Hitler and his God

“Near-Ultimate Evil”

“During the post-war trials of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, material relating to the influence of esoteric thought on National Socialism and the Nazi hierarchy was deliberately suppressed, and has been lost to the record”, write Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. “According to one of the British prosecutors, the late Airey Neave, large bodies of existing evidence were too bizarre to be admitted; they would have permitted too many high-ranking Nazi Party members to plead insanity and thereby escape retribution on grounds of diminished responsibility … So flagrant an eruption of the irrational as the Third Reich represented was uncomfortable, disturbing and potentially dangerous. For the world to be made aware of the sheer potency of the irrational, on so awesome a collective level, would have been to open a Pandora’s Box of incipient ills for the future. And it would have been profoundly unsettling, for citizens of both the Western democracies and the Soviet Union, to confront too blatantly what precisely they had been up against …

“In consequence, for a generation of post-war historians and commentators, the role of esotericism in the rise of Nazi-Germany was never accorded the attention it deserved. Instead of being assessed and explored as what it was, the religious dimension of National Socialism was nervously dismissed by such facile formulations as ‘mass madness’, ‘mass hysteria’ and ‘mass hypnosis’, and then subordinated to theories of economics, sociology and so-called political science. A few novelists attempted to address the matter honestly.” Baigent and Leigh mention by name Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Michel Tournier and George Steiner. “But historians chose deliberately to ignore the entire issue for more than twenty years. When it was finally acknowledged, it was acknowledged by ‘fringe’ historians, who, with dubious ‘facts’ and luridly spurious theories, swung the pendulum wildly in the opposite direction.” 898

Günter Scholdt, who wrote a voluminous book about authors who were Hitler’s contemporaries, is impressed by the number of them who saw an “abysmal evil” in his person and his actions, and who used words like “Satan”, “demon” and “demonic” to characterize him. To mention a few: Konrad Heiden writes about “the abysmal force” that was in Hitler, “the demon, disguised as an unknown soldier from the Vienna lodging-house”. Emil Fackenheim, a “theologian of the Holocaust”, calls Hitler’s reign “a radical evil”, “an eruption of demonism in history”. To William Shirer, Hitler was “a person of undoubted, if evil, genius”, “possessed of a demonic personality”, “the demonic dictator”.

In an interview with Ron Rosenbaum, Alan Bullock exclaimed: “If he isn’t evil, who is? … If he isn’t evil, then the word has no meaning.” To Yehuda Bauer, “widely regarded as the most authoritative historian of the holocaust”, Hitler represents “near-ultimate evil”. Sebastian Haffner calls Hitler “a truly evil man” and writes about “the enormous evil in him”. Ambassador François-Poncet is of the opinion that Hitler was “a man driven to the extreme by a demon”. The historian Milton Himmelfarb says: “I don’t think that Hitler was a statesman. I don’t think that Hitler was an accidental agent. I think he was an evil man, an evil genius.” In Gitta Sereny we find: “Hitler’s evil, I believe, went far even beyond this madness”, by which she means the Holocaust. And Trevor-Roper too writes about “that demonic character”, “that demonic and disastrous genius”.

Then there are also the persons who have a direct experience to tell. Admiral Karl Dönitz said: “Hitler was a demon.” General Franz Halder stated: “I never found genius in him, only the diabolical.” SS-general Walter Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “Hitler was ruled by the demonic forces driving him …” Ulrich de Maizière, general staff officer: “From Hitler emanated a demonic influence which is hard to describe, but against which few people could protect themselves.” Hjalmar Schacht, who made Nazi Germany’s economic recovery possible, professed after the war: “Hitler was a genius, but an evil genius.” And so on.

The list of the human instruments of “the evil genius” at the top is long, although most have remained anonymous to the public or had names which faded in the public memory. There were not only Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. There was Reinhard Heydrich, the epitome of “the Blond Beast”, whose name may still evoke some vague associations, as may the names of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann and Amon Göth, the camp commandant in Schindler’s List. But who knows the name of Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau who founded the SS-Totenköpfe, the camp guards, and invented the inhuman regimen of the concentration camps? Or Odilo Globocnik, amiably called “Globus” by Himmler and charged by him with building the extermination camps in Poland? Or Hans Kammler, “technocrat of annihilation” and commandant of that suburb of hell which was Mittelkampf Dora, where the V-2s were built? Or the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia – Walter Ohlendorff, Arthur Nebe, Friedrich Jeckeln … – who performed such an effective job of slaughtering Jews and non-Jews alike in their tens of thousands?