I SAW HITLER the man, his life, his work, and his extinction, as I have described it all in the preceding pages. I began writing this book five months after Hitler’s death. That is, perhaps, too short an interval between the events themselves and their treatment as history. But it has this merit: that the facts are all fresh in my memory, undistorted by the passage of time. I hope that my story will be useful to future historians as source material with which to work.
In conversation Hitler himself used often to berate those “scribblers of history” who twist and falsify history in retrospect in order to grind political axes. Preserving the facts as they are still vivid in the memories of contemporaries and eye-witnesses is not to make oneself a historian, but rather to lay the groundwork for the historian.
The candid camera shots of a writer who records life as it was lived and experienced cannot and are not intended to be a substitute for the artistic portrait which catches the essence of a human being as seen in the most various lights. The contemporaneous record resembles a moving picture film taken in slow motion. Historiography is something else again; it portrays a human being within the framework of his nation, and its evaluations are based on different and perhaps wider considerations.
When it comes to writing history which will be meaningful for the German people, one cannot help but take into account the feelings of hero-worship which are very much alive in that people. Such feelings are strongly rooted in traditional German thinking. The great German historians have always been in accord with this national tendency. Those feelings have, however, been expressed with perhaps the greatest force and conviction by the famous English historian Thomas Carlyle, whose work is so highly esteemed in Germany. In his book Heroes and Hero-Worship he says: “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.... It is the soul of the whole world’s history.... No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man.”
In the interests of clarity, it is essential to define the nature of heroism. The hero, says Carlyle, “is the victorious interpreter of the divine idea, who lives within the inner sphere of things, in the True and the Eternal which is always present beneath the commonplace, invisible though it is to most eyes. Therefore it is at all times difficult to recognize what a great man is.”
Leaving aside the criterion of total achievement, the characteristics of heroism according to Carlyle are valor, sincerity, harmony with the moral law, and the “seeing eye,” the power of true insight into the essential characteristics of things. Was Hitler endowed with these characteristics indispensable to historical greatness?
Hitler was without doubt a brave man. His courage impressed everybody. And in his aspirations for his people Hitler was also profoundly sincere. He believed heart and soul in a Teutonic mission of the German people, in their special gift for organization and their talent for government, in the call of the nordic race to provide spiritual leadership, and in the destiny of the German nation to be a creator of culture. And he believed that it was his own special task, his supreme vocation, to direct this mission of his people.
These beliefs were the motivations of his acts. But the “seeing eye,” the “power of true insight” which Carlyle calls the mark of divine kinship which in all epochs has united a great man with other men—this Hitler did not possess. He did not see through the appearance of things to their essence; rather, he succumbed to error and the lure of false ideas.
There are certain historical parallels for this condition. Odin, the greatest of the Germanic heroes, saw himself as a god, but he was, says Carlyle, “not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew.” In action for his people he was successful. Hitler was not. Hitler did not live in the days of old, but in the present age, which is one of extreme modernity.
Hitler had no insight into the divine character of human existence, nor into the always miraculous life of nature. He had a false view of evolution and saw the events of the present with the outmoded concepts of the past. This is one of the two critical points on which Hitler is disqualified for the historical role of a true heroic figure.
We will have to admit that Hitler had great social ideas, but he had no sense of development, no eye for inner harmony, no feeling for the natural maturing of things. Above all he had no inner comprehension of the necessity of the moral law in contemporary human society. Bent on realizing the fantastic world of his imagination, ready to use any means which would speed this end, he lacked all ability to distinguish between good and evil, lacked all understanding of a moral imperative, of a Thou Shalt or Thou Shalt Not. This was the second critical flaw in Hitler’s character, by which he fell short of true greatness. It was a flaw which negated the genuinely heroic aspects of Hitler, his courage and sincerity.
