Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The Times reported last week that Mein Kampf is shortly to be reprinted in Germany, the first time since 1945.  The article itself was accompanied by a wholly gratuitous commentary from one Ben Macintyre, headed Illogical and evil nonsense – read, gasp at it and bin it.   That just about sums up the content of the piece.  Macintyre is not opposed to publication; he just blows a rather hysterical fanfare – ‘badly written’, ‘turgid’, ‘illogical’, ‘boring’, ‘evil nonsense’ and on and on.  Why bother reading it at all?  Macintyre has read it for you!    

Time, I think, for me to revive an earlier comment I made welcoming the prospect of the first new German edition since the fall of the Third Reich.  I knew the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria, which for long refused requests for republication, was scheduled to run out next year, a fact that I found quite pleasing.

Why was I pleased? To begin with I should say that, so far as I am concerned, the banning of books, books with a political message, no matter how repellent, is always wrong. But more to the point, Mein Kampf is an honest political statement, perhaps the most honest ever written by a politician. One only wishes that it had been taken more seriously at the time. It certainly was during the early days of the Cold War, when Western writers scoured the speeches of communist leaders, gathered and published with such dubious titles as Khrushchev’s Mein Kampf.

Hitler was eventually to recognise how unnecessary, how dangerously unnecessary the book had been as power became a realistic possibility, distancing himself from parts of the message in the early ‘moderate’ days of the Third Reich. He wrote a second book in 1928, this time focusing more directly on his foreign policy aims, which was buried during his days of power, only published after the war with the English title of Hitler’s Secret Book. 

You see, for Hitler the spoken was always more important than the written word. It’s virtually impossible to quantify but I would hazard that that while Mein Kampf may have converted thousands- and I do stress may - the speeches converted tens of thousands. Indeed, Mein Kampf is more likely to have discouraged any potential convert by its convoluted and rambling message. If racist and fascist groups promote it today it’s because it’s Hitler’s ‘book’, a kind of icon, not because it has any real political power, any proselytising power.

Publication was banned in this country for more than twenty years after the Second World War. Republication in 1969, in an edition edited by D. C. Watt, was opposed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It was opposed, I believe, by some Jewish groups. I can understand this. At the time the crimes of the Nazis must still have been raw in a lot of minds. Yes, it was understandable but misguided. Father bought Watt’s edition while he was still at school.  He told me that it was the dullest thing he had ever read, duller even than Cicero!

“Oh, that my enemy would write a book”, really is the guiding thread here. Well, he did, and it reveals much more about him than he ever intended, much more about his inner psychosis; reveals more about his intellectual and mental confusion than he could ever have imagined. That is the crucial thing. Publication in England was opposed by Jewish leaders. It’s a sign of how things have moved on, how understanding has grown, that publication in Germany has been backed by Jewish leaders.

Oh, I should also say that, contrary to Macintyre’s view and contrary to what you might have heard, Mein Kampf is actually quite readable if clumsy and ill-organised, the meanderings of a semi-educated high-school drop out.  You might very well read it; I doubt very much if you will gasp at it.  It’s unlikely to give you any greater insight than you already possess.  

Downfall

I cast my eye recently over a review of A. N. Wilson’s newly published Hitler: A Short Biography. Now, A. N Wilson, if you’ve never heard of him, is an omnivorous writer, moving with apparent ease from fiction to non-fiction. His Hitler book, intended for a general audience, is the latest addition to the other critical biographies he has penned.

However, before I read a word of the review, I already concluded that this was pointless book. My first thought was who the hell needs yet another biography of Hitler? My second was it’s only just over two hundred pages long; how on earth could all of that history and drama be crushed into such limited space?

Actually, I’m being slightly disingenuous here. I did not, on first glance, read the review – by Bernard Sims in Prospect -, or, rather, I did not read beyond the words Hitler: A Short Biography. By A. N. Wilson. Harper Press, 208pp, £14.99. That was enough for me. But I came back to it; I read it in full, because the book has occasioned a bit of a spat, a hissy fit fought out on the pages of the New Statesman, a perfect cat fight by two old toms!

It began last month when Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and a specialist in the Third Reich (his three volume history is commendable), wrote not so much a review as an assassination of Wilson’s book, concluding that “It’s hard to think why a publishing house that once had a respected history list agreed to produce this travesty of a biography.” The answer is simple, prof; it’s by A. N. Wilson, who sells, and it’s about Hitler, who sells!

