The Hitler Problem. - Review - book review

National Review, Jan 22, 2001 by Jeffrey Hart

Earlier I spoke of various key questions about Hitler that have been the subject of scholarly debate. Of the first importance, surely, is the genesis and crystallization of Hitler's hatred of the Jews. Without Hitler there would have been no death factories, no murderous Einsatzgruppen accompanying the Wehrmacht eastward; Hitlerism even legitimized the slaughter of Jews in satellites Hungary and Rumania.

The problem for historians can be put briefly. In Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler at length places his anti-Semitic epiphany in prewar Vienna and his down-and-out bohemian years from 1908 to 1913. Yet there is little or no evidence external to Mein Kampf that supports this, not his letters nor the testimony of those who knew him. In fact, though cosmopolitan Vienna might well have shocked the young provincial from Linz, Hitler associated with Jews, and sold his drawings to Jewish retailers, eking out a precarious living.

All the evidence points to November 1918-May 1919 as the period of crystallization. While Hitler has little to say about these tumultuous months in Mein Kampf, it is during this period that "Jewish Bolshevism" becomes virtually a single word in his vocabulary, and his anti- Semitism becomes the core of a Weltanschauung that posits a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Germany.

On November 8, 1918, Hitler lay in a military hospital in Pasewalk, temporarily blinded by gas (he had fought for four years on the Western Front and won two Iron Cross decorations-one First Class, very rare for an enlisted man). On that day, a Protestant chaplain announced the armistice to the men in Hitler's ward. In Mein Kampf, Hitler testifies to the devastating effect this had on him, leading to his conviction that the German army had been "stabbed in the back."

This belief was possible only because while the essentially defeated army was still fighting, a violent Marxist-inspired revolution swept through Germany. There were naval mutinies at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, and uprisings in most cities and towns. On November 9, there was an uprising in Berlin. When Hitler returned to Munich, he found a Soviet trying to govern, backed by Red Guards and a Red Army of some 20,000 men, mostly factory workers. The Executive Council in Munich was headed by a Jew, Eugene Levine; another radical leader, Kurt Eisner, held massive rallies in support of the revolution. The revolutionary leaders in Berlin included Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Both Jewish, they were soon murdered by counterrevolutionaries. Other Jewish revolutionaries included Max Levien, Rudolf Englhofer, Ernst Toller, and Gustav Landauer.

In Catholic, conservative Bavaria, the revolution never had a chance. Within weeks, it was crushed by units of the regular army and returned veterans organized into Freikorps troops. Hitler later referred to this period as "the passing rule of the Jews." Yet it is here that Kershaw locates the hardening of Hitler's distinctive form of anti-Semitism, when he begins to refer to the Jews in biological similes as a disease of society: parasites and bacilli, language that is clearly genocidal. By 1924 he writes in Mein Kampf that a million German lives lost during the Great War would have been saved if "twelve to fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas."