It seems to be an article of faith with the British newspaper industry that nothing quite shifts copy like an article on Adolf Hitler: how else to explain the fascination with obvious nonsense like this?
A brief encounter with a Jewish prostitute may have led to Hitler's genocidal Holocaust, claim psychiatrists.
They believe he may have caught the sexually transmitted disease syphilis which, if untreated, can eventually cause madness.
According to a report, mental and behavioural disturbances triggered by the advanced stages of the disease could have resulted in Hitler targeting Jews and the mentally retarded.
There is "ample circumstantial evidence" for the theory, according to a team headed by psychiatrist Dr Bassem Habeeb.
Set aside the thinly-veiled antisemitism of this "theory" - that a Jewish whore is to blame for Hitler killing 6 million Jews - and let us consider instead that this nonsensical speculation is neither new, dating as it does back at least four decades, nor does it stand even the slightest chance of being true: the fact is that there was absolutely nothing in Hitler's ideological system which was in the slightest bit new or less than widespread when he put it together. Mix long-standing European antisemitism with the anti-Slavic pan-Germanism of the likes of Karl Lüger, throw in a jumbo portion of the "scientific" [sic] racialism and eugenicism favored by mainstream scientists of the period, add in a strong dash of the socialism which also gave birth to Mussolini, leaven it with the "Aryan superiority" claptrap propagandized by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and what you have is nothing other than what the world would come to know and hate as National Socialism.
There's absolutely no need to invoke supposed Jewish prostitutes for whose existence there isn't a shred of evidence in order to understand why a pan-German ultra-chauvinist who abandoned the land of his birth to enlist in the army of another "more German" one should have refused to accept that his adopted country could really have lost a war it seemed on the verge of winning and preferred instead to blame an "enemy within" for the defeat, especially when just such a long-demonized group was at hand and counting amongst its ranks Marxist agitators of surrender and revolution like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht*Kurt Eisner. To German-speakers like Hitler who grew up soaked in racism and theories of their superiority as well as notions of Judaism as a "bacillus" eating away at the German body-politic, incidents like the sudden collapse of the German war effort and the Spartacist revolt would have been all it took to crystallize their latent anti-semitism into the murderous hatred Hitler harnessed so successfully. Hitler got into power by peddling his antisemitic theories to a public already widely receptive to such ideas, and it would be utterly stupid to argue that those 11 million Germans who voted for him in 1933 were all suffering from syphilis acquired by patronizing Jewish prostitutes.
Of course, the great irony in the Daily Wail's resort to giving such a stale and ludicrous speculation a new lease of life is that no major British paper did more in the 1930s to sell Hitler as a reasonable man with reasonable policies ...
*Liebknecht was not, in fact, Jewish - though he did earn the lethal hatred of ultranationalists by being the only German MP to have openly called for surrender during the war, in line with the "revolutionary defeatism" advocated at the time by V.I. Lenin.
Comments