That might have been that. After all, most of the people likely to buy this book probably don’t read the New Statesman; they may not even read reviews at all. But dear old A. N would not let matters rest; he took up the gauntlet so freely thrown, thus starting a new blitzkrieg, spread over several issues of the NS, a withering barrage of words!

I rather think Evans was a bit miffed that an outsider had intruded into his own lebensraum; he certainly chews the carpet, Hitler-style, in his review. ‘Banal’, ‘stale’ ‘cliché ridden’, ‘unoriginal’, ‘lame’, ‘tired narrative’, came his verbal panzer shells. Wilson counter-attacked on the magazine’s letters page: “All is joy. The war is over. Hitler is dead. Get a life, poor Evans. There is no need to be so cross.”

Evans did not rest; his Stukas screamed down from the sky the following week – “I am cross with him not because I think only specialists should write about Hitler - I explicitly noted the contributions made by novelists and literary scholars - but because he has simply ignored 99.9 per cent of the work on the subject done by historians, and as a result has written a book that is absolutely valueless as well as full of errors, many of them not minor at all.”

I read in the Telegraph that this is not the first war in a tea-cup that Wilson has been involved in. In 2002 he wrote a review of Bevis Hiller’s biography of the poet John Betjeman, calling it a ‘hopeless mishmash.’ Four years later he produced his own biography of Betjeman, citing a passionate love letter written by the poet’s mistress. It was hoax. The ‘mistress’ was Hiller, a lover scorned, coldly calculating his revenge, waiting for just the right moment, penning and planting the said epistle. The first letter of each sentence spelled out “A N Wilson is a shit.”

So there!

Anyway, back to Hitler, back to Simms’ Prospect review, hopefully for a less impassioned view. It was. My initial judgement was right: this is a book not worth reading. Wilson apparently tries to draw some parallels between the 1929 crash in the world economy, which gave Hitler his big opportunity, and that of 2008. He is looking, in other words for a second coming, a new beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

That’s reasonable enough, I suppose; these are uncertain times; people are insecure, fodder, one might think, for demagogues. What do we get? Why, such illuminating insights as a comparison between Hitler’s demand for typewriting lessons for children and Tony Blair’s call for a laptop in every British primary school! Ah, yes, a sign of a Reich to come. I have no idea or not if A N Wilson is a shit but he’s clearly had a bit of a downfall.

Happy Easter, guys. :-)

Fear and Loathing in Berlin

Amongst other things (always, always there are other things!) I’m reading Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundnani. I don’t want to say too much about it at the present, as I have it in mind to write an article on the legacy in Germany of the Baader Meinhof terrorist faction, born of profound ignorance, born of an ignorance of history. This was to produce some grotesque inversions, a type of poisonous relativism. It came to mind when I discovered that the Berlin Historical Museum has just opened and exhibition about Hitler, the first since 1945 to break a taboo subject.

I say it’s about Hitler but it isn’t really, at least not Hitler in isolation. There are still some taboos, you see, to be overcome. So, no Hitler; instead the ponderous and didactic Hitler and the Germans: the National Community and Violence. The museum authorities seem to have approached the subject with quite a high degree of caution, fearful that it might attract the Neo-Nazi fringe.

Because of this nothing directly connected with Hitler personally has been allowed, just a lot of Nazi-era brick-a-brack: uniforms, beer mugs with swastikas, cigar boxes, banners, posters and so on and on and on. No recordings of Hitler speeches because that would be well, too Hitler, and the busts have been placed in such a way that won’t allow people to pose beside them for photographs!

I was inclined to dismiss this as a rather futile display of Nazi kitsch but with all of the qualifications, all the ands and ifs and buts, it is intended to make a serious point. For too long the Germans failed to engage with their past, either because of a sense of shame or because of a convenient collective amnesia, fertile ground for the hysterical delusions of the 68ers.

The museum is attempting to show, in as wide a context as possible, how the nation was seduced by Hitler and what impact this had. In a country where the swastika is still banned history is being allowed to come back to life and at least to some extent speak for itself. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana wrote. An important step has been taken in remembering the past.

In writing this I was immediately reminded of a depiction of Hitler that is not likely to appear in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany, not in any immediate future that I can foresee. It happens to be my favourite image of a monster who, in the end, was no more than a man. It's called An Icon of Fear by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It caused a controversy when it was first exhibited because it seems to invite sympathy. At the risk of being misunderstood I have to say that it invited my sympathy, something I never thought I would feel for a man who destroyed so many futures and almost destroyed the civilization of Europe itself. But what sins he carries, what a terrible burden. I remember reading the words of a Jewish writer -unfortunately I can’t remember whom -, saying that he hoped that Hitler's tortured soul had at last found peace. When I look at An Icon of Fear, an image of the child as father of the man, an image of a penitent and frightened little boy, I can only echo these sentiments.

