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Copyright 2000 Chicago Tribune Date: Sunday, November 26, 2000 Edition: Chicagoland Final Section: Books Page: 1 Zone: C Source: By Milton J. Rosenberg. Milton J. Rosenberg is professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago and host of "Extension 720" on WGN Radio.
HITLER: 1936-45: Nemesis
By far the best political biography of Adolf Hitler published in recent years is that of Ian Kershaw, whose second and concluding volume has now appeared. Compared to the many others that came earlier, even the important and illuminating works by Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest, Kershaw's large-scale study is more probing, more judicious, more authoritative in its rich detail and yet more commanding in its mastery of the horrific narrative. The great question that arches over Kershaw's second volume (it is addressed, as well, in his earlier studies of Nazism) is how to account for the Holocaust. One strong interpretation was asserted some years ago by Milton Himmelfarb in a famous essay whose very title gives his thesis: "No Hitler, No Holocaust." Against this view stands the controversial work by Daniel Goldhagen. Again, the title of his book conveys its argument: "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Two reasonable conclusions lie at the core of Goldhagen's heated indictment of the German citizenry of those years: Hitler and his henchmen could not have chosen mass murder without the assent and complicity of the military they commanded; and they had good reason to believe that the German public could be brought to accept the shift from the policy of getting the Jews out of Germany and then out of Europe to getting them out of life itself. Kershaw, a deservedly eminent British historian, has plumbed deeply both the old and the newly available archival files. He recounts how a great symbiosis had been built up in the prewar years. Hitler and the constantly propagandized German mass had come to see themselves as bound together in a kind of mystical union. Hitler reflected and deepened that sociopsychological reality in the ecstatic formula that he sometimes worked into his major public orations: "All that I am I am only through you -- and all that you are you are only through me." That symbiosis was further deepened by Hitler's great and audacious gambles in the three years preceding the war. These expanded the Reich through an admixture of military threat and diplomatic crisis. First came the military reoccupation of the Rhineland (in violation of the Versailles Treaty), then the anschluss, or annexing, of Austria; next came the occupation of the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia, followed in six months by the total takeover of that country. The German officer corps, at its higher reaches, was aristocratic in origin and more given to doubt and resentment than to admiration and trust as, in 1933, its members regarded their new fuehrer. Kershaw shows how Hitler held them in ambivalent obedience, first by killing off the leaders of the SA, the Nazi private army, on the "night of the long knives," and then by his vigorous build-up of Germany's military forces. Still the general staff counseled against each expansionist step that Hitler took during the three crucial prewar years. Their predictions that France and England would counter with military intervention were, of course, disconfirmed in each instance. As early as 1936, in Kershaw's estimate, the near-deification of Hitler that flowed in from the German public had brought him to "think of himself as infallible; his self image had reached the stage of outright hubris." By 1939, and in the face of his expansionist successes, the military leaders had, in the main, come to the same view. They began to believe they were led by a genius rather than by an unstable, provincial fanatic. By that time the Nazification of German life had progressed to the point that the country was being run by party functionaries who fully commanded the cities and the provinces. Meanwhile, the ranks of the Nazi Party were swelling by millions, and the German mass was taking in the mythology and eschatology of the new pagan religion. From his testamentary volume, "Mein Kampf," written in 1924, and in all the years up until the war, Hitler and his thousands of Nazi propagandists put forward a set of racial myths and a program concerning final purposes. This pagan Nazi creed did really hold that the Nordics were a biologically superior race and that they were confronted by an enemy race -- the Jews, low but cunning, seemingly deferential but secretly powerful. Furthermore, in the social Darwinian struggle already under way, the Jews controlled both Bolshevism and Western capitalism and were employing them to block the necessary expansion of the Nordic race. That expansion would be toward the East, and when, after a final struggle, Germany had been able to fulfill its geopolitical destiny, all of Europe would be rendered judenrein, or cleansed of Jews. Just how they would be disposed of, whether by expulsion, enslavement or "other means" remained, until 1941, an issue not publicly addressed. From Kershaw's use of their letters, speeches, diaries and excited memoranda jotted after visits with Hitler, we learn something decisive about such major figures as Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Ley, Rosenberg, Frank and, most significantly, Himmler and Heydrich. They were all "true believers" and as deeply immersed in the Nazi worldview as were the lower ranks of the Nazi hierarchy and large sectors of the German public. And they