Hitler Studies: A Field of Amateurs
Abstract
Uno de los más grandes misterios del siglo debe ser el fallo de historiadores profesionales y biógrafos, después de más de medio siglo transcurrido desde los hechos, para mostrarse tanto interés en explicarlo. El hecho de que Hitler continúe siendo un misterio, sin embargo, no es un hecho como otros, para ser registrado como un dato de la historia y dejado a un lado. Un misterio, por definición, es la aparición de algo sorprendente e inesperado que reclama una explicación. Pero, ¿no es uno de los propósitos de la historia (de hecho, la principal función de los historiadores) explicar hechos históricos y hacerlos comprensibles? Los historiadores profesionales han rechazado ensuciarse sus manos investigando los muchos misterios de la vida y carrera de Hitler, dedicándose a entrevistar a testigos. Los historiadores no sólo han fallado sino que han sido acusados por colegas de evadir su deber en la transformación de los hechos de la vida y carrera de Hitler en una narración comprensible y coherente.
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HAOL, Núm. 10 (Primavera, 2006), 157-168 ISSN 1696-2060
© Historia Actual Online 2006 157
HITLER STUDIES: A FIELD OF AMATEURS
Ben Novak
City University of Bratislava, Slovak Republic. E-mail: trevrizent@gmail.com
Recibido: 10 Noviembre 2005 / Revisado: 14 Diciembre 2005 / Aceptado: 9 Enero 2006 / Publicación Online: 15 Junio 2006
Resumen: One of the greatest mysteries of the
century must be the failure of professional
historians and biographers, for more than half a
century after the event, to show much interest in
actually explaining it. The fact that Hitler
continues to be a mystery, however, is not a fact
like other facts, to be recorded as a datum of
history and passed over. A mystery, by
definition, is the appearance of something
surprising or unexpected that fairly calls out for
an explanation. But, is it not one of the purposes
of history (indeed, the major function of
historians) to explain historical events and to
make them understandable? Professional
historians have consistently refused to get their
hands dirty investigating the many mysteries of
Hitler's life and career by going into the field to
interview witnesses. Historians have not only
failed, but have been charged by fellow
historians with "evading," their duty to weave
the facts of Hitler's life and career into a
coherent and comprehensible narrative.
Palabras Clave: biography, Germany,
historians, historiography, Hitler, nazism.
______________________
f the career of Adolf Hitler is one of the
most catastrophic events of the entire
twentieth century, including in its wake the
most destructive war as well as the greatest
crimes against humanity in human history, then
one of the greatest mysteries of the century must
be the failure of professional historians and
biographers, for more than half a century after
the event, to show much interest in actually
explaining it.
Imagine, for example, the U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) waiting until some time
after the year 2060 before interviewing
witnesses and commencing its investigation of
Osama bin Laden to discover how he was able
to plan and carry out the attack on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon that occurred on
September 11, 2001. Imagine further that in the
intervening years all the work of interviewing
witnesses and gathering the testimony, upon
which subsequent investigators would have to
rely if the whole story were ever to be told, was
left to amateurs. Imagine next that FBI officials
were loathe to explain the event, insisting that it
was the "product of conditions", describing it in
"metaphors", and insisting on giving abstract
causes for it that were devoid of concrete facts
as well as inherently implausible. Finally,
imagine that Osama bin Laden became a man of
mystery and intense public fascination—his
face, even in caricature, known by almost every
school child on the planet; his birthday, like the
birthday of Hitler (the dreaded 4/20) known by
almost every high school student; the high and
low points of his life the subject of docu-dramas
on prime time television and countless popular
books, articles, novels, plays, and movies.
Imagine an entire academic industry grown up
to insist on the mystery and inexplicability of
the man.
Impossible to imagine? Of course. But consider
the attitude of professional historians to the case
of Adolf Hitler, and the analogy may not seem
as far-fetched as one might think.
Indeed, I intend to argue that it is a fair analogy
to describe the failure of historians to investigate
the case of Adolf Hitler, the man behind the
most catastrophic events of the twentieth
century.
Of course, this would not be a fair analogy for
most historical events. Historians are not the
FBI, and they do not normally investigate
current events, or even recent events. There are
several reasons for this.
The first and most important one is that rarely
are the documents available until long after the
event. In the case of major political leaders and
I
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
158
events, governments often keep documents
sealed for fifty years or longer. Thus historians
do not usually waste their time writing
"histories" when they know that the most
important information bearing on what
happened is not available. Second, history is an
ongoing process that tends to change the
understanding of events as they later develop
and come to fruition. Often events that seemed
unimportant at the time acquire greater
significance with the passage of time; decisions
that seemed wise or foolish in the short run are
sometimes seen to have been the height of folly
or wisdom in the long run. Historians quite
rightly do not wish to describe and explain
events until they are fully played out. Thus
historians usually wait until many decades after
an event to describe both its genesis and its
consequences.
In the case of Hitler, however, the analogy is
pertinent because all of these preconditions were
fulfilled by 1945 or, at the latest, by 1946. First,
the eruption of Hitler and the Nazis came to a
crushing end amid the ruins of the Third Reich.
After the suicide of Hitler and the unconditional
surrender of Germany, there was nothing more
of Nazism to be developed or played out, except
perhaps the trial of its leaders as war criminals
and the judgment at Nuremberg, which was
rendered by the end of 1946. After that, Nazism
was as dead as a doornail and Hitler was nothing
but "history". Second, almost all of the
documents and records of the Third Reich and
the National Socialist Party were captured intact
by the Allies, and, in a virtually unprecedented
action, opened up to historians immediately after
the war. Finally, the Nuremberg trials sealed the
judgment of history on these events; there would
be no re-interpretation. There were, therefore, no
good reasons for historians not to begin writing
a coherent biography of Hitler immediately after
the war.