Because Hitler possessed a number of heroic traits, which won the people’s reverence, but lacked two of the essential requirements that lead human greatness to success, namely insight and moral strength—because of his unfortunate character structure, his dynamic leadership brought tragedy upon the people who had believed in him. This explains the terrible moral predicament of the German people, a Gordian knot which could only be cut through by the sword of the victorious Allies. A strange combination of evil circumstances was at work here.
The dangerous man, writes Carlyle, is the man who follows his fancies and misunderstands the nature of the thing with which he is dealing; called to high position, such a man is indescribably dangerous. And precisely such a man was Hitler.
For Hitler, the rude power of natural evolution, not human reason, was the motive force of the divine world order. He did not recognize that evolution also affects human thought. His mind was medieval in a century of world-shaking discoveries.
The phenomenon that was Hitler is unparalleled in history. In the incessant swings of the pendulum from good to evil, in the hardness and demonism of his character, and the extent of his influence upon the world, he was unique among historical figures. We will find no likeness to the total configuration of his personality; we can see only certain parallel traits in other historic characters. Perhaps these analogies may clarify some of his essential features.
Voltaire, in his History of Charles XII, describes that adventurous Swedish king as follows: “He was perhaps the most extraordinary man who ever lived. In himself he united all the great traits of his forefathers; his sole fault and his sole misfortune was that he carried all these traits to excess. He possessed unconquerable obstinacy and an uncontrollable character. He exaggerated all heroic virtues to such a degree that they became as dangerous as the opposite vices. His firmness became inflexibility.”
Napoleon called himself the “Son of Fortune.” Metternich told him in Dresden in 1813: “Failures as well as successes drive you to war.” Carlyle, passing judgment on Napoleon, wrote: “Faith in democracy carried Napoleon through all his great work.... But at this point, I think, the fatal charlatan-element got the upper hand.... Self and false ambition had now become his god.”
The Italian neurologist, Lombroso, coined the phrase: “Genius is madness.” Professor Ernst Kretschmar, in his book Men of Genius, points out the connection between creative genius and certain forms of psychopathy and mental disturbances: “The psychopathic element in the inherited disposition of men of genius is an indispensable part of the psychological whole which we call genius.”
Physically, Hitler was in my judgment a splenetic. Mentally, he was afflicted with a mania for excess; psychologically he was a schizophrenic personality of unique intensity.
His sound mind produced a great national ideal. His morbid viewpoint totally misread the future course of human evolution. His inhuman and insatiable will shattered the edifice of contemporary life.
Our teachers of history have stressed the value of personality and held up to us as luminous examples the ideal of the heroic; to teach young people appreciation for the hero has been one of the goals of education. But this desirable attitude on the part of historiography and pedagogy also has its undesirable side-effects, which have perhaps not emerged often enough in our history to be recognized clearly. Our interpreters of history, in their laudable effort to see only the positive and not the negative aspect of things, have sometimes overstepped the boundaries of idealism and represented matters in a falsely glorious light. In former days both sides of the question were aired, and certain bounds were set upon hero-worship. Such sobriety has recently become unfashionable, and to be “a debunker of heroes” has been to incur disgrace.
One excess in the writing of history begets another. We are now experiencing the opposite tendency. Indiscriminate worship is being corrected by what I may call “compensatory injustice.” Youth heretofore has been educated to an immoderate and uncritical worship of “great men.” Now, in one sudden blow that has descended with the violence of a natural disaster, the hard realities of life have corrected and overcorrected that fault in education. Belief in human greatness and infallibility, reverence for certain historical personalities is first carried to excess, then countermanded. The undisputed heroes of today are the mediocrities of tomorrow.
The really great men, those who are recognized as such by the history of all nations, are unaffected by this process. But it must be said that this education of the German nation for centuries to blind faith, to exaggerated worship, to unconditional respect, and to a totally uncritical attitude toward flattering speeches and fine words, has laid the people open to grievous mistakes and to total catastrophe.
