Obs/Sereny: Spin time for Hitler (Apr. 21, 1996)
sufaud
The truth is generally the first casualty in writing about the
Holocaust.Can we ever trust the obsessive historians of the Final
Solution?
By Gitta Sereny
The Observer (London); Apr 21, 1996, p. 1
I want to write here about a kind of passion, the curious and, in some
cases, I think, sad passion about Hitler and his Third Reich which has
ruled and continues to rule the lives of a considerable number of
people who write or inspire books.
Of course, there are those who might consider my own preoccupation
with this subject for the past 30 years a kind of passion. But,
compared with the love and hate that motivate the people I will be
talking about, my sometimes consuming interest is impersonal. There
are, as I write, four books next to me, each of which is a testimonial
to obsession.
The first is a curious tome, available by direct order from the so-
called publishers (in America one James Bender, a friend of the
author's; in Germany the right-radical Druffel Verlag, who have
published books by old Nazis). Lip-smackingly called Gestapo Chief:
The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Muller, it is subtitled 'From US
Secret Archives'. The author's name is given as Gregory Douglas; his
address, shown in a series of letters from the CIA which he reprints,
is 23, West Alexander Avenue 10, Merced, California 95348.
Now I am quite familiar with this man, though under a different name
-- he has many of them. I knew him as Peter Stahl and my husband and
I, researching a fantastic story, visited him in Merced in July 1988.
In November the previous year Stahl had sent me by courier what he
announced as an 'extraordinary document' that had just 'come into his
hands'. It was not only extraordinary, but shocking -- a much censored
photocopy of a seven-page CIC (later CIA) 'agent report' to all
appearances copied from originals in a US intelligence archive. Dated
November 1948, it was signed by two Berlin-based CIC officers, Andrew
L. Venters and Severin F. Wallace.
The report, titled 'Ubersee' ('Overseas'), stated that Soviet
intelligence had discovered that two SS generals, Odilo Globocnik and
Heinrich Muller, had been spirited out of Europe in 1945 by the
Americans with the connivance of the British. Heinrich Muller had been
the head of the Gestapo, and it had long been rumoured that he had
survived and was living in the Soviet Union. Odilo Globocnik, however,
who as the head of the 'Aktion Reinhard' -- the organisation in charge
of the murder of the Jews in occupied Poland -- was at the top of
Allied war criminals lists, was known to have committed suicide in May
1945, after being caught by the British in a hut in the Austrian Alps.
There was even a much reprinted (though unclear) photograph of him
dead, taken by a British officer and entitled 'The worst man in the
world'.
If this document was genuine, the British and Americans, outrageously,
would have helped two of the worst Nazi evil-doers escape justice
which, without doubt, would cause one of the greatest scandals since
1945. Therefore, before seeking any backing for research, and keeping
my interest secret, I had to authenticate the documents. For this I
turned to one of America's leading archivists, Dr Robert Wolfe, at the
US National Archives. As horrified as I by the document, he undertook
to search for the originals and to authenticate the signatures. Two
months later, he told me that Venters and Wallace had indeed been CIC
officers in Berlin: the signatures checked out and neither he nor two
other top people he had consulted could fault the photocopied
documents. He was, however, he said, encountering unusual reticence
and even opposition from other agencies in his search for the
originals. We were concerned lest the secret should slip out before I
could research the background of the story.
My photographer husband Don and I -- now with the backing of the Times
-- left immediately for Trieste, Globocnik's last posting as SS head
of police. Over the next weeks we followed his trail, his escape over
the mountains with chests of valuables, to the alpine hut where he was
finally arrested, and to the castle in the town of Paternion, in the
Austrian province of Carinthia, where British intelligence troops held
him and where, when identified, he allegedly committed suicide.
By June 1988, we had seen everybody still alive who had had anything
to do with Globocnik's life, including British officers who saw his
corpse, the family of the Gauleiter of Carinthia who was caught with
him (he was hanged by the Yugoslavs), and his son, Peter, who, a baby
in 1945, had never known him but had always thought it quite possible
that, like so many of the worst criminals, he had survived.
Everything about the alleged suicide, including the famous photograph,
was decidedly fuzzy, and even the British Army records at Kew of his
capture and death were contradictory. I felt neither comfortable about
the documents, nor by this time about Stahl. He talked too much, had
too many pet theories -- about Joe Kennedy, the President's father;
about Churchill and Roosevelt and secret advance knowledge of Pearl
Harbour; about Roger Casement: Stahl urged too hard, wanted too
little. By the time we arrived at his door in Merced in July 1988, I
strongly suspected that the papers were forged.