In addition, there were several very strong
reasons for historians to do so. First, public
interest in and, indeed, fascination with, the
strange and mysterious career of Adolf Hitler
and the bizarre events of the Third Reich has
been high, not only in Germany but among the
publics of the victorious Allies as well. Gordon
A. Craig notes that as early as 1950, "appalled
by the flood of books and articles about National
Socialism that was pouring from the printing
presses, a German journalist wrote, 'He has
played a trick on us. This Hitler, I think he'll
remain with us until the end of our lives'"1 . In
the 1960's, a new wave of interest in Hitler
appeared as the first generation born after World
War II matured. In Germany, this was called the
"Hitler Welle ", or "Hitler Wave". Normally a
"wave" has a crest and a trough; however, as
John Lukacs observed thirty years later in 1997,
the "trough has not yet appeared"2 . Indeed, the
"wave" continues to grow. In 1975, it was
reported that more than 50,000 serious books
and scholarly articles had already been
published, and bibliographers were complaining
that their numbers were so high that it was
becoming impossible to keep track of them. By
1995, it was reported that this number had
increased by 70,000, to more than 120,000. To
get some idea of the enormity of this research,
that computes to more than twenty-four
scholarly books and articles on Hitler and
Nazism published every working day for twenty
years—and the number is growing
exponentially. Thus public interest in the
mystery of Hitler continues to grow, with no end
in sight.
Second, there were numerous witnesses
available to be interviewed whose testimony
would be vital to understanding solving the
mystery. Historians were under a duty to track
down these witnesses, interview them, and
preserve their testimony before they died.
Third, and most importantly, Adolf Hitler was,
and is still, an unsolved mystery. Biographer
Robert Payne calls the rise of Hitler "most
crucial and mystifying event of our century"3 ,
while Eberhard Jäckel calls it "the seminal
question of the twentieth century"4 . Percy Ernst
Schramm speaks for all historians when he
writes: "By virtue of his personality, his ideas,
and the fact that he misled millions, Hitler poses
an historical problem of the first magnitude"5 .
H. R. Trevor-Roper writes that, despite the
passage of half a century, "Hitler remains a
frightening mystery"6 .
The fact that Hitler continues to be a mystery,
however, is not a fact like other facts, to be
recorded as a datum of history and passed over.
A mystery, by definition, is the appearance of
something surprising or unexpected that fairly
calls out for an explanation. But, is it not one of
the purposes of history—indeed, the major
function of historians—to explain historical
events and to make them understandable? Are
historical problems of the "first magnitude" to
be simply declared "inexplicable?" Is Hitler to
live on as history's greatest mystery—the most
Ben Novak Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs
© Historia Actual Online 2006 159
unique and inexplicable man who ever lived? If
the answer to these questions is "no", then we
must inquire into the responsibility of historians
as to why the mystery remains.
In light of these questions, what are the duties of
professional historians? Theodor Mommsen
long ago set out criteria for what is minimally
expected of historians: "History", he said, "is
nothing but the distinct knowledge of actual
happenings, consisting on the one hand of the
discovery and examination of the available
testimony, and on the other of the weaving of
this testimony into a narrative in accordance
with one's understanding of the men who
shaped the events and the conditions that
prevailed"7 . Thus historians have two minimal
duties: 1) to discover and examine the available
testimony; and 2) to weave it into a coherent
narrative.
In regard to the rise of Hitler, historians have
failed this definition on both counts. On the first
count, professional historians have consistently
refused to get their hands dirty investigating the
many mysteries of Hitler's life and career by
going into the field to interview witnesses. Were
it not for a handful of amateurs who ventured to
go where the "angels" of the historical
profession feared to tread, we would not have
many of the materials upon which historians are
now relying to solve the mystery.
On the second count, historians have not only
failed, but have been charged by fellow
historians with "evading," their duty to weave
the facts of Hitler's life and career into a
coherent and comprehensible narrative. Instead,
Hitler remains an unexplained mystery, an
"unperson," unique in all human history,
declared to be "inexplicable."
The reason for the vast and rising public and
scholarly interest in Hitler, I submit, is simple:
he continues to be a mystery. The attraction
involved in such a mystery was once described
by Albert Einstein, who said (in another context
but nonetheless applicable here): "The most
beautiful thing we can experience is a mystery".
Hitler become beautiful? This is a terrifying
thought. But the fact is that the most horrible
things—from Frankenstein to Dracula to
Godzilla to the Slime Monster—can become
fascinating and attractive when wrapped in
mystery. Peter Wyden has written of the
increasing public fascination with Hitler as the
"Hitler virus"8 . The danger, as Saul Friedländer
warns, is that such continued fascination may
result in an "inversion of signs and the
beginning of a new discourse about Evil"9 .
It is the purpose of this article to discuss the
responsibility of historians for the continuing
mystery of Hitler and the corresponding
fascination it attracts, in terms of the two duties
that Mommsen laid upon them: 1) the duty to
investigate and gather the facts necessary to
solve the mystery; and 2) the duty to weave the
facts into a coherent narrative.
1. THE FAILURE OF HISTORIANS TO
INVESTIGATE
The most fundamental and difficult question in
the field of Hitler studies is the question of how
this uneducated high-school dropout and bum
from the streets of Vienna ever came to be one
of the most outstanding orators and political
organizers in German if not all modern history.
Strangely, the professional historians have
avoided this question as though it were a case of
AIDS. Surely, unless there were some miracle in
Hitler's life at the age of thirty when he attended
his first political meeting10 , any historian worth
his salt would be looking into this man's early
life to find the secret of his success at gaining
power. Yet, instead of going into the field to
find and interview every person who ever knew
the young Hitler, as any good private detective
would have done, the professional historians sat
at their desks for fifty years, leaving all of the
tracking down and interviewing of witnesses to
amateur historians. Fortunately, there were
several amateurs who stepped in to fill the gap,
and it is to them that we owe most of everything
that we know of the young Hitler other than
what this most secretive of men chose to tell.
The first of these was Franz Jetzinger, author
Hitlers Jugend: Phantasien, Lügen, und die
Wahrheit (1956)11 . Jetzinger was not a historian
but a Social Democratic politician who served as
a deputy in the Provincial Assembly of Upper
Austria for fifteen years before the Second
World War. After the war he secured a post as
librarian of the provincial archives in Linz.
Jetzinger hated Hitler with a passion, and in
1946 began searching for every document and
interviewing every witness he could locate in
connection with Hitler's youth. It is to Jetzinger
that we owe much of our knowledge of the
documents of Hitler's family, his ancestors, his
father's change of name, and where the family
lived.