Killing Hitler

Last month at a conference in Moscow General Anatoly Kulikov, formerly Russian Interior Minister under Boris Yeltsin, said that Stalin called off two assassination attempts against Hitler, one in 1943 and another in a more advanced state of preparation in 1944, for fear that his successors would conclude a separate peace with the Western Allies. He continued by saying that in pursuing the war to the very end Stalin intended to destroy Germany as a future threat as well as gaining more influence in Eastern Europe.

It’s an intriguing claim but as yet no documentary evidence has been produced, though the general has said that the details will be forthcoming in a new book about Russia and the Second World War. Kulikov says that in preparation for the second plan the intended assassin had even infiltrated Hitler’s immediate entourage, before the mission was aborted.

We now seem to be entering the realms of the fantastic. Security around Hitler was severe. For a stranger to get anywhere within striking distance does not seem at all likely. The evidence, once produced, will have to be very strong indeed. Writing in The Telegraph Guy Walters has already dismissed Kulikov’s claim, in the continuing absence of proof, as ‘junk history.’ I suppose the general might just be trying to talk up the book to be published by the Club of Military Leaders, which he heads, but he is going to look rather foolish if this grand claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Of course there is another possibility, that the general is reminding a Russian audience of the suspicions and fears once entertained towards the West, the Casablanca declaration that the Germans had to surrender unconditionally notwithstanding. It’s certainly true that if the attempt by sections of the German military to assassinate Hitler in July of 1944 had been successful any new government would have made an early approach to Britain and America. There were already tensions within the Alliance which might conceivably have resulted in a separate peace. The truth is that Germany had to be defeated and seen to have been defeated. Against this background cloak-and-dagger assassination schemes were quite irrelevant. Stalin would have understood that.

Defending the Indefensible

Is it possible to mount a defense of the indefensible? Is it possible to mount a defense of Neville Chamberlain and the policy of Appeasement? Putting her head into the mouth of the lion, Ana answers in the affirmative!

We have come a long way since the publication of Guilty Men, the self-satisfied 'I told you so' polemic of the 1940s. No serious historian would now consider dismissing Chamberlain and Appeasement in quite the same terms as the Cato conspirators. History is not created in looking back but in working forward. Appeasement has to be viewed from the perspective of 1919, not 1939.

Yes, it seems obvious from the standpoint of 1945, when history was torn up by the roots, that one had to be terribly deluded to attempt any form of reasonable compromise with people quite as monstrous as the Nazis; but at the time of the Munich Agreement this was not the common view. What was the alternative to Munich? Should a half-ready Britain and a half-hearted France have gone to war that could have had an outcome even more disastrous than that of 1940? For the Fall of France is unlikely to have been followed by victory over the skies of Britain.

By the 1930s most people in Britain had come to accept that Versailles had been an 'unfair' settlement: Appeasement thus has to be viewed in that context, a reversal and a remedy to the supposed errors of 1919, which denied the Germans the right of self-determination, granted to so many others. There was nothing to suggest in 1938 that Hitler wanted war for the sake of war, and every indication that international diplomacy could be pursued down normal channels.

But even while Chamberlain talked with the dictator he speeded up British rearmament, though such a move had been vigorously opposed by the strong domestic pacifism movement and the demand for disarmament, embraced by people like Michael Foot, one of the Guilty Men authors.

Appeasement could conceivably have continued after March 1939, when Hitler unilaterally occupied Bohemia and Moravia; at least this is the view promoted by A. J. P. Taylor in The Origins of the Second World War. But for Chamberlain it was a step too far, and the British guarantee to Poland followed.

Appeasement bought time, though this was not really Chamberlain's chief intention, which was to solve a problem, redress a wrong and secure the peace. Since the 1960s, and the controversy surrounding Taylor's book, scholars have made serious attempts to analyse the whole thrust of British diplomacy in the broadest possible terms, free of the glib judgements and moral outrage of the past. I would particularly commend The Realities Behind Diplomacy and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, both by Paul Kennedy.