The premises of this education reveal certain logical errors. It has long been an accepted principle in the natural sciences that thought and knowledge are also subject to progressive evolution. New methods of research follow from new knowledge and new developments. The same would appear to be true for the liberal arts and for history.
In practical life the ultimate and decisive criterion for the greatness and genius of a man is, in general, what that man has done for his nation or for humanity—whether his achievement be material or immaterial in nature, whether its importance emerges immediately or after a time.
But there remains a possibility I have left aside, and one which I must consider, lest I be charged with prejudice. For Carlyle speaks of heroes who are not victorious, who bravely fought and fell. Such men were what he calls “heroic seekers.”
Such men there have certainly been—great inventors and unrecognized geniuses whose contributions to the nation or to mankind became evident only after their deaths, became a blessing enjoyed by posterity. Was Hitler one of these? Can such a collapse, such wholesale annihilation of all we valued in Germany, ever turn out to have been for the good, so that future generations will look to Hitler as the father of a better world? Does this seem likely? This is a question I may safely leave to the reader to answer.
The German people saw in Hitler the symbol of their own life and destiny. They saw their reflection in his greatness and sunned themselves in his good fortune. They perceived themselves in the bravery, endurance, and will-power of this man, admired themselves in the bold products of his mind. But they also worshipped themselves in his autocratic nature, his overestimation of himself, his psychological obtuseness, his conceit, and his inadequate sense of reality. And so in the end they fell victim to a worship of their own magnified and distorted mirror-image.
If we Germans would draw any lesson from the almost incomprehensible events of recent years, so that we may have mental clarity enough to strike out on a new path, we must raise the question: guilt or destiny? Was it guilt or destiny which brought the German people to their present predicament? From my participation in German history during this fateful decade and from my first-hand view of political events, I can say out of deepest conviction: It was not ill will, not criminal desires, which brought the nation to its present pass and which won for Germans the base reputation of being politically amoral. This nation followed Hitler in good faith and, alas, all too credulously; the blame is not the nation’s but his alone. A victim of the demonism of his own nature, Hitler was not only their leader, but their seducer!
I have described the circumstances under which the nation awarded Hitler unprecedented power. Hitler was to lead the German nation onward and upward. His mandate did not include the mandate to make war. The Germans did not want war; the years 1914-1918 taught them to hate war in all its grimness and senselessness. They were led into war without their consent and against their innermost desires. That today they must assume in toto all responsibility for Hitler’s lost war weighs them down with an oppressive burden. But if this is a fact and as such unalterable, the nation nevertheless must under no circumstances cover up for Hitler, assume for him the blame for the monstrously inhuman and immoral deviations and the abuse of power which Hitler committed without the knowledge or the desire of the people. For so, it would seem, the nation would refuse to admit the truth about their late Leader. Should the people, in mistaken loyalty and with violation of the truth, continue to make a hero out of him, they would be taking his sins upon their own shoulders. Such self-incrimination would bring no good to the nation, but only more grief. It would not be fair to future generations of Germans to encumber them so with a guilt in no way their own. Rather, the people must face the unadorned truth about Hitler. They will then understand themselves. And other nations will realize that when the mysterious figure of Hitler took over the direction of Germany, a tragic, fated guilt descended upon the people. Hitler’s diabolic qualities, his selfcontradictory traits, the alluring power of his ideas, and his seductive words, the hypnotic force of his will, and the ugly offshoots of his inhuman political morality—all these entered into and could not be separated from Hitler’s “life work.” In submitting to his leadership, the people enthroned his demon.
For thirty years our present generation has led a life of suffering and sacrifice. Hitler has plunged it into misery and misfortune. How, then, can we ascribe any real greatness to him?
But if we draw from this experience conclusions which will further rationality, morality, and progress, it is possible that the unhappiness which descended upon our people along with the figure of Hitler may become a blessing for posterity. In which case Hitler will not have lived in vain for the German people, for he was obviously sent by Dark Powers as the executor of an unknown destiny.