… ‘Women who lost husbands in the horrendous war and even here, in this country, experienced far worse than I. For them it was horrible, the men going off to war and then never coming back. Many lost husbands who hated [the regime] and they nonetheless were killed. That is bitter. But for me, everything was worthwhile. I thought, he has fulfilled his life. And he did. Definitely.
‘When you talk with me for a long while,’ she said, ‘you understand that one lives a whole lifetime from such an experience. When he was killed, I had two delightful children, two dear sons. I thought, so. That is enough for a whole life.’
For the survivors and their testimonies I want to single out from the huge and forbidding archive a volume that deserves permanent currency: Anton Gill’s The Journey Back from Hell. It is an extraordinarily inspiring treasury of voices, and one grounded and marshalled by the author with both flair and decorum. Indeed, these reminiscences, these dramatic monologues, reshape our tentative answer to the unavoidable question: What did you have to have to survive?
What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (‘the people who had no tenets to live by — of whatever nature — generally succumbed’ no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.
Having communed with the presences in Gill’s book, with their stoicism, eloquence, aphoristic wisdom, humour, poetry, and uniformly high level of perception, one can suggest an additional desideratum. In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And a rich, delicate, and responsive sensibility — how surprising do we find this? — was not a hindrance but a strength. Together with a nearly unanimous rejection of revenge (and a wholly unanimous rejection of forgiveness), the testimonies assembled here have something else in common. There is a shared thread of guilt, the feeling that, while they themselves were saved, someone more deserving, someone ‘better’ was tragically drowned. And this must amount to a magnanimous illusion; with due respect to all, there could have been no one better.
He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words ‘Adolf Hitler’. And he seems slightly more manageable, somehow, when escorted by quotation marks. Of mainstream historians, not one claims to understand him, and many make a point of saying that they don’t understand him; and some, like Alan Bullock, go further and admit to an ever-deepening perplexity (‘I can’t explain Hitler. I don’t believe anyone can… The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain’). We know a great deal about the how — about how he did what he did; but we seem to know almost nothing about the why.
Newly detrained at Auschwitz in February 1944, and newly stripped, showered, sheared, tattooed, and reclothed in random rags (and nursing a four-day thirst), Primo Levi and his fellow Italian prisoners were packed into a vacant shed and told to wait. This famous passage continues:
… I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.
There was no why in Auschwitz. Was there a why in the mind of the Reichskanzler-President-Generalissimo? And if there was, why can’t we find it?
One way out of the quandary involves an epistemological rejection: thou shalt not seek an answer. And this commandment can take different forms (leading us into a sphere known as the theology of the Holocaust). In Explaining Hitler — a work of almost uncanny percipience and stamina — Ron Rosenbaum is sympathetic to the spiritual queasiness of Emil Fackenheim (author of, for example, The Human Condition After Auschwitz); however, he quietly derides the secular but self-righteous Claude Lanzmann (maker of Shoah), who calls all attempts at explanation ‘obscene’. Rather, Rosenbaum inclines to the position of Louis Micheels (who wrote the painfully intimate memoir, Doctor 117641): ‘Da soll ein warum sein: There must be a why.’ As Yehuda Bauer tells Rosenbaum, in Jerusalem, ‘I’d like to find it [the why], yes, but I haven’t’: ‘Hitler is explicable in principle, but that does not mean he has been explained.’
Still, we shouldn’t forget that the mystery, the why, is divisible: first, the Austrian artist manqué turned tub-thumper, second, the German — and Austrian — instruments he carried with him. Sebastian Haffner was a popular historian who studied both ends of the phenomenon, from below in Defying Hitler (a memoir of life in Berlin 1914–33, written in 1939, just after he got out) and from above in The Meaning of Hitler, an intense exegesis that appeared in 1978, when Haffner was seventy-one (in 1914 he was seven). The first book went unpublished in his lifetime, and there is no attempt at uniting the two perspectives. But we can attempt it; and the connections are unignorable.
In moods and mentalities, it seems, Volk and Führer partook of the same troubled Danubian brew. On the one hand, the people, with their peculiar ‘despair of politics’ (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their eager fatalism, their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their ‘resentful dimness’ and their ‘heated readiness to hate’, their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (of all or nothing, of Sein oder Nichtsein), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on the stage of global politics. His inner arcanum, Haffner believes, floridly manifested itself during the critical hinge of the war: namely the two-week period between November 27 and December 11, 1941.
When the Blitzkrieg in the east began to collapse, Hitler notoriously remarked (November 27):
On this point, too, I am icily cold. If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power… I shall shed no tears for the German nation.
By December 6, as the War Diary of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff records, Hitler had acknowledged that ‘no victory could any longer be won’. And on December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, he boldly, gratuitously, and suicidally declared war on the USA. Where, here, is the Führer’s why? According to Haffner, he was ‘now coveting defeat’; and he wanted that defeat to be ‘as complete and disastrous as possible’. Thereafter his aggression veered in on a new target: Germans.
This reading offers a framework for December ’41–April ’45, and helps make some sense of the Ardennes offensive in late ’44 (which effectively opened the eastern door to the Russians) and the two disobeyed ‘Führer Orders’ the following March (for mass civilian evacuation from the west, and the ‘Nero Order’ for scorched earth). We now ask, How far back did it go — the subconscious drive towards self-destruction, and later its treasonable corollary, the conscious drive towards ‘national death’? And the answer seems to be that it went back all the way.