Hitler

"I know he’s written a huge two-volume biography . If that’s what grabs you… but it doesn’t grab me. His earlier book, The Hitler Myth , is much more effective because it looks at how he interacted with the German people and how his image was manipulated after he got into power to turn the negatives into pluses. For example, the fact that he was sexually dysfunctional and had non-relationships with women was turned into the idea of the Führer denying his natural manly instincts to work all the time for Germany. This is an old trick. If you think back to Ingres’s portraits of Napoleon at his desk at three o’clock in the morning with the candles all burnt out. It’s a pretty constant form of image making. God knows. I’ve never thought about that one. People just think he was. No, The Hitler Myth is about how grannies would knit socks for him, about the whole interaction with the German people. Rather like any famous person, when they walk into a room you somehow think their eyes have connected with you. If you touch the hand you don’t wash it; you tell your mates you really touched him. That’s true, but the book is about how he becomes the fulfilment of people’s wishes. Yes, I’m sure he did. That’s the thing. Having read lots about Hitler and all his own ruminations, his informal ramblings, his Führer monologues (because somebody was jotting down everything he said late at night, on such subjects as what soup the Spartans drank – seriously) he does come across as something of an enigma. There was nothing there. Everybody was desperately trying to keep their eyes open and he was going on about how marvellous it was that it only took a few hundred Brits to keep down millions of Indians – that’s what we need to do. Yes. Maybe it’s like any sort of problem – you’re missing the most simple thing. But the more you look at it, it’s like there’s nothing there. It’s hard to explain. There’s a lot of feeling but it all seems quite bogus and empty. Of course, the strict theological definition of evil is the absence of good, so it does actually suggest a vacuum, oddly enough. So it’s right. Yes. I read a very interesting book once, a German book that consisted of all the letters ordinary people wrote to Hitler. They are extraordinary. Some of them are just opportunistic, a baker wanting to call a cake a Hitler Torte. Hitler said no. And marriage proposals. Endless marriage proposals."

"Ian Kershaw is a totally admirable historian. He is absolutely scrupulous. He does incredible research. His books have superb scholarship and breadth of knowledge as a result. But, above all, he has a clarity of thought and a clarity of prose which is not merely enviable but should be followed by any sort of academic historian who wants to know how to write and how to reach a wider audience and also to remain a completely scholarly source. Yes, indeed, and he knows them almost better than anyone. I don’t think that any historian should ever accept that a book is definitive. Nothing is definitive. But I don’t see Kershaw’s work on Hitler really ever being surpassed. So much of it is in the detail rather than overall. One sees so much written about Hitler that just churns out the same sort of stuff. Where Kershaw is so judicious and magisterial is that he manages to put details and, above all, Hitler’s words into a much wider context. One sees the implications particularly when it comes to the difficulties of a setting and the exact progress towards the Final Solution. For example, he looks at the decision about when to launch the Holocaust or the Shoah by gas, as Grossman called it, which is one of the key areas of debate amongst historians. And Kershaw’s assessment is probably the most reliable and accurate of all. In his book he defines “the Final Solution to the Jewish question” as “the systematic [Nazi] attempt to exterminate the whole of European Jewry”. And this is the traditional view and the one currently accepted by mainstream historians. Kershaw goes on to state the three major questions that, in his view, surround the Final Solution. They are: How and when the decision to exterminate the Jews came about; what was Hitler’s role in this policy of mass murder, and whether the Final Solution followed a single order from a long-held programme or evolved in a haphazard and piecemeal fashion over a period of time? After posing these questions, he concludes: “The deficiencies and ambiguities of the evidence, enhanced by the language of euphemism and camouflage used by the Nazis, even among themselves when dealing with the extermination of the Jews, mean that absolute certainty in answering these complex questions can not be achieved.” He is saying there is room for doubt in regard to the answers mainstream historians have given to the previous questions."