Explaining Hitler Read online

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR RON ROSENBAUM’S

  EXPLAINING HITLER

  “In the end, Explaining Hitler therefore achieves something more than what it sets out to do. Rather than merely explaining the explainers, it brings alive again the sordid story of Hitler himself, reinvigorating our memory of him and his milieu. For one more generation, Mr. Rosenbaum has prevented Hitler from passing into history as a caricature, and that is an achievement worth admiring.”

  —Anne Applebaum, Wall Street Journal

  “Remarkable. . . . Drawing on his considerable skills as an investigative journalist, Rosenbaum interviews many of the historians and other researchers, professional and amateur, who have looked into these matters. He has a sympathetic ear, a knack for classification, and a sharp, critical mind.”

  —Michael R. Marrus, New York Times Book Review

  “Brilliant. . . . richly researched and eminently readable.”

  —Milton Rosenberg, Chicago Tribune

  “Reading this book is like having a long conversation with someone who’s passionate, brilliant.”

  —John Dorfman, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Restlessly probing and deeply intelligent. . . . In this brilliantly skeptical inventory of the world’s Hitler-thinking, Rosenbaum analyzes not only the multiple Hitler theories but also the agendas and fantasies that the theorizers bring to their subject. His book may be useful to the surprising number of people—Flat-Earthers of the moral realm—who, even now, refuse to believe in the existence of evil.”

  —Lance Morrow, Time

  “A truly brilliant book.”

  —Frank McLynn, Irish Times

  “It is both thoughtful and deeply felt and in some ways its personal freewheeling qualities enable Rosenbaum to get closer to the demonic element in Hitler.”

  —John Gross, New York Review of Books

  “Rosenbaum’s bracing, rigorous, exhilarating, and beautifully written book is an amazing voyage into what must be one of the most confounding areas of scholarly inquiry.”

  —Lev Raphael, Detroit Free Press

  “Ron Rosenbaum brilliantly explores the origins of Hitler’s evil. . . . Few contemporary writers are better equipped to pull off this task. Rosenbaum is a rare triple threat: He is a first-rate thinker, a fine reporter, and a superb writer. He is also, as this volume proves, in control of a massive body of scholarly work on Hitler. . . . Personal without being self-indulgent, erudite without being pedantic, written with passion and moral engagement worthy of its momentous subject, Explaining Hitler is an exemplary work of intellectual journalism, an idiosyncratic classic.”

  —Gary Kamiya, Salon

  “A journey of considerable enlightenment. . . . Rosenbaum comes up with what is real news even for those of us who claim to be knowledgeable about the era.”

  —Fred E. Katz, New Leader

  “Vintage Rosenbaum: a blend of a newshound’s investigative reporting with a literary critic’s close textual reading, all wrapped in an elaborate (if gingerly proffered) bundle of theories.”

  —David Greenberg, The Forward

  “Explaining Hitler blossoms into an absorbing, occasionally suspenseful and exciting, and genuinely fresh look at a man who already ranked as perhaps the most thoroughly analyzed public figure in history.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Rosenbaum has one of the most interesting minds and compelling voices in contemporary journalism. . . . The result is an extremely contemporary book that uses Hitler as a way to address the most profound questions of Western philosophy.”

  —Robert S. Boynton, New York Newsday

  “Rosenbaum lays claim to no final answers, but by deploying and interweaving techniques proper to both history and literature, he uniquely illuminates one of the darkest corners of modern experience.”

  —Steve Dowden, Boston Sunday Globe

  “It is toward understanding the ways our culture has tried for more than half a century to make sense of Hitler and what he wrought that this book makes its real contribution.”

  —Michael Andre Bernstein, Los Angeles Times

  “A remarkable study, as rich in humanity as a fine novel.”

  —Algis Valiunas, American Spectator

  “A thinking person’s blockbuster.”

  —Austin American Statesman

  “Smart, scrupulously reported.”

  —Newsweek

  “A superb history.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Profound and provocative. . . . A resourcefully imaginative examination of our desperate search for an explanation of ultimate evil.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Offers groundbreaking insights into the enigma of Hitler’s psyche.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bold and provocative. . . . Illuminates the most perplexing unsolved mystery of the twentieth century. In Explaining Hitler, profound historical questions spring urgently and hauntingly to life.”

  —Sam Tanenhaus, author of Whittaker Chambers

  “A work of exceptional scholarship. Ron Rosenbaum has written a fascinating and thought-provoking study that is a must-read for anyone interested in trying to understand Hitler.”

  —Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed and Hitler’s Children

  “A remarkable book, a major contribution. Ron Rosenbaum gives us his often dramatic discussions with the major analysts of Hitler’s career and personality. While highly readable, it goes deep into the basic issues of ethics, of free will, and the problem of evil.”

  —Robert Conquest, author of Stalin and The Great Terror

  “This is a wonderfully thoughtful investigation. The great strength of the book is the empathy Rosenbaum displays for the points of view he examines. It’s a masterful job of listening, of tuning in to some great intellects of our era as they debate the subject—one that allows us all to participate in our own search for Hitler.”

  —Charles L. Mee, Jr., author of Meeting at Potsdam

  “Ron Rosenbaum has brought his searching style of inquiry to the darkest of twentieth-century questions—the nature of evil in one man, in Adolf Hitler. By visiting and examining the experts and their testimonies, he has written a bewildering Rashomon tale, seen in a multifaceted mirror. Explaining Hitler is a remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.”

  —David Remnick, author of Lenin’s Tomb

  EXPLAINING HITLER

  Copyright © 1998 by Ron Rosenbaum

  Preface and Afterword copyright © 2014 by Ron Rosenbaum

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Designed by Tanya M. Pérez-Rock 1998

  Set in 10-point Photina by the Perseus Books Group

  Portions of this work were originally published in The New Yorker in different form.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Basic Books, a subsidiary of Perseus Books Group LLC: Excerpt from The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, by Robert G. L. Waite. Copyright © 1977 by Robert G. L. Waite. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a subsidiary of Perseus Books Group LLC.

  Diane Cole: Excerpts from an interview between Diane Cole and Lucy

  Dawidowicz.

  Used by permission of Diane Cole.

  Neal Kozodoy, Literary Executor for the Estate of Lucy Dawidowicz: Excerpts from The War Against the Jews, by Lucy Dawidowicz, Reprinted by per
mission of Neal Kozodoy, Literary Executor for the Estate of Lucy Dawidowicz.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press Edition 2014

  ISBN: 978-0-306-82319-0 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail: [email protected].

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To those who survived, and to those who did not

  The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain.

  —Alan Bullock

  There will never be an adequate explanation. . . . The closer one gets to explicability the more one realizes nothing can make Hitler explicable.

  —Emil Fackenheim

  Hitler is explicable in principle, but that does not mean that he has been explained.

  —Yehuda Bauer

  He [God] owes me answers to many questions.

  —Holocaust survivor

  at Auschwitz, 1985

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the Updated Edition

  Introduction: The Baby Pictures and the Abyss

  Part One

  The Beginning of the Beginning

  CHAPTER 1. The Mysterious Stranger, the Serving Girl, and the Family Romance of the Hitler Explainers

  CHAPTER 2. The Hitler Family Film Noir

  CHAPTER 3. The Poison Kitchen: The Forgotten First Explainers

  Part Two

  Two Postwar Visions: Sincerity and Its Counterfeit

  CHAPTER 4. H. R. Trevor-Roper: The Professor and the Mountebank

  CHAPTER 5. Alan Bullock: Rethinking Hitler’s Thought Process

  Part Three

  Geli Raubal and Hitler’s “Sexual Secret”

  CHAPTER 6. Was Hitler “Unnatural”?

  CHAPTER 7. Hitler’s Songbird and the Suicide Register

  CHAPTER 8. The Dark Matter: The Sexual Fantasy of the Hitler Explainers

  Part Four

  Hatred: Complex and Primitive

  CHAPTER 9. Fritz Gerlich and the Trial of Hitler’s Nose

  CHAPTER 10. The Shadow Hitler, His “Primitive Hatred,” and the “Strange Bond”

  Part Five

  The Art of Evil and the Future of It

  CHAPTER 11. To the Gestapo Cottage; or, A Night Close to the Führer

  CHAPTER 12. David Irving: The Big Oops

  Part Six

  The War over the Question Why

  CHAPTER 13. A Tale of Three Kafkas: A Cautionary Parable

  CHAPTER 14. Claude Lanzmann and the War Against the Question Why

  CHAPTER 15. Dr. Louis Micheels: There Must Be a Why

  Part Seven

  Blame and Origins

  CHAPTER 16. Emil Fackenheim and Yehuda Bauer: The Temptation to Blame God

  CHAPTER 17. George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish “Invention of Conscience”

  CHAPTER 18. Singling out Christianity: The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby

  CHAPTER 19. Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans

  CHAPTER 20. Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

  Afterword to the Updated Edition

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  PREFACE TO THE UPDATED EDITION

  Bear with me a moment. I’m not sure you need to read this Preface, but I feel like I need to write it. I need to say something about the title, Explaining Hitler. To dispel any doubt, clear up any ambiguity, the unfortunate shadow that irony casts. And by the way, in general, I like ambiguity. My longtime favorite work of literary criticism is William Empson’s classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. I often see eight or more.

  And I like irony—as long as people get it. But how can one be sure? There was that encounter with one interviewer who kept asking, about this book, “But what’s your explanation, what’s your explanation?”

  Without much success I tried to explain Explaining Hitler. Explain that it was a book about the enterprise, the process, the attempt to explain Hitler. Something the subtitle—The Search for the Origins of His Evil—seemed to make clear. Not about my Answer. Not the final solution to The Final Solution. Not my PowerPoint slideshow drawing a clear line from the baby picture of Hitler (on the cover) to the exterminationist Führer in the bunker.

  It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question “Why?” The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about the explainers—about the eyes of the beholders—and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

  The hopelessly confused and conflicting psychoanalytic modes (was it the bad father or the overprotective mother?). The “psychohistorical” (the discredited “Jewish blood” theory), the psychosexual (the largely discredited Geli Raubal rumors). The ideological (was Hitler’s anti-Semitism the result of nineteenth-century German “racial science” or nineteen centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, or a fusion of both?). The theological (what do the savants of Holocaust theodicy—the search for a reason for ultimate evil in a universe supposedly ruled by a just and loving God—tell us?). And the metaphysical: What do we make of George Steiner’s “threefold blackmail of transcendence”?

  Not neglecting the disease models (Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s lifelong, unsupported belief that Hitler contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna). A sad symptom of the recurrent effort to find a Jew to blame, such as the Australian obsessive who wrote a thick book based upon the supposition that Ludwig Wittgenstein—probably, though not definitely, a classmate of Hitler in middle school and the product of a family that converted from Judaism to Christianity—was somehow to blame.

  Or did it all come down to a mosquito bite (the deferred “psychopathic” symptomology of epidemic encephalitis, a disease Hitler supposedly contracted in the World War I trenches)? Just to name a few, examined skeptically, herein.

  Everyone seems to want to have one pet theory of Hitler, almost like a talisman against “the horror of inexplicability” as I call it. A talisman they hold closely, guard jealously. No need to think about it anymore. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to answer the question, “Oh, have you read Alice Miller?” (the psychoanalyst whose error-filled Hitler thesis dressed up the discredited “Jewish blood” theory in Freudian terms to explain Hitler).

  I came to examine these theories, however flawed as Hitler explanations they might be, for what they reflected of the explainers’ predispositions and concerns. One critic described the book as being about “the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history.”

  About the flaws, the hidden agendas, the explanations that serve as consolations, or even exculpations (“the perversion made him do it,” “the mosquito made him do it”). The meaningless ascription to him of the term “psychopath” or “sociopath.” The way Hitler had somehow “escaped” all the terminologies, the overconfident theories that sought to pin him down, like some insect specimen. Escaped not in the manner of the “Hitler alive in Argentina” myth but escaped explanation.

  Why was that? Was he the sort of “exceptionalist” phenomenon that transcended explanation—or had we just not found the events obscured by history, the missing piece of the puzzle that might constitute evidence for an explanation?

  Explaining Hitler, in other words, is not my got-it-all-nailed-down instruction manual. It’s not a biography; it’s more a dissection, well, an examination of biographies—an essay in intellectual history. I do not have the hubri
s to declare discovery of a Unified Field Theory of Hitler. No Higgs Boson of Hitler. No “Theory of Everything” Evil. That doesn’t mean there won’t—or can’t—ever be one, or that it’s not worth the attempt to further clarify what we mean by Hitler, by evil, by origin. Indeed, as I’ve tried to point out in the book, the attempts often tell us more about ourselves, our own self-images, and our cultural predispositions than some indisputable truth about Hitler. “Cultural self-portraits in the negative” was the phrase I used: Hitler is everything we (hope) we are not. Thus the desire for explanations that put him beyond the range of “normal” human beings. Beyond the range of us.

  I don’t believe all explanations lack any merit and I go to great lengths to evaluate what they may have added to our understanding. And yet, and yet. . . . So often so many explanations fall maddeningly, and sometimes even comically, short.

  For the record, my approach in Explaining Hitler grew out of the intellectual training I had in the practice of “close reading”—the search for resonant ambiguities and conflicts in texts inculcated in me by the last of the so-called New Critics at Yale (Robert Penn Warren, William K. Wimsatt, and the like). A method initially evolved for the study of literature, but which I’ve found transferable, if used with care, to the study of history or as I described it:

  close reading of documents, memoirs, police reports, and close listening to the voices of the explainers I sought out, in an effort to hear the unspoken subtext, the significant allusions, the hidden agendas, conflicts, and in particular, the doubts beneath the surface. To sense the nature of the longing that drives the explainers, and the kinds of solace explanations offer.

  The problem to which I applied this was the one posed by the Hitler Baby Picture on the cover of this (and the initial) edition of the book. My emphatic choice of cover image. Because it asks the crucial question: How do we get from here (the innocent infant) to there (the genocidal monster)? In other words, what factors shaped the metamorphosis? Or was it a gradual evolution? At what point did Hitler become Hitler?

  It’s a controversial question. Is it “an obscenity in itself” to ask this question as Claude Lanzmann—the director of Shoah and would-be dictator of discourse about Hitler—argues? An obscenity even to try to explain? I don’t agree. I don’t believe one should stifle the innate human desire to make sense of things, even if some things elude our grasp. I don’t believe Hitler and the Holocaust should be removed to some sacralized space apart from history.