BOOK: Tomaz Jardim, "Ilse Koch on Trial"

Tomaz Jardim: Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674249189. viii + 357 pp.

This book is an interesting biography of Ilse Koch, whose husband Karl was the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937–41. She grew notorious for contributing to the abuse of the prisoners there, and for allegedly collecting lampshades made out of human skin; I was vaguely aware of this notoriety but didn't really know anything more about her, so I decided to pick up this book to learn more.

As the title of the book suggests, it is mostly interested in her trials, especially the ones after the war, so her life prior to that is dealt with relatively briefly. Indeed relatively little seems to be known about her early life (pp. 11–13), and as with many people who would later grow notorious in the Third Reich, there is nothing particularly remarkable in the background of either Ilse Koch or of her husband. Karl worked as an insurance salesman in the 1920s “and at times resorted to petty thievery and small-time embezzlement” (p. 14) — but then in the 1930s, he rose quickly through the ranks of the SS and, as commandant of Buchenwald, was remarkably brutal and remarkably corrupt even by the standards of Nazi concentration camp commandants (pp. 24–6). He embezzled money and valuables taken from the prisoners and used their slave labour for his own benefit (pp. 26, 59–60). The Kochs and their two children lived in a villa not far from the camp, from which prisoners were often sent to work in or around the house as servants.

The higher-ups didn't particularly mind Karl's reign of terror and arbitrary brutality against the prisoners (though technically much of that was against the rules as well); it was his corruption that eventually got him in trouble. A regional SS official named Josias zu Waldeck started investigating him for this in 1941; for some time, Koch was protected by Himmler, who was willing to overlook some corruption in an effective and loyal commandant (p. 41). But as the war started going badly, rooting out corruption came to be seen as more important than before, and Himmler's support for Koch faded. Both Kochs were arrested in August 1943 (p. 54), and after a lengthy investigation, their trial before an SS court began in September 1944 (p. 68). Besides his embezzlement, Karl was also charged with the unauthorized killing of prisoners, notably two who had treated him for “a case of syphilis he had acquired while in Norway” (p. 57). Ilse was charged with “habitual receiving of stolen goods” (p. 74) and thus being an accessory to her husband's embezzelement. She was found not guilty and was released, but Karl was sentenced to death and was executed at Buchenwald in April 1945, shortly before the Nazis abandoned the camp (p. 77).

After the war, rumours emerged that Ilse Koch used to select prisoners that had interesting tatoos so they would be killed and pieces of their skin preserved, or in some cases even made into lampshades. These objects were indeed exhibited (pp. 83–4), but there doesn't seem to have been anything more than rumour to connect them to Koch; nevertheless the press, both then and later, delighted in reporting on her supposed crimes in the most salacious and sensationalist terms (pp. 93, 141, 143, 289). More sober and more plausible accusations revolved around claims that she had, on a number of occasions, reported prisoners for real or imagined transgressions, thereby ensuring that they would get beaten and possibly killed by the SS guards. At any rate, Koch was arrested by the U.S. occupying authorities and included as a defendant at a trial before a “military commission court” (p. 95); the other thirty or so defendants were mostly SS officers who had served at Buchenwald (p. 91).

In terms of protecting the rights of the defendants, this court left much to be desired (pp. 95–100), but at the same time it was far from a full-blown kangaroo court either; Captain Lewis, the defense counsel appointed by the court (p. 104), seems to have done a vigorous and thorough job. In particular, he showed that many of the prosecution witnesses were unreliable and were only relaying hearsay. He challenged the prosecutor, Denson, to produce the infamous human-skin lampshade as evidence, but was told that “it had been turned over to judicial authorities at Nuremberg” where it could now “no longer be located. The lampshade had mysteriously disappeared, and it would never surface again.” (P. 124.) The witnesses' testimony “left little doubt that tattooed skins had had been collected at Buchenwald [. . .] but was insufficient to implicate Koch” (p. 112).

But the main argument of the prosecution was that the defendants had been “ ‘participating in a common design’ to commmit war crimes”, and that Buchenwald as a whole had been a sort of “criminal enterprise” such that everyone who supported its operations while knowing about their nature was guilty, regardless of what exactly he or she did or didn't do (p. 98). This was harder to defend against; Koch denied, strenously but implausibly, that she had had any idea as to what had been going on inside the camp — she had been just a busy housewife raising her children and not talking to her husband about his work. The route of her daily walks was carefully scrutinized with the aid of a map to demonstrate that she must have seen inside the camp through its barbed-wire fence on numerous occasions (pp. 134, 136).