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
160
Jetzinger's interviews of those who had known
Hitler and his family have also proved
invaluable, perhaps the most important of which
was his discovery of Hitler's only childhood
friend, August Kubizek, whom Jetzinger
located, interviewed, and goaded into writing a
much longer set of his own memoirs. The latter
were published in 1953 as Adolf Hitler, mein
Jugendfreund12 , and constitute the only
testimony we have from anyone who knew
Hitler as a youth.
Kubizek's memoirs are important as the first and
only insight into, as H. R. Trevor-Roper writes
in the Introduction to Kubizek's memoirs, the
incipient character of the man who "without any
other natural advantage besides his own
personality, became the most powerful and
terrible tyrant and conqueror of modern
history"13 . It was only through the indefatigable
work of Jetzinger, however, that this witness
was discovered and his testimony obtained
before he died. If if it had been left to the
professional historians, we would never have
known of Kubizek, and his memoirs might
never have been written and published.
The next amateur to do what professional
historians ought to have done was Werner
Maser. Maser was a simple soldier during the
War who spent time in both American and
Russian prisoner of war camps and, upon his
release, studied in East Berlin. Emigrating to the
West in 1952, he worked first as a journalist
before realizing that the investigation of Hitler
was being completely ignored by the
professional historians. He set out to fill the
vacuum.
"Maser's main achievement", writes John
Lukacs, "was the unearthing of large quantities
of data through his tireless research"14 . Much of
this data came from Maser's relentless efforts to
track down the testimony of witnesses who
knew Hitler, and his determination to collect and
preserve their testimony before they died.
Between 1965 and 1973, he produced four huge
volumes on the history of the National Socialist
party and Hitler's early career, followed by a
book on Mein Kampf , a biography of Hitler, and
a book on Hitler's papers and documents15 .
Though Maser was clearly carrying out the first
duty of a historian according to Theodor
Mommsen, his work was not appreciated by
professional historians. Rather, as Lukacs notes,
he was excluded from "the higher circle of
German academic historians"16 (One is
reminded of the attitude of professional police
forces toward private detectives in mystery
novels: their results in solving cases are
grudgingly recognized, but the detectives
themselves are looked down upon).
To give some idea of the importance of both
Jetzinger and Maser, it is worth noting how
much their work is relied upon by professionals.
In Ian Kershaw's recent biography, Hitler:
Hubris 1889-1936, for example, ninety of the
164 footnotes to the chapter on Hitler's youth
(Chapter I) cite Jetzinger, Maser, or Kubizek—
and almost all of these are for factual
information—while of the remaining seventy-
four footnotes, twenty-seven cite to Hitler
himself (i.e., Mein Kampf ), or are largely
interpretational. Thus, almost everything we
know of the facts of Hitler's early life, except
what Hitler himself chooses to tell us, comes
from these amateurs who did the primary
research, and gathered the testimony while the
witnesses were alive.
John Toland, author of Adolf Hitler (New York,
Doubleday, 1976), is the next amateur to begin
doing what the professionals should have done.
Toland began researching his biography of
Hitler in the 1960s by visiting every place Hitler
had ever lived and talking to people who knew
him. Toland located over 250 witnesses, and
was amazed to find that many of them had never
been interviewed by a professional historian17 .
Perhaps the most damning evidence of the
failure of professional historians to do primary
research, however, is Brigitta Hamann, author of
Hitler's Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators
(1996)18 . Hamann is a historian of the nineteenth
century who left her normal field because of the
glaring failure of historians to check their
sources. She was the first scholar to evaluate the
mass of conflicting testimonies from the Vienna
period of Hitler's life.
During the 1930s and later, many highly
questionable sources came forward with exposés
about Hitler containing much sensational and
contradictory information. Professional
historians were in the habit of uncritically
roaming through these materials to quote
whatever random piece of information fit their
theory. Until Hamann, it rarely occurred to
professional historians to actually study the
materials evaluate their credibility, to correct
inaccuracies, or resolve contradictions.
Ben Novak Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs
© Historia Actual Online 2006 161
Hamann's work provides a healthy and
necessary corrective to the works of many
professional historians.
In conducting her research, Hamann also noted
the names of many people whose existence had
long been known to historians, but who had
never been interviewed. One such man, for
example, roomed with Hitler in Munich in 1913-
14. Of course, by the time Hamann did her
research, this man was dead, and she could only
interview his surviving relatives. But the point is
that few professional historians until Hamann—
half a century after Hitler's death—did what one
would expect them to do, namely, locate,
interview, check, and evaluate the sources.
Thus, the field of Hitler studies is considerably
poorer because of the failure of professional
historians to carry out their first duty, that of
collecting and preserving the evidence. Further,
they waited for historians from outside the field
to even begin the most elementary evaluation of
sources. When one hears professional historians
claiming that Hitler is "inexplicable" because of
the lack of evidence19 , one should ask: what did
professional historians do to locate the witnesses
and to gather their testimony while they were
still alive? Why did they uncritically accept
sensational testimony without performing the
most elementary evaluation of its accuracy,
reliability and credibility? Unfortunately, the
field of Hitler studies has been a "field for
amateurs".
2. EVADING THE HISTORICAL
PROBLEM OF HITLER
The charge of evasion is not a new one. In fact,
it was first raised as early as 1953 by the man
who is often called the "Dean of Hitler Studies",
H. R. Trevor-Roper. Eight years after Hitler's
death, Trevor-Roper published an essay entitled
"The Mind of Adolf Hitler," in which he
accused historians of "evading" the two
unanswered questions that constitute "the
problem with Hitler". Those two unanswered
questions are: 1) Who was this man? and 2)
How did he do it? In the first paragraph, Trevor-
Roper starkly charges historians with evading
both:
"Who was Hitler? The history of his political
career is abundantly documented and we cannot
escape from its terrible effects. A whole
generation may well be named in history after
him and we shall speak of the Age of Hitler as
we speak of the Age of Napoleon or the Age of
Charlemagne. And yet, for all the harsh
obviousness of its imprint on the world, how
elusive his character remains! What he did is
clear; every detail of his political activity is
now—thanks to a seizure and exploitation of
documents unparalleled in history—historically
established; his daily life and personal behavior
have been examined and exposed. But still,
when asked not what he did but how he did it, or
rather how he was able to do it, historians evade
the question, sliding away behind implausible
answers"20 (Emphases added).
Trevor-Roper then goes on to offer a list of the
implausible theories given by historians, which
have changed little in half a century:
"To the Marxists—most old-fashioned of all—
he was simply a pawn, the creature of a dying
capitalism in its last stages. Others have seen
him as a charlatan profiting by a series of
accidents, a consummate actor and hypocrite, a
sly, cheating peasant, or a hypnotist who
seduced the wits of men by a sorcerer's charms.
Even sir Lewis Namier endorses an account of
him given by a disgusted German official as a
mere illiterate, illogical, unsystematic bluffer
and smatterer. Even Mr. Bullock seems content
to regard him as a diabolical adventurer
animated solely by an unlimited lust for power".
Trevor-Roper insists that these are not
explanations but evasions—negative labels that
explain nothing. In dismay he asks, "Could a
mere adventurer, a shifty, scatterbrained
charlatan, have done what Hitler did, who,
starting from nothing…nearly conquered the
whole world?" But in answer to his question,
Trevor-Roper is met only by the silence of
statues: "So we ask", writes Trevor-Roper, "but
we seldom receive an answer: the historians
have turned away, and, (he adds, sardonically),
like antique heroes, we only know that we have
been talking with the immortals from the fact
that they are no longer there". In other words, in
the face of Hitler, like a Medusa, historians have
turned to stone.
After Trevor-Roper's charge of evasion, one
might have expected an avalanche of articles
contesting his charges, and a multitude of new
biographies of Hitler to come from the pens of
professional historians in order to prove him
wrong. Instead, one was met with, as Trevor-
Roper suggested, the "silence of statues". One
searches in vain for an article denying the
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
162
charge, and equally in vain to find a professional
historian writing a coherent biography of Hitler
that truly addresses the questions Trevor-Roper
raised.
A review of the major biographies published in
the first half century after Hitler's death amply
confirms Trevor-Roper's charge21 . Prior to 1953,
there were only two postwar biographies of
Hitler that could be called major, well-
researched works. The first of these was Alan
Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published
in 1952, the year before Trevor-Roper's
accusation—and, indeed, the work that
provoked Trevor-Roper to make it. The second
was Walter Görlitz' and Herbert A. Quint's
Adolf Hitler: eine Biographie, also published in
1952. Görlitz and Quint's biography was as
much on Trevor-Roper's mind as Bulllock's.
In the next forty-five years after Trevor-Roper
made his charges against professional historians,
there have been only three other major
biographies of Hitler that are worthy of mention
as new, significant, in-depth, scholarly, well-
researched, and complete attempts to write a
narrative history of this man. These are: 1)
William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich, published in 1960; 2) Joachim
Fest's Hitler, published in 1973; and 3) John
Toland's, Adolf Hitler, published in 1976. What
is astonishing about this list is that of these five
biographies (including Bullock and Gorlitz and
Quint), only one of their authors (Bullock) is, or
was at the time of writing, a professional
historian.
For a long time after World War II, the only
major biography written by and for Germans
was Görlitz' and Quint's Adolf Hitler: Eine
Biographie. Görlitz and Quint, however, were
simply two amateur historians who wrote under
pseudonyms. Görlitz' true name was Otto Julius
Frauendorf, while Quint's was Richard Freiherr
v. Frankenberg. Both were Pomeranian
conservatives whose only qualification was that
their hobby was military history. Frauendorf and
von Frankenberg jumped into a field vacated by
the professionals to provide a young generation
of Germans coming of age after the war with the
only postwar biography of the man who was
responsible for the destruction they saw all
around them. Frauendorf later went on to a
successful career in journalism. One might ask:
Where were all the academic historians who
occupy prestigious chairs of history at
universities? The answer is: they were sitting at
their desks drawing very good salaries and
dreaming of an "inexplicable" Hitler who would
absolve them of their obligation to write history.
The first major biography of Hitler to appear
after Trevor-Roper made his charge of evasion
against professional historians was William A.
Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Shirer, too, was not a professional historian;
rather, like Frauendorf, he was a journalist-
turned-amateur-historian. Shirer had been an
American correspondent in Berlin in the 1930s
covering Hitler after he came into power. In
1943, he published the memoirs of his
experiences as Berlin Diary: The Journal of a
Foreign Correspondent 1934-194122 .
In the Preface of The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich Shirer records his reasons for becoming
an amateur historian. A review of them amply
confirms the charge of "evasion" made by
Trevor-Roper. It is worth quoting Shirer at
length for the light he sheds on the attitudes of
the professional historians he encountered when
he began his biography.
"Though I lived and worked in the Third Reich
[Shirer explains] during the first half of its brief
life, watching at first hand Adolf Hitler
consolidate his power…this personal experience
would not have led me to attempt this book had
there not occurred at the end of World War II an
event unique in history. This was the capture of
the most confidential archives of the German
government and all its branches. . . the National
Socialist Party and Heinrich Himmler's secret
police. Never before, I believe, has such a rich
treasure fallen into the hands of contemporary
historians"23 .
Yet never, Shirer writes, had such a "rich
treasure" been so completely ignored by
professional historians. Had they researched the
documents and written scholarly biographies
explaining the times and events, Shirer would
never have attempted to compete with them, and
rested content on his journalistic memoirs. But
where such a "rich treasure" was being
positively shunned by the professional
historians, Shirer explains, it felt right to the
journalist in him to walk where the angels of the
historical profession feared to tread, and to tell
the story as he saw it.
Shirer also recorded the arguments made by
professionals to discourage him from writing a
biography of Hitler—arguments that surprised
Ben Novak Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs
© Historia Actual Online 2006 163
Shirer as much as they would have surprised
Theodor Monmsen. Shirer portrays the
crustiness of professional historians by detailing
the rationalizations they employed to argue
against writing a biography of Hitler. He refers
first to those professionals who advised him that
this unique cache of documents and materials
should be not examined at all, but "left to a later
generation of writers". "Most historians", they
argued to him, "waited fifty years, or a hundred,
or more, before attempting to write an account
of a country, an empire, or an era".
"But", Shirer asks in reply, "was this not
principally because it took that long for the
pertinent documents to come to light and furnish
them with the authentic materials they needed?"
In the case of Hitler, the materials were already
present and were begging to be studied—but the
professional historians insisted that no attempt
should be made to weave them into a historical
narrative.