Here we have three principle grounds for the rationality of Appeasement: Britain did not have enough skilled workers to produce rapid rearmament without endangering the whole process of economic recovery; military chiefs advised the politicians of the country's lack of preparedness for a major international conflict; and public opinion was consistently opposed to a strong stand against the dictators outwith the League of Nations. The whole rationale is simple enough: there was nothing to be gained for England economically, strategically or politically in fighting a Second World War, a conclusion fully borne out by what followed after 1945.

I have to say that my favourite treatment of the whole subject is Maurice Cowling's The Impact of Hitler, partisan and hugely entertaining! Cowling places the whole thing in a far broader explanatory context than had been attempted hitherto. In his estimation Appeasement was a policy that made perfect sense, because it was the only way to preserve the integrity of the Empire and British power in the world. It's an interesting perspective, though the chief emphasis shifts away from international relations towards domestic economic concerns.

For an alternative view one could do no better than refer to the work of David Dilks. Here Appeasement is essentially a consequence of the failure of the peace of 1919; or the failure, to be more precise, in securing the peace against a possible resurgence of German power. Chamberlain's action was thus informed by two things: recognition of German grievances, and an equal recognition that Britain lacked the economic and military resources for war. In Dilk's words he "hoped for the best and prepared for the worst." He talked, he compromised and he rearmed. In the final months before the war British spending on armaments reached a peacetime record. Chamberlain was no dupe; Appeasement made sense.

Eva and Adolf Sex Romp?

A new biography of Eva Braun is scheduled for publication later this month. Entitled Eva Braun: Life with Hitler by Heike Gortemaker, a Berlin-based historian, it claims to be the first truly objective and academic study of the life of Hitler’s girlfriend. It certainly reports some novel findings: Eva was not just there in the background but had an important influence on Hitler; that she was politically-committed and was allowed to attend important meetings, and, perhaps most interesting of all, she and Adolf actually had a sex life!

I do have to reserve judgement here and wait until I’ve had a proper look at this book, the result of three years of research, research which has uncovered previously unseen documents, letters and diaries. I’ve read Angela Lambert’s The Lost Life of Eva Braun, published three years ago, a plodding unfocused tome, based all too often on surmise and speculation. I came away feeling that, yes, Eva was dull not bad; that goodness is sometimes just as banal as evil. So, a politically and sexually active Eva will come as a refreshing alternative, as will a work based on solid scholarly investigation.

Having said that I can only hope that the ‘evidence’ is better than the advanced reports I’ve read in the press. Perhaps the publishers are being canny, only releasing tit-bits, nuggets of information to whet the appetite. Apparently Eva knew about the Holocaust and ‘made to attempt to speak out.’ Would it have made any difference if she had? Goebbels noted in his diary that “She was a bright girl who meant a great deal to the Fuhrer”. Yes, but so what, what exactly does that tell us, in what way does it take our understanding any further forward?

Gortemaker blames British historians for shaping the traditional ‘dumb blonde’ image of Eva, blaming the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, a war-time intelligence officer, who compiled a brilliant and lastingly influential report on Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker. She says that;

Trevor-Roper took his cue from Albert Speer, whom he interviewed at length. Speer said, “For all the writers of history, Eva Braun is going to be a disappointment”, and claimed that women had no significant role to play in the Nazi party. It was said of all the women, from the wives to the secretaries. Speer was trying to protect his wife. There was a strong movement to protect women in general, and so it became generally accepted that women had little role to play in the politics of the Third Reich.

Two things arise here, an empirical observation and a question. It’s perfectly true that women did have little role to play in the politics of the Third Reich, and there were few in any leading positions in either the party or the state. The question is simple: why would Speer feel the need to ‘protect the reputation’ of a dead woman?

Never mind that; what about the sex? Yes, what about it? Gortemaker is “totally convinced” that Eva and Adolf had a normal sex life. Well, all I can say is that for me, or for anyone working in the field of history, “totally convinced” simply does not cut it; only proof does. What proof does she offer here? Apparently Eva’s friends and relatives say that when she saw Neville Chamberlain sitting on a sofa in Hitler’s Munich flat in 1938 she giggled, saying “If only he knew what goings-on that sofa had seen.” Hmm, well, yes, more than a little cryptic, I would have thought; it could have been Blondie and the cat! Still, I shall wait and see. :-)

Oh, that my enemy would write a book

I was both surprised and pleased, yes, pleased, to see that Mein Kampf is to be republished in Germany, although those eager to read the word of the Fuhrer will have to wait another five years for the dubious pleasure, until the copyright of the state of Bavaria expires. I was surprised because I had no idea that it was still under a publishing interdict.