In the event, the court found her guilty and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, the proceedings of the court were “subject to a series of automatic reviews” (p. 146), going all the way up to General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany (the wikipedia tells us that his office had a funny acronym: OMGUS :))). The reviewers “found unequivocally that the most serious and shocking charges leveled at Ilse Koch were supported by scarcely more than rumor and hearsay” (p. 150) and, at their recommendation, Clay reduced Koch's sentence to four years (which meant she would go free in about a year, in October 1949).

This was received with howls of outrage in the American press, where most of the journalists as well as the general public evidently ignored the weakness of the evidence against her and simply assumed that even the most lurid rumours about her crimes were true (pp. 157–8). Protests were organized; Clay was heckled during a visit to the U.S. (p. 164); the folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song (p. 166); and even the U.S. senate formed a committee to investigate how this could have happened and what could be done to prevent Koch's release. But they couldn't try her again for the same charges, and there was not enough evidence for fresh charges (p. 173).

Eventually they came up with one of those sleazy technicalities that lawyers are always so good at: her previous trial had been for war crimes, and the jurisdiction of the military commission court specifically excluded any crimes against German citizens. Consequently, she could still be tried in a German court, for regular non-war crimes such as (incitement to) murder or assault, perpetrated against German citizens. These things, after all, had in principle been against the law even under Nazi Germany (p. 192).

The German authorities gathered testimony from a large number of witnesses and even had a few people travel to America to talk to former prisoners who now lived there (pp. 207–10); despite all this effort, all the charges were for incitement to murder or attempted murder, from her habit of reporting prisoners for punishment, which, the prosecution argued, she must have known could get them killed (and in some instances had got them killed). Koch continued her strategy of simply denying everything, but it was clearly not working. The court found her guilty of some, though not all, of the charges, and sentenced her to life imprisonment again (p. 253).

She spent the rest of her life, some sixteen years, in prison. Her numerous appeals for clemency were all rejected, partly because the authorities expected such petitioners to say they are sorry for their crimes, while Koch insisted that she was simply innocent (p. 268); but partly the reasons for keeping her in prison were political: she was so notorious in the eyes of the international public that releasing her would make Germany look soft on Nazis (p. 281). Eventually she lost hope of ever regaining her freedom, and committed suicide in 1967.

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An interesting recurring topic in this book is the observation that Ilse Koch was adversely affected by what the author, in line with modern-day woke terminology, refers to as “misogyny”: her cruelty and callousness towards the prisoners was greatly at odds with society's expectations that women should be kind and compassionate; and her licentiousness (reports of which, though exaggerated by the press, were not entirely without foundation; pp. 75–6) was at odds with the expectation that they should be chaste and modest. Moreover, she didn't even have the excuse of being part of a system and following orders; it was clear that she had been pursuing her crimes solely at her own whims. In the eyes of society (even more so in the mid-20th century than today) she looked like a greater aberration from social norms than, say, a typical (male) concentration camp guard (p. 281). “By virtue of her gender, the judges implied, Koch should be held to a higher standard of ethical and benevolent behavior in the concentration camps than was expected of her male counterparts.” (P. 257.)* It was easy and comfortable for the German public to observe that this monster still was, and must remain, in prison, and pat themselves on the back for not being soft on fascists, even if most of the other war criminals had been released long before.

[*Our author clearly disapproves of this double standard, and to be sure he is in a certain sense right in doing so; but this is something that has always bothered me a bit about the feminist movement — instead of trying to make the men as good as the women, they have always been content with making the women as bad as the men. True, that is equality of a sort, but it hardly strikes me as a change for the better.]

I think the author is on to something here; it is plainly obvious that she was treated unfairly. Every time that she reported some prisoner for punishment, there must have then been some SS guard who actually beat or killed that prisoner; this is a far worse thing to do than what she had done, and yet it was she and not he who became notorious to the general public, inspired a series of 1970s exploitation films and was the subject of campaigns against her release from prison and of exaggerated, sensationalized press reports that kept on portraying her as a sadistic pervert and repeating as fact the old rumours of her human skin collection — even in notices of her death (pp. 288–9) — although prosecutors had consistently failed to prove that she had had any connection with them.

Moreover, there are one or two other things that bother me a good deal about the court proceedings against her. One is the principle of “participating in a common design” (p. 98) that played such a large role in the various group trials against concentration camp staff and the like. It strikes me as an obvious unprincipled legal trick to make the prosecution's job easier; they knew they would have a hard time proving guilt on an individual basis, so they went for what is basically collective guilt where “the cook is as liable as the hangman” (p. 138); if you applied such a thing consistently throughout the legal system, society would simply collapse. If you declare Buchenwald a “criminal enterprise” (p. 98) — which, fair enough, it sort of was — what's preventing you from declaring the Third Reich as a whole to have been a criminal enterprise, and prosecuting everyone who ever paid taxes to it? Or even outside a war-crimes context, whenever a company breaks the law, you could prosecute all of its shareholders and all of its employees as sharing in the guilt — because, after all, one can hardly ‘participate in a common design’ more obviously and blatantly than by forming a company to do so.