Just as we were about to abandon the search for lack of definite
proof, we found in Germany a former CIC officer who had served with
the two men whose signatures were on the document. He looked at it
with astonishment. 'It was done by someone exceptionally well-
informed: he was able to get the right stamps, knows the format, the
language and was able to copy, superbly, the signatures,' he said. 'He
slipped up in one way only: he didn't know the two men.' The ex-CIC
man had shared quarters with Venters for several years; he was his
friend. 'Andrew was an Austrian by birth and a Jew,' he said. 'But
that was not the main thing: the main thing is that he was a
profoundly cultured man of total integrity who would never, under any
circumstances whatsoever, have been part, even with retrospective
knowledge, of such a cover-up. Globocnik, to him, was not just the
devil incarnate, but dirt: he could not have written and could not
have signed such a report -- he would have preferred to kill himself.
This document is a very clever but quite outrageous forgery.' Two days
later, the Austrian widow of the British officer who had taken the
photograph of Globocnik's corpse found for us in her attic in Vienna
another picture taken at the same time, this one not in the least
fuzzy: Globocnik was dead.
Mr Douglas-Stahl's book is as much a fake as the document he sent me
eight years ago. In his acknowledgements he maliciously thanks me for
my 'research into the authenticity of the key documents, without which
this book could not have been written'.
We don't know whether and where 'Gestapo' Muller survived and, if he
survived, who he talked to. What is certain is that he never had the
conversations reprinted here: Mr Douglas-Stahl has Muller recite here
all the stories Peter Stahl told me over the years -- Casement,
Churchill, Roosevelt, the bombing of Dresden (with David Irving's 10-
times inflated figure of 250,000 dead), and of course all about
Globocnik: alive, after having been saved by the nasty British for
money. And then, folded into it all, more falsehoods about the Final
Solution itself, that one crime that none of these obsessed people can
leave alone.
In this case, he tries posthumously to shatter the reputation of Kurt
Gerstein, a genuine Christian hero, who having seen the extermination
camps in action, tried desperately to get his information to the
Allies, both through the Church and through a Swedish diplomat in
Berlin. Stahl has his mouthpiece Muller state that it was Gerstein who
invented the gassing method of killing the Jews. It is all quite
disgusting and any German who publishes this filth should be ashamed
of himself.
The Douglas-Stahl book is, of course, a marginal publication, but the
element of obsession it reveals also rules the other three books I
have at my side; books which, by contrast, are being taken seriously
by publishers and reviewers alike.
I'll only comment briefly on the fairy tale about Martin Bormann's
alleged kidnapping out of Hitler's bunker on 27 April 1945 and his
alleged survival in Britain for 40 years or so, because its publishers
Simon & Schuster, who paid a silly advance of pounds 500,000 for it,
have put off its release to September. Absurd though the story is,
there is, here too, an element of obsession. Not so much in the writer
and ghostwriter who can't be blamed if they think they've struck gold
in a silly season, but in their main character, a man who did exist,
though, far from being Bormann, was born, bred and married with four
children in England.
There are photographs of this man looking a bit like Bormann -- but,
then, countless people did and do. However -- and this is where the
obsession comes in -- it appears this Englishman, fascinated before
and during the war with the Blackshirts at home and the Nazis in
Germany, began at some time in the Fifties or Sixties to cultivate a
slight German accent and convinced his mistress, with whom, so goes
the tale, he had a child, that he really was Martin Bormann. All very
crazy. There is nothing wrong with a story drawn from this as fiction;
where it becomes a problem is if the publishers present it as fact --
as was apparently their original intention. And then, with its claim
of British complicity in a 'rescue' of such a man as Bormann, it
becomes a falsification of history.
When writing on this subject, there is a great difference between a
deliberate falsification of history and a mistaken thesis. The latter
applies to the much-reviewed book Hitler's Willing Executioners by the
American social scientist Daniel Goldhagen.
This is a sad book on which, I feel certain, hangs a sad tale: the
author says as much in his acknowledgements where, in a long and
loving paragraph, he thanks and dedicates the book to his father, his
'constant discussion partner' during his work on it. For 50 years, it
has been difficult to criticise books by survivors. It was
presumptuous to do so, even when they were worthless in a literary
sense, for their suffering cried out for respect and compassion. This
reticence however, cannot and indeed must not apply to survivors'
children if what they write is presented not as a personal account but
a serious work -- or thesis -- of history.