Next, Shirer felt that he had to defend himself
against those professionals who insisted that
historians had to wait decades before writing in
order to gain "perspective". To this objection he
replies, "And though perspective was gained,
was not something lost because the authors
necessarily lacked a personal acquaintance with
the life and atmosphere of the times and with the
historical figures about which they wrote?" But
the professional historians were unconvinced
and, like Trevor-Roper's "antique heroes",
turned away.
Finally, against all the professionals Shirer
quotes one of the first and greatest historians,
Thucydides, who prefaced his History of the
Peloponnesian War, with this clinching
justification for writing history fresh: "I lived
through the whole war". Thucydides writes,
"being of an age to comprehend events and
giving my full attention to them in order to
know the exact truth about them".
Modern historians, Shirer implies, were either
not "of an age to comprehend events", or did not
want to "know the exact truth about them."
In any event, Shirer argues, the Third Reich is a
"unique case", and he, for one, though not a
professional historian, would not wait "fifty
years, or a hundred, or more", to research and
write history about a time he had personally
lived through and experienced, especially when
"such incomparable sources" were available.
Shirer's book was published in 1960 and was
received by both the public and reviewers in the
United States like rain after a drought. It was a
great success and was rapidly translated and
published with great fanfare to a European
public equally thirsty for historical
understanding. Shirer's book also coincided
with the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann,
which sparked an even greater interest in the
mystery of Hitler and the Nazi period. The
1960's became known as the beginning of the
"Hitler Welle" or "Hitler Wave", a period of
intense public fascination with Hitler, marked by
a avalanche of sensational biographies by non-
historians, and popular books, articles, plays,
television programs, films, and documentaries
on the Nazi period.
Nonetheless, Shirer's narrative, like Maser's
research, was not warmly received by academic
historians. Shirer's view was that Hitler was just
another world conqueror in the same vein as
Caesar or Napoleon. While the professionals
disagreed with this assessment, they did not act
to provide any new of better narrative. Rather,
professional historians were content to offer
little but specialized studies of aspects of
Hitler's career and the Nazi period. The only
two notable exceptions were Helmut Heiber's
Adolf Hitler: Eine Biographie (1960), which
offered "insightful passages," but little more
than the same "conventional"24 explanations of
Hitler that Trevor-Roper had criticized as
evasions; and Ernst Deuerlein's Hitler: eine
politische Biographie (1960), which, although
still considered to be "the best short Hitler
biography"25 , was too short to weave together
any new, comprehensive narrative into the facts.
By the end of the 1960s, therefore, the public
was all but clamoring for a comprehensive,
scholarly biography by a professional historian.
But they were not to get it. Instead, what they
got what was the most "definitive" biography of
Hitler, Joachim Fest's Hitler, published in 1973.
But this also, like Shirer's work thirteen years
before, was not written by an academic
historian. Fest began his career as a radio and
television reporter who went on to became one
of Germany's leading journalists. At the time of
writing Hitler, he was a member of the editorial
board of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Fest's biography was a huge success, and Fest
went on to become one of Germany's leading
historians. But he broke into the "club" by doing
what the academics and practicing professionals
had failed to do. Nor did Fest's biography solve
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
164
the mystery of Hitler or meet Mommsen's
criterion of a narrative. Instead, Fest evaded the
problem by simply placing Hitler outside of
history ("History records no phenomenon like
him"26 ), and declaring him to be an "unperson",
whose personality "scarcely arouses our
interest"27 .
Two years later, surveying the attempts of
historians to come to grips with this "unperson",
Fritz Stern, a German professor of literature,
sadly concluded that historians were simply
baffled.
"As we go down the list of the more important
biographers…we find each more meticulous
than his predecessor in the sifting of fact from
fiction, of documented evidence from inference
and interpretation…Yet there is a point at which
it is apt to defeat its own purpose, which I take
to be an understanding of history. A montage of
historical minutiae…does not necessarily lead to
better insight. More details often entail less
sense. . . The facts of the case—chief among
them the metamorphosis of the Nobody from
Vienna into the Leader of Greater Germany—
are so extraordinary that when they are 'left to
tell their own story' they hardly make any sense
at all"28 (Emphasis added).
Thus by 1975, thirty years after Hitler's death, it
was still the considered judgment of scholars
that historians had failed to weave the facts into
a coherent narrative. But not even Stern's
judgment provoked professional historians into
action. The next major biography, John Toland's
Adolf Hitler (1976)29 , not by a professional
historian, either.
Toland was a budding playwright, short-story
author, and novelist who fell into writing history
at the age of forty-five by accident—or by
"fate," as he tells in his autobiography,
{captured} by History: One Man's Vision of Our
Tumultuous Century (1997)30 . Toland admits
from the beginning that he had no story line with
which to tie together the facts of Hitler's life
into a narrative. "My book has no thesis," he
writes; except that "Hitler was far more complex
and contradictory than I had imagined"31 .
Toland, therefore, merely piles fact upon fact
but at least admits that, as Fritz Stern had said,
they "hardly make any sense at all".
By the end of the 1970s, therefore, more than a
third of a century after Hitler's death, that there
were only five major scholarly biographies of
Hitler—Bullock's, Görlitz and Quint's, Shirer's,
Fest's, and Toland's—only one of which, Alan
Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952),
was written by a professional historian. After
Bullock, professional and academic historians
merely confirmed Trevor-Roper's charge: they
continued to evade the issue, leaving the field to
amateurs.
As a result, the field of Hitler studies became
littered with dozens of sensational and
amateurish, as well as hack-conventional
biographies of Hitler. Psychologists were having
a field day, with explanations of Hitler that
included everything from a goat biting his penis
to theories of monorchism and an over-
protective mother32 . But, in the absence of
historians doing their duty, the mystery only
intensified.
At about this time, another amateur historian
seized the opportunity to enter the field that
professional historians left vacant, and began
rooting through the documents, sometimes
coming up with well-researched, and at other
times presenting poorly researched, amateurish,
politicized, and highly controversial results. This
was David Irving, who, while not attempting a
new biography of Hitler, built a career on
showing that many professional historians had
not done their homework.
