Adolph Hitler was a quarter Jewish
Tom Jigme Wheat
Tom Jigme Wheat
Rosenbaum's attempt to find the ruined village, in a blasted landscape still filled with unexploded shells, opens into and metaphorically reflects the attempts by decades of Hitler scholars to unearth those "irregular and disreputable family events." The crux of those irregularities concerns the mysterious identity of Hitler's grandfather, whose name was left off the baptismal certificate of Hitler's father, Alois Schicklgruber -- a gap that has given rise to what Rosenbaum calls the "family romance of the Hitler explainers," the legend that some mysterious stranger, perhaps a Jew, was Hitler's real grandfather.
The most intriguing evidence for the idea that Hitler had Jewish ancestry comes from Hitler's personal attorney, Hans Frank, who claimed, in a memoir he wrote while awaiting execution at Nuremberg, that while investigating a blackmail threat from one of Hitler's black-sheep relatives he discovered that a Jewish family for whom Hitler's grandmother once worked had paid her child-support money for her son. Hitler's father, then, had presumably been fathered by the Jewish family's 19-year-old son -- making Hitler himself one-quarter Jewish.
"It's astonishing how much mischief this one story has caused since it came to light in 1953 ... how many years of research, years of debate have been devoted to untangling the ambiguities embedded in it," writes Rosenbaum. "And it has continued to be seductive. It remains, after four decades, one of the two great temptations of Hitler explanation lore [the other having to do with Hitler's affair with his niece Geli Raubal and his alleged sexual perversities], tempting because it offers the gratification of a totalizing, single-pointed explanation of Hitler's psychology." The totalizing explanation is simple: Hitler, whether he believed he had Jewish blood or only feared that he might, sought to "prove his purity, his freedom from infirmity, by the unrelenting, uncompromising ferocity of his war against the Jews, exterminating the doubts about the Jew within himself by murdering all the Jews within his reach."
Rosenbaum, who describes himself as having "a predisposition to Empsonian ambiguity and uncertainty rather than the certainties of theory," is suspicious, here and throughout "Explaining Hitler," of one-bullet Hitler theories like Frank's Jewish-grandfather story -- or like the psychosexual theories about Hitler's alleged abnormalities. For many explainers, Rosenbaum observes, "the longing to find a sexual explanation is almost sexual in its intensity." Various writers have asserted that Hitler was homosexual, impotent, syphilitic, that he had a missing testicle or a freakishly underdeveloped or mutilated penis (one bizarre story asserts that Hitler suffered a disfiguring bite while attempting to urinate in the mouth of a goat) and that he engaged in perverted excretory or urinary sexual practices.
Without entirely ruling any of these out (the last two theories seem particularly persistent), Rosenbaum cites Hitler's affair with a young woman named Mimi Reiter, which was apparently successfully consummated. As for the persistent rumors about Geli Raubal, Hitler's niece and by all accounts the great love of his life, who was found shot, an apparent suicide, in his bedroom in 1931, Rosenbaum declines to join those who assert that she killed herself because she couldn't take her uncle's kinky excretory voyeurism anymore, or who posit a correlation between her death and Hitler's subsequent bloodthirstiness. "To deny or doubt that there was some shameful sexual secret at the core of Hitler's psyche does not diminish the mystery of Hitler's soul," Rosenbaum writes.
In fact, one of his motivations for writing the book, he says, was the "remarkable confidence, despite the shakiness of the evidence, of so many schools of explanation." (He hints that anti-Semitism may help explain why there are so many Hitler-explanation stories that involve Jews, whether they appear as ancestors, lovers or doctors: Somehow, a Jew must be to blame.) He is particularly hard on psychoanalysts who are prone to push-button causation theories. For example, he derides renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller's breezy assertion that Hitler's evil was caused by the beatings he was given by his father, and holds up for special ridicule her statement, in response to those who questioned Alois Hitler's brutality, "As if anyone were more qualified to judge the situation than Adolf Hitler himself." ("Yes, and who more deserves our trust and confidence?" he dryly responds.)
Nonetheless, Rosenbaum does find something significant in attorney Frank's tale. It reveals, he argues, not the familiar "demonic, Wagnerian mass-mesmerist" Hitler driven to genocide by psychological self-hatred, but a more sordid, familiar, criminal type -- what he calls "the film noir Hitler, the Munich-demimonde Hitler, one whose relentlessly seedy, small-time character has been forgotten if not erased." The real significance of the Frank story is that it's a blackmail story -- in fact, two blackmail stories. Rosenbaum makes much of the fact that when Hitler heard Frank's report, he blandly asserted that not only had the Jewish family's son not impregnated his grandmother, but that his grandparents had in fact blackmailed the Jewish family by threatening to say that he had! "Consider thekind of Hitler who emerges from the Hans Frank story," Rosenbaum writes. "This is a Hitler steeped in the nuances of small-time sleaze, a Hitler who can think both like a blackmailer and like a blackmailer's victim ... Hitler as sleazy con man, small-time crook."
Rosenbaum's embrace of the two-bit-punk Hitler reflects his desire, throughout the book, to knock Hitler off his demonic pedestal, to present him as evil with a small "e." This realistic, demythologizing impulse, however, later runs head on into a fact so monstrous, so seemingly ungraspable that all "realism," all of the orthodox tools of psychology, appear completely useless: the Holocaust. Dazed by the horrific magnitude of what Hitler did, Rosenbaum never entirely succeeds in integrating his vision of an all-too-human Hitler with the unprecedented mass murderer.
