treblinka. One relatively new aspect of Holocaust study is a focus on what happened when the trains finally did stop running.... Daniel Blatman’s 2011 work, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Harvard University Press).

When the camps were disbanded, the large SS and native Polish and Ukrainian guard troops feeding the gas chambers were not redeployed to stave off the Russians. Instead they were ordered to take all the living and half-dead captives on the road in what became the final phase of the Final Solution: the Death Marches. Hundreds of thousands of closely-guarded prisoners were mercilessly beaten or shot when they couldn’t keep up, starved to death while being harried along icy roads to . . . where? There was no sanctuary left safe for killing, but the killing had to continue at all costs, a horror at least as unfathomable as the camps themselves. The Death March commanders didn’t have to “follow orders. ” They had incorporated Hitlerism so deeply, they wanted to follow orders. As Evans argues, killing Jews was more important than military objectives. These commanders risked their own lives to continue the murder.

What’s worse, Blatman reports, is that it was not just military men but civilians along the way who gleefully took part in murdering the half-dead Jews. For those, like me, who thought it impossible to be further shocked by Hitler’s willing accomplices, reading about the Death Marches introduced a new level of horror.

It is a testament to how deeply dyed the souls of the killers were. Hitler was possessed, some might say, but he was also the cause of possession in others. It seems to me a remarkable vindication of what Trevor-Roper argued in the immediate aftermath of the war when he described Hitler as more than anything a messianic “true believer” in his anti-Semitism. A position at first countered by Alan Bullock and others (such as A.J.P. Taylor), who tried to see him as more a cynical “mountebank,” an actor, a charlatan, even a “realist politician” who merely used his Jew-hatred opportunistically for popular support....

Yet astonishingly there are those such as Kennedy who somehow think the Jew-hatred--the continent-wide messianic project of extermination “not dealt with at all in Kennedy’s book”--was irrelevant to Hitler’s conduct of the war.

There is one respect in which I would take Evans’s characterization further, as Lucy Dawidowicz does in Chapter 20 of my book: Hitler didn’t lose the war. Not the war Evans argues was most important to him: the racial war. Hitler won that war. Six million to one. Yes, he committed suicide at the end. (And yes, 50 million others lost their lives so he could win the part of the war he cared about most. Collateral damage.)... In retrospect at least, it’s tempting to argue that Hitler was, if not the first, then by far history’s greatest single suicide bomber. He blew up Europe to kill the Jews in it, even if it meant killing himself and tens of millions of others in the end.

Reading Evans’s essay, I couldn’t help recall... Trevor-Roper conjur[ing] up a vision of a strange mesmeric talent and a single unshakable mission. He found, among other papers, Hitler’s final testament, which he described as a defining document. It called on the German people to never cease fighting “the eternal poisoners of the world,” the Jews, thus defining himself with his last words as a man who held one mission above all else.... “Do you think Hitler knew,” I asked Trevor-Roper, “that he was doing wrong when he committed his crimes?”

“Absolutely not,” Trevor-Roper said with asperity. “He was convinced of his own rectitude.”... I have come to believe more strongly that evil is not a concept to be dispensed with, but that what we call evil inheres in ideas, in ideologies that motivate the commission of evil acts, under the guise of providing for the collective good. The real question is, what heightens susceptibility to evil ideas?...

The recent (non-parodic) history of Hitler explanations has been mixed.... There are a few works I’d like to single out.... Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library, an especially thoughtful study, adds to the familiar list of books such as Henry Ford’s The International Jew and its source, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another title whose prominence I’d missed: Racial Typology of the German People by Hans F.K. Günther.... Add to this... William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.... I don’t think I would have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction, but I found myself impressed with Shirer’s reporter’s eye. For Hitler. For the still inexplicable power of the “spell.”...

The larger lesson of Shirer’s prescience here is that somehow those who were eyewitnesses, those who were ear witnesses as well (like George Steiner, who tells me in my Chapter 17 that he was so transfixed just from hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio in 1930s Vienna, that he knew); they all somehow knew something beyond the ken of those who experienced it secondhand. There is a phrase I neglected to use in the first edition: Führerkontakt. The transformative personal charisma that turned Hitler’s rival, Berlin-based Goebbels, into a gibbering sycophant in a single meeting, according to Goebbels’s own diary. Führerkontakt that had mind-scrambling effect on august German General Staff strategists and radiated out from the inner circle to all those tens of thousands in Sportzplatz- and Nuremberg-style rallies within the sound of his voice, the access to his appearances in real time. Different, almost incomprehensible, to those of us consigned to a remote viewing.

This is one reason why I found the first-person perspective of the courageous Cassandra-like reporters of the anti-Hitler Munich Post (to whom I pay my respects in the “Poison Kitchen” chapter) so invaluable. Sifting through the crumbling original issues of the paper I found in the basement of a Munich archive, seeing the rise of Hitler through their eyes, I felt an almost palpable sense of that spell. I still feel not enough recognition has come to their efforts to investigate and publish the truth about Hitler, particularly from the world of journalism where there are few greater models of heroism. I still recall the chill I felt when I came across their September 9, 1931 issue that published excerpts from a secret Nazi Party document that first used the word for “Final Solution”: Endlösung.The fact that few of their German readers seemed to realize its full implication does not excuse ignoring their achievement. That has begun to change--one of the things I’m most proud of about this book. Indeed, a former mayor of Munich did his Ph.D. thesis on the Post journalists, and at least one entire book (albeit in Portuguese) has been inspired by my account. Yes, Woodward and Bernstein took on Nixon, but those reporters took on Adolf Hitler and the entire Nazi Party. 

