New York, December 10, 2000
Depravity Was
Contagious
In
Volume II of his biography, Ian Kershaw shows
that Hitler had the perfect personality for a
cult leader.
By IAN BURUMA
Hitler
was a crushing bore, the last person you would
wish to meet, a dinner party guest from hell.
His breath stank, and his hobbyhorses -- the
Jewish conspiracy, the Bolshevik threat, the
German destiny, the treachery of almost everyone
-- were trotted out at the slightest
opportunity, interminably, madly, tediously.
True, he managed to charm the odd English
socialite; some of the Mitford sisters
found him an absolute sweetie. But as the war
dragged on, even his most loyal courtiers could
hardly bear to have lunch with him. Then, of
course, to be a bore is one of the perks of
tyranny. You have a captive audience. The
interesting thing about Hitler, however, is not
so much his own personality but the effect he
had on others.
How was it possible for this
uncouth Austrian crank to turn so many people
toward barbarism? Various explanations have been
offered. A nation of poets, romantics and opera
lovers was seduced by Hitler's demonic powers.
Or perhaps the nation of poets and thinkers
already harbored genocidal feelings toward the
Jews, and all Hitler had to do was tap that well
of poison. There are also those, beyond the pale
of respectable historiography, who believe that
Hitler was a relatively decent man who had no
idea what savagery people got up to in his
name.
Ian
Kershaw, who has now completed the second
and final volume of his superb biography,
Hitler. 1936-45:
Nemesis, will have none of the above.
Not all Germans had genocide on the mind, and
Hitler was neither a genius nor an innocent, and
certainly not decent. Like most historians,
Kershaw, the head of the department of history
at the University of Sheffield in England,
believes that the condition of the German nation
had much to do with Hitler's rise. The national
sense of self-pity, after wartime defeat and
economic catastrophe, could be whipped into a
frenzy, and the erosion of organized religion
could place spiritual yearnings where they did
not belong, in leadership cults and the
like.
As Kershaw says,
"The rise from the depths
of national degradation to the heights of
national greatness seemed for so many (as
propaganda never ceased to trumpet) to be a
near miracle -- a work of redemption brought
about by the unique genius of the
Führer."
If Hitler had one outstanding
talent, or perhaps one should say instinct, it
was an unerring sense of other people's
weaknesses: their irrational fears, their
vanities, their greed and their bloodlust. He
was sensitive to these things because he shared
them to an extreme degree. In the second half of
the 1930's, Hitler gave most Germans what they
wanted: victories abroad, a pumped-up economy,
revenge on imaginary enemies and grand
spectacles to celebrate the quasi-erotic ecstasy
of belonging to a master race.
What he did on a large scale, he
did for individuals too. He gave his generals --
most of whom he never trusted, and often
detested -- all the arms and men they wanted. He
offered the industrialists untold riches. Old
comrades were loaded with titles, money and vast
powers; nightclub bouncers and beer hall bullies
suddenly found themselves living in grand
palaces, lording it over millions of people.
Mediocre scholars, artists and intellectuals
were treated as geniuses, while more gifted men
and women were persecuted as racial inferiors
and degenerates. No wonder things looked good to
most Germans in 1936, when the world came to
Berlin to party beneath the Nazi banners at the
Olympic Games. That is, things looked good if
you were able to look away from less agreeable
aspects of the new regime. And most Germans
looked away.
Hitler, as Kershaw describes him,
had the perfect personality for the successful
cult leader. He was a malign guru, allowing his
followers to project their fantasies onto him.
His asexual, aloof, hollow personality probably
helped. He lived vicariously through the crowd,
soaking up its energy.
Kershaw's brilliant account is a
depressing book to read, not only because of
what it tells us about Hitler but also because
of what it says about the masses who followed
him. The greasy opportunism of his generals and
paladins is bad enough. But there is something
particularly revolting about the idea of 20,000
people crammed into Berlin's Sportpalast one
night in 1938 bellowing "Führer command, we
will follow!" after listening to Hitler rant
hysterically about the need to stop the Czechs
from "exterminating Germandom."
There has been a great deal of
debate over the last decades about how
much Hitler knew of the Holocaust.
