Discovering Hitler
SARAH GAINHAM writes from Bonn:
There have been attempts lately in Germany to look at Hitler; if possible objectively but at any rate to look at a figure that seemed to dis- appear from the consciousness of the people he had led to total disaster in the moment of his death and which for years afterwards was hardly Mentioned.
His reappearance as an historical figure was not caused by the Eichmann trial as is often assumed. A working party (Office for Co- ordination between the Lander to Elucidate Nazi Crimes, to give it its name) was set up by the pro- Vincial Justice Ministers who are variously responsible for police and judicial affairs in rederal Germany, after the trial at Ulm in 1958 of members of an SS 'special unit' in Tilsit during the war had exposed the confusion from which such men were profiting. From the moment files and dossiers were centrally available and not con- fined to local authorities a whole programme of trials and Charges for future trials were begun, the largest of which is the trial of Auschwitz guards now going on at Frankfurt.
The young, particularly, began asking questions and undoubtedly it was the circulation represented by this interest of readers who did not remember Hitler that caused the spate of Mass-circulation reading about his personal Character and life. It ranges from the sorriest nonsense to serialisation of the long introduction bY Percy Schramm to a new edition of Hitler's Tabletalk. Among other explanations, doctors have suggested a change in the character of the boy Hitler at puberty caused by some illness; and it sidelight on the chances by which hihorical facts are collected was given, after this 'illness theory was published, by a reader's letter to a newspaper. The writer had talked to an old lady Who had known Hitler as a child when she was a child, and recalled that no change had taken Place in his character—as she expressed it 'that littler Adi [the names inverted in the Austrian stYlel was always a bad lot even as a child.' Both the doctors' theories and Professor Schramm's minute details of Hitler's appearance and life have been attacked as belittling the Wickedness of the man. And it does seem ludicrous to emphasise one person's impression !It.at Hitler was kind to those who worked for nim. or that he shaved himself; perhaps the one Subjective impression is valueless, but the shaving ts. further evidence of an important trait of littler's; he could not bear intimate contact and even his doctors never saw him stripped.
„ he desire to collect personal memories while (neY still exist is one of the driving forces of the Nast interesting and valuable of these recent Publications. Hans Bernd Gisevius published last Year (Rtitten and Loening, Munich) a biography Hitler subtitled 'an attempt at interpretation.' Official views of it are cool and historians are resentful, perhaps because the author has an im- Inense amount of private material which—at least li)lartlY out of scorn for professional historians— e has not troubled to annotate.
Gisevius, a member of Admiral Canaris's secret Service staff and plotter against Hitler from be- fore the war, is well-fitted to make this first ,sa,llemPt at an explanation, as he says, of the "lenomenon Hitler. He was frequently present at eLD.rnmittee meetings with his subject and the w8hest staff officers, and when he remained in at he could talk immediately after staff etr'nferences with the protagonists on terms of lusted intimacy. Much material, notes, sketches 4nd the like, were entrusted to him by friends,
for he was in Switzerland during the war and could get stuff out, so that not everything col- lected by the plotters was lost in Gestapo house- searches after the failure of the July 1944 plot.
Thanks to his intelligence training, Gisevius takes nothing at its face value; and thanks to a personal characteristic, lAatred of humbug, he examines with a positive glee of dislike all those pompous respectable persons, views, accepted wisdoms who have pushed their own failures on to the dead. Hardly anybody comes out of the examination well. Most important, internal Ger- man events are recounted as they happened and not afterwards from the outside; evidence hardly noted by foreign historians makes clear actions, and reasons for actions, which up to my reading of this book had been, for me at any rate, like the bursting on to the stage of the Demon King in pantomime, unrelated to anything else.
Hitler's devotion to the Wehrmacht, the first community he had ever 'belonged' to, is the most important example of this. Gisevius's intensely personal appreciation of this major fact of Hit- ler's life makes continuous sense of the 1934 Purge, the Blomberg scandal, and the disgusting intrigue by Goering, Himmler and Heydrich to get rid of Blomb-erg's obvious successor, General Fritsch. Paradoxically, the ease with, which the arch-intriguer manceuvred the senior Generals into their own impotence and set up the OKW (unified command of the armed forces) under a chairborne creature of his own whom he could control, disillusioned Hitler of his awe and admiration of the Army mystique. It was a major factor in his later attitude to the army, then the finest in the world, which he completely destroyed.
Over and over again pusillanimity and con- formism stopped someone forcing an issue, let things ride while the body of those who wanted to do something was headless because the seniors were divided by Hitler's genius for setting each against each, muddled by his constant intriguing and concerned about their pensions. The trick of suddenly deciding on something which then had to be done at top speed before the actors had collected their wits--the writing of the Nuremberg Laws is an instance almost funny in its macabre way—is an object lesson to everyone private or public who has to deal with a human being of this obsessive type.
The monster remains a monster but Gisevius, in a really extraordinary sustained effort—sus- tained for something like fifteen years—of intel- lectual insight, has made clear how time, social conditions and a pathological will, allied with political genius—yes, genius, I am afraid—pro- duce entirely revolutionary situations.
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