This disorientation is understandable. But might it not at least be argued that the man who ordered the murder of 6 million Jews was still nothing but a spiteful grifter -- that his psychology was not essentially different from that of a thousand other sociopathic murderers? And if German anti-Semitism was as deep-seated and far-reaching as Daniel Goldhagen and others have argued, it becomes possible to imagine that Hitler was not that different, in his ideology and even perhaps in his visceral attitude toward Jews, from many Germans. Rosenbaum's resurrection of the currently unfashionable "Great Man" theory of history is commendable and largely justified, but one of its consequences is that he scants historical context.
The only thing that made Hitler different from your garden-variety anti-Semitic criminal, by this argument, was that he had acquired absolute control over an enormous killing machine. This argument, which terrifyingly posits a total lack of correlation between the magnitude of an intention and the magnitude of a deed, may be too horrific for Rosenbaum to contemplate. The idea that the man who killed a million babies might be identical, in moral imagination, will and consciousness of what he had done, to a punk who bludgeoned a drunk to death in an alley is horrible, absurd -- yet is it really inconceivable? The varieties of criminal pathology are endless.
Moreover, the supposed epic ambiguity of Hitler, the failure of experts to agree on much of anything about him, may not be as significant as it appears. After all, all murder is enigmatic. The closer you look at almost any intelligent, cold-blooded murderer, the more complex and enigmatic he will appear. If you were to send a team of world-class historians, psychologists and philosophers into a maximum-security jail and order them to study a given killer for four decades, it seems possible, even likely, that they would come back with a portrait as multifaceted, contradictory and enigmatic as the one that historians have drawn of Hitler. This is not to argue that this hideously reductive theory is the truth about Hitler, or even particularly interesting. But Rosenbaum's failure even to consider it suggests the seductive power of the massive question marks that generations of scholars have erected, like a row of inscrutable totems.
In any case, Rosenbaum's thought-provoking vision of the grifter Hitler of the '20s leads into what may be his book's most original -- and, for a journalist, certainly its most inspiring -- contribution: his tribute to the courageous, long-forgotten German journalists who desperately tried to alert the world to the terrible menace in Munich -- and often paid for their efforts with their lives. In particular, he salutes the reporters and editors of Hitler's bête noire, the Munich Post (which Hitler called the Poison Kitchen), and the doomed crusade of an unfathomable editor named Fritz Gerlich, whose savagely Swiftian attacks on Hitler were stopped only when storm troopers smashed into his newspaper office, destroyed his last edition and dragged him off to Dachau, where he was murdered. (One of the most haunting tales in the book concerns Gerlich's steel-rimmed spectacles, which "had become a kind of signature image for the combative newspaper man among those who knew him in Munich." Rosenbaum describes how Nazi thugs notified Gerlich's wife of her husband's death by sending her his famous spectacles "all spattered with blood.")
Rosenbaum justly calls the story of these "first explainers" "one of the great unreported dramas in the history of journalism." If "Explaining Hitler" achieved nothing else, its rescuing of these extraordinary men and women from oblivion would earn it a place in Hitler scholarship. In his characteristically terse, muscular prose (Rosenbaum is the master of the staccato sentence fragment, which he throws after the preceding sentence like a fast right hand after a jab), he ends his chapter with an appeal for German journalists "to do justice to the men of the Poison Kitchen, men who brought so much honor to the profession with their courage and investigative zeal." He closes: "And one more thing I believe ought to be restored: their street address. Number 19 Altheimer Eck should become a memorial and shrine to the Poison Kitchen."
Sequestered in the basement of Munich's Monacensia Library, Rosenbaum stared at the headlines that day after day rang out like warning bells from the Munich Post's front pages. "19 Shot in Terrible Political Bloodbath." "Nazi Party Hands Dripping With Blood." "Germany Today: No Day Without Death." The act of reading the paper, Rosenbaum writes, was nightmarish: "There was something about communing with the actual crumbling copies of the newspaper ... issues in which Hitler was a living figure stalking the pages, that served to give me a painfully immediate intimation of the maddeningly unbearable Cassandra-like frustration the Munich Post journalists must have felt. They were the first to sense the dimensions of Hitler's potential for evil -- and to see the way the world ignored the desperate warnings in their work."
The significance of the Post reporters' coverage of Hitler, for Rosenbaum, is that they saw him, first and foremost, as a "political criminal," not an ideologue. "The emphasis on the down and dirty criminality of the Hitler Party [which the Post insisted on calling the Nazis] is a signature of the Munich Post writers' vision: They were, in effect, enlightened police reporters covering a homicide story in the guise of a political one," Rosenbaum writes. "And, in fact, after immersing myself in their reportage on Hitler and the Hitler Party, I came to see that 'political criminal' was not an empty epithet but a carefully considered encapsulation of a larger vision: that Hitler's evil was not generated from some malevolent higher abstraction or belief, from an ideology that descended into criminality to achieve its aims; rather, his evil arose from his criminality and only garbed itself in ideological belief."
Rosenbaum thus argues that the early Hitler was a political criminal, a murderous grifter. He was possessed by a primitive hatred of the Jews, but he didn't work out a self-justifying ideology until later. Yet Rosenbaum also seems to entertain Lucy Dawidowicz's radical theory that the idea of the Final Solution came to Hitler as early as 1918 (a much earlier date than most historians are willing to posit) and that he never wavered from it. Could Hitler have consciously planned the extermination of European Jewry based only on primitive hatred, without ideology? The idea seems problematic. Whatever the case, Rosenbaum clearly thinks that the cheap-punk Hitler evolved after he took power, turning in some complex fashion into the ideological monster.
Tom Jigme Wheat
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/7961211/Hitler-had-Jewish-and-African-roots-DNA-tests-show.html