"And then there's David Irving. In his session with the notorious historian and sometime Holocaust denier, Rosenbaum writes of Irving's gymnastic contortions as he tries to rationalize an October, 1941, document, confirmed as authentic, in which Adolf Eichmann quotes Reinhard Heydrich, another top Nazi official, as saying "I've come from the Reichsführer [Himmler]. He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews." -- Michael Posner, The Globe and Mail, August 21, 1999

Toronto, August 21, 1999

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On the trail of evil |

by Michael Posner

Was Hitler a monster? A calculating cynic? A kind of artist from Hell? Journalist Ron Rosenbaum spent a decade trying to find out.

The Globe and Mail | August 21, 1999

[[email protected] | focus@GlobeAnd Mail.ca | [email protected]]

THE provocative cover of Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, is a sepia-tinted baby photograph of the future Fuhrer, circa 18 months. Apple-cheeked and wide-eyed, he gazes out in wonder, projecting that sense of tabula rasa,the blank slate of innocence that all infants have. He might, in fact, be any of us.

So what went wrong, so terribly wrong? How was the young, undistinguished Adolf, the sensitive mother-attached youth with artistic aspirations but no talent, transformed into this desperate century's über-villain (no simple achievement, given some of his rivals). How did he become the apotheosis of evil? Can the genesis of his crimes be understood at all? Or is the very attempt to explain Hitler, as French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (the maker of the nine-hour documentary, Shoah)has insisted, tantamount to justification for his acts and therefore obscene? Was Hitler the necessary precondition to the Holocaust? Or could it -- would it -- have happened without him?

It is these essential but perhaps unanswerable questions that Rosenbaum, a veteran American journalist, author and teacher, poses and grapples with in this dense and rich survey. Raised on Long Island, in a middle-class family, he grew up without much awareness of the Holocaust. Two events precipitated his interest in Hitler: The first was belatedly learning that a distant relative had actually perished in a concentration camp. The second was an argument with two ultra-militant Jews about tactics used to combat neo-Nazism. One of his opponents asked him: "What if you had been a Jew in Munich in the 1920s. Don't you think it would have been right to assassinate Hitler?"

That led him to research the Hitler library. Fourteen years later, he was finished. Covering an enormous swatch of territory, both geographically and philosophically, his sprawling book takes us into the learned company of roughly a dozen psycho-archeologists of the Third Reich, from former University of Toronto philosophy professor and theologian Emil Fackenheim to George Steiner to Yehuda Bauer.

Each has laboured mightily, sometimes for decades, to locate the source of evil genius, to determine whether Hitler was merely a consummate actor, orchestrating the grassroots sickness of German anti-Semitism for his own political purposes, a view espoused by British historian Allan Bullock; or whether, as the distinguished British historian and former counter-intelligence operator Hugh Trevor-Roper argues, Hitler was a man convinced of his own rectitude, sincerely believing in the crazed ideas of Aryan purity he set down in Mein Kampf, and continuing to believe them -- and act upon them -- during his 12 years in power. Such a view, in a sense, exculpates Hitler: To be truly evil, one must have consciousness that he does evil.

The larger mystery, however,is whence this madness originated. Was it from Hitler's alleged sexual incapacity, the result of possibly having only one testicle? Was it the product of his tormented knowledge of Jewish blood in his own genealogy (some scholars suspect that he had one Jewish grandparent, but it has never been verified)? Did he nurture a lingering resentment of how a Jewish doctor once treated his mother for cancer?

Rosenbaum, in Toronto last week to promote the newly released paperback edition of his work, doesn't pretend to offer neat resolutions. Indeed, he says, after 10 years immersed in the vast Hitler archives, he fears that "Hitler may have escaped us," escaped our ability to fully explain him, a thought that left him, when the manuscript was done, in a state of depression.

What he does conclude, in concurrence with philosopher Beryl Lang, is that Nazi crimes were categorically different from those carried out by any of the century's other architects of genocide. Numerically, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tsetung both killed more of their enemies than Hitler did. And Cambodia's Pol Pot seems to win the dubious-achievement award for mass murder, at least from a percentage of the population standpoint.

But Lang sees Hitler's atrocities in another light, infused with an artistic consciousness. It's something more than brute force -- it's genocide conceived and executed by an act of the imagination. "It seems to me," he quotes Lang as saying, "that there is a sense of irony constantly -- the sign [over the gates at Auschwitz] Arbeit macht Frei (work will make you free). It's like a joke. It is a joke. The orchestra playing as the people go to work."

Many Hitler scholars, Rosenbaum notes, tend to get immured in the minutiae of various lines of theory and speculation, endlessly debating when and whether Hitler became fully committed to the elimination of the Jews. For this paralysis, he finds the work of the late Lucy Dawidowicz (The War Against the Jews, 1975) a potent corrective. It's her contention that Hitler's plot to exterminate the Jews developed early, as early as 1918, when he was recovering from being gassed in the First World War. All his subsequent temporizing, his seeming reluctance to sanction the Final Solution, are, she says -- and Rosenbaum agrees -- an elaborate charade.

And then there's David Irving. In his session with the notorious historian and sometime Holocaust denier, Rosenbaum writes of Irving's gymnastic contortions as he tries to rationalize an October, 1941, document, confirmed as authentic, in which Adolf Eichmann quotes Reinhard Heydrich, another top Nazi official, as saying "I've come from the Reichsführer [Himmler]. He has received orders from the Führer for the physical destruction of the Jews."

There it is -- or so it seems: unequivocal evidence from Eichmann's own diaries that the Final Solution was no accidental, off-the-cuff, carried-out-by subordinates program. The directive came right from the top.

But no, rallies the ever-inventive Irving, "[The diaries] aren't counterfeit; but Eichmann could have been lying when he wrote them [in 1956]."

"It was a rare thing to watch him wrestling with the two sides of himself," Rosenbaum writes, "the historian who wanted to validate this document and the Holocaust denier who wanted to deny what was in it."

Escaping Hitler, Rosenbaum is now turning his attention to a more inspiring subject, William Shakespeare, a refreshing journey from the most base to the most sublime.

Our opinion

 IT is a mystery where Posner gets the date October 1941 for the document. Mr Irving obtained Eichmann's papers (not "diaries") while in Argentina in October 1991. Perhaps that is the source of Posner's error. Our friends and supporters worldwide may wish to answer Michael Posner's smears ("notorious ...denier...ever-inventive"). We include below and at top three e-mail accounts where correspondents may send their commentaries -- to editors or sub-editors (one's letter may relegated to the literary section of The Globe in lieu of the main Letters Page, for example, for publication purposes).