Why was I pleased? The answer here is altogether more subtle. To begin with I should say that, so far as I am concerned, the banning of books, books with a political message, no matter how repellent, is always wrong. But more to the point, Mein Kampf is an honest political statement, perhaps the most honest ever written by a politician. One only wishes that it had been taken more seriously at the time. It certainly was during the early days of the Cold War, when Western writers scoured the speeches of communist leaders, gathered and published with such dubious titles as Khrushchev’s Mein Kampf.

Hitler was eventually to recognise how unnecessary, how dangerously gratuitous the book had been as power became a realistic possibility, distancing himself from parts of the message in the early ‘moderate’ days of the Third Reich. He wrote a second book in 1928, this time focusing more directly on his foreign policy aims, which was buried during his days of power, only published after the war with the English title of Hitler’s Secret Book.

You see, for Hitler the spoken was always more important than the written word. It’s virtually impossible to quantify but I would hazard that that while Mein Kampf may have converted thousands- and I do stress may- the speeches converted tens of thousands. Indeed, Mein Kampf is more likely to have discouraged any potential convert by its convoluted and rambling message. If racist and fascist groups promote it today it’s because it’s Hitler’s ‘book’, a kind of icon, not because it has any real political power, any proselytising power.

It was banned in this country for more than twenty years after the Second World War. Republication in 1969, in an edition edited by D. C. Watt, was opposed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It was opposed, I believe, by some Jewish groups. I can understand this. At the time the crimes of the Nazis must still have been raw in a lot of minds. Yes, it was understandable but misguided. Father bought Watt’s edition while he was still at school and has told me that it is the dullest thing he had ever read, duller even than Cicero !

“Oh, that my enemy would write a book”, really is the guiding thread here. Well, he did, and it reveals much more about him than he ever intended, much more about his inner psychosis; reveals more about his intellectual and mental confusion than he could ever have imagined. That is the crucial thing. Publication in England was opposed by Jewish leaders. It’s a sign of how things have moved on, how understanding has grown, that publication in Germany has been backed by Jewish leaders.

Hitler-Power and Beyond

As the truly absurd contention that Hitler was 'democratically' elected tends to appear from time to time the point really needs to be clarified.

At its electoral peak the NSDAP obtained 37.4% of the popular vote in Germany. By November 1932, the last free election to the Reichstag, this had declined to 33.1%. So, even at their most popular the Nazis failed to impress 62.6% of the electorate, and they never achieved an overall majority in the Reichstag. Hitler was only appointed Chancellor by some shady political manoeuvring amongst the cabal surrounding President Hindenburg. More than that, he was appointed precisely because the NSDAP was showing signs of serious electoral decline. The fear shared by Franz von Papen and his reactionary clique, the real power brokers in January 1933, was that former Nazi voters would move en mass to the Communists, a fear given some support in the November elections, which saw the KPD gaining ground, just as the Nazis lost.

The early Hitler ministry, like every other since 1930, had no majority in the Reichstag, and was thus dependant on the continuing use of Artlcle 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed the President to overrule parliament. So, please, please, no more 'Hitler was elected' rubbish. This is the sort of garbage one only ever hears from ignorant old dilettantes. :-))

Now to a broader question: was Hitler a weak dictator? This has been the subject of detailed scholarly debate, and is by no means easy to answer. Hitler's style of dictatorship was so different from, say, that of Stalin or Mussolini in a way that makes comparison all but impossible. For one thing he was personally lazy, a vice for which he had been criticised in the early days of the Nazi movement by Gottfried Feder. Other than the exercise of power for its own sake, the Nazi Party, moreover, had little in the way of an organised programme, more a series of vague goals.

It was also Hitler's practice to appoint people to office with overlapping areas of authority, which turned the Nazi State into a jungle of competing interest groups and personalities. Hitler intervened rarely to sort out the ensuing mess. All of this contributed to Hans Mommsen's contention that Hitler was "in many ways a weak dictator." From the opposite political perspective David Irving even suggests that Hitler was "probably the weakest leader Germany has known this century" (Hitler's War, 1977, introduction). This view conflicts with others, from Alan Bullock to Klaus Hildebrand, who says that Hitler had both a programme and the power to carry it out.