The other thing that bothered me is that she was basically prosecuted twice for more or less the same crimes, purely on the basis of legal technicalities about the jurisdiction of the courts and about whether the victims were German citizens or not; and moreover that the outcome of these two trials was so different: four years in one case, life imprisonment in the other. Something must be very wrong and in a certain fundamental sense unjust about a legal system in which it is possible for the same actions to receive such very different punishments at two different trials. In any case, I think life imprisonment is a grotesquely excessive punishment for mere incitement to murder; but then, I wouldn't approve of life imprisonment even for actual murderers.

Another thing that bothered me is that Koch's third trial, by the postwar German authorities, relied on the use of the pre-Nazi criminal law (p. 192) in a situation where it was obviously not meant to be applied.* There is an interesting observation on pp. 64–5 that Nazi Germany was evolving into “a dual state, where the traditional legal order [. . .] remained largely intact” but “coexisted alongside the ‘prerogative state,’ by which arbitrary power was wielded by the regime [. . .] This duality guaranteed that irony and contradiction would be constant features of the Nazi legal order.” In other words, if, for example, some concentration camp guard arbitrarily killed a prisoner in 1940 or so, this was technically against the law on murder which was still on the books since the days of the German Empire or perhaps of the Weimar Republic; and it was technically even against the SS's own rules (as we can see by the fact that Karl Koch was charged with such murders in his own trial, pp. 70–1); and yet such killings were routinely taking place all the time in concentration camps all over Nazi Germany, with the complete knowledge and connivance of all the relevant authorities. There should, in my opinion, exist some sort of legal principle according to which, if some law or rule is flouted sufficiently widely, routinely, openly, and with not enough being done about it, then it should be held as no longer applying, or at least not applying in those particular circumstances, even if it is technically still on the books somewhere and hasn't been explicitly repealed yet. Otherwise you can get the ‘three felonies a day’ situation where a bunch of impractical laws remain in existence indefinitely, where it is then impossible to live a normal life without violating them all the time, and where the whole population then technically violates those laws all the time and never gets prosecuted for them — except when the authorities want to fuck someone over, in which case they can dust those old laws off and charge a person with violating them.

[*And this is evidently not a one-time occurrence but a common practice; we read on pp. 292–3 that as late as 2021, a 95-year-old former concentration camp secretary was charged with “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases”.]

That being said, I do also disapprove of the way the Nazis built up their dual legal order, instead of simply modifying their existing laws to make sure that their oppresive practices would be openly legal. (It would, after all, have been trivial for them to do so, since the Reichstag would pass whatever legislation Hitler wanted, or he could even pass laws by himself under the Enabling Act.) But I suppose they thought this would make them look bad, or they actively preferred the confusion of the dual system as it afforded them better opportunities for arbitrary oppressive behaviour.

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Anyway, this was an interesting and very readable book about a not-very-pleasant topic. It is written efficiently and not too long, so that I wasn't getting bored at any point; there's a decent amount of photographs as illustrations, and I particularly liked the fact that they are included at the relevant points of the text instead of being gathered into a separate section of plates in the middle of the book as is often the case. But most important of all, the book is very sober and well balanced; it doesn't try to exonerate Koch or believe her impossible protestations of complete innocence, but it does provide an important counterweight to the grotesquely exaggerated, sensationalized accounts of her that had prevailed in the popular press for such a long time. Even the devil is rarely quite as bad as he is made out to be.

BOOK: Christopher Hale, "Himmler's Crusade"

Christopher Hale: Himmler's Crusade: The true story of the 1938 Nazi expedition into Tibet. London: Bantam Books, 2003, 2004. 0553814451. 592 pp.

I don't usually read the same book more than once — how could I justify doing that when there's so many unread books waiting on my shelves :] — but I decided to make an exception for this book. I bought it in 2004, relatively soon after it was published, and I remember that I read it in something like three or four days, which means that I must have enjoyed it a lot; but I found that I remembered almost nothing about its contents, and there was no blog post for me to refer to since this was before I started my blog. But as I still find the subject matter fascinating, I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to read it a second time and write a post about it.

