evil deeds such as mass murder and the not-always-obvious nature of the intent of the doer, preferring the stricter term ‘wickedness’ to describe wrongdoers who do evil deeds knowing they are doing wrong. I was drawn to the philosophical literature on the problem of wickedness … by another defining moment in my encounters with Hitler explainers: my conversation in London with H. R. Trevor-Roper, former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, one of the first and most widely respected postwar Hitler explainers. I’d asked him the deceptively simple question I’d begun asking a number of Hitler explainers: ‘Do you consider Hitler consciously evil? Did he know what he was doing was wrong?’ (9)[Original emphasis]
Trevor-Roper’s answer was an emphatic No: Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude. Although his deeds reached an extreme of awfulness, he committed them in the deluded belief that they were right. Rosenbaum also points out that the assumption that Jewish people themselves might be expected to be the first to reject this ‘rectitude argument’ is also flawed, as evidenced by the statement of Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Jerusalem headquarters, and the chief Nazi-hunter in Israel. When asked if he thought Hitler was conscious he was doing wrong, Zuroff almost shouted: ‘Of course not! Hitler thought he was a doctor! Killing germs! That’s all Jews were to him! He believed he was doing good, not evil!’ (10) (Original emphasis.)
The acceptance by many historians of the rectitude argument leads Rosenbaum to a tentative and very interesting conclusion: ‘that beneath the Socratic logic of the position might be an understandably human, even emotional, rejection — as simply unbearable — of the idea that someone could commit mass murder without a sense of rectitude, however delusional. That Hitler could have done it out of pure personal hatred, knowing exactly what he was doing and how wrong it was.’ (11) (Original emphasis.) Allied to this is the so-called Great Abstraction Theory of history, which places emphasis on profound and inevitable trends at the expense of the activities of single personalities as formulated in the now-unfashionable Great Man Theory. According to the Great Abstraction Theory: ‘Nothing could have prevented the Holocaust. No one’s to blame for the failure to halt Hitler’s rise. If it hadn’t been Hitler, it would have been “someone like Hitler” serving as an instrument of those inexorable larger forces.’ (12) The alternative, which is considered unthinkable by many historians and philosophers, is that a single human being wanted to bring about the Holocaust — a human being … a member of our species. (The reader may detect a similarity between this notion and the reluctance by some to allow Hitler to be placed within the continuum of human behaviour mentioned earlier.)
While the implications of the Great Abstraction Theory may serve as a form of consolation (nothing could have prevented the Holocaust from happening: it was the result of uncontrollable historical forces), it has been rightly criticised in some quarters for its implicit removal of Hitler from the position of sole creator of the Final Solution. In the last analysis, he remains the greatest enigma: any attempt to explain seriously the origin and nature of the evil of the Third Reich must centre on Adolf Hitler — not as a pawn of larger forces, but as the prime mover of Nazism.
All of which brings us back to the central question, phrased memorably by Rosenbaum: what made Hitler Hitler? What turned him from an apparently ordinary, undistinguished human being into the very embodiment of wickedness, the destroyer of more than six million innocent people? According to Yehuda Bauer, a founder of the discipline of Holocaust Studies, while it is possible in theory to explain Hitler, it may well be too late. The deaths of crucial witnesses and the loss of important documents may have resulted in our eternal separation from the means to answer the question, to draw an accurate map of the hell Hitler created on Earth.
Of course, there have been numerous theories put forward, including the suggestion that Hitler’s anti- Semitism derived from the unproven seduction and impregnation of his paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, by a Jew, resulting in the birth of his father, Alois Hitler. According to this theory, Hitler exterminated the Jews in order to exterminate what he perceived as the poison in his own blood. Another conjecture has it that Hitler discovered an affair between his half-niece, Geli Raubal, and a Jewish music teacher, and that he either drove her to suicide or had her murdered. This resulted in a desire for murderous vengeance against the Jews. Yet another theory suggests that the death of Hitler’s mother in 1907 was in some way made more painful by the malpractice of her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, for which Hitler, once again, exacted terrible vengeance. (13)
As we have just seen, the desperate search for an adequate explanation of Hitler has resulted in a number of contradictory theories, many of which are built on flimsy evidence. Interestingly, this search has also generated a mythology of its own, revolving around what Rosenbaum calls ‘the lost safe-deposit box. A place where allegedly revelatory documents — ones that might provide the missing link, the lost key to the Hitler psyche, the true source of his metamorphosis — seem to disappear beyond recovery.” (4) This mythology was inspired by real events in Munich in 1933, when Fritz Gerlich, the last anti-Hitler journalist in that city, made a desperate attempt to alert the world to the true nature of Hitler by means of a report of an unspecified scandal. On 9 March, just as Gerlich’s newspaper, Der Gerade Weg, was about to go to press, SA storm troopers entered the premises and ripped it from the presses.
