Intelligence

60 years after the bullet, Hitler is still an enigma

TheStar.com - 60 years after the bullet, Hitler is still an enigma

Debating the whys of evil may be futile

And some argue we shouldn't even ask

LYNDA HURST
FEATURE WRITER

He died 60 years ago today.

To be precise, Adolf Hitler took a revolver and shot himself in the mouth. He probably bit a cyanide capsule to ensure success.

The last thing he would have been aware of was the roar of artillery shells as Russian tanks smashed through the shattered streets of Berlin. It shook the walls of the Chancellery air-raid shelter where he'd been hunkered down all month. By mid-afternoon that April 30, they were just blocks away.

Closing in.

Defeat, failure and retribution were arriving for the leader of the Nazi Third Reich, the "nobody from Vienna" who had been responsible for World War II and the deaths of 55 million people, the man who had calculatedly set out to eradicate the Jewish people, the man for whom 10-year-old boys were now being used to ward off the Red Army.

But Hitler was calm on his last day.

The maps on which he'd been feverishly moving around phantom regiments the past few weeks lay untouched.

The furious, vein-popping rages, during which he'd blamed his fall on, alternately, the German people, traitors among his military staff and, of course, the Jews, finally were at an end.

The day before, he'd been told of the fate of his one-time ally, the strutting Benito Mussolini. Il Duce and his mistress Clara Petacci had been shot, their bodies hung upside-down in a Milan square, there to be desecrated by cursing Italians.

That was not going to happen to him.

With his bride of 36 hours, Eva Braun, Hitler shook hands with those still in the bunker, among them the last, trusted lieutenants who remained, Josef Goebbels and Martin Bormann, then went into his study and closed the door. Within minutes, a single shot rang out.

When the group entered, they found Hitler sprawled dead on the blood-soaked sofa. Beside him lay Eva, who had poisoned herself.

Wrapped in blankets, the bodies were quickly carried up and out to the Chancellery garden where they, exactly as the Fuhrer had ordered the day before, were doused with gasoline and set on fire. His SS bodyguards gave a final "heil" salute, then disappeared back into the bunker.

It was 11 days after Hitler's 56th birthday.

The Third Reich, which he had predicted would endure for a thousand years, had lasted just 12 years and three months. It would outlive him by just seven days. On May 7, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces — the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the United States. The next day was celebrated as VE day.

By then, the Russians had found his remains, and scooped the ashes and bits of bone into a cigar box, where they disappeared into history.

But with his death, a mystery — some would say an obsession — was born:

Who was Adolf Hitler?

What was he?

He saw himself as nothing less than the Chosen One; the redeemer of German pride after the humiliating defeat and harsh peace terms of World War I.

In 1918, recovering from a gas attack and temporary blindness, he had had a vision of his mission, and harked back to it in Munich in 1936: "I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence."

That was his view.

To millions of Germans, he is a shameful aberration. A cultural deviation. To his victims, especially the survivors of the "final solution," he is a monster, a madman, the devil incarnate.

The late theologian and philosopher Emil Fackenheim said Hitler was more than a bad man, in the sense of human badness, but something else, something beyond that, "the explanation for which, if there is one, can be known or fathomed only by God."

For nearly 60 years, historians have tried to fill in the ground between the two poles.

The evidence is there to assess Hitler as a thug, a political criminal, a malevolent mediocrity with flashes of genius. A brilliant propagandist, but an "unperson"; a hollow man with no inner self. A supreme actor who believed his own act. And, ultimately, the arch-conceiver of atrocities, executed by others, that lie beyond comprehension.

That's what he was. But some essential element is missing.

How could this failed artist from Austria, a puffed-up slacker and beer-hall ranter, come to embody Germany's myth-ridden dreams of destiny? How could he emerge from the far-right political fringes to gain absolute power over a seemingly civilized nation?

He had never been promoted above corporal in WWI, yet 20 years later, he would unleash a world war, an Armageddon, and very nearly win it.

The much-vaunted charisma doesn't survive in the film footage.

To modern eyes, in full hysterical tirade at his meticulously staged torch-and-flag rallies, Hitler looks demented, repellent, out of control — his vehemence a demonic parody of an evangelist. At other times, chatting with his henchmen at Berchtesgaden, say, he's merely a round-shouldered nonentity with a ridiculous smudge of a moustache.

"Hitler had many different faces," Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, a maps officer and one of last remaining survivors of the final days in the bunker, told Reuters this week.

"He could be kind. The Austrian charm would sometimes come through. He was always asking people about their health. But he was mostly ice cold and deeply distrustful of everyone."

There's no question that Hitler started out as a vulgar rabble-rouser, a fanatical outsider, says University of Toronto historian and author Michael Marrus, a leading expert on the Holocaust. "But you shouldn't go away thinking what a bunch of patsies the Germans were," he adds.

"At first he was looked on as a gangster who'd taken over the state. But he had the ability to manipulate high-powered professionals; they became convinced of his strategic capacity. There's no question there was something there, a genius."

What was there was an "evil genius," according to Hitler's first full biographer, the late British historian Alan Bullock. "To achieve what he did, Hitler needed — and possessed — talents out of the ordinary which in sum amounted to political genius, however evil its fruits," he wrote in 1952.

The field marshals may have looked down their upper-class noses at Hitler, but they bowed to his military tactics. When he virtually eliminated unemployment and curbed spiralling inflation, industrialists hailed him as an economic saviour.

And ordinary people?

The Nazi Party never received more than 37 per cent of the vote before elections were halted in 1932. But there are those who believe Hitler had his grip on an all-too-willing population. And many Germans did embrace his messianic message of natural superiority, their right to have lebensraum, living space, and to dominate Europe.

They shared his loathing and fear of Bolshevism, knowing — or not knowing — that in his mind, Communists and Jews were one and the same.

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.

"Complicity was massive, from the Wehrmacht leadership and captains of industry down to Party hacks, bureaucratic minions, and ordinary Germans," wrote Kershaw. "(But) without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a program to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable."

That was also the conclusion of his first assessor, Alan Bullock, who concluded that what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 happened for one reason only: "The evidence seems to me to leave no doubt that no other man played a role in the history of the Third Reich remotely comparable to that of Adolf Hitler's."

To Bullock, Hitler was a "moral cretin," a cynical egotist, immune to conscience or the sufferings of others — such things didn't exist in his moral universe.

The conception of the Nazi Party, the tactics it employed to curb opposition, the propaganda it used to draw in the German people, were all, unquestionably, Hitler's, he wrote. And "it took the combined efforts of the three most powerful nations in the world to break his hold."

Is that the reason why so many are still so fascinated by the Hitler enigma?

"You'd have to ask those who are," scoffs McGill's Peter Hoffmann. He is not among them.

"Great crimes and criminals have a mysterious attraction," he concedes. "Both philosophers and psychologists are at a loss to explain it."

All we really need to know, says Michael Marrus, is this: "Civilization, technology, the social indices of success are all so fragile that, if we are not vigilant, gangsters can take over."

But the search for an explanation, a key to Hitler, will almost certainly go on. Not so much to provide a resolution, but to help people see clearly if — or perhaps when — a new version of him arrives in their midst.

Additional articles by Lynda Hurst

April 30, 2005 at 10:52 AM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home