Adolf Hitler

From Philosopedia

Hitler, Adolf (20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945)

As pointed out in Michiko Kakutani’s review of Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler (1998),

• [B]y the time Hitler came to power in 1933, racial anti-Semitism had already made Germany “pregnant with murder”; the scholar Hyam Maccoby contends that Christianity (with its pernicious anti-Semitic stereotypes) had by World War II created a craving for vengeance against Jews; and Richard Breitman, editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, argues that the traumas sustained by Germany in the early years of the century (a humiliating defeat in World War I, then starvation, inflation and a crushing depression) forged a desperation and rage that Hitler was able to channel against the Jews. At the same time, hard-core Freudians and psycho-historians intent on trying to map Hitler’s psyche have come up with an assortment of explanations that effectively let Hitler off the hook, using what Mr. Rosenbaum calls “the Menendez defense” to depict him, astonishingly enough, as a victim. The famous psychoanalyst Alice Miller portrays Hitler as a victim of an abusive father; Erich Fromm, as the victim of an overbearing mother. Other thinkers have attributed Hitler’s pathology to a “primal-scene trauma,” to a missing testicle, to a sexual secret that “isolated him from the normal love of human beings,” to a physical illness and to a self-hatred (stemming from his suspicion that his grandmother had a Jewish lover and that he himself was “tainted” by Jewish blood).

In Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1998), Ian Kershaw wrote that—although Hitler had an abusive father and a doting mother—there is no serious foundation to the rumors of hidden Jewish ancestry, deformity of the genitals, the incompetence or greed of a Jewish doctor at his mother’s deathbed, or many of the other whispers about his background. But, as pointed out by Christopher Hitchens, “Mein Kampf was published as an initially unsuccessful vote-getter in 1925, and at that time social democracy was very strong and popular, and the German Jews were still quite secure. To describe either as the work of Satan was to show what you really thought. [‘There is no making pacts with Jews,’ he tells us he decided back in 1918 when he had recovered from his nervous collapse. ‘There can only be the hard either-or. I. However, resolved to become a politician.’].”

Although some mistakenly assume that the consummate symbol of evil in the 20th century was a non-believer, Hitler is an embarrassment to fellow Catholics for such of his statements in Mein Kampf (1940) as, “Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s Work.” At a Nazi Christmas celebration in 1926, he had said, “Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews. . . . The work that Christ started but could not finish, I—Adolf Hitler—will conclude.” When he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in November 1939, Hitler exclaimed, “Now I am completely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence’s intention to let me reach my goal.” To celebrate, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber sent a telegram instructing that a Te Deum be sung in the Munich cathedral “to thank Divine Providence in the name of the archdiocese for the Fuhrer’s fortunate escape.”

This was followed by the Pope’s personal congratulations. John Toland, a biographer, has written of Hitler’s religion,

• Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god—so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty, Himmler was pleased to murder with mercy. He ordered technical experts to devise gas chambers which would eliminate masses of Jews efficiently and ‘humanely,’ then sent them east to stay in ghettos until the killing centers in Poland were completed. As late as 1941, Hitler told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals, “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

In fact, he mandated that schoolchildren recite a prayer at the beginning of each school day. In Albert Speer, Gitta Sereny prints a letter Speer wrote to his daughter, Hilde, from Spandau prison on 9 January 1953, one in which he made it clear that Hitler “forbade his chosen circle, Hess, Goebbels, Göring etc. to leave their churches.” Meanwhile, the princes of his church never requested his excommunication.

Joseph McCabe labels Hitler a theist, for Hitler repeatedly cited God in public speeches and said he was a Christian. A survey of Mein Kampf will surprise Jews who may not have noticed some of Hitler’s choices of words and phrases, such as the following: thirty pieces of silver; God’s grace; Lucifer; God’s will; God’s creation; “I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven”; God’s image; devil shuns holy water; [and] sin against the will of eternal providence.

Meanwhile, some secular humanists might be surprised to learn that some of Hitler’s supporters called the Nazi philosophy a “New Humanism.” In La Fiction du politique (1987), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe referred to Nazism as “a humanism.” Hitler apparently did not receive any last rites of the Church. On 30 April 1945, he was told by his private pilot, Hans Baur, that a plane was available and was capable of flying as far as Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria (or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara. Hitler declined the offer. Instead, he dictated his final testament to Traudl Junge: “During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people. This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before.” At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler youth leader, entered and found Hitler as well as Eva Braun, whom he had married two days prior. “I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa,” Axmann declared in 1995. “His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down. I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself and appeared to be sleeping.” According to Axmann, two aides took the bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about fifty gallons. A Soviet general, Leonid Siomonchuk, confirmed to German interviewers that he was present when Hitler’s dentist examined the corpse and declared that it was Hitler’s. Hitler’s remains were secretly stored in the East German town of Magdeburg, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer (The New York Times, 4 May 1995). A part of what may be Hitler’s skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow, where Alzha Borkovich, a Russian archivist, displayed it in 1995 before German television cameras.

{CE; Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, February 1999; Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, 30 June 1998; RE; TRI}

HITLER’S POPE

“Pope Pius XII helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20ty-century devil," wrote John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999). Allowed to see Vatican materials that had been gathered years ago to support the process for Eugenio Pacelli’s canonization, Cornwell was nonplussed upon finding that Pacelli was anti-Jewish, that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, and that after the way “he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews.” His contempt of Judaism was based on his belief that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom, referred to “their Jewish cult,” once campaigned to remove black French troops from the Rhineland because he was convinced they were raping women and abusing children, and helped lead German Catholics in the millions to join the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope.