WUnited Press International / Washington Times
May 9 2005
Why Hitler is still Villain No. 1
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Washington, DC, May. 9 (UPI) — President George W. Bush, Russian
President Vladimir Putin and around 50 other heads of state and
national leaders gathered in Moscow to celebrate Victory in Europe,
or VE-Day, Monday all agree that Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi
Third Reich, was a definitive example of human evil: They are right.
The late Hans Schenk, professor of European thought at the University
of Oxford 35 years ago, had a very distinctive way of introducing the
study of Hitler in his tutorials on modern history. “Very well,
ladies and gentlemen, let us look at the monster,” he would say.
More than 60 years after his death, it is this larger than life,
almost supernatural, intensity of malignant hatred that remains the
most distinctive and disquieting aspect of the life of Adolf Hitler.
At least two other tyrants of the century arguably were responsible
for the deaths of more people — Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and
Chinese leader Mao Zedong. But those often-quoted statistics are
misleading.
Even if one takes the highest imaginable totals for the number of
Soviet citizens who died during Stalin’s dictatorship, a vast number
of them died because of Hitler’s Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,
which killed 27 million Soviet citizens alone. Or they perished
because of the stupidity of Stalin’s policies, such as the starving
to death of up to 10 million Ukrainian peasants in the great
collectivization of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
In Mao’s case, he does not appear to have wanted the 25 to 30 million
people who starved to death during his 1958-61 Great Leap Forward to
have died. He really thought that his bizarre policies would
immediately enable China to outstrip the Soviet Union and even the
United States in industrial power.
But there is no doubt that Hitler wanted the 6 million Jews, well
over a million Poles, 27 million Soviet citizens and possibly 2
million Yugoslav citizens that he slaughtered to die. In his last
hours of life, he lamented that he had been too merciful to the
German people whom he ruled and that he had not made a more thorough
job of slaughtering more of them.
Hitler enjoyed full power for only 12 years. Stalin ruled with full
power for a quarter of a century, more than twice as long. And Mao
misruled China for more than 27 years. But Hitler killed far more
people per year than either of his rivals for “worst villain” did.
And he was far more thorough in slaughtering his chosen targets.
Also, Hitler’s definitions of races and classes of people to be
denied the right to life were far more sweeping than either of his
rivals. Far more than even Stalin or Mao, Hitler scorned the very
concepts of love and mercy. His contempt for Christianity was almost
as great as his hatred of the Jews.
These chilling aspects of Hitler’s thought are widely overlooked or
ignored even now. But some of the most eminent leaders and scholars
of his own time recognized them very well.
The great German historian Friedrich Meinecke in his classic 1946
work “The German Catastrophe” described Hitler and Nazism as the
eruption of the daemonic into world history on a hitherto
unprecedented scale.
Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill called Hitler the
repository of the most malignant and corrosive hatreds ever to be
contained in a human breast.
And Schenk, a devout Czech democrat and Roman Catholic Christian who
had escaped Hitler’s reach, used to say of Lord Alan Bullock’s
classic biography of Hitler that it was “excellent, but flawed. It
failed to grasp the demonic dimensions of the man.”
Hitler certainly did not invent the modern concept of racial genocide.
He did not pioneer its use by the bureaucracy of a powerful modern
state. That dark distinction belonged to the Young Turk regime that
ran the Ottoman Empire through World War I. The Young Turks even
called their attempt to annihilate the Armenian people, their “Final
Solution of the Armenian Problem.”
But Hitler eagerly adopted and improved such pioneering work by
others. Even Stalin and Mao never applied on the same scale the
principles of sadism and torture which the Nazis, inspired by Hitler,
applied to their victims.
Churchill was well aware of the distinction. In confidential
conversations with some of his top advisers while serving as wartime
prime minister, he drew a distinction between the principles of
communism which, he felt, was doomed to collapse because it ran so
strongly in the face of human nature, and those of Nazism.
Nazism, Churchill believed, was a far more sinister and threatening
ideology because it did not deny basic human needs and emotions, but
catered to and magnified the darkest impulses among them. That was
why, in one of his classic speeches, he warned that, if Britain and
its allies lost the great conflict, the entire world could be plunged
“into a new dark age, made more sinister and, perhaps, more
protracted by … a perverted science.”
The dark architect of this astonishingly effective and thorough
assault on two and half thousand years of moral monotheistic
civilization in the Western world remains a strangely elusive figure,
despite the thousands of biographies and studies that have been done
of him. The more scholars attempt sophisticated or rational
explanations for his policies and strategies, the more they seem to
stumble before the obvious scale of the suffering he inflicted and
the hatreds he unleashed.
The intellectual Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil”
to describe the real nature of Nazi crimes. It was a term Hitler and
Churchill, for very different reasons, would both have rejected with
amused contempt. For Hitler did not want his evil to be banal.
A lifelong, passionate admirer of the grand operas of Richard Wagner,
whence he claimed much of his inspiration, he did his utmost to cast
his most outrageous deeds in a heroic, superhuman and garish light.
And he bequeathed this propensity for extraordinary artistic excess
to his entire movement.
Nazi storm troopers goose-stepped wearing thigh-high leather boots.
Nazi Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers were equipped with sirens to
terrify their victims before blasting them with high explosive bombs.
After the war was won, a monumental architecture was planned for
Berlin to obliterate all the centuries of human-scale experience that
had gone before. The ancient cathedrals and other Christian holy
places of Europe were to be dwarfed and humiliated into irrelevance.
Meinecke was right. Hitler’s meteoric rise to the status of conqueror
of entire continents is a cautionary tale for the ages on how easily
scores of millions of human beings can have their emotions
manipulated and distorted to carry out the most horrendous of crimes.
All too many other outrages recorded in the same century shows that
this mass propensity toward the taking of life and the inflicting of
torments on millions of fellow human beings is not some unique moral
failing of the German people. It is common to all humanity.
This is why Hitler, far more even than Stalin, or Mao, or any of the
other monstrous figures of the 20th century, serves to
single-handedly embody and exemplify the crimes of them all. He
showed what all of humanity could be capable of if the hard-won moral
wisdom of the great religious traditions, or the careful balances of
stable political systems, were lost.
He showed what happened when all the restraints on the darkest human
emotions were swept away and the beasts within were unleashed. No
pretense at banality can undo the memory of that loss of innocence.
To deny him his contemptible stature would be a further dishonor to
the tens of millions he killed without regret or remorse. Bush, Putin
and the other world leaders were right to make this 60th anniversary
of VE-Day such a special occasion. Hitler remains Villain No. 1: No
one else comes close.