Hitler vs. History
Hitler's Secret Book. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. (Evergreen Books, 25s.)
DISCOVERED among the captured German docu- ments in Washington, this characteristic outpour- ing tells us nothing new about either Hitler or his policy, and it would be a pity if the use of the word 'secret' in the title raised false expecta- tions. In fact, it is a straight -re-hash of Mein Kamp/—happily substantially shorter—and the only. specifically new question it raises is why Hitler chose to reformulate his views in 1928. In his introduction, Telford Taylor suggests that Hitler's motive was to put the Germans straight about the question of South Tyrol (an issue on which they can still do with instruction), but one guess is as good as another, and my own would be that he thought there was room for a less indigestible and more readily saleable version of his magnum opus. In the event it was not printed —probably because Hitler's publisher, Max Amann, feared he would lose money over it— but the suggestion that it was 'suppressed' be- cause `so explicit a projection of his foreign policy aims' was 'politically inexpedient' is simply not borne out by the contents. Here, in fact, are all the well-worn themes (and no new ones), the old illusions, the same twisted arguments, the same crude Darwinian theories, the bar-parlour economics, the custom- ary debasement of pseudo-history. But if (as Alan Taylor once wrote) Mein Kamp/ brings us `the generalisations of a powerful, but uninstruc- ted, intellect,' the most striking thing about Hitler's second book is its failure to convey any sense of latent, if perverted, intellectual ability. The. other impression (somewhat unwillingly entertained) is that the key to Hitler's personality lies in all probability in a disturbed and twisted sexual neurosis; his preoccupation with birth- control, syphilis, race-contamination and the like is clearly obsessive, and one is uncomfortably aware of dark, paranoic voids which only Freudian analysis could fill. For the historian, however, the decisive question is not how Hitler came to write such stuff, but why 90 per cent. of Germans accepted him as their inspired leader.
From this point of view the analysts of Nazi doctrine have perhaps been too subtle and missed the obvious cue. The real bond between Hitler and the German people was the conviction that Germany's destiny was 'to make world history' and not 'to terminate her life as a second Holland or a second Switzerland.' Given a leader who would guarantee them Faustian heroics instead of civilised living, it is doubtful whether they were particularly interested in the means. Bismarck's successors before- 1914 had assumed that world destiny implied world policy and a place in the colonial sun; Hitler reverted to a 'continental policy'—living-room (as he said) not in the Camcroons but in Europe. Provided they were not asked to better their position, as other peoples strove to do, by the humdrum method of pro- ducing and exporting more, either line suited the Germans. The trouble with Hitler's line was that it was hypothecated upon the improbable assumption that England would do nothing about a German bid for European hegemony, so long as Germany's 'foreign policy aims' were 'manifestly of a purely continental character.'
This fatal assumption is hard to reconcile with that 'insight into politics' which has so impressed Hitler's English biographers. After this we need not be surprised that Hitler deluded himself, as countless Germans had done before, into be- lieving that irreconcilable Anglo-American rival- ries would drive Britain into the German camp. And what of the anti-French obsession which so perverted his judgment that he still saw France as Germany's enemy Number One—a piece of atavistic historicism which soon proved ludic- rously wrong? Worse still, however, was his de- termination to ignore the reality of Russia, his gullible repetition of stale Germanic claptrap about the deficiency of Slays in 'State-building forces.' An alliance with Russia, he assures us, `has no sense for Germany'; nor would it 'occur to anybody to fear a Russian hegemony.' And if, on the other hand, he was alive to the impact of the United States, he characteristically drew the wrong conclusion. Instead of realising that the emergence of America as a world power imposed strict limits on Germany's potentialities, his spon- taneous reaction was to hurry on with his des- perate gamble for German hegemony.
Here again Hitler, with his Wagnerian sym- bolism of the hammer and the anvil, could rightly claim to be a 'man of the people,' for the pre- sentiment that a baleful fate imposed on Germans the Sisyphean task of halting the wheel of world history or perishing in the attempt was no peculiar Hitlerian posture but rather a common trait of German thinking. The result was to hurry on the very developments which National Social- ism set out to thwart. Determined to be hammer for fear of being anvil, Germany found itself instead the catalyst and Hitler the midwife of a new world order in which Germany as a single political unit had no place. Perhaps, after all, the Dutch and Swiss were right.
GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH
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