Nobody, least of all the young Germans of the post-Hitler generations,
has any doubts about the moral responsibility of all Germans, if
nothing else than by default, for Hitler's crimes, particularly
against the Jews. By the same token, these same young people -- who
not long ago walked in mile-long candlelit processions in protest
against the attacks on Turks and other foreigners by right-radical
hoodlums -- cannot understand how their elders could not have
protested against the Nazis' maltreatment of their Jewish fellow
citizens. But neither can they imagine the circumstances of that time,
particularly the calculated slowness of the developments -- the
application of the infamous Nuremberg laws published only in the Reich
Law bulletins -- which finally, after the conquest of vast areas in
the East, put millions of East European Jews into the Germans' hands,
culminated in genocide.
Daniel Goldhagen, 36, born into the cocoon of a strong, close Jewish
community in the golden environment of Harvard, cannot visualise it
either. And thus his book is simply a hymn of hate to the Germans. His
publishers in America and here are hyping it as a 'profound' study
which will fundamentally revise 'our thinking' and 'revolutionise our
knowledge of the Holocaust'.
I don't consider it either 'profound' or particularly new. Most of the
facts he quotes have been known for several years, and even his
statistics of 'ordinary' Germans -- auxiliary policemen -- taking part
in the murders in Russia and Poland, presented in the publicity and in
some reviews as particularly original and shocking, are wrong: they
were in fact much worse than he says. For he should have included
whole regiments of Wehrmacht soldiers.
But Goldhagen does not seem to have talked with any of these men, many
of whom returned, permanently damaged and unable to deal with their
memories; nor to have met their families or talked to their children
who were separated from them by a gulf of silence; nor does he seem to
have visited institutions in Germany where many of them ended up.
I have done all these things and I, who hated and fought the Nazis
from childhood on throughout my adult life, am here to tell him that
whatever the psychological phenomenon that caused most of these
soldiers to take part -- conditioning, absolute obedience to Hitler, a
dreadful kind of mass acquiescence -- it is not true that hundreds of
thousands of German soldiers, or for that matter 60 million Germans at
home, were, as he claims -- bursting with anti-Semitism -- only too
ready, individually, to kill Jews. No more true than that most
Russians longed to take part in the murder of Kulags, all Nigerians in
the murder of Biafrans or all Serbs in killing Muslims.
But while Goldhagen's emotion-based -- obsessive -- thesis is
simplistic, narrow and misleading, his book is not a deliberate
falsehood. The master of this particular craft, now presenting a new
Goebbels biography -- is the British revisionist writer David Irving.
He and Douglas-Stahl have a very similar intelligence and psychology.
But Stahl is an amateur working in obscurity while Irving, nothing if
not professional, has always succeeded in making himself heard and
read.
And this is, basically, because he is a man of talent, both as a
researcher and a writer. As a researcher he is good enough to make it
difficult for anyone to fault him who doesn't know the material he
uses as well as he does -- and let us face it, few do. As a writer, he
simply writes well; for the unwarned reader, his stuff -- and here is
the danger -- can be fun.
As reputable publishers will no longer touch him, he published and is
distributing his Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich himself -- as
he did with his expanded edition of Hitler's War in 1991 -- from his
London home in Duke Street, under the imprint 'Focal Point'. His
Goebbels is consistent with his established theme: Irving's Hitler is
the national hero misled by evil men. In Hitler's War (first published
in 1976) Himmler, Heydrich and the generals did all the wrong; in this
version Hitler's new devil is Goebbels.
Up to a point this is, of course, true -- it is precisely the clever
mixture of truth and untruth that makes Irving dangerous: Goebbels was
devilishly clever at politics, and devilishly good at his function:
propaganda. One shudders to think what he could have done with the
electronic means now at our disposal. But although Goebbels was a
radical anti-Semite even before Hitler emerged, Irving is yet again
trying to manipulate history when he suggests that Goebbels was the
originator or even the driving force in the Final Solution. He tries
to prove this with selected quotes from Goebbels's diaries, while
carefully avoiding passages which show clearly that Goebbels was only
informed -- by Hitler himself -- of the annihilation of the Jews many
months after it had begun.