Revisionist historians like David Irving
argue that there was no systematic, planned
genocide of Jews, because there is no evidence
that Hitler ever ordered such a thing. He
believes that Jews were haphazardly killed by SS
zealots beyond the Führer's control.
Kershaw makes mincemeat of such theories, not by
producing a document signed by Hitler ordering
the Holocaust (there was no such thing), but by
showing that nothing inside the Third Reich was
beyond his control. If Nazi murder squads ran
amok in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, it was
because Hitler allowed them to. He didn't have
to know all the details. Others could work out
the methods: shooting, starving, gassing.
Hitler's people knew their enterprise was
blessed by him. They murdered, and Hitler said
it was good.
Kershaw has plenty of evidence for
this. At the height of the Kristallnacht pogrom
against Jews in 1938, Hitler told Joseph
Goebbels to hold back the police. "The
Jews," Goebbels quoted him as saying, "should
for once get to feel the anger of the people."
In a speech in 1939, Hitler "prophesied" that
another war would result in "the annihilation of
the Jewish race in Europe." When one or two
Wehrmacht generals became a bit squeamish about
the mass killing of Poles and Jews in 1940,
Heinrich Himmler responded that he did
"nothing that the Führer does not know
about." Around the turn of 1940-41, Hitler
ordered his SS chiefs to come up with "a final
solution" to "the Jewish question." There were
no gas chambers at that point, but whatever the
means, the end was clear: there would be no more
Jews left in Hitler's Europe.
And here is what Hitler said to
Goebbels in 1943, when the death camps were
working at full throttle:
"In nature, life always
works immediately against parasites; in the
existence of peoples that is not exclusively
the case. From that results the Jewish
danger. So there is nothing else open to
modern peoples than to exterminate the Jews."
To say there is no document with
Hitler's express order to annihilate the Jews is
to miss the point. The powers of every Nazi
leader, from Himmler or Goebbels down to the
lowliest party functionary, depended on Hitler.
That is why the Third Reich was such a mess. For
Hitler's realm was less a properly functioning
state than a cult run by criminals in the name
of a godlike leader. Hitler's men were, as
Kershaw notes, "working towards the
Führer." They wanted to outdo one another
in zeal just to please him. They knew he wanted
to get rid of the Jews. They would do their
worst to bring this about.
The
Holocaust, as Kershaw describes it, in my
view plausibly, was a process of escalating
radicalism rather than the result of a single
decision or worked-out plan.
First the Jews had to be deported
from Germany and Austria and crowded into Polish
ghettos together with Polish Jews. When Hitler's
satraps in Poland complained of having too many
Jews, plans were made to deport them to Siberia,
or Madagascar, or wherever they would starve,
freeze or rot to death. When that turned out to
be impractical, German police units, SS killers,
local thugs and soldiers of the Wehrmacht were
unleashed to shoot, burn or club the Jews to
death. When that turned out to be too stressful
(for the killers), the gas chambers were put
into operation.
There is no evidence that Hitler
was an opportunist who used anti-Semitism as a
tool of power. There is, on the contrary, every
reason to assume that he believed the Jewish
danger was real. This probably explains why he
was always careful to avoid taking direct
responsibility for the genocide, and never
signed an order. If he had been a mere
opportunist, he would have been proud to
demonstrate his leadership in the killing. But
Kershaw argues that it was precisely because he
believed that the Jews posed a mortal threat
that Hitler plumped for a peculiar kind of
discretion. Somewhere in his sick mind, he was
afraid that the "Elders of Zion" were already
plotting their revenge. This shows once again
that true believers can be more dangerous than
cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal;
the former have to go to the end -- and drag the
world down with them. 
Ian Buruma's
most recent book is "The Missionary and the
Libertine: Love and War in East and
West.".
write
to David Irving
There
has been a great deal of debate over
the last decades about how much Hitler
knew of the Holocaust. Revisionist
historians like David Irving
argue that there was no systematic,
planned genocide of Jews, because there
is no evidence that Hitler ever ordered
such a thing. He believes that Jews
were haphazardly killed by SS zealots
beyond the Führer's control.
Kershaw makes mincemeat of such
theories, not by producing a document
signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust
(there was no such thing), but by
showing that nothing inside the Third
Reich was beyond his
control.
David
Irving comments: