What manner of man Haman or Pharaoh or Ghengis Khan was, we shall never know, but we would seem at least to have the chance to understand Hitler before that dreadful figure passes over the horizon into history and myth. In the considered opinion of the editors, this essay on the personality of Hitler, his motivation and his aims, is one of the most original, penetrating contributions to the subject they have yet seen. 

_____________

The study of people’s attitudes to Hitler before he came tol power and, in some degree, during the early days of his regime, is a study in misconceptions. Almost everybody has sinned here, certainly almost every intellectual in and out of Germany. The most we can hope for is to be wiser after the event, and two recent volumes¹ afford an excellent opportunity. They explode the notion, still current and plausibly enforced by our reading of Mein Kampf, that the man was at best a semi-literate fool—though endowed in some mysterious way with incredible will power, at once the agent and the slave of a sinister idée fixe. Nothing could be further from the truth. What looked like doltishness was at bottom mere boorishness, anchored in temperament, carefully exploited for purposes of prestige and propaganda, overindulged on occasion—especially n the field—but capable of correction and actually corrected at every turn. This implies what becomes quite clear in these pages: Hitler had manners when he wanted to, and even a certain kind of charm—by no means effective with women only, as misogynists are fond of claiming. But both the charm and the manners were turned off and on at will; he was emphatically not a gentleman.

_____________

I remember discussing the Nazi movement with British friends in 1938. The prevailing sense was one of malaise rather than fear. The Nazis were people, with Hitler their avatar, whom one must not touch at any price; not because they were poisonous but because they were unclean, they didn’t “feel right”: toads not vipers. This leads on to a different legend, as widespread as that of Hitler the dolt: Hitler the bluff. I do not mean to deny that Hitler was an expert at bluffing, especially during the time he was busy building up his military machine, but even at that time of most furious barking there was considerable force to his bite.

Nor did Hitler lack intelligence, or talent, or knowledge of sorts. That he had the first, few will deny—though I have heard it denied by quibblers who would grant him at most what the Germans call Bauernschlauheit (peasant cunning), or else a diabolical kind of cleverness. All this is nonsense, semantic subtlety misapplied to vindicate the blindness of one’s own intelligence in not spotting accurately, and in time, somebody else’s. Hitler was certainly intelligent, and by ordinary standards; he had more than average gifts of abstraction, generalization, inference; he was alert to particular events; he had a remarkable knowledge of people— “his” people and, alas, some that were not his—and he succeeded within limits in adjusting his actions to his insights.

Hitler had normal traits, but these were balanced by others decidedly pathological; besides, his personality was so completely involved with his role as party leader and dictator that what might have been tractable in the individual became wholly refractory and opaque once that individual was merged with his persona. At the same time, this merger must not blind us to the fact that there was an individual to start with and that his mind was well, and not at all oddly, endowed.

By turning to Hitler’s knowledge, we do indeed cross the line into oddity. But, once more, the issue has on the whole been presented too simply. His learning, such as it is, shows every trace of being self-taught, shy of discipline, out and out eclectic. It is also remarkably muddled—though not quite so muddled as the reader who uses Mein Kampf as his sole source might infer, for there the confusion (via simplification) has been pushed to an extreme for propagandistic reasons. But what is interesting—and somewhat surprising—is how little of that knowledge was adventitious, appropriated at random. Surprising, considering another legend: Hitler’s extreme impressionableness in intellectual matters and his reliance for any kind of speculative thought on men like Goebbels and Rosenberg.

Granted that what he has to say on cultural and philosophical topics is so much tinsel and trumpery, the tinsel and trumpery are hard won, spun out of his own bowels, genuine. The dogged autodidact who during his adolescence devoured scrap after scrap of high thought—Marx, Nietzsche, Gobineau, and God knows how much besides—to distill his own political doctrine and to achieve, by an endless series of refutations and corroborations of other men’s ideas, an expedient self-definition—this unsavory latter-day Faust knew what he was doing and when put on the spot had his answer ready: “Give me a chance and I’ll prove to you that it works.” A hard core of pragmatism distinguishes Hitler’s type of mind quite sharply from that of a Rosenberg or a Goebbels: muddleheads both of them, given to abstruse ravings, though it may be claimed that the latter at least had a queer sensibility which made him respond to certain aesthetic refinements.

In any event, there is ample evidence to show that Hitler had nothing to learn from the debauched university wits in the Nazi party; that by 1930 or thereabouts he had absorbed all the learning he needed or would need, except in matters of strategy and technology; that he was not only the ruling personality but also the ruling intellect of his coterie—always ready to pontificate, impatient of contradiction, long-winded, histrionic to a degree. The authors of both Hitler Directs His War and Hitlers Tischgespraeche agree in their delineations of the “Fuehrer’s” manner; and it is pretty much the picture we expected to get. His interests and preoccupations, on the other hand, present us with all kinds of surprises.

_____________

The volume Hitler Directs His War offers a selection from the stenographic transcripts of his daily military conferences held between December 1942 and March 1945—a fair span over which to gauge the effect the vicissitudes of war had on Hitler and his associates at headquarters. In Dr. Gilbert’s preface, certain of Hitler’s well-known characteristics are made to stand out in sharp relief: his extreme moodiness, his distaste for loud voices, his incredulity or impatience whenever things happened to take a turn for the worse, and a corresponding eagerness to seize on cheerful incidents, however trivial. Gilbert strongly stresses the “substratum of tension” between Hitler and most of the professional officers—Rommel being the great exception—and verifies, in the field of military affairs, his great combinatorial skill which, though far from infallible, cannot be reduced to, or confounded with, those famous occasional “hunches”; also his remarkable skill in argument.

Among many recurrent motifs in this book there are two that deserve special consideration: Hitler’s attitude towards the army leaders, and by implication towards the upper strata of society (German as well as foreign), and his attitude towards death.

In view of his origins and upbringing, on the one hand, and the caste system of the German army on the other, Hitler’s military status during the First World War was quite naturally that of a common soldier. Short of being commissioned in the field, there was no chance for a man like him to make a career in the army and it so happened that he didn’t. His feelings in this matter seem to have been mixed. His lower-middle-class defiance of the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy inclined him toward an acceptance of his status; he showed signs both of pride and of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment—the deep-seated envy and distrust the plebeian feels towards the well-bred, insouciant, gay (or those who seem so). During his formative years Hitler doubtless identified his privileged “betters” with the members of the cadet and officer corps—sons, all of them, of genteel parents, moving in an aura that for the Private First-Class must have held all sorts of pleasant associations: the casino, Sekt, lights of love, and most pleasant of all, lack of internal pressures, an easy conscience. This ambivalence towards the upper class—especially upper-class army men—never left Hitler, even though the Nazis later gained a good number of adherents from the aristocracy and in its turn the army came to be stocked with Nazi officers, not to mention the large SS outfits whose status was equal, and in some cases superior, to the Wehrmacht’s.

_____________

Clearly it was not all a matter of status—whose status could compare with Hitler’s?—but of breeding and savoir vivre. Though he carried himself very well in his dealings with diplomats and old-school generals (was indeed in some respects their superior and often genuinely deferred to), it becomes apparent on reading these minutes that, somehow, he just couldn’t quite “see” the social elite—except when in brown shirts, indistinguishable from the rest, they paraded past him, or when in one of the vast auditoriums, after he had finshed a speech, they rose thundering to their feet to salute him. Here was one of the few differentiae that this great differentia-hater (this, or “leveler,” seems to me a more accurate term for Hitler than Gilbert’s “great simplifier”) found unmanageable to the end. Unlike the workers, and to some extent the intellectuals, the upper strata—the land-owning gentry, the military, the industrial magnates—could not be completely bullied into submission, shot through though they were with cowardice, sycophancy, complaisance. Being heterogeneous as a class, they remained elusive.

Hitler Directs His War contains a curious passage which is directly pertinent to this question. It occurs in the conference of January 27, 1945. Hitler, Goering, Guderian, Burgdorf, and others are present After a lengthy discussion of the situation in Alsace and general questions of command in the West, a memorandum by General Burgdorf concerning the newly created Volkssturm (and by implication the army as a whole) is brought in. The document broaches the possibility of demoting officers without prejudice, because of local exigencies. Goering is strongly opposed, the issue being, of course, “honor.” The traditional associations of demotion are entirely punitive; if you demote a general because the job he is doing calls only for a major, something will happen to his morale; so that in the long run the army is bound to be the loser. Goering’s alternative sounds simple enough: let the man keep his old rank and make him do the inferior job. This, though not pleasant either, will hurt less. His main opponent is Burgdorf, who in a polite way makes light of these scruples, while pointing out the difficulties that arise when you overstaff your army with high-ranking officers. He does not see any harm in a former colonel’s re-entering the service as a common soldier; all that matters is whether the individual is efficient in his job.

Hitler says relatively little but his comments are revealing: they betray the most acute discomfort. He starts by maintaining that “the rank should be connected with the job”: the orthodox, static conception one would expect from a mind thinking in simple correlations between status and function. But evidently there is a third factor: personal ability, initiative, and this Hitler finds unsettling. Burgdorf quite blandly puts his finger on the source of Hitler’s confusion. “The moment,” he says, “the Fuehrer adopted the policy of promoting men according to their ability instead of their seniority, the logical thing would have been to demote those people who did not have the ability for the rank they were holding.” Hitler replies with a long harangue about the difficulties he is facing in trying to build a new army without utterly wrecking the old structure—until finally he gets around to his experiences in World War I. “People weren’t promoted at all in the First World War. That was the worst promotion system that ever existed.” But there is no reasonable system that can be put in its place, at least while the emergency lasts.

The gulf between Goering’s rank-consciousness and Burgdorf’s cool common sense widens steadily, with Hitler neutralized between the two: what is he to say, after all, when the best professionals disagree? And the “Fuehrer” throws fond glances at his own party hierarchy, where things can be handled rather smoothly, where the three-way relation of rank, ability, function is a matter of course and where the pyramid tapers to a simple apex. As so often in reading Hitler’s wartime statements, one gets here a strong sense of regret on his part: regret that the party was not powerful enough to fight this war unaided—and unhampered—by the military. After all, the total state provided for one system only; the distinction between civilian and soldier being theoretically abolished, there seemed to be no reason why a special body of men should be needed to wage wars—a body, moreover, composed of such arrogant and refractory members. Hider’s own hierarchy was built to exclude any other; it claimed the whole stage: but behind the wings stood the dialectic spirit of history, laughing.

_____________

This is how Mr. Gilbert describes Hitler’s office in the Chancellery: “[His] study was a hall rather than a room. The long wall opposite the door of the antechamber was broken by a large number of tall but narrow windows, and by a glass door leading into the garden of the Chancellery. Along the two side walls on the right and left a few tables with heavy leather-upholstered chairs were placed, but in comparison to its large size the furniture was sparse. The whole area was dominated by a writing desk and chair, heavy pieces of furniture which stood near the middle of the wall opening on the garden.”

The furniture of Hitler’s mind is reflected in his favorite physical décor: sparseness, with heavy, solid objects to relieve the emptiness here and there; the same disposition indoors that made him delight in massive installations, whether for military or extermination purposes, dotting a vast tract of charred, uninhabited land.

While his movements through these physical embodiments seem to have been easy enough, Hider traversed the unprepossessing landscapes of his mind in the attitude of both victor and victim, with propitiatory hands raised to humor the hostile Fates. Along with his boundless belief in himself as the agent of Providence, chosen to establish an earthly paradise for his people, we find in numerous statements not designed for public consumption a deep hatred of mankind, and an arch-Protestant conviction of man’s fallen state. Hider’s destructive cynicism was early noted, but it has not been sufficiently stressed that, quite plainly and from the very start, it covered all of mankind, including, as happens in every case of true nihilism, himself.

That Hider considered himself by no means transcendently charmed, exempt from the general blight, that he felt “set apart” in a different and much more special sense only, is a fact constantly borne in upon the reader of these pages—provided he attends as much to the tone of the statements as to their overt content. For no matter how private and informal these talks, Hitler could not very well afford—even had he so desired—to indulge Ecclesiastes-like sentiments in front of his generals. So while he brings in the Fatherland, the life of the nation, and similar tags to temper any outburst of radical pessimism, he does it lamely, almost as an afterthought. The true emphasis lies elsewhere.

Here is an example, shortly after the news of Stalingrad had reached headquarters: “The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation. But how anyone could be afraid of this moment of death, with which he can free himself from this misery, if his duty doesn’t chain him to this Vale of Tears. Na!” But for the style and the patriotic reference this might have come from a Calvinist preacher. And again, after the attempt on his life in July 1944: “It [death] is only a fraction of a second, and then one is freed from everything, and has one’s quiet and eternal peace.” The same sentiment, with stronger connotations, here, of Buddhism via Schopenhauer. The destination is heaven—or Nirvana—not the Third Reich in perpetuity. Whenever the shock of the situation becomes strong enough—as, also, in his reaction to Mussolini’s fall—to move this callous man, similar feelings emerge. And certainly what holds true for him would hold a fortiori for his minions: the death-wish, faced rarely and with reluctance, must be universal.

To counter this powerful impulse Hitler had to devise a complex apparatus of affirmations and ritual observances. Unhappiness such as his could only be staunched by constantly appeasing the infernal forces, by giving them what he considered their due. Through the infliction of misery unequaled in any age he might ease his own misery—temporarily. Hence the appalling succession of blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, mitigated and possibly justified in his own eyes by what his disciples admired most in the man: his personal asceticism, the clean code of the monk. Whether or not the tales of his frugality and sexual abstemiousness are true, they are thoroughly plausible; and it is as absurd to dismiss such conduct as a mere “front” as it is shallow to see in it nothing but a Spartan regimen necessitated by the magnitude of his job.

Hitler liked to boast of his hypnotic powers—there is a bantering reference to them in these minutes: “I have to hypnotize Quisling today”—but he was scarcely hypnotized by his own power, nor could he hypnotize his growing discomfort into oblivion. Putting millions to sleep was no effective relief for insomnia. And strong as his evil eye must have been, it did not prevail against the Medusa stare that would freeze him. Lacking Perseus’ shield, this spurious “savior” was cast for the role of victim: transformed, at last, into his own monument.

_____________

In approaching Hitler’s Tischgespraeche (“table talk”) it is well to put by all conventional notions of good—i.e. pithy, profound, witty—talk; also the notion that a social, dialogue element (whether implied or overt) is of the essence of such “compositions.” There is no give and take in these pages; the interlocutors are not simply muted, to be sketched in by the reader, but fundamentally nonexistent. As always, Hitler addresses the void—or himself, which, in any social sense, comes to the same thing.

The book Hitlers Tischgespraeche—sponsored by a new institute in Germany purportedly devoted to an objective examination of the record of National Socialism—contains Hitler’s mealtime conversations, or at least their salient passages, while at his headquarters in East Prussia or the Ukraine, or on his private train. The time covered is from July 1941 to August 1942. His fellow diners were, in roughly equal proportion, Wehrmacht officers and high party officials.

A man like Hitler is exempt from literary standards, including those of good speech; were he not, these soliloquies would be judged atrocious—callow in thought and extremely clumsy in style. Yet we read them not for their intrinsic value, but for the light they shed on his mind; and that light, while not blinding, affords more illumination than we had any reason to hope for.

_____________

With the Enlightenment starts the open rebellion of Western man against nature. No longer the beneficent Earth Mother, in whose giant lap men take strenuous walks and relax, she comes to be seen as an alien force, fully as sinister as ourselves and a great deal less calculable—despite every triumph of science and technology. Henceforth two major attitudes will characterize man’s dealings with nature: a wish for extinction through submission (Wagner, Schopenhauer, the whole Romantic movement in literature), which is the organic solution; a wish for extinction through dominance, which is the technological or technocratic solution, codified by Spengler, and whose pet contemporary tokens are the robot, the jet plane, the atom bomb. Hitler is unable to decide which of these two modes of suicide he ought to preach and practice.

To be sure, he makes a show of choosing, and quite early in life. The result is a doctrine, crazy, but with every appearance of being solidly forged; acted out, moreover, with great determination, that is to say with no trace of hypocrisy, no evidence of scruples or flagging power of will. There can be no doubt: Hitler has plumped for the technocratic alternative, cleverly camouflaged as Lebensraum, supremacy of the Aryan race; at times lifting the camouflage and singing, quite frankly, the praises of scientist and engineer as the true rulers of our age—though by preference these should be Germans and racially pure. As for nature, it will be subjugated at any cost; repressed and finally erased in the individual, who, phoenix-wise, will emerge as the robot. The resources of the land will be mobilized, much as the resources of a nation at war, with geophysicists and geopoliticians surveying the whole globe the way an army doctor might scan each recruit for Diensttauglichkeit. Quite clearly, Hitler has made up his mind.

Yet it may be doubted that he ever did. Not only because of the elements in his agrarian program which point the other way—these might be dismissed as “eyewash,” as a sop thrown to the farmers, though there is much genuine romanticism in Darré, in the whole “blood and soil” cult, however depraved and perverted. But what is decisive are Hitler’s own statements—the ones not published for show—which prove him to be a very divided man indeed. He quite plainly operated with a double standard and was ready to enforce that standard in all its duplicity.

In peacetime the virtues of peace are in order; and peace here really refers to the elemental peace of nature: rustling of oak leaves, the pastoral hearth, the study of runes, summer-solstice festivals, and the rest. This peace also, and in another mode, means death; extinction of self, return to the Great Mother. But as long as there is no peace we must court life—or death—the militant way: through planned construction and destruction, an army the like of which has never been seen, a populace whose coefficient of technical skill will make even the Americans blush. Both programs lay constantly in Hitler’s mind, perhaps not clearly distinguished but sufficiently separate to cause him discomfort. Being the man he was, he went ahead with either, resolute, scornful of compromise. Yet something happened to him during the process. The more we read about Hitler, and by him, the more our bull in the china shop comes to resemble the dumb ox trotting to slaughter—though traits of the bull, or bully, persist to the very end.

_____________

As Hitler grows older, his confessions of disturbed balance increase in frequency: the night-self has definitely gained the upper hand. (In his later years Hitler would never go to bed before four or five in the morning, or rise before noon.) His night-self discloses him as romantic artist—in sad disrepair, to be sure. (“Among various points mentioned by Herr Hitler were, that he was by nature an artist, not a politician, and that once the Polish question was settled, he would end his life as an artist and not as a warmonger”—Sir Nevile Henderson, August 1939.) The line takes us back to Richard Wagner, Kleist, the painter Caspar David Friedrich, the “pan-psychist” philosopher Schubert, who wrote a book on the “night-side” of creation. There is much reveling in death and destruction, the hardest way to secure the softest end; a mounting attraction for the “depths” that claim the somnambulist drugged with sleep.

In a less pathic way, Hitler had managed to maintain the illusion of peace during the early years of his regime: Speer and others have told about his delight in painting, architecture, movies, as well as in scenery. Those were the original anodynes to induce that “inner calm and assurance necessary to his world-shattering decisions” (Speer). That all anodynes are in essence narcotic, death-dealing, is a fact which Hitler apparently never acknowledged, either physically or mentally. His day-self rationalized nature into the mere pleasance, or tonic avocation, it proverbially is for the “hardworking businessman.” In any case, with the advent of war these satisfactions ceased, never to be recovered.