It will, of course, be impossible for anyone unfamiliar with these
diaries, which are without doubt the most authentic record of Hitler's
time, to call him on his quotes: I have the diaries so far published
and have been allowed to see some of the rest. The German historian
Elke Frohlich, the greatest living expert on Goebbels, had discovered
in Russian secret archives in March 1992 the entire collection of
glass plates on to which Goebbels had his diary entries from 1924 to
1945 photographically copied before the war ended. She has been
working on them since then, to fill in the gaps in the various
portions of his diaries which she had previously published, and to
verify and complete the transcriptions.
In his book, Irving has to admit that it was she -- rather than he, as
he had originally told the Sunday Times when he offered them the story
for pounds 75,000 in 1992 -- who had found the microfiches in Moscow.
Nonetheless, he cannot resist stating that he had 'the immense good
fortune to become the first, and so far only, person to open the
complete microfiche records'.
What nonsense. The fact is that when he learnt of Dr Frohlich's
discovery he talked his way into the Moscow archives, and 'borrowed' a
dozen of the glass plates to show to Andrew Neil, then the Sunday
Times editor, while he was on a visit to Moscow. With his contract
firmed up, Irving smuggled the plates out of the country and -- cheek
of all cheeks -- knowing Dr Frohlich to be on holiday had copies made
at her Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. On her return a
few days later, she telephoned the Moscow archive to warn them, but by
this time the nimble Irving had flown back and replaced the glass
plates.
There is no question of his having 'exclusive' access to '80,000
pages' of the diary as he boasts. First of all there are not 80,000
pages (Dr Frohlich estimates that there will be 50,000). The dozen
plates he borrowed contained some 700 diary pages, and these were the
only 'exclusive' source he had -- for a few days, until he was
discovered. For all other diary information, he has to rely, like
everyone else, on those already published. Not surprisingly, however,
he makes good use of what he has for his purpose of whitewashing 'our
Fuhrer' -- as I have heard him refer to Hitler -- this time using
Goebbels as his tool.
For those of us familiar with Irving, his twisting and turning about
the genocide of the Jews is fascinating. Until just a few years ago,
he denied it altogether: lots of people died in the war, he shouted
from the rooftops, and Jews died, too, but there were no six million
dead, and there were no gas chambers. A few years ago we attended a
lecture in London introduced by Irving, at which a pseudo-scientist
from America called Leuchter, who had been to test the walls of the
alleged gas chambers in Auschwitz, reported that he had found no
residue of cyanide -- not too surprising, perhaps, in a reconstructed
building after 50 years. The unhappy Mr Leuchter was plucked from the
platform by Scotland Yard and deported the next morning.
For Irving himself that occasion was a kind of nadir: he can still
travel in America, where British visitors don't require visas, but his
publishers there have just withdrawn and he is now persona non grata
in many European countries and archives -- researching history will,
thank Heaven, become increasingly difficult for him.
All this said, for those curious about Goebbels's life and loves,
Irving's book serves nicely. Anyone, however, who wants to learn about
the political acts of one of this century's most able and most
dangerous men, should remember that what they are reading is one
brilliant propagandist -- one man who hates and loves obsessively --
writing about another.
In my book on Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, I said how his strange
but decisively important relationship with his Fuhrer demonstrates the
extraordinary degree to which emotions influence political events and
history. But upon further reflection, perhaps it is not all that
extraordinary: to feel is probably the most basic need in human beings
and is the earliest sensation which has nothing to do with rationality
-- with thought, with judgment.
It is here -- as an example only, for there are many obsessions, with
people, ideas, or even things -- that the four books I cite have a
common denominator. All of them, whether founded on love or hate, and
whether expressing the obsession by means of invention, omission or
distortion share the fatal weakness: the absence of the detachment,
rationality and judgement which must inform any historical approach to
the Third Reich.
Next week in the Review, Gitta Sereny interviews Francois Genoud, the
Swiss banker and Nazi sympathiser who controls the literary estates of
Goebbels, Hitler and Bormann.
Gitta Sereny's most recent book is Albert Speer: His Battle with
Truth, which won both the Duff-Cooper and the James Tait Black
Memorial prizes in 1995. The result of 12 years work, it supplies a
unique portrait of Hitler's favourite architect and minister, and of
Hitler himself. Among Sereny's other books are Into That Darkness,
based on a long series of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of
the Treblinka death camp, and The Case of Mary Bell.