If your only acquaintance with Adolf Hitler is a few documentaries and encyclopaedia articles, you will learn a great deal about the man from Ian Kershaw’s massive study. Take, for instance, what an utter philistine Hitler was. Somehow one imagines him reading Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu—and perhaps even (I don’t know) obscure monographs on the occult by John Dee. But no. In Hitler we learn that the Führer enjoyed adventure books about cowboys and Indians written for adolescent boys—books that he read into adulthood and was still recommending to his general staff when he was Reich Chancellor. Incredible that this is the level of the mind that filled the world with sorrow, warplanes and crematorium smoke. One is also struck by how amazingly sclerotic Hitler’s mind was. On starting Kershaw’s book, I anticipated a slow descent into madness. From nationalism and xenophobia there would slowly emerge (I supposed) a pathological view of Jews as the incarnation of evil threatening German survival. At last, high on methamphetamine, sleep-deprived, frothing at the mouth, Hitler licences genocide. But no. In 1922, when Hitler was a nonentity peddling shabby watercolours on the streets of Munich and sleeping in dosshouses, all the key elements of his worldview were already in place. And when, much of the world in ruins, he swallowed a capsule of prussic acid in the Bunker in 1945, nothing had changed. [1] Noteworthy, too, is Hitler’s eccentricity, his absurdity. Consider: At the start of his rise to power, Hitler was often invited into the bourgeois drawing rooms of the Weimar Republic. Picture a shortish, twitchy man in a shabby raincoat and threadbare suit. He already sports that ridiculous little moustache. He brandishes a dog whip and carries a Luger. He gorges himself on cream cakes and works himself into a lather over Wagner, architecture and (naturally) the Jews. On one occasion, reports Kershaw, a pianist begins to play an overture from Wagner and Hitler accompanies him by whistling the tune and marching up and down swinging his arms like the conductor of an orchestra. One member of this circle recalled that Hitler gave the impression of “a stray dog in search of a master.” Another (continuing the canine theme) described him as looking like, “a wet poodle.” No doubt these Weimar libertines and socialites viewed Hitler with the same good-humoured indulgence with which the ancient Athenians viewed Diogenes the Cynic, the curmudgeonly philosopher who lived in contented filth under an overturned bathtub on the outskirts of the city and heaped ribald scorn on passersby. I appreciate the underlying idea—a ranting lunatic has a way of livening up the party. But then with a qualm one recalls Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. It is good if society is tolerant, noted Popper. But if it is too tolerant, those who are intolerant will seize power and create a society of intolerance. In order to maintain a tolerant society, Popper concluded, we must be intolerant of intolerance. [2] As we read on, we find this further point of interest to add to our developing portrait: Historians have noted a conspicuous lack of a personal life in the historical record of Hitler—of predilections, vulnerabilities, intrigues. There is no doubt that “the Führer” was a part which Hitler played for the public. That is not unusual for despots. What is unusual is that Hitler appeared to play the part in private too: With an obsessive, narcissistic tenacity, Hitler remained “in character” even behind closed doors among his inner circle. And, as a result of this, his private self was squeezed out. Inevitably, one thinks of Sartre’s concept of Bad Faith. But the extreme to which Hitler took it adds to Sartre’s concept an aspect of morbidity, of monstrosity—something which might be allegorised by a story in which an evil mask adheres to and forever supplants the human face of the one who puts it on. And while the most salient feature of Hitler is his inhumanity and brutality, this is something which it is very difficult to apprehend. Like a sphericity of the planet to one standing on its surface, it is too vast to compass. In a similar connection Stalin (who had reason to know) once remarked, “One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.” However, there are ways of breaking the spell of incomprehension. One, perhaps the most effective, is to isolate from among the oceanic expanse of victims a representative human face for which we are able to develop a personal affection and empathy. This is why the diary of Anne Frank is such an important artefact; even more important (as some have suggested) than all the evidence of the Nuremberg trials. A second way is to find an apprehensible unit of measurement for horror and superimpose it upon the Holocaust for scale. Consider: The Sandy Hook shooting is one of the worst and most shocking mass shootings in the history of United States. On that dark day, 20 children were murdered by a deranged gunman with an assault rifle. Now compare: A single Nazi death squad on an excursion into a single Russian village behind the advancing German front massacred a group of “undesirables” so large that included 11,000 children. That one incident, which is little more than a footnote to the history of the Nazi regime, is the equivalent of 55 Sandy Hooks. And Hitler, meanwhile, evinced an amazing squeamishness at the practical fulfilment of his own murderous dreams. He did not witness the pogroms. He did not once visit a death camp. And on one occasion, when his luxuriously appointed train stopped alongside a train transporting troops back from the front, he saw the worn faces of the troops from his carriage window and asked for the blind to be pulled down. What, in the final analysis, was Hitler? Making a first pass, we might define him as an ill-educated beerhall rabble-rouser and self-mythologizing bigot who was fortuitously levered into a position of unmitigated authority from which he inspired and expedited the worst crimes in human history. But that definition leaves something critical out of account. It captures only the human container, the transient medium of flesh and blood, through which something else was operative. To complete an anatomy of Hitler and the Nazis we would need to commission the explanatory resources of a theologian—whose contribution, though vital, need consist of little more than an invocation of the mysterium iniquitatis.
[1] Ironically, prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide, can be absorbed into a carrier gas for use as a pesticide—its most infamous application in this form being Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi death camps. See Matthew 26:52. [2] Or consider this paradox: a fascist party that vows to abolish democracy and begins to rise to power through the established democratic processes. Does the state temporarily repeal democracy to stop the party from winning the election or allow the party to win the election and permanently repeal democracy?