Making Sense of a Madman

One thing you'll find as a student of the German language is that as you begin to immerse yourself in modern German culture and politics, there's a certain individual whose legacy you won't be able to escape no matter how hard you try.

I am speaking, of course, of Adolf Hitler, who with the passage of time seems to cast an ever longer shadow not just in the German-speaking world, but even beyond: for all the use which is made of him as an earthly stand-in for Satan, there is an unhealthily robust interest in the man's life and deeds which I've never been able to accept stems purely from moral indignation, and at some level I think this widespread preoccupation with Hitler stems at least in part from feelings of admiration - for his meteoric political rise and his military conquests if not necessarily for his genocidal acts - which are merely masked by pro-forma condemnations mouthed to maintain respectability in polite circles. I think this sneaking admiration is at root not only of the efforts of some (though probably not most) Holocaust deniers as well as in the popularity of the programming run by the Hitler History Channel.

Being a member of one of those groups whom Hitler most despised, I lack the requisite self-hatred to partake of such feelings of identification myself, but that doesn't mean that I can't attempt to uncover the roots of Hitler's continued fascination and the intellectual currents which he mined into to promote his barbarism, and this is precisely what I've been trying to do over the last few weeks. It's all very well to just dismiss Hitler out of hand as merely a madman, but while he certainly was mad the fact is that he managed to preach his brand of insanity successfully enough for 40% of the German electorate to vote for him in 1933, and nothing I've read or witnessed indicates to me that Germans were or are any more murderous by nature than the British, the French, the Belgians or any other European nationalities which have spilled oceans of foreign blood in wars of conquest. As irrational as Hitler's aims were, the appeal of his programme must be as explicable in purely rational terms as any other phenomenon, and the best way I can think of to approach such an endeavor is to try to go back to the original sources - to study the man's speeches and writings, and to study the times in which he made them in order to appreciate the context in which they had such an impact.

Towards the aforementioned end, I have been gathering and sifting through a vast amount of material, from which I've managed to gain quite a few new insights I wouldn't have had I confined myself to simply reading biographies by Joachim Fest and Ian Kershaw. I would like someday to arrange my findings into a coherent form and share them on here as an essay, but for now I will share just two findings of which I am now certain, one uncontroversial and the other less so.

The first insight I wish to share is that hatred of Jews was absolutely central to Hitler's world view, more so even than "lebensraum" or any other ambitions he might have claimed to have: for Hitler the "real enemy" was and always would be "The Jews", not the actual British, American or Russian troops with which his Wehrmacht did battle on two fronts, and it is only by grasping this point that one can understand why Hitler would have given greater priority to keeping the trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka running over getting supplies to German soldiers desperately fighting off the Red Army's advances: if the war could be prolonged until the murder of every single Jew in Europe was complete, to Hitler's mind this would still have been counted as a victory, even the only really important one, for by Hitler's way of thinking even total defeat on the battlefield would be something Germany could easily recover from just as long as the "cancer" within the "Aryan" racial body had been thoroughly excised. With all of this in mind, to argue as some do that too much attention is paid to the Holocaust in discussing Hitler is to engage in rank dishonesty: although Hitler despised Slavs and intended to exterminate or enslave them in a new German Empire modeled on the lines of Britain's dominions in India, his feelings of contempt towards speakers of Slavic languages bore no comparison to the fanatical hatred he harboured towards Jews, and I don't think it's going too far to say that killing the Jews within Russia's borders was an even more important motivator for his ordering Operation Barbarossa than was acquiring lebensraum, convincing Britain to seek peace or any of the other more "reasonable" demands he stated at the time.

The second and more controversial claim I'll make here is that all of the evidence indicates that Hitler was not an antisemite before World War I, and he almost certainly wasn't one even in 1918, when he was hospitalized due to mustard gas exposure: as numerous sources attest, Hitler had no problem befriending Jews during his years in Vienna, or taking orders from them while serving in the German Army, and indeed his Iron Cross First Class was bestowed on the recommendation of a Jewish officer who recalled no hint whatsoever of antisemitism in his subordinate at the time. That Hitler was already a fanatical pan-German (and therefore necessarily anti-Slavic) in 1914 is clear from his decision to flee Austria to enlist in the German army, but to date his antisemitism to the pre-war period is to accept his efforts to bolster his antisemitic bona-fides in "Mein Kampf" at face value.

No, Hitler's antisemitism can be traced to the year 1919, and almost certainly to his experiences during the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic (Räterepublik), whose heavily Jewish leadership - along with the even more dominant Jewish presence in the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic founded by Bela Kun - seemed to give substance to the allegation that there was an international "Jewish plot" to foist communism on the rest of Europe; that many of the same creators of the Räterepublik were also to blame for advocating surrender and instigating munitions strikes during the war no doubt reinforced in Hitler's mind the conception of Jews as saboteurs, traitors and propagators of "bolshevism": the long-winded, pseudoscientific social-darwinian attempts at justification for why "The Jews" should wish to do such terrible things would come later, and almost certainly via Alfred Rosenberg, along with "lebensraum" and much other nonsense, while the supposedly hard-headed rationale behind the "lebensraum" drive would come from Karl Haushofer via Rudolf Hess, but at the close of 1919 the main component of Hitler's belief system comprised of his obsession with "Judeo-Bolshevism".