So, what did the people who knew him best think of the Führer and his working habits? You can have this from the Memoirs of Albert Speer, the man who, perhaps, knew him best of all;

I would often ask myself did he really work? Little was left of the day; he rose late in the morning and conducted one or two official conferences; but from the subsequent dinner on he more or less wasted his time until the early hours of the evening. His rare appointments in the late afternoon were imperilled by his passion for looking at building plans. The adjutants often asked me 'please don't show any plans today'.

This lack of a systematic approach to work was made even worse in February 1938, after which cabinet meetings were no longer held. Germany, in a very real sense, ceased to have an effective government machine, with decisions being taken in a manner that allowed civil servants to act. Quite often Hitler was incommunicado in his remote mountain chalet near Berchtesgaden, so that "Ministers in charge of departments might for months on end, and even for years, have no opportunity of speaking to Hitler...Ministerial skill consisted in making the most of a favourable hour or minute when Hitler made a decision, this often taking the form of a remark thrown out casually, which then went its way as an order of the Führer." (J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism, 1919-1945, vol. 2, State Economy and Society, 1933-1939, 1984, p. 200)

The only argument here against the notion of a weak dictatorship is that this lack of system and structure somehow magnified Hitler's personal power; but it still reduced the effectiveness of the whole Nazi system. Charisma is a card that should never be overplayed. Decisions could and were made, sometimes quickly; but these tended to be in areas of immediate concern to the dictator, particularly over matters of foreign policy. However, on the Jewish question, a matter seemingly central to the whole Nazi programme, the policy was marked by muddle and confusion, until very late in the day. The very best that can be said of Hitler is that, if not weak, he was, as Ian Kershaw has argued, not "master of the Reich" in the sense of being all omnipotent.

Go East, Young Man

I was wryly amused by the story about Fritz Darges, the last surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle, who died recently aged ninety-six. As the last SS adjutant to the Führer he was present at all major conferences and social engagements, so hopefully his memoirs, which he instructed should be published after his death, may reveal some interesting secrets. Not that that is the source of my amusement.

Darges, who first met Hitler in 1934, described him in a press interview as ‘warm-hearted.’ He was to find out, to his personal cost, just how ‘warm-hearted’ he was. I can’t quite make up my mind if Darges possessed a sardonic wit-not a noted German quality-or a death wish, but he cracked a kind of joke at one the strategy conferences at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia.

It was July 1944, just two days before von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt. A fly was buzzing around, landing on Hitler’s shoulder and then the map he was looking at. Annoyed, he told Darges to ‘dispatch the nuisance.’ His response was that since this as an ‘airborne pest’ the task should be delegated Nicolaus von Below, the Luftwaffe adjutant. Maybe he was just a stickler for protocol! Oh, but Hitler did not like this at all. In a temper he shouted “You’re for the eastern front.” And to the eastern front he went.

Still, he continued to love his boss, right to the end of his life.

War Lords

What is the difference between Stalin and Hitler as military leaders? Well, that's simple enough: Hitler thought he was a genius and acted like a genius, with disastrous consequences for the whole German war effort. Stalin thought he was a genius and acted like a politician, giving the initiative to the people who had the talent and skill to realise his strategic vision. Stalin learned from his mistakes; Hitler did not learn from Stalin's mistakes.

Possibly the worst order that any leader can give to his generals is 'hold on at all costs and do not retreat.' All this means is that the enemy finds a weak point, advances and then destroys the defending forces in battles of envelopment, precisely what happened in western Russia in the summer and autumn of 1941. But by 1942 Stalin had learned the advantages of trading territory for military advantage.

The Second Battle of Kharkov was to be the last truly serious Russian defeat in the war. Thereafter, with minimal interference from Stalin, soldiers like Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Koniev were allowed sufficient inititive to bring their formidable talents to bear. Hitler, in contrast, began to interfere with military operations, down to the most basic levels of command, robbing the German army of the flexibility and initiative which had long been the chief mark of its battle-field effectiveness. The German Sixth Army could have withdrawn from Stalingrad even after it was surrounded in November 1942; but Hitler insisted that it remain. A new pattern of fight and defend at all costs was established, leading to the destruction of one German force after the other as the Russians pushed westwards in 1943-44.

