Mistaken Identity?

In a famous Commentary article that appeared that year, the political journalist Milton Himmelfarb had argued, as the title of the article declared: “No Hitler, No Holocaust.” In other words, without Hitler an anti-Semitic regime might have come to power in Germany in the 1930s just as such regimes had come to power in nations throughout the world in the past millennia. But just as those regimes had oppressed Jews, instigated pogroms, they hadn’t sought to exterminate them utterly and systematically the way Hitler drove the Nazis and the rest of occupied Europe that collaborated to do so. Extermination was Hitler’s personal and inexorable goal. The Nazi or anti-Semitic regime that came to power—assuming it did after he’d been assassinated—would have likely oppressed the Jews, Himmelfarb argued, but it wouldn’t necessarily have turned the entire continent of Europe into an industrialized killing machine the way Hitler’s unshakable, single-minded drive and determination to exterminate the Jews made the Holocaust Hitler’s act of will, his highest priority, higher, some believed than winning the war. It was the reason the historian Lucy Dawidowicz titled her powerful history of the Hitler regime The War Against the Jews.

This was known as the Intentionalist position. No Hitler, no Holocaust.

On the other hand there was the argument that abstract forces—the pre-Hitler German ideology of “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” the 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism, the German hatred of Jewish-inspired Modernism, the need to make room for German occupants of conquered territories in Poland and Russia by killing the Jewish inhabitants made the Jews expendable—made turning them into ashes the most efficient and economical way of disposing making room for Lebensraum. This is known as the Functionalist position.

I had a feeling the answer to the JDO question—why not assassinate Hitler in Munich?—depended in large measure on the question of how much could have been known about Hitler’s intentions. How much was known about him in the years before he came to power? It was one of the factors that led me to focus my research—I was still thinking about a novel, not the nonfiction account of Hitler controversies my book became—on the contemporary journalism about Hitler, the Munich Hitler, Hitler in his adopted hometown, evil in embryo, the Munich Hitler that had been lost in the focus on the Holocaust Hitler, the Berlin Hitler.

A Hitler that had almost been forgotten by history, obscured by the night and fog. A Hitler that could be found more often in footnotes in larger histories that glossed over the pre-Berlin period. In the memoirs of reporters who covered the Hitler movement in Munich for the Western press. Biographers—and the new breed of psycho-biographers—tended to focus on the apocryphal and often fraudulent legends of his childhood, seeking to find there some Original Trauma (usually the fault of an early encounter with a Jew or a woman or a Jewish prostitute or the like, blame-it-on-the-victim biography).

But I was especially intrigued by the footnotes referring to the investigative work of the anti-Hitler journalists in the 1920s, particularly those of the Munich Post, the anti-Hitler Social Democratic newspaper that had dug up damaging and scandalous scoops on Hitler and what they pointedly called “The Hitler Party.”

Eventually I went to Munich and located, in a basement archive, crumbling copies of their daily paper with its daily reports of Nazi attacks on the opposition. (One thing you learn reading the old Munich newspapers is how important a role political murder plays. The daily toll the Post recorded of “Brown murders” as they called the Brownshirt death squad crimes, the physical criminality of the Nazi party, and the blatant assassination of political opponents is often neglected in explaining Hitler’s rise. One sees too much reliance on superficially more “sophisticated” theories of charisma and propaganda artistry. Hitler slaughtered his way to power just as he slaughtered his way out of it.)

The Munich Post was like a dark grimoire of attacks, beatings, Nazi sexual scandals (the Geli Raubal affair), homosexual blackmail plots (the Röhm letters), financial skullduggery, lying Nazi history (the “stab in the back” myth), accompanied by brilliant satiric attacks on Nazi party members and Hitler himself, lots of lampoons and ridicule of Hitler. I decided eventually to write a nonfiction book in large part because I wanted to rescue these reporter heroes who drove Hitler crazy. (He called the Post the “Poison Kitchen” because it was always “cooking up slanders” against him, “slanders” almost always true.)

But in terms of the question behind the question the JDO asked—how much could people know back then?—the most important story I discovered in the Post archives is one that had been tragically neglected by the world at the time and by historians later: On December 9, 1931, the Munich Post published a secret Nazi party document—the party’s plan to dispose of the Jews after it came to power, a plan that contains what is the first known usage of the phrase “Final Solution.”

People could have known if they’d read the papers. Hitler tried to hide the death camps from the world’s view, but his intentions weren’t hidden in his rise to power.

But there was another even more contemporary question my dialogue with the JDO guys raised. A question that has to do with Hitler and has to do with the state of Israel and has to do with a nuclear-capable state in the region whose leaders make threats to eliminate the 5 million Jews of Israel in a second Holocaust (though they deny the first). They have not hidden their intentions. They are close to the means for accomplishing them. Doing in an instant what it took Hitler six years to accomplish.

Let me ask readers of Tablet two questions: What would you do, knowing what we know about Hitler in, say, Munich in 1931: Would there be grounds for an “extrajudicial killing”? Second question: Does it bear any relation to the dilemma the state of Israel faces, deciding what to do vis-à-vis Iran in the next few years? They’ve made their exterminationist wish plain. Emil Fackenheim has said we are commanded “not to give any posthumous victories to Hitler.”

I don’t have the answers, and I’m not saying the JDO did or does. But they made me think about the questions in a more immediate way, flaming dogs or not.

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars and a forthcoming book on the new age of nuclear war, is a columnist for Slate. He lives in New York.

Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist for Slate, is the author, among other books, of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.