Reading the paragraph above, one may be tempted to think I'm somehow "justifying" Hitler's Jew-hatred, but that is not at all the case. That a long-oppressed minority should be attracted to an ideology which promises to radically break with the past and usher in an age of total equality is no more surprising when the oppressed are European Jews than it is when they are black American or African intellectuals, very many of whom have been drawn to communism from Paul Robeson and W.E. DuBois through far too many 1960s African leaders to name right down to the ANC leadership today; nor would a rational and unprejudiced mind leap from the finding that Jews were overrepresented in the leadership of communist revolutions to the conclusion that all or even most Jews look favorably on communism, just as it is only the bigots who seize upon the fact that black Americans are convicted of more crimes than their white fellow citizens as "proof" that "blacks" as a whole are criminals by nature. Seizing upon some group or other's "disproportionate" participation in some unfavorable activity or other as "evidence" of an innate malevolence is deeply irrational unless one can establish that this evil activity is driven by the core beliefs of said group, so while it is fair to say, for instance, that Islam encourages seeking the submission of "unbelievers" by violent means, nothing in Judaism can be seized upon as impelling one to strive for a society in which every individual is a slave of the all-powerful state. Hitler was witness to communist inspired violence led in large part by radicals of Jewish origin, but it wasn't reason which led him to conclude that all Jews - even the conservative, German-nationalist, anti-socialist ones like Walter Rathenau - were all working hand in hand as part of some international "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy, and Hitler's distaste for rational, objective thought can be easily attested just by reading, say, Chapter XI of Mein Kampf, in which he lays out his racial theories in a meandering, contradiction-laden diatribe chock full of mystical völkisch nonsense dressed up in the language of pseudoscience. While I say that Hitler was not an antisemite in any active sense before 1919, that is not to say that he possessed a mind disciplined and rational enough to resist the call of antisemitism when it seemed to offer a nice, tidy explanation for why the adopted homeland he'd fought for so fanatically for four years should have come to be in the state it was in; nothing more could have been expected of a 30-year old lance corporal without even a high school education and lacking any history of steady employment prior to his army service. The world's misfortune is that this ill-educated, hate-filled nonentity also happened to be a born agitator and an extremely shrewd political organizer, and one whose racism and antisemitism would have stood out at the time only in their intensity rather than by the very fact of their existence.

Comments

[Chirol]

One thing you'll find as a student of the German language is that as you begin to immerse yourself in modern German culture and politics, there's a certain individual whose legacy you won't be able to escape no matter how hard you try. I am speaking, of course, of Adolf Hitler,

That is actually the one thing Americans find. The rest of the Europe which has a far broader range of experiences with the Germans isn't so fixated on WWII.

[Abiola]

Können sie Deutsch sprechen? I can, and when I talk about Hitler's shadow, I am thinking particularly about the German media, which is surely as European as it gets - read the FAZ, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, etc., regularly enough, and you'll find that hardly a day goes by when Hitler's name won't come up in one of them, while German publications know equally well what their British counterparts (as well as the Hitler channel) do - that there's nothing to guarantee a circulation boost like putting Hitler on the cover of a publication.

Finally, I actually do live in Europe, so I think I might know a thing or two about what Europeans think about their neighbour ...

[Chirol]

Ich wohne seit ueber 4 Jahren in Deutschland und habe deutsch studiert =) Habe auch in Daenemark gewohnt sowie alle Westeuropaische Laender besucht =) Thus I also know a thing or two.

Your reply doesn't actually address what I said. Your intro mentions that students of German can't escape Hitler and his legacy. While it is no doubt still an issue here the German news is filled with other things just as regularly like global warming, social conditions and how evil the US is. It's not a top concern anymore. I've been reading German news in German for years and still think it is Americans who are far more obsessed with Hitler and WWII and are almost always the ones who bring it up.

[Abiola]

"Your reply doesn't actually address what I said."

I don't agree. Hitler looms over a heck of a lot in modern German politics, from Germany's current testy relations with Poland (thanks in part to the politically influential Bund der Vertriebenen), to the German establishment's insistence on keeping conscription, to German attitudes towards smoking (decried in the Third Reich, so left uncriticized in the Bundesrepublik), to the fact that GSG-9 is a unit of the police (fears of a new Waffen SS), to the prohibition on singing certain songs (Horst Wessel Lied) or brandishing certain emblems (Swastika) in public, to the Bundesverfassungsgericht's obsession with "cults" in general and the Church of Scientology in particular, to the recent controversy over Eva Herman's remarks, usw. To say that "it's not a top concern anymore" is about as far off the mark as it is possible to get.

"I've been reading German news in German for years and still think it is Americans who are far more obsessed with Hitler and WWII and are almost always the ones who bring it up."