There are other factors to consider in the respective war-time roles of Stalin and Hitler. As a leader Stalin was an inspiration, and his decision to remain in Moscow, and be seen in public, as the Germans advanced towards the city, had an incalculable effect on Russian morale. W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1943-45, was to say of him "I'd like to emphasize my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency, one of those historical occasions when one man made such a difference." Contrast that with Hitler who, as the German emergency deepened, sunk further and further into the background, leaving Goebbels to fill the gap in national leadership. For all his faults Stalin was an asset for the Russian war effort; for all his talents Hitler was a disaster for the German

Mein Kampf-a Reading

Mein Kampf is conceivably one of the most honest political manifestos ever written, so much so that after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 he was discomforted enough to claim initially, when his regime was still militarily weak, that it represented "merely a fantasy written behind bars." But in the course of his political life he was to work towards all of the goals set out in the book, from racial policy to the quest for Lebensraum. His final testament in 1945 did little more that rehash some of the central themes of Mein Kampf.

It should be read, first of all, as a form of political biography, which has a tendency to spill over at points into outright pathology. The Weltanschauung Hitler develops during his time in Vienna in particular is crucial in understanding his later political actions. At the most basic level it is a crude mixture of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and popular science; ideas half-digested and badly understood. It is in Vienna, moreover, where Hitler becomes both a committed German nationalist and an anti-Semite, drawing his ideas from the racist pamphlets freely available at the time.

Moving beyond the autobiographical element, the main themes to look for are hostility to the Treaty of Versailles, hostility to the Weimar Republic, and hostility to Communism. These are all united by his overriding hostility to the Jews, who threaten Germany from all angles, either as Marxists or as plutocrats. Germany, he believes, has to strive for a super power status, by breaking the bonds of Versailles, and surging eastwards at the expense of the Slavs. Democracy he regards with disdain; for "...as practiced in Western Europe today, it is the forerunner of Marxism." He has little respect for ordinary voters, even the people who later would help carry him to power, describing them as 'stupid' or as 'cattle'.

The theme of anti-Communism is also one of considerable importance, again uniting his hatred of left-wing ideologies and the Jews. Russia was not only the seat of Communism, but it was also dominated by the Jews who were aiming at the destruction of Germany. It was also, by fortunate coincidence, the area that was to provide the chief outlet for German expansionism-"When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must principally think of Russia and the border states subject to her...The struggle against the Jewish Bolshevization of the world demands that we should declare our position towards Soviet Russia."

The passages on propaganda with some care; because it is here that the book is often at its most informative and revealing, a useful guide to the effective techniques adopted by the Nazi Party. For example, he writes "We chose red for our posters, our intention being to irritate the left so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings." He is particularly good in his descriptions of politics and mass mobilisation as a form of collective drama, and the need for simplicity and again simplicity. And if you intend to tell a lie make sure it’s a big one, to be repeated continuously until it becomes the truth and truth the lie.

The Timing of the Final Solution

This is a piece I wrote in answer to a question on the Humanities Reference Desk of Wikipedia on the precise timing of Hitler’s decision on the Final Solution. No document has been found or will ever be found, because that’s not the way that Hitler worked. What follows is a set of educated deductions which I have based largely upon Laurence Rees' monograph, Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution, in the edition published by BBC Books in 2005

By the spring of 1940 it was becoming increasingly clear that the policy of using the General Government as a 'racial dustbin' was causing huge logistical problems. In May 1940 Himmler addressed the issue in a wide-ranging memorandum, in which he rejects 'the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally un-German.' (Lees, p.45) He goes on to say that I hope to see the term 'Jews' completely eliminated through the possibility of large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony. When Himmler discussed this proposal with Hitler he was told that it was gut und richtig (good and correct). But the tenacity of England effectively put an end to all such notions by the autumn and winter of that same year. The problem in the General Government remained, and got steadily worse with the arrival of additional deportees.

Moving further down the line to the summer of 1941, when mass killings were already underway in Russia, we have Göring's memo to Heydrich of 31 July, asking for a blueprint for 'the execution of the intended Final Solution of the Jewish question.' However, as Lees says (p.84), the discovery of a document in the Moscow Special Archive casts some doubt on the particular significance of Göring's memorandum. This contains a note from Heydrich, dated March 26 1941, in which he says;

With respect to the Jewish question I reported briefly to the Reich Marshal and submitted to him my new blueprint, which he authorized with one modification concerning Rosenberg's jurisdiction, and then ordered for resubmission.

This document has to be taken in the context of the coming invasion of the Soviet Union-which was expected to collapse in a few weeks-and the continuing deadlock with the British in the west. In other words, the new destination for the Jews of Europe was no longer Africa, but parts of conquered Russia, including areas expected to be under the jurisdiction of Alfred Rosenberg.