From 1939 on, all Hitler’s statements are fed by an ambiguous source. The common measure, and highest value in life, is still glory; but how curious its trappings. Philosophically, the paradox is simple enough. None but the perennial, Valhalla fighter deserves peace; war is glory and so is peace—as a “limit.” Since the limit can never be reached, all the glory is war’s. But Hitler had to deny, even to his intimates, that the goal was chimerical; and this introduces a plangent millennial note into his discourse, reminiscent, at times, of Utopian socialism, in which paradise remains permanently the day after tomorrow.

Had the recipients of Hitler’s wisdom at headquarters had any inkling that his millennial Reich was nothing but a perversion of an old socialist dream, they would have felt even more uncomfortable than they did, listening to the gospel of “true,” i.e. national, socialism. Reactionary as it was, that gospel contained hints of a classless society, of economic redistribution, which could not please them very much. They would have preferred a doctrine of straight nihilism—its active variety, of course—to these disturbing imaginative vistas. But his long experience in addressing party rallies had taught Hitler one thing: in order to make that all-out effort, that surrender of self expected of him, the ordinary citizen required a positive goal commensurate with the greatness of his sacrifice.

It is true that things had changed, and that the men he was now addressing were neither civilians nor ordinary citizens; but he could not scrap that whole well-rehearsed program merely to suit them. News of his double standard might leak out and destroy the morale of the nation at large. Or perhaps—who can tell?—his mind was simply no longer able to stand the strain of a double standard, of thinking in two sets of terms at once: there are definite signs here of automatism, of an irrational compulsion that would bring the same old slogans to his lips, regardless of the occasion. Yet there is the equivocal ring, too; and that ring makes itself heard the more insistently, the plainer, the more single-minded the “message” becomes.

_____________

Before we turn to the message, let us look at the discourse. It swings back and forth between exhortation to action and the faked millennial superstructure—the Germanische Grossreich deutscher Nation; covering, as it swings, a remarkable range of topics. Many of these seem casual, unrelated to the major concerns. Hitler holds forth on such matters as smoking, drinking, women’s dresses, the theater, the miserable plight of professional dancers. He shows himself genial, relaxed, plainly enjoying the speechless admiration of his acolytes as they watch their redoubtable Leader in the role of solicitous benevolent despot. And given his sorry premises, much of what he says sounds thoroughly plausible.

But the plainer the message, the greater its ambiguity. Since Hitler’s doctrine was a compound, his most direct statement of it exhibited most sharply its several features, and so its stresses and tensions. Nature, though rarely mentioned by name, looms large in the compound; and nature, by straining against society, pulls society in; society pulls in both war and peace; war and peace pull in fate, and so on. Yet all these disparate notions are used as if they were near-synonyms; which makes it easy to reduce them to a key notion, called by Hitler himself the “primordial rhythm” (Rhythmus der Vorwelt). Everything stems from this rhythm, present as well as future; it pervades every field of heroic action, whether that “action” be Parsifal, a brown-shirt rally, or the resettlement of Russia by German elite farmers. The rhythm itself is neutral; some of its manifestations have wholly positive associations, while others can be variously manipulated—e.g. war, peace, nature.

But whenever Hitler speaks of nature, desperation is apt to shine through—to be immediately canceled, or transcended, by a rhetorical flourish. “We might find it horrible to watch how in nature one thing preys on the next. The fly is killed by the dragon-fly; the dragon-fly by a bird; that bird by a larger bird. Once it grows old, the biggest thing falls prey to bacteria; which in their turn, and by a different method, are destroyed too. If we possessed means of magnifying things by several millions, we might succeed in discovering new worlds. . . . One thing is certain: all this cannot be changed. Suppose you take your own life: it returns to nature as matter, mind, spirit. The toad doesn’t know what it was before it existed, and we know as little as the toad. The thing to do, then, is to explore the laws of nature, so as not to oppose them: to ignore these laws is like challenging the firmament. If I believe in any divine commandment at all, it is this and no other: preserve the species!”

