Lynda Hurst: Who Was Hitler?

Lynda Hurst, in the Toronto Star (4-30-05):

... Who was Adolf Hitler?

What was he? ...

In the unstable Germany of the 1930s, there was a desire for a strong leader, says McGill University historian and author Peter Hoffmann. "But a lot of people shook their heads when they saw the crowds' reaction to him. They thought these people were fools or black sheep."

An acknowledged expert on the German Resistance (which included his father), Hoffmann says ordinary people didn't want another war. Berliners flatly refused to cheer when troops marched through the streets in September 1938, and Hitler delayed his plans in consequence.

As American journalist William Shirer recorded in his 1947 Berlin Diary, "they stood at the curb in utter silence ... the most striking demonstration against the war I've ever seen."

War came, nevertheless, exactly one year later, declared by Britain and France after Hitler provoked it by invading Poland. The pretext? The abuse of the German minority there.

"That is when the nation rallied around its leader, right or wrong," says Hoffmann. "They were at war. The propaganda was powerful. And when they were air-bombed by the Allies, it strengthened their feeling even more."

Hitler's histrionic oratory may have whipped up the public, but in private, according to British historian Ian Kershaw, it could test the patience of even devoted listeners.

In his recent two-volume biography of Hitler (Hubris and Nemesis) - currently the academic gold standard - Kershaw says he was a non-stop talker whose adjutants feared that a casual comment by a guest could lead to a stupefying all-night lecture.

But, as Kershaw makes clear, he was also a shrewd political boss with an uncanny ability to see people's motivations. He pitted those beneath him against each other to thwart united action against him. And God help those who crossed him.

It is, of course, the other central question that truly mystifies, that guarantees a steady stream of books, punctuated by films, year after year, long after Hitler's death.

The knee-jerk anti-Semitism of his early years was far from untypical in the culture of the times, and not just in Germany and Austria. But something, it's agreed, happened, probably just after WWI, to make it full-blown. Something that, by 1942, would transform it into the obscenity of the Holocaust.

Theories abound.

Everyone is searching for the " Eureka!" explanation, according to Ron Rosenbaum. His 1999 book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, exhaustively investigated the world of the sense-makers. He had hoped to discover "if not the truth about Hitler, then some truths about what we talk about when we talk about Hitler."

He found "one-bullet theories" in spades, ranging from the absurd and desperate to the intriguing. A startling number of them focused on a real or imagined Jewish encounter in Hitler's early life in Austria.

A sampling:

Hitler's unknown paternal grandfather possibly was Jewish (unprovable). The incompetent doctor who painfully and futilely treated his mother for breast cancer in 1907 was Jewish (yet Hitler kept in friendly touch with him for years). The Viennese prostitute who gave him syphilis was Jewish, a notion that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, among others, has advanced.

The syphilis theory could account for Hitler's well-documented paranoid rages, his multiple health problems (from skin lesions to an abnormal heartbeat), his lack of sexual interest in Eva Braun, and the fact that in 1936 he appointed Germany's leading syphilis expert as his own personal physician.

It might also account for Hitler's progressively irrational outbursts.

After the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Germany's last, unsuccessful offensive, he exploded. "We will not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we will take a world with us."

There is convincing, if circumstantial, medical evidence for syphilis-linked insanity, say proponents. But Ian Kershaw is skeptical, saying it is based on "dodgy hearsay" - like all the others.

Not everyone is intrigued by the "why" of Hitler.

Emphatically not French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. The creator of the nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah famously believes that any attempt to explain Hitler is to exculpate him; to understand him is to humanize him. That comes too close to a posthumous victory.

Lanzmann was furious that Rosenbaum used a baby picture of Hitler on his book cover: No explanation can "bridge the gap, explain the transformation from baby picture to murderer of a million babies," he argued. "It is not just a gap, it is an abyss."

To the University of Toronto's Michael Marrus, "combing over every crumb" of Hitler's early life is a perverse obsession, leading to "'Hitler chic, Hitler camp,' his being part of our intellectual furniture."

Rosenbaum, however, thinks the "why" is important, but wrote that "the longing to believe in a single-pointed explanation may come from the fantasy alternative it offers. If only that one thing hadn't happened, that one factor wasn't there, no Hitler, no Holocaust."

On that, at least, there is virtual unanimity. Other historians have had their doubts, but Kershaw is convinced that Hitler believed every word of his ideology of hatred....