were fully committed, as well, to the plan for an ethnically cleansed Europe. Only Goering, among the top leaders, comes through as capable of some cynical reserve or amusement. But in no way does his sophistication inhibit his endorsement of the great blood-letting once it is under way. Preoccupation with the descent of German forces into the genocidal frenzy that destroyed not only 6 million Jews but also millions of others -- particularly Slavs, Gypsies and captured Soviet military -- has sometimes obscured a prior question: Why, after all, did Hitler ignite a massive war by invading Poland only six months after he had extinguished the Czech Republic? Kershaw confirms, with new documentary material, what some other scholars had earlier suggested: The Nazi faith had long foreseen an inevitable great movement into the east, where the expanding German race was fated to find lebensraum, or space to live. Since it lay immediately to the east, Poland must first be taken on the way toward the ultimate assault upon the Soviet Union. Kershaw has no doubt that Hitler, by this stage, fully believed his own propaganda that the USSR was a "Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy" and, by decree of geopolitical fate, must be destroyed by Germany. In his racist monomania, Hitler seemed not to have noted that by 1936 Stalin had killed all but one of the Jewish members of the Politburo and numerous other Jews who had been prominent associates of Lenin's. One morning in late August 1939, the world awoke to the startling news that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact. This signaled that Germany was about to assault Poland. (The secret protocol signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, the foreign ministers of the two great totalitarian states, agreed to a division of the Polish spoils.) Despite warnings from England and France, Hitler, in what Kershaw deems a fatal miscalculation, believed he was free to act. As he said to Goering at the time, "I have always gone for broke." "In war," says Kershaw, "Nazism came into its own." Better than two-thirds of his concluding volume is given over to a superbly detailed history of how the war was fought and lost by the Germans, guided increasingly toward catastrophe by Hitler's strategic choices. With better strategy, could Germany have won? Despite its military power and skill, its audacity and rapaciousness, it was apparently doomed by many separate, hard realities. Among these were the strangely ill-coordinated and uncentralized nature of the Nazi state, the sheer reactive hate that the Nazis' barbarism released against them and, of course, the material superiority of the Allied powers. But the ultimate source of the doom of the Nazi state was Hitler himself. Kershaw subtitled his first volume "Hubris" and the second "Nemesis." In classical drama, nemesis is the ruin wrought by retributive justice. The ruin that Hitler's pridefully evil career brought upon him and upon the German nation was, however, far exceeded by the ruin he visited upon his victims. And foremost among these were the Jews of Europe. A great historical debate began some 20 years ago between the intentionalist and functionalist schools. The first argues that Hitler and the Nazi elite always intended to exterminate the Jews. The other argues that they stumbled and improvised their way toward Auschwitz and Sobibor. That debate still persists, though Kershaw's truly authoritative study may finally put it to rest. To convey in brief summary his richly detailed and carefully explicated account of how the Holocaust happened requires simplification verging on distortion. But, in essence, his interpretation -- backed by effectively deployed documentation -- can be reduced to a few crucial points. Hitler never wavered from his intention to rid Europe of the Jews. He constantly repeated his "prophecy" (given before the Reichstag early in 1939) that if the Jews brought another war, as he had frequently asserted they had brought World War I, it would lead to "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Himmler, Heydrich, Frank and others, once they had command of the captive Jewish populations of Poland and the Ukraine, decided early on to kill those who could not work and to work the others to slower deaths. As the Soviets, some two years after they were invaded, began blocking and then reversing the German advance, Himmler -- with Hitler fully informed and approving but keeping his distance -- pushed the extermination program forward. What the einsatzkommando killing squads and military police battalions had begun by killing some 2 million, the extermination camps completed, killing 4 million more within the space of little more than one additional year. A devastating further fact, to which Kershaw attests, is that the German high command not only tolerated but, with some exceptions, approved the final bloodbath. In essence, the psychotic ideations of the ultimate leader shaped the intentions of the various elites -- bureaucratic, party-based and military -- that encircled him and sought always to be "working towards Hitler." Intentionalism and functionalism were always too limiting as hypotheses to account for the Holocaust. But the weight of the compelling evidence that Kershaw presents in this truly magisterial work allows and verifies his final judgment that "Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century." That he had so many willing helpers remains a disheartening contradiction of our desire to believe that moral sensibility is the ground of human existence.
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