Word slowly began to percolate into the minds
of professional historians that something was
amiss. By the 1980s, professional historians
finally began to enter the field, not with
comprehensive biographies of Hitler, but with
"studies" of his personality and "footnotes" to
his character33 . But these only heightened the
mystery. A consciousness began dawning
among professional historians that the problem
with Hitler could no longer be swept under the
rug. Thus there broke out in Germany in the
mid-1980s one of the most remarkable debates
in the history of scholarship. This was the
"Historikerstreit"—a prolonged and bitter
debate among professional historians that flew
far beyond the normal orbit of academic journals
and landed in the popular media, inviting
amateur historians as well as the general public
to participate.
The gist of the debate, although not directly
mentioned, was Trevor-Roper's charge a third of
a century earlier that historians were "evading"
the problem of Hitler. This point was most
clearly made by Martin Broszat in 1987, when
Ben Novak Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs
© Historia Actual Online 2006 165
he charged that "the older generation of German
historians… very often resorted to writing about
a 'demonic' or 'diabolical' Hitler and the like as
a consequence of their inability to offer
historical explanations"34 . "In contrast with
this", Broszat insisted, "there has long been a
need for more rational explanation". Broszat
opposed what he called history by "metaphor",
arguing that such an evasive approach to history
tended to "impede further questioning rather
than furnish answers".
This, of course, was precisely what the
Englishman, Trevor-Roper, had argued a third
of a century earlier, in 1953. Nor was it an
entirely new claim in German scholarship. A
decade before, Karl Dietrich Bracher had
accused historians of a falsification of history in
relation to Hitler that he called "Ghenghis
Khanism". With such an attitude, Bracher
argued, how "difficult" it is to "understand and
explain the rise of a man from so narrow and
parochial an existence to a formidable figure on
whom depended a development of such
universally historical dimensions and
consequences"35 . The failure to properly
research and provide a coherent account of
Hitler had provoked a "civil war" among
historians.
The Historikerstreit went on for several years
and produced some remarkable characterizations
of professional historians—or at least the
dominant professional historians in Germany.
Foremost among these critics was Joachim Fest
who referred to the latter as "keepers of the seal"
who had "become the 'mandarins of myths."
Because of their attitudes, he charged, "Hitler
and National Socialism, despite years of study
and reflection, have remained more myth than
history"36 .
Essentially, the Historikerstreit boiled down the
soup of Hitler studies into two insoluble lumps.
One "lump" claimed that Hitler, the Nazis, the
Third Reich, and the Holocaust were unique in
all history, and could not be compared to, or
explained in terms of, any other previous human
experience. This lump also argued that Hitler
was so irrational and illogical that nothing that
he did could ever make sense or be explained.
The other "lump" claimed that "the simplest
rules that are in effect for every past have been
suspended"37 , and that while Hitler may have
been both mad and evil, nevertheless who he
was and what he did could be reduced to history
and made explainable to ordinary mortals. Thus,
to one "lump", Hitler sits astride history like a
supernatural, evil demon, defying rationality and
explanation; while the other "lump" argues that
Hitler was nothing but just one more, albeit
horrible, event in human history that can and
should be subject to explanation just like all
other events.
However much the Historikerstreit stirred up the
waters of academe, it nonetheless failed to
produce any major, newly researched, and
scholarly biography of Hitler. Thus in 1998,
when Ron Rosenbaum published his foray into
the world of Hitler Studies, Explaining Hitler:
The Search for the Origins of His Evil, he could
only report that: "The real search for Hitler—the
search for who he was, who he thought he was,
and why he did what he did—has been an
expedition into a realm far more inaccessible
than the rain-forest jungles of Argentina".
Rosenbaum describes the state of Hitler studies
as "a terra incognita where armies of scholars
clash in evidentiary darkness". The "evidentiary
darkness" to which Rosenbaum refers is
precisely the failure of professional historians to
document and preserve the sources and
testimony discussed in the first part of this
article. Theodor Mommsen is turning over in his
grave.
Thus we had to wait until 1998—fifty-three
years after the death of Hitler, forty-five years
after the first biography of Hitler by a
professional historian, twenty-two years after
the last major biography by a non-professional,
and twelve years after the beginning of the
Historikerstreit—for a second professional
historian to venture a newly researched
biography of Hitler. This was Ian Kershaw,
whose first volume, Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936,
was published in 1998, followed by the second
volume, Hitler: Nemesis 1936-1945 in 1999.
Unfortunately, however, this work turned out to
be a major disappointment. While excellently
researched (with 362 pages of footnotes) and
engagingly written, the author admits in the
Introduction that he is without a clue as to how
to answer the questions Trevor-Roper accused
historians of "evading". Kershaw, however, at
least acknowledges the problem:
"How do we explain how someone with so few
intellectual gifts and social attributes, someone
no more than an empty vessel outside his
political life, unapproachable and impenetrable
even for those in close company, incapable, it
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
166
seems of genuine friendship, without the
background that bred high office, without even
any experience of government before becoming
Reich Chancellor, could nevertheless have such
an immense historical impact, could make the
entire world hold its breath?"38 .
Rather than attempting answer this question,
however, Kershaw does exactly what Trevor-
Roper accused professional historians of doing:
he immediately evades it, asserting that it is
"falsely posed". Instead, Kershaw declares that
Hitler (in a famous phrase borrowed from
Winston Churchill), is "a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma"39 . Therefore,
Kershaw argues, there is no need to explain him.
To a professional historian, it seems, a mystery
is not something to be solved, uncovered,
revealed, or explained; it is simply another
datum, to be worked in with all the other facts,
and treated as though it, too, were a "fact".
Thus Kershaw's biography proceeds to tell not
the story of Hitler the man—which is what
biography is supposed to be—but only the story
of Hitler's power: "the character of his power—
the power of the Führer"40 (Kershaw's
emphasis). In other words, Kershaw treats Hitler
as nothing more than the effects he caused,
insisting mysteriously that there was no one
behind the effects. When Kershaw seeks to go
behind "the power of the Führer " to explain
who this man was and how he did it, he finds
nothing—only what he calls a "void" or a "black
hole." "There was no 'private life' for Hitler"41 ,
he insists. Kershaw fails not only to provide a
coherent narrative, but insists that the most
stupendous effects of the twentieth century were
all caused by "the little man who wasn't there".
What has been the result of the failure of
historians to weave a narrative of the facts of
Hitler's life and career, a duty that Theodor
Mommsen laid upon them as part of the essence
of their profession? It is that Adolf Hitler
continues to stand athwart the stream of history
as the most mysterious man who ever lived,
frustrating all efforts of the best and wisest
academicians of the age to explain him or to fit
the experience of the twentieth century into
narrative history.
Ron Rosenbaum was the first journalist to sense
a significant story in the failure of historians to
render a coherent account of Hitler. Rosenbaum
researched the literature and interviewed a
dozen of the most prominent scholars in the
field of Hitler Studies in order to document the
"scandal" (that's my word not Rosebaum's)
involved in the failure of historians to "explain
Hitler." In Explaining Hitler: The Search for the
Origins of His Evil (1997), Rosenbaum charges
that Hitler has simply "escaped explanation"
(Rosenbaum's emphasis). Rosenbaum writes
eloquently of his amazement at what he found to
be the state of Hitler studies:
"Is it conceivable, more than half a century after
Hitler's death, after all that's been written and
said, that we're still wandering in this trackless
wilderness, this garden of forking paths, with no
sight of our quarry? Or, rather, alas, with too
many quarries? The search for Hitler has
apprehended not one coherent, consensus image
of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers,
competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of
competing visions. Hitlers who might not
recognize each other well enough to say "Heil"
if they came face to face in Hell"42 .
Among professional historians, Rosenbaum
describes what he calls three "levels of despair"
induced by the failure to explain Hitler. The
most extreme level he calls the "revolt against
explanation itself"43 . Some historians seriously
hold that any attempt to explain Hitler is
"immoral." These historians insist that Hitler
must forever remain a mystery, and that history
must never attempt to explain him. Any
explanation is considered, reports Rosenbaum,
"dangerous, forbidden, a transgression of near
biblical proportions". Theodor Mommsen is
now doing cartwheels in his grave.
The second level of despair, which Rosenbaum
labels "moderate," is based on the inability of
historians to find any narrative into which Hitler
fits or any new theory to explain him. It is the
general consensus of historians that Hitler is
simply not explainable by "the systems of
explanation, historical and psychological, that
we use to explain ordinary human behavior"44 .
Thus it is considered "moderate" to
acknowledge the bankruptcy of imagination of
the historical profession in its failure to find any
narrative understandable to ordinary human
beings or any credible explanation of the most
stupendous events of the twentieth century.
Shortly after the rise of Hitler, Hermann Göring
boastfully predicted that "In later time the
historians will not know how to depict it. For the
first time in world history the historians will
conclude: that did not happen by the normal
Ben Novak Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs
© Historia Actual Online 2006 167
process"45 .
It seems to be the position of "moderate"
historians today that Göring was right.
Rosenbaum calls the third level of despair that
he found among professional historians
"evidentiary despair". This is the argument that,
while it is not impossible to explain Hitler "in
theory", it has become impossible because the
evidence has disappeared. In other words,
historians excuse their profession for its
collective failure to explain Hitler by arguing
that, while the possibility may once have
existed, it is no longer possible "because too
many crucial witnesses have died without giving
testimony", because "too much evidence was
not collected in time", or because "too many
memories have faded"46 . This brings us full
circle: the third level of despair not only admits
the truth of the second charge against
professional historians, the failure to weave the
facts into a coherent narrative, but also proves
the first charge, the failure to investigate and
preserve evidence.
CONCLUSION
Returning to the image with which this article
began, imagine that Osama bin Laden had been
killed during America's invasion of Afghanistan
in the fall of 2001, and that the entire network of
Al Queida leaders were captured and put on
public trial, ending forever their terrorist threat
to the world. Imagine further that all of the
records of Al Queida were captured and made
available to scholars, including thousands of
pages of writings by Osama bin Laden himself
as well as large numbers of books, memoirs, and
reminiscences by his childhood friends,
associates, and confederates. Is it possible that
professional historians would for the next sixty
years fail to interview the people who knew him,
refuse to write scholarly biographies of the man,
ignore the records, pronounce the entire event
inexplicable, and leave the research of these
events to amateurs? If they would, then Osama
bin Laden would undoubtedly grow into a man
of mystery and fascination to the general public,
just as Hitler has. The twenty-first century
would be explained by historians like the
twentieth: one inexplicable catastrophe after
another—all caused by "unpersons".
In summary, the responsibility for the fact that
Hitler is still a mystery, and that public interest
in him is high and growing, is at least partly
caused by the failure of professional historians
to carry out the responsibilities of their
profession. They have failed, at least according
to the two minimal criteria established by
Theodor Mommsen: 1) to investigate and
preserve the evidence; and 2) to weave the facts
into a coherent narrative.
NOTES
1 Craig, Gordon A., "Fate & the Fuehrer". The New
York Review of Books, 2 November 2000.
2 Lukacs, John, The Hitler of History. New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 4.
3 Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler.
New York, Praeger, 1973, xii.
4 Jäckel, Eberhard, Hitler in History. Hannover,
University Press of New England, 1984, 1.
5 Schramm, Percy Ernst, Hitler: The Man and
Military Leader. Chicago, Quadrangle Books; 1971,
123.
6 Quoted in Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining Hitler: The
Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York,
Random House, 1998, xv and 68 (Hereinafter cited
as Rosenbaum).
7 Mommsen Theodor, "Rectoral Address delivered at
the University of Berlin in 1874", in Fritz Stern,
(ed.), The Varieties of History From Voltaire to the
Present. New York, Meridian Books, 1956, 192.
8 Wyden, Peter, The Hitler Virus: The Insidious
Legacy of Adolf Hitler. New York, Arcade
Publishing, 2001.
9 Freidländer, Saul, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay
on Kitsch and Death. New York, Harper & Row,
1984, 107.
10 Rosenbaum writes of the efforts of historians to
find "in the facts of Hitler's life before he came to
power some single, transformative moment, some
dramatic trauma, or some life-changing encounter
with a Svengali-like figure -a moment of
metamorphosis that made Hitler- Hitler".
Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining …, op. cit., xiv.
11 Jetzinger, Frantz, Hitlers Jugend: Phantasien,
Lügen- und die Wahrheit (Vienna, 1996). English
translation by Lawrence Wilson, Hitler's Youth.
London, Hutchinson & Co., 1958.