Although no copy of the Gerlich report has ever been found, rumours have been circulating for many years about the ultimate fate of the information with which Gerlich hoped to warn the world of the danger of Hitler, one of which involves a secret copy of the report that was smuggled out of the premises (along with supporting documentary material) by one Count Waldburg-Zeil. Waldburg-Zeil allegedly took the report and its supporting documents to his estate north of Munich, where he buried them somewhere in the grounds. According to Gerlich’s biographer Erwin von Aretin, however, Waldburg-Zeil destroyed them during the war, fearful of what might happen should they be discovered by the Nazi authorities.
Rosenbaum informs us of an alternative version of these events, involving documents proving that Geli Raubal was indeed killed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. According to von Aretin’s son, the historian Professor Karl- Ottmar Freiherr von Aretin, his father gave the documents to his cousin, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Guttenberg, co- owner of the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, who put them in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland. Guttenberg was killed following his involvement in the attempted coup against Hitler on 20 July 1944. For the sake of security, he had not told anyone the number of the safe-deposit-box account.
The idea that somewhere in Switzerland there lies a set of documents containing information that might be of some help in explaining the transformation of Adolf Hitler from man to monster is a powerful one, and has generated more than one subsequent controversial claim. There is, for instance, the account given by a German novelist named Ernst Weiss, according to which the voice Hitler claimed to have heard while recovering from war injuries in a hospital at Pasewalk summoning him to a mission to avenge Germany following her surrender in 1918, was actually that of Dr Edmund Forster, a staff psychiatrist at the hospital. Forster ‘sought to cure Hitler’s hysterical blindness by putting him in a hypnotic trance and implanting the post-hypnotic suggestion that Hitler had to recover his sight to fulfil a mission to redeem Germany’s lost honor’. (15)
Weiss, who apparently befriended Forster, claimed that the psychiatrist discovered a dreadful secret during the course of Hitler’s treatment, a secret with the potential to unlock the future Fuhrer’s psyche and which Forster took with him when he fled Germany in 1933. Shortly before his suicide (to which he was driven by the Gestapo), Forster took his Pasewalk case notes to Switzerland and placed them in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Basel. As an added security measure, Forster rewrote the notes in a cipher of his own devising, the key to which he took to his grave.
As Rosenbaum notes, the unreadable cipher in the lost safe-deposit box is a powerful metaphor for the elusive explanation of Hitler:
These lost-safe-deposit-box stories clearly serve as expressions of anxiety about — and talismans against — an otherwise apparently inexplicable malignant evil. In fact, despite the despairing tone of the safe-deposit-box myths, they represent a kind of epistemological optimism, a faith in an explicable world. Yes, something is missing, but if we don’t have the missing piece in hand, at least it exists somewhere. At least somewhere there’s the lost key that could make sense of the apparently motiveless malignancy of Hitler’s psyche … A missing piece, however mundane or bizarre … but something here on earth, something we can contain in our imagination, something safely containable within the reassuring confines of a box in a Swiss bank. Something not beyond our ken, just beyond our reach, something less unbearably frightening than inexplicable evil. [Original emphasis.] (16)
If I have relied rather heavily on Rosenbaum’s work in the last few pages, it is because it is of considerable relevance to our concerns in the present book. When I began to think about writing Invisible Eagle, my intention was to attempt an evaluation of the evidence for Nazi involvement with occultism and black magic. In the course of
