The Hitler of History

"But I would single out a volume by John Lukacs called The Hitler of History . John was a Hungarian-American historian who wrote a lot about the 20th century and a great deal about Churchill. His book deals with the historical controversies about Hitler and what historians have made of major questions, such as ‘What was the origin of Hitler’s murderous antisemitism?’ It’s a relatively short book, and it really isn’t necessary to know the full story of Hitler’s life in order to benefit from it. I conclude—based on Kershaw, Lukacs, and all the other reading I’ve done on Hitler—that we will never know. It’s sometimes said that he acquired his antisemitism during his years as a kind of vagrant and frustrated artist in Vienna. But that doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts. It does seem to be the case that it was an idea that seized him when he moved to Germany. John Lukacs has a speculation that because Hitler hated his father and he suspected that his father had Jewish ancestry (which was not true, I think), therefore he hated what he hated about his father. That’s just a speculation: John doesn’t suggest that this is in any way documented. What I say is that the answer to that question resided in the psyche of one individual, and that psyche shut down forever with Hitler’s suicide in April 1945. So we’ll never know. There was a fair amount of antisemitism in Germany, especially in the wake of World War One. Antisemitism increased as you went east in Europe and was probably at its high point in Czarist Russia. The major plank of Hitler’s political platform was overturning the settlement that was made in 1919 and he blamed that settlement—without any evidence—on the Jews. But two qualifications need to be added. One, Hitler never got above a third of the popular vote in German elections and there were four or five elections in 1933. In those elections, the Nazi vote totals peaked and then declined. So he was on a downhill slope politically when German conservatives foolishly—and in some cases suicidally—made him chancellor. The other thing is that there’s a difference between ordinary antisemitism and annihilationist antisemitism, and it was only with Hitler that the first turned into the second."