12 Kubizek, August, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfruend
(Graz und Göttingen, 1953). English edition: Young
Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship (London, 1954);
American edition: The Young Hitler I Knew ,
translated by E. V. Anderson (Cambridge, Riverside
Press, 1955). Subsequent citations are to the
American edition, which is hereinafter cited as
Kubizek).
13 H. R. Trevor-Roper, Introduction to ibid., xii-xiii.
14 Lukacs, John, The Hitler…, op. cit., 15
(Hereinafter cited as Lukacs).
15 Der Frühgeschichte der NSDAP: Hitlers Weg bis
1924 (Frankfort, 1965); Hitlers Mein Kampf (1966);
Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythios, Wirklichkeit (1971);
and Hitler: Briefe und Notizen (1973).
16 Lukacs, John, The Hitler…, op. cit., 15.
Hitler Studies: A field of amateurs Ben Novak
© Historia Actual Online 2006
168
17 Toland, John, Adolf Hitler. Garden City,
Doubleday, 1976, ix. See also id., Captured by
history. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997, 298,
where Toland comments after he interviewed a man
in Urfahr who had known Hitler well, "As I left him
[I] wondered why no one else had never tried to
interview him".
18 Hamann, Brigitta, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahres eines
Diktators. München, Piper Verlag, 1996. Translated
by Thomas Thornton: Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's
Apprenticeship. New York and London, Oxford
University Press, 1999.
19 This is precisely the claim of Yehuda Bauer.; see
Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining …, op. cit., xv.
20 Trevor-Roper, H. R., "The Mind of Adolf Hitler",
published as the Introduction to Hitler's Secret
Conversations 1941-1944. New York, Farrar, Straus
& Young, 1953, vii. Also published in England as the
introduction to Hitler's Table Talk , vii. This as well
as the following quotations are all from the same
page.
21 While there have been more than a hundred
biographies of Hitler published, only a handful are
regarded as major, researched biographies. See the
review of Hitler scholarship in Chapter I of Lukacs.
22 Shirer, William L., Berlin Diary: The Journal of a
Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941. New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.
23 Id., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New
York, Simon & Shuster, 1960, ix of the Foreward;
subsequent quotations in the text are found on the
same page.
24 Lukacs, John, The Hitler…, op. cit., 13.
25 Ibid., 18.
26 Fest, Joachim, Hitler. Verlag Ullstein, 1973.
Translated by Richard and Clara Winston and
published in the United States (New York, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1974, 3). All subsequent citations
are to the American edition, which is hereinafter
cited as Fest.
27 Ibid., 6.
28 Stern, Fritz, Hitler: The Führer and the People.
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975, 12.
29 Toland, John, Adolf Hitler…, op. cit.
30 Id., Captured..., op. cit..
31 Id., Adolf Hitler…, op. cit., x.
32 See, for example, Waite, Robert G. L., The
Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. New York, Basic
Books, 1977; and Binion, Rudolf, Hitler among the
Germans. New York, Elsevier, 1976.
33 For example, Sebastian Haffner's, Anmerkungen zu
Hitler. Munich, Kindler, 1978.
34 Broszat, Martin; Friedländer, Saul, "A Controversy
about the Historicization of National Socialism", in
Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the
Holocaust, and the Historian's Debate. Boston,
Beacon Press, 1990, 127. This article, which consists
of correspondence between its authors, is reprinted
from Yad Vashem Studies , 19 (1988), 1-47, and New
German Critique, 44 (Spring/Summer 1988), 85-126.
35 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, "The Role of Hitler:
Perspectives of Interpretation", in Laqueur, Walter
(ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide: Analysis,
Interpretations, Bibliography. Berkeley, University
of California, 1976, 212.
36 Fest, Joachim, "Encumbered Remembrance: The
Controversy about the Incomparability of National-
Socialist Mass Crimes", in Forever in the Shadow of
Hitler?, translated by James Knowlton and Truett
Cates (Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1993,
71). This article originally appeared in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 August, 1986.
37 Nolte, Ernst, "The Past that Will Not Pass: A
Speech that Could Be Written but Not Delivered", in
Forever…, op. cit., This article originally appeared
in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , 6 June, 1986.
38 Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936. New
York, W. W. Norton, 1998, xxiv.
39 Ibid., xxv.
40 Ibid., xxvi.
41 Ibid., xxv.
42 Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining…, op. cit., xii.
43 Ibid., xv and xvi.
44 Ibid., 67, quoting H. R. Trevor-Roper.
45 Quoted by Robert Cecil in The Myth of the Master
Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology. New
York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972, 96; citing K. Hayer,
Wenn die Gotter den Tempel verlassen (Freiburg,
1947), 105.
46 Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining…, op. cit., xv,
quoting Yehuda Bauer.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Fate & the Fuehrer " . The New York Review of Books The Hitler of History
- Gordon A Craig
Craig, Gordon A., " Fate & the Fuehrer ". The New York Review of Books, 2 November 2000. 2 Lukacs, John, The Hitler of History. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 4.
Hitler: The Man and Military Leader Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
- Eberhard Jäckel
- Percy Schramm
- Ernst
Jäckel, Eberhard, Hitler in History. Hannover, University Press of New England, 1984, 1. 5 Schramm, Percy Ernst, Hitler: The Man and Military Leader. Chicago, Quadrangle Books; 1971, 123. 6 Quoted in Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York, Random House, 1998, xv and 68 (Hereinafter cited as Rosenbaum).
Rectoral Address delivered at the University of Berlin in 1874
- Mommsen Theodor
Mommsen Theodor, "Rectoral Address delivered at the University of Berlin in 1874", in Fritz Stern, (ed.), The Varieties of History From Voltaire to the Present. New York, Meridian Books, 1956, 192.
The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler
- Peter Wyden
Wyden, Peter, The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler. New York, Arcade Publishing, 2001.
Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death
- Saul Freidländer
Freidländer, Saul, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. New York, Harper & Row, 1984, 107.
- R Trevor-Roper
. R. Trevor-Roper, Introduction to ibid., xii-xiii.
Garden City, Doubleday, 1976, ix. See also id., Captured by history
- John Toland
- Adolf Hitler
Toland, John, Adolf Hitler. Garden City, Doubleday, 1976, ix. See also id., Captured by history. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997, 298, where Toland comments after he interviewed a man in Urfahr who had known Hitler well, "As I left him
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
- Id
Id., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York, Simon & Shuster, 1960, ix of the Foreward;
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