As it happens, what stays in the mind after reading this passage is the gloom, not the flourish. Gloom arises from brooding, fixation; from the slow complex of the past moving in on us rather than from our nervous forward glances. Provide as he might against the future, the realm Hitler most dreaded—and relished—was the past; and his favorite past, the one he found truly engrossing, was that of myth and pre-history rather than any historical period.²

Not only did the primeval appeal to the artist in him but it also formed a grand repository of ‘lessons”; awful, solemn, salutary lessons. Quite a few of these speculations turn on the Stone Age, the Ice Age, Hörbiger’s Welteislehre. And Hitler, so crude and peremptory when dealing with the present and future, with history even, now suddenly warms to his subject: he explores and conjectures, begins to show the bare rudiments of scientific interest and method. But the potent attraction is matched by an equally keen malaise. That world of fossils, stone ages, glacial deposits, cave dwellings—all those dead, disjunct, mysterious things—is bound to absorb to itself in the end his own carefully planned, “enlightened” world of brand new weapons, buildings, auto highways, and his schemes, yet vaster and shinier, for the future.

_____________

Hitler’s frantic search for improvements in every technical field is simply a token of his abject dread: dread of the past reclaiming its own, taking the life out of things by spoiling their function. “There can be no doubt: after a certain time every installation falls into disuse. Once the daily routine settles down on things, they become meaningless, full of cracks, dross, rust, etc.” There is only one way in which we can ward off this fateful deterioration: by never allowing the normal routine to settle; declaring, instead, a permanent state of emergency. Emergency made constant may then perhaps breed its own “true” permanence: a childish paradox, and one in which Hitler never believed. But nature had failed him; there was now no anodyne left but technology; and when in pain a man will readily reach for a drug he is sure won’t work. Besides, being a doctor as well as a patient, Hitler could always try it on others. As it happened, the anodyne worked exceedingly well with his lieutenants and with the ruck of the populace. Cold as ice—eiskalt was one of his pet terms—he watched the absurd spectacle of people building on the edge of the void; dropping an occasional word of warning—or was it meant as encouragement?—from tight lips. “In this too I am eiskalt: if the German nation is unwilling to fight for its preservation—well then: let it disappear from the globe.” A curious sentiment, this, coming from a man usually described as a passionate “racist.”

Those large eyes, steel-blue, which used to transfix people, freezing skeptics into awed submission—those were not the eyes of a prophet beholding the land which his people, unable to share his vision, shall finally enter—though he, the seer, may not. They were the numbed eyes of a man dead long since; who had risen from Cimmerian darkness—Hörbiger’s Welteiszeit—to travel across the ages in search of a sun sufficiently strong to melt his armor of ice. He found his space, his time, but all he could do once he found them was to pass his frost on to others. We learn from this book that Hitler’s heart went out to Greece and Rome, and every grace of the South; that he hated the dank, frigid North; that he felt thorough contempt for the Nordic myth his comrade Rosenberg had concocted for his use.

That he loved and admired Wagner, looking on him as a kindred spirit, his brother—this, on the face of it, will seem a contradiction. But since Wagner’s plight was essentially that of Hitler—an icy man, he too, who made his associates shiver—why should not the “Fuehrer” have felt a sense of kinship? If someone glories in fire magic and fiery assumptions, it may be safely alleged that he is suffering, not from excess of heat but from excess of cold—a cold, moreover, for which there is no remedy in the real world. What drew Hitler to Wagner was not a common passion or exaltation—furor Teutonicus—but a common dearth. Nor can Hider’s funeral pyre be read as the climax of all his strenuous aspirations; what happened that day in the Chancellery garden was simpler than this—or maybe more complex. It spelled, really, a “new departure” for him: his body, incurably chilled while alive, found its first warmth in those brisk enveloping flames.

_____________

¹ Hitler Directs His War, by Felix Gilbert (Oxford), and Hitlers Tischgespraeche, edited by Henry Picker (Athenaeum-Verlag, Berlin).

² lt is interesting to compare in this sense Hitler's various statements about the great leaders of the past: the further removed they are from the present, the greater his admiration. Napoleon seems bigger than Bismarck, Caesar than Napoleon, Alexander than Caesar—a simple scaling ‘up” down the alley of history.