Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum Macmillan 444pp, £20 in UK
Hitler is a conventional byword for evil and his extermination of six million Jews is usually considered the greatest crime in history. But as long ago as the fourth century BC Plato argued in the Protagoras that no man consciously commits evil; instead, he performs evil actions thinking them to be good. So was Hitler simply a "true believer" who thought he was ridding the world of a plague?
The snag, as Ron Rosenbaum sees clearly, is that you cannot convict a man of evil in such circumstances. The lunatic in the asylum sincerely believes he is Napoleon, and similarly Hitler genuinely thought he was doing mankind a favour. So, to nail Hitler on the charge of evil, we have to accept that he knew he was doing wrong. Rosenbaum sets out to find the evidence.
The author has spent ten years reading, researching and interviewing. One of the reasons one can confidently say there is something in this book for everyone is the human interest of the interviews themselves and the circumstances surrounding them. Some of the interviewees seem, frankly, to be as mad as Hitler is often asserted to have been - no names, no pack-drill, but the diligent reader will not be fooled as to their identity. Such are the passions engendered by this subject that Rosenbaum had two of his experts walk out on him, and some of the other encounters were rather less than a meeting of minds. But from the melange of face-to-face duelling, archival digging and sedulous reading in the secondary sources, Rosenbaum has fashioned a truly brilliant book, one of those seminal volumes that comes along just once in a decade.
In a short review one cannot do justice to the complexity of the issues Rosenbaum deals with, or to his lucid and nuanced exposition. But one can make a long list of the things he does not believe to have value in this discussion. All speculation about Hitler's childhood traumata, all discussion of his obsession for his niece Geli Raubal, all theories purporting to show that the Fuhrer had only one testicle or a truncated penis - in short, all views deriving from psycho-history or human pathology, are ruled out of court.
The central issue, as Rosen baum sees it, and the only one that does not allow Hitler in some sense to wriggle off the hook, is the Holocaust and Hitler's responsibility for it. Here again Rosenbaum is severe on any view that would mitigate Hitler's responsibility. He has no time for the view that the Holocaust was largely the work of middle-ranking bureaucrats like Eichmann or that Himmler and Eichmann devised it and kept the Fuhrer in ignorance. He is drawn to those historians who make Hitler the chief anti-Semite among the Nazis and argue that he planned the deaths of six million Jews long before he came to power in 1933.
Although Gentiles (Alan Bullock, H.R. Trevor-Roper, even David Irving) are not excluded, increasingly one becomes aware that the core of this book is the argument within Jewry about the origins and meaning of the Holocaust. This is where the main blemish of the volume shows itself. The most intellectually sophisticated Jews - George Steiner, Hannah Arendt - are the ones Rosenbaum likes least because their coruscating pyrotechnics seem to him to exculpate Hitler.
In his brilliant novel The Portage to San Crostobal of A.H., Steiner puts into the mouth of Hitler a three-fold apology for the Holocaust: one, he got the idea of the Master Race from the Jews as Chosen People; two, the world wants revenge on the Jews because it introduced to reluctant mankind (via Moses, Jesus and Marx) the unwelcome concept of conscience; three, the Shoah was the reason for the creation of the state of Israel so this makes Hitler the real Messiah. This scintillating use of paradox infuriates Rosenbaum, and may be the chief reason why he seeks refuge in the dogmatic "certainties" of a more old-fashioned strain in Jewish scholarship which makes Hitler and Hitler alone responsible for the Holocaust. No cultural contexts, no economic forces, no responsible junior acolytes, just plain "No Hitler, No Holocaust".
Even while disagreeing strongly with many of Rosenbaum's conclusions and noting that he is by no means free from the dogmatism of which he accuses others, one has to concede the power, scope and clarity of this intellectual tour-de-force, which I found as gripping as any novel. To write as well as this on such difficult themes is given to few of us. With this magnificent book Rosenbaum has achieved what is surely a career best.