It seems clear that the 31 July document should be read against the background of forced migration, rather than mass murder as such, though in practical terms the end result would have been just the same, as most of the deportees are likely to have frozen to death in the east with the onset of the Russian winter. However, it was the specific actions of the Einsatzgruppen-particularly in the shooting of women and children-that raised yet another set of problems, and a further quest for solutions. The decisive moment here, it might very well be argued, came in August 1941, when Himmler visited Minsk, and saw the work of the killing squads at first hand.

The Minsk killings, and the complaints, amongst others, of Lieutenant-General von dem Bach-Zelewski, that the sheer personal horror involved was having a severe psychological impact on the men in the Kommandos, pushed Himmler along the path of a less 'bloody' solution to the whole issue. He already had before him one possible 'clinical' way out: mass-killing had already been tried and tested in the euthanasia programme, with poison gas being used to kill as many as ten thousand people in mental hospitals in Wartegau and West Prussia between October 1939 and October 1940.

The need for new killing techniques-soon to be explored in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, the continuing build up of Jewish deportees in the ghettos of Poland, and the unexpected stubbornness of Soviet resistance, demanded that the whole issue be re-examined from top to bottom. Amongst others, Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, was lobbying Hitler for more radical solutions, urging the expulsion eastwards of all the Jews of Berlin to already grossly overcrowded ghettos, like that at Lodz. The way out of this deadlock was the authorisation of the first mass gassings at Chelmno, close to Lodz, in late 1941.

Given Hitler's method of working, and his dislike of committing himself to paper, we will never know for certain when outright murder took the place of deportation as the favoured solution to the Jewish question. If I was pushed to choose a specific time-frame, on the basis of the evidence as it presents itself, it would be October 1941. By then the decision had been taken to send all of the Reich's Jews to the east, even though the war with Russia showed no sign of ending. In November, in a conversation with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler said that he wanted all Jews, even those not under German control, 'to be destroyed.' (Lees, p. 110) Here, in essence, is the agenda of the Wannsee Conference, where the populations detailed for elimination included those living in areas not even under German control, including England. The following month the gas vans of Chelmno began their work.

Against this whole drift of events and policy, the Wannsee Conference has been allowed to carry far too much weight. The decision on mass extermination, it seems highly likely, was conveyed by verbal instruction alone by Hitler to Himmler sometime in October. Wannsee was merely a forum for ensuring maximum bureaucratic complicity. Those who attended, with the exception of Heydrich (and even he was not yet in the uppermost ranks of the party leadership) were by and large men of the second-division, like Martin Luther from the Foreign Ministry, representing Ribbentrop; senior bureaucratic functionaries, in other words, implementers of policy, rather than formulators.

Hitler, the Reader

Hitler’s Private Library by Timothy W Ryback

I had a quick trot through this book, which arrived in my college library last session. I already knew that Hitler was a reader, though of a very specific type. His favourite form of fiction was the western, particularly those written by Karl May, and the detective story, though he liked to keep these low-brow tastes a secret from the general public. A boilermaker unwise enough to tell his friends that the Führer had a taste for adventure stories ended up in Dachau.

Apparently his personal library once amounted to some sixteen or seventeen thousand books, not all detective stories and westerns. A good bit of what remains is stored in the Library of Congress and Brown University, although this amounts to only ten percent of the total. Timothy Ryback, the author of this survey, was clearly less interested in the books as such than in discovering traces of Hitler himself, in pencil strokes, exclamation marks and turned pages. He even manages to pinpoint exactly when a particular book was being read. While at the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia, he was apparently reading Robert Graves' Claudius novels.

Anyway, on the author proceeds, following traces of the tyrant, in his grunts and snorts. He got particularly excited on discovering a crinkly little hair, which he assumes fell from the Führer’s moustache. Really? Well, maybe he’s just being coy! :))

Hitler and the Occult

It maddens me when I see references, in both fiction and fact, to Adolf Hitler's supposed interest in occult forces. He did not have an astrologer, as some have alleged.. In fact he was altogether contemptuous of the practice, and astrologers were among one of the many groups persecuted during the Third Reich.

There were, however, some among the leadership prepared to take the practice seriously, either for political ends or out of simple superstition. Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess were most notable amongst the latter. The man who came closest to being the 'court' astrologer was Karl Ernst Krafft, who was arrested in May 1941 following Hess's flight to Scotland, when Hitler, in his fury, ordered a fresh purge of occultists and astrologers of all kinds. Goebbels joked at this time that it was odd that not one amongst the group was able to predict what was about to happen to them!