Distance has somewhat obscured the immediacy of such first-hand, first-person witnesses and allowed the advocates for the “functionalist” school to give organizational charts and bureaucratic struggle more prominence in “explaining” the Holocaust....

Moving beyond Hitler, there are concentric circles of controversies.... Consider... Hitler’s murders of the Jews and Stalin’s murders of just about everyone. Two of the most interesting writers on these questions, Alvin Rosenfeld and Timothy Snyder, have differing, though not necessarily contradictory, ways of talking about the Holocaust, its centrality, and its uniqueness. Timothy Snyder... contends that the time span should be extended back to the early-‘30s, and defined more geographically than ethnically. Which means including what is now regarded as Stalin’s deliberate mass starvation of the Ukrainian peasant populace (the “kulaks”) beginning in 1931.... Synder places this slaughter on the continuum of subsequent Stalinist mass-murder frenzies.... It is hard not to read Snyder’s work without trying to deny that human nature could give rise to such insane, relentless slaughter. But one can’t.... Snyder’s conflation of the Holodomor, the Purges, and the murder of the Poles tends to make the Holocaust of the Jews part of a continuum rather than a stand-alone horror. It raises profound questions about how we establish a hierarchy of evil acts. Is an order about agricultural administration that seems to deliberately seek starvation the same as rounding up, shooting, and gassing Jews in a hands-on way?

Alvin Rosenfeld has some concerns about this.... Rosenfeld takes on what might be called the ahistorical cultural assimilation of the Holocaust into the anodyne language of “man’s inhumanity to man,” “intolerance,” and the like. Formulations that manage to elide the rather significant and distinct aspect of Hitler’s extermination: anti-Semitism. I’ve called this sense of the dilution of the particular meaning of the Holocaust a kind of Faustian bargain, in which Jews trade an inclusive “universalizing” of the Holocaust for incorporation into a generic “mass murder” category, which can denature the savage, bloody actuality of the ancient hatred behind it....

I think the Holocaust demands of us that we not lose sight of the fact that it was not just another tragedy in war-torn Europe amidst clashing nationalisms. At the heart of Rosenfeld’s argument is the thesis that anti-Semitism has a two-millennium-long history (at least), one that has produced a continuous slaughter of Jews transnationally, and Hitler’s holocaust should be seen in that light, as not an aberration but a culmination of a disease of Western civilization that transcends ordinary violence. And that the Holocaust portended not an end but a beginning....

One recurrent question raised by both the Snyder and Rosenfeld books is the one of comparative evil. Hitler vs. Stalin: It’s not a competition, but it can be a way for us to evaluate what we think is worst about what human beings are capable of. What we talk about when we talk about evil. Do we measure it by body count? A case could be made that Stalin’s death toll (and indeed Mao Zedong’s) is greater than Hitler’s (unless we add to Hitler’s ledger the 50 million deaths from the war he started in 1939). Or do we also have to factor in the question of deliberation, intent, of “agency”? Hitler’s murder of the Jews could be said to be more direct (machine-gunning and gassing, the Death Marches), while Stalin’s engineered starvation of the Ukraine (like Mao’s massive famines during “The Great Leap Forward”) was more a remote-control manipulation (and denial) of resources that caused a populace to shrivel and die (amidst the horror of cannibalism) with much less hands-on killing. Hands-off killing can be just as bad or worse. But, as one of the first great writers in English to document Stalin’s crimes, Robert Conquest, who had exposed the massive death tolls from Stalin’s purges and starvations, said to me, “Hitler’s just feels worse.” After reading Snyder’s Bloodlands, one acolyte of Conquest said to me that it still “feels” a little worse, but by a little less.

I’ve tended to believe that it doesn’t diminish Hitler’s evil or the horror of the Holocaust to acknowledge crimes of equal magnitude but of different methods. Indeed I believe that if we err we should err on the side of seeking commonality with victims of other genocidal horrors, mass murders, and the like (Rwanda, Native Americans, slavery, etc.) rather than seek to find differences that separate us from their suffering. 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 Soviet 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....

I had advanced a notion in the book that one of the most heuristic ways of looking at Hitler was to see him as he saw himself from the very beginning in Vienna: as an artist. A failed artist, but one who was then able to put himself in a position where he could create a kind of art of evil.

“Art of evil” in this context is not an empty phrase. In one sense, he was using genocidal means to re-sculpt the human genome by carving off entire chunks (Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs). Ascribing to Hitler an artistic consciousness is important in the discourse about the very possibility of evil. Especially in an age when neuroscience is replacing evil with neural-defect diagnoses like psychopath and sociopath, which see evil as the result of brain defect or malformation. With free will considered an illusion, there is no evil because there is no choice, only determinism. Artistic consciousness may be the last validation of free will, its last refuge from determinism. It is hard to ascribe every efflorescence of artistic consciousness, every brush stroke or musical note or poetic image, to some materialist, physiologicallydetermined, or behaviorist syndrome in the brain....

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.