1. I didn't say anything about whether Americans are "more obsessed" with Hitler or not; I said he looms large over modern German culture and politics, which he does.

2. Americans may be more likely to use the "You're just like Hitler!" rhetoric, but Germans manage to relentlessly flog films, magazine issues, art shows, etc. about the man without any external help. Do a quick search on "Hitler" for news.google.de and tell me that he's really yesterday's news.

[Chirol]

Your first example has nothing to do with Hitler and everything to do with the expulsion of Germans from their homeland in Prussia and elsewhere. Poland has an entire complex of its own being eaten up and spit back out over hte years by Germany and Russia. WWII is just the example most people remember. It's also a populist theme Polish politicians use at home and abroad to maximize gains from German shame.

re the GSG9, I dont know who've you been talking to but it's not even remotely related to the Waffen SS and no German who's had basic history would make such a ridiculous statement. The closest thing you'd have is perhaps the Verfassungsschutz which I do hear complains about but rather that they are anti-democratic and not anything about Hitler.

Ss for smoking, elaborate because I'm not sure what you mean. Lucikily Germans still love their cigarettes even as the US and EU crack down on it.

As for Verfassungsfeindliche Symbole, remember that it is ONLY illegal to display the Hackenkreuz and SS symbol for political reasons. You are free to buy, sell and trade Nazi items or show them in any historical or educational context. Is it a silly law? Yes, but it stems more from the German overcautiousness about protecting democracy.

Your argument concentrates far too much on one man. The idea that a modern and developed country like Germany could be taken over by fascists is what scares people. Hitler is secondary in that sense. In addition, like Turkey for example, Germany doesn't have much historical experience with democracy which is why it is a bit overprotective.

Hitler is by far not a top concern anymore and its silly to think so. Germany would be more than happy to forgo any further discussion of him or the war as they are and have been ready to move on.

Where do you live now if I may ask and have you ever lived in Germany? And for how long?

[ExpatJane]

Why am I wandering into this silly spat? Chirol, you seem to be missing the point that's being made.

He never said it was a "top" concern. You did. What he said was that Hilter is still very much mentioned in the press on a frequent basis. All that it would take to verify this is a LexisNexis search for terms used in German newspapers.

He didn't compare the German's focus on Hilter to America's focus on him. Again, you did.

You don't have to live in Germany to read the German news. You're not the only German language student in existence. Honestly, after the month I spent in Berlin you'd have to pay me to go back to that city or, at least, to go back to the unpleasant section that I was in, Prenzlauer Berg.

With the neo-Nazis and other hooligans running around the former East Germany now beating up foreigners, you might want to roll back your comments regarding fascists. Are you trying to say that Hitler isn't a source of inspiration for them? http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=871

Over and out!

BTW, good post Abiola.

[Abiola]

Expatjane,

Thanks for putting it so well: you hit the nail right on the head.

Chirol,

Resorting to "who's lived where longest?" is a pathetic excuse for an argument, as is simply ignoring evidence contradicting your thesis and resorting to pompous ad hominems like "silly": what is truly silly - no, outright inane - is trying to make the preposterous argument that a man who was responsible for the slaughter of 60 million Europeans, the imposition of communism on all of Eastern Europe, the division of Germany for 45 years, and the loss of nearly all of what used to be called Prussia, is someone whose legacy the Germans could possibly get over to the degree you insist. One might think "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung" wasn't a German word to read your strange statements ...

[Chirol]

I hate to tell you but hiding behind a response straight out of a thesaurus is that you brought up the subject of experience in your first reponse

"Finally, I actually do live in Europe, so I think I might know a thing or two about what Europeans think about their neighbour ..."

I was merely responding and asking for more details. But hey, if it makes you feel better to ignore that, I understand.

As for Hitler, my point is that English speaking countries are far more concentrated on him than Germans. I never said his legacy isn't present in Germany today, but that outsiders tend to misinterpret and overestimate it whereas Germans are interested in other aspects of WWII, as I mentioned.

[Abiola]

"I hate to tell you but hiding behind a response straight out of a thesaurus is that you brought up the subject of experience in your first reponse"

No, YOU tried to insinuate that I couldn't know what I was talking about without offering any reason whatsoever beyond bald assertion for such a belief.

"But hey, if it makes you feel better to ignore that, I understand."

What makes me feel better is not having to deal with people who try to pass off non-sequiturs and ad hominems as actual arguments ...

"I never said his legacy isn't present in Germany today, but that outsiders tend to misinterpret and overestimate it whereas Germans are interested in other aspects of WWII, as I mentioned."

You know what, it would seem that even this assertion of yours - which corresponds to no claim I ever made in my post - doesn't seem supported by the facts.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/123083.html

["Rather more disturbing is this tidbit from the Sydney Morning Herald's story on search trends, which notes that "Germany, Mexico (?) and Austria were the world's top three searchers of the word 'Hitler.'"]

Or just look at the following directly.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=hitler

German language searches come first on that list, with English-language searches all the way down at number 8. The entirety of your argument is without foundation, so save the patronizing humbug for someone else.