"This Wicked Man Hitler"
"This Wicked Man Hitler"
"Despite the recent outpouring of popular and scholarly books on
Hitler, no work has yet been produced that satisfactorily explains
Hitler's obsessive ideas about the Jews, the readiness of the German
people to accept these ideas, and Hitler's ability to harness an
enormous apparatus of men, institutions, and facilities just in order
to murder the Jews. Hitler has proved to be an elusive and
unrewarding subject for conventional biography because the
explanations for the baffling mystique he exercised, for the power he
came to wield, and for his unspeakable accomplishments are not to be
found in the facts of a banal life, but in the ideas and feelings
that created the symbiosis between him and the German people. Their
matuality and inter-dependence thrived, as Hitler first expressed and
later gratified the Germans' most arrogant and abominable ambitions.
He relieved their deepest fears and anxieties and, near the end,
disburdened them both of guilt and responsibility for the wickedness
they had given him warrant to commit. J.P. Stern, an English
literary scholar and a refugee from Germany, perceived that the
biographical approach was likely to trivialize rather than to
illuminate this particular man:
That conclusion is borne out in the popular biographies by Robert
Payne and John Toland, neither of which adds much to our knowledge or
understanding of Hitler. Payne, a prolific professional writer,
produced a briskly told account of Hitler's life which is altogether
devoid of ideas. He tells little about Hitler and the Jews: barely
ten pages out of over 600 are devoted to the Final Solution, with a
handful of other references to anti-Semitism, though not even a
mention of the Nuremberg Laws.
Toland's book is more accomplished, yet despire massive research and
countless interviews with countless persons, he has not succeeded in
telling (in over a thousand pages) anything important that we had not
known before. Asking few questions of historical significance of
either his documents or his living subjects, Toland approached this
book on Hitler, he admits, without a thesis. The 'most meaningful'
conclusion he reached was 'that Hitler was far more complex and
contradictory' than he had imagined.
But the nadir in Hitlerology is reached by
David Irving's Hitler's
War.<34> An amateur historian, whose reputation as a German
apologist and as a writer without regard for accuracy or truth won
him a measure of notoriety, <35>
Irving produced a 926-page work
intended to show that Hitler was kind to his animals and to his
secretaries, that he was 'probably the weakest leader Germany has
known in this century,' and that he did not murder the Jews or even
wish to do so, but that the murder was committed behind his back,
without his knowledge or consent. The killing of the Jews,
Irving
believes, 'was partly of an ad hoc nature, what the Germans call a
Verlegenheitslo"sung - the way out of an awkward delemma, chosen by
the middle-level authorities in the eastern territories overrun by
the Nazis - and partly a cynical extrapolation by the central SS
authorities of Hitler's anti-Semitic decrees.'
Irving claims to have new evidence and fresh interpretations of known
documents, but in fact, all of his evidence is familiar. He develops
his arguments mostly by suppressing or ignoring the impressive body
of existing evidence and partly by applying a guileful literalness to
cases of Hitler's aesopian language.
Irving's thesis, which denies Hitler's responsibility for the murder
of the Jews, is too preposterous to require refutation and argument,
but one example will suffice to show his "scholarly" method. As
seemingly irrefutable proof for his case,
Mr. Irving offered an
entry in Himmler's handwritten telephone log. On November 30, 1941,
at 1:30 P.M., Himmler, then in Hitler's military headquarters bunker
'Wolf's Lair,' telephoned SS Obergruppenfu"hrer Heydrich, then in
Prague. The gist of the telephone message was entered in four short
lines in the log, though
Mr. Irving cited only the last two lines:
Judentransport aus Berlin
That is:
From this
Mr. Irving concluded that Hitler had somehow learned what
Himmler was up to and had ordered him to stop. An obedient Nazi,
Himmler had called Heydrich in Prague to transmit Hitler's order.
But in view of everything we know about the destruction of the Jews,
Irving's construction of events makes no sense. If Himmler continued
to kill the Jews long after November 30, 1941, why did he order the
liquidation of this one transport stopped? If he deceived Hitler
before and after about the murder of the Jews, why should he be
honest about it this once? Besides, what became of that transport of
Jews from Berlin? Were they returned home?
Irving's conclusion
fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of those two lines in
view of what actually happened, though it serves to support his
perversely fanciful interpretation of Hitler's character.
To understand those two lines it is necessary to read also the first
two lines of the telephone conversation. Here is the full German
text:
Verhaftung Dr. Jekelius [name not fully decipherable]
That is:
The last two lines now make sense. Himmler called Heydrich to
instruct him that a certain Dr. Jekelius, presumed to be the Soviet
Foreign Minister's son, was to be taken in custody by the security
police. Jekelius could be located in the transport of Jews from
Berlin arriving in Prague <sic - should be 'Riga'> and, unlike the
rest of the transport, was not to be liquidated. (Perhaps the
Germans intended to exchange Jekelius for one of their officers
captured by the Russians.)
Irving, wittingly or unwittingly, has in fact disproved his own
theory [Emphasis Nizkor's]. For if Hitler was indeed responsible for Himmler's call
(there is no evidence that he was), then
Irving has shown that
Hitler did in fact know all about the murder of the Jews. And indeed, how
else could it have been? The murder of the Jews was Hitler's most
consistent policy, in whose execution he persisted relentlessly, and
obsessiveness with the Jews may even have cost him his war for the
'Thousand Year Reich.'"
<34> David Irving, Hitler's War (New York: Viking, 1977). Irving's work has
been described as 'revisionist,' but the label is improperly applied. Irving
is merely an apologist for Hitler and desrves no consideration as a
historian, revisionist or otherwise.
<35> His first book, The Destruction of Dresden (London: W. Kimber, 1963),
caused a sensation by its accusation that the Anglo-American raids on
Dresden in February 1945 constituted a major war atrocity.
Irving's book,
which exaggerated threefold the number of deaths that actually occurred and
made unfounded charges about Allied actions, has since been refuted. Two of
this later books, Accident: The Death of General Sikorski (London: W.
Kimber, 1967), and The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1969), prompted legal action.
Irving lost both cases and had to
pay damages and costs of about #45,000 in the libel suit on Convoy PQ 17.
<37> Irving, Hitler's War, p. 332; Himmler's handwritten notes appear on p.
505 and are here reproduced from the National Archives Microfilm Publication
T84, Roll 26. I wish to acknowledge the help of Dr. Fred Grubel, director of
the Leo Baeck Institute, in deciphering the script and its meaning. Nearly
every reviewer who considered
Irving's "evidence" tried to explain this
document. No one thought to look up the item in its entirely. Martin Broszat
comes up with a very convoluted but unconvincing explanation. "Hitler und die
Genesis der 'Endlösung,'" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,
a25
(October 1977), 739-775.
[Archive note: the document referred to above <37> is not included here - see original source. knm.]
From The Holocaust and the Historians by Lucy
Dawidowicz. The book was published by Harvard University Press. The
material is taken from pp 34-38.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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Dawidowicz on David Irving
Books about Dawidowicz:
'If sociological interpretations lose
sight of the man behind the trends, it is the common failing of
biographies that they abstract a man from his world - a procedure
that is particularly misleading in the case of one whose every public
word and every public act expressed for almost the whole of his
career the fears and aspirations of his contemporaries.'
keine Liquidierung
Transport of Jews from Berlin.
No liquidation.
Angebl [ich] Sohn Molotovs.
Judentransport aus Berline.
keine Liquidierung.<37>
Arrest Dr. Jekelius.
Presumably Molotov's son.
Transport of Jews from Berlin.
No liquidation.
Footnotes