Books

Fuehrer's side of the fence

Robert Blake

Hitler's War David Irving (Hodder & Stoughton £9.95)

Mr David Irving is not an uncontroversial historian. The rows about his books on the death of General Sikorski and the P017 will long be remembered by those who follow these things. If there is anything at all predictable in the historiographical world, it is that a work by him is sure to cause a furore. His latest will be no exception, for it is an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler — or if that is too strange a verb — to revise the , accepted version in a sense that is more favourable than anything hitherto presented in this country about that 'demon figure sprung from the abyss', as Winston Churchill once described him.

It must be said at once that the book Makes fascinating reading. Mr Irving possesses the gift of narrative and the art of arrangement. He has, according to his own account, spent ten years researching into the subject. He is bilingual as regards German and he has a knack of persuading the heirs of various prominent Nazi figures to produce letters, diaries and other documents which they have kept carefully guarded from previous inquirers. He has also induced some of those who are still alive and were closely connected with Hitler to speak with a candour which they have seldom displayed in any other context. Hitler's Secretaries and adjutants were without exception of the utmost help', he writes. It would be interesting to know how and why Mr Irving has acquired the confidence of these persons. It is, of course, legitimate conduct on the part of any historian of modern times in search of evidence to feign beliefs which he does not Wholly share, and to express sympathies which go beyond his actual convictions. It is Often the only way to acquire evidence. But one cannot close this book without wondering just what Mr Irving's opinions about Hitler and Nazism really are.

Mr Irving's proclaimed objective is to tell the history of Hitler's war as seen from Hitler's. side of the fence. This is a commendable purpose and there can be no doubt that his indefatigable research has Yielded much fascinating information. Normally one would expect this sort of account to be written by a member of the defeated nation. Napoleon's campaigns as seen by Napoleon have been better described by Frenchmen rather than Englishmen. But Napoleon did not leave a memory which his compatriots were anxious to erase. On the contrary, the Napoleonic 'legend' lingered on to evoke its own tradition and literature, indeed actu

ally to shape the course of French history for years to come. This is not true of Hitler. The atrocities which he committed, the total defeat which he brought upon his country, the universal obloquy which attends his name have made most Germans wish to do nothing about him except forget. To the modern German generation the history of the Third Reich is a non-subject. If anyone was to write a history of the Six Years War from the German point-of-view (or rather from the point of view of the German leader, it had to be a non-German, preferably one who had not actually been himself involved in the war and who could, in spite of his nationality nevertheless imagine himself into the Hitlerian court. Mr Irving has achieved this brilliantly and the publishers' claim that his descriptions of events 'give us the uncanny feeling of having been there' is fully justified.

Why does one entertain certain reservations about what is by any standards a remarkable book? It is partly because Mr Irving seems to have put himself so completely into Hitler's place that at times he almost appears to accept the Fuehrer's own values. Take the references to Churchill and Eden which he quotes. Naturally they are highly unfavourable. Hitler did not like either Churchill or Eden. Mr Irving could no doubt reply that it is unnecessary for him when giving us Hitler's remarks to tell the reader that they were untrue, eg that Churchill was not an 'alchoholic dilettente' and that Eden was not a 'brilliantined moron'. Yet is it being ov,er-sensitive or suspicious to read into these and many other quotations a certain relish on the party of the author? And in other passages one gains the impression that in the end Mr Irving regards Roosevelt, Churchill, Eden, Hitler, Goering, Stalin as all much on a par, all equally capable of committing high crimes in the interests of state, none of them morally so 'very different from the others.

This brings us to the section of the book which has attracted the most attention in places where it has been published, Hitler's responsibility for the massacre of the Jewish population, of Europe. Mr Irving considers that Hitler did not, despite his virulent anti-semitism, order this appalling atrocity:

'My own hypothesis. . . is this: the killing was partly of an ad hoc nature, what the Germans call a Verlegenheitslosung, the way out of an awkward dilemma, 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.'

Mr Irving concedes that Hitler eventually came to know what wag being done in his name, but 'wholly in keeping with his character. . . he took no action to rebuke the guilty. His failure or inability. to act in effect kept the extermination machinery going to the end of the war.'

Mr Irving has claimed on television that it is a distortion of the balance of his book to single out the few pages in the main text — ten out of eight hundred — which deal with this subject. It is fair to say that Mr Irving does indeed record with candour many of the odious aspects of Hitler's conduct without attempting to explain them away or attribute them to others: 'Given the brutality of Hitler's orders to "dispose of" the entire male population of two major Soviet cities, his insistence on the execution of hostages on a one hundred to one basis, his demands for the liquidation of Italian soldiers, Polish intellectuals, clergy and nobility, and captured Allied airmen and Red Army commissars, his reluctance to acquiesce in the extermination of Europe's Jews mains a mystery.'

But if his account of Hitler's Jewish policy attracts more attention than anything else in his book Mr Irving cannot fairly complain. In his introduction which epitomises what he regards as his most important themes, Hitler's responsibility for the liquidation of the Jews occupies two and a half out of thirteen pages. It is scarcely for Mr Irving to protest at the concentration of his critics on this central and crucial subject when he has particularly directed them to it.

His case is largely negative — the absence of conclusive written proof that Hitler actually ordered the massacre of the Jews. He also makes much play with a note of a telephone call by Himmler from Hitler's HQ on 30 November 1941 telling Heydrich that a convoy of Jews from Berlin was not to be 'liquidated'. The fact that an order was given not to murder people on a particular occasion is hardly a very convincing agrument. As for the more general point, it is scarcely surprising that no explicit written evidence survives. The orders for the extermination of the Jews were on every level Veiled in obscure and discreet language. It defies belief that Hitler knew nothing about a systematic and major operation of this kind.

Mr Irving allows himself to wonder whether the war was really worth fighting as far as Great Britain was concerned. Most readers of his book will feel that on his own showing it certainly was. After all, even if we accept his exoneration of Hitler, there must have been someone in Germany responsible for the mass murders. I prefer the judgement of Mr A.J.P. Taylor in his splendid essay on Winston Churchill: 'Future generations may discuss the second world war as "just another war". Those who experienced it know that it was a war justified in its aims and successful in accomplishing them.'

The world has been fairly nasty since 1945. It would have been much nastier if Hitler had won.