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The ‘crusade’ part of the title is clickbait — the book is actually about the German Tibet expedition of 1938–39 — but the ‘Himmler’ part is honest, as he really did support the expedition and took a keen interest in it. But the book takes a broad view of its subject, and the expedition itself occupies only slightly more than half the book, while the rest provides a generous amount of background and context and biographical information about some of the protagonists' lives before and after the expedition. On the one hand, this was all quite interesting to read and was written in a very engaging way; on the other hand I couldn't help wishing, occasionally, that there had been a little less of this extra material. But it would be ungenerous to complain about that, especially on a second reading. For example, the introductory chapter traces the history of the crackpot ideas that inspired Himmler's support of the expedition, and I couldn't help wondering if we really need to hear quite so much about the life of Madame Blavatsky, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to wonder that if I had been reading about this for the first time, and if I hadn't read two or three other books about the same subject before (e.g. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Occult Roots of Nazism and Black Sun, though I sadly didn't get around to writing blog posts about them).

But the main protagonist of the book, reasonably enough, is not Himmler but the leader of the expedition, Ernst Schäfer. In principle he was a zoologist, but he was at least as much a hunter and adventurer as he was a scientist (pp. 98–9). He had been to Tibet twice before, in the early 1930s, in expeditions led by Brooke Dolan, a rich and hard-drinking American who was just as keen a hunter as Schäfer, and the main purpose of his expeditions seems to have been collecting animal specimens (notably including a giant panda, p. 93) for American museums. The second expedition was additionally motivated by Dolan's having to leave America until the dust settled on some of his drunken antics there (p. 104). They approached Tibet from the Chinese side, but large parts of China were in a state resembling civil war, the expedition's progress was blocked by an uncooperative governor, Dolan eventually abandoned his companions and the whole thing ended in acrimony (pp. 116–20). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schäfer was determined that next time he came to Tibet, it would be with a purely German expedition and with himself firmly in charge.

He joined the SS in 1933, like a number of young German intellectuals at that time (p. 100–1); it was something of a Faustian bargain: they got the opportunity to advance faster in their academic careers, get better support and funding for their research, but then they also got to be war criminals and participants in genocide.

Himmler was fond of all sorts of crackpot theories and in exchange for his support, Schäfer's new expedition would have to pay some attention to them: carry out anthropometric investigations on the Tibetans to see if the Aryan master race had perhaps originated there, or migrated there at some point; look for extra hardy strains of cereals that could help German agriculture during the upcoming war; and even look for evidence of Hanns Hörbiger's crazy World Ice Theory (pp. 181–2, 194).* Nevertheless Schäfer managed to resist some of Himmler's pressures and at least ended up staffing his expedition with more or less bona fide scientists; besides him there was an anthropologist, an entomologist and a geophysicist, SS officers all (p. 188).

[*See also p. 406 for some surprising indirect evidence that Schäfer himself may have taken that theory seriously...]

*

The new expedition was planning to enter Tibet from the south, from British India (I guess because China was in a full-blown war with Japan by then). On the one hand, neither the British nor the Tibetans were at all keen to allow any foreigners to enter Tibet (p. 219); on the other hand, the British didn't want to rebuff the German expedition too bluntly while their policy of appeasement was still in effect (pp. 227, 232). Schäfer et al. spent some time exploring Sikkim and then, by a stroke of good luck, got the Tering Raja, a member of the Sikkimese royal family now living in Tibet, to put in a good word for them with the Tibetan government, who then officially allowed Schäfer's expedition to visit Lhasa for two weeks, as long as they did no hunting and no scientific research (pp. 291–2). In practice they still did a good deal of both, but had to be a bit more discreet about it (pp. 306–7, 313, e.g. hunting with a sort of rubber “catapult”).

Once in Lhasa, Schäfer proved quite successful at lobbying the Tibetans (and the expedition anthropologist, Bruno Beger, gained a lot of goodwill by providing free medical treatment; p. 384) and, despite the efforts of the local British representatives, the expedition was allowed to stay in Tibet for another two months (which, among other things, gave them the rare opportunity to film the Tibetan new year celebrations; pp. 389–90). The Regent of Tibet even asked if he could buy some guns from Germany (p. 400)!

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The expedition returned to Germany in August 1939 (p. 426) — if they had waited one month longer, they would have been interned by the British upon the outbreak of war. Schäfer subsequently toyed with the idea of yet another Tibet expedition, this time with the goal of inducing the Tibetans to start a guerilla campaign against British India (p. 444). This hare-brained scheme was, fortunately, abandoned, partly because Hitler was none too keen to dismantle the British Empire (p. 449) and partly because the scheme relied on Soviet help, so it was impossible after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Later there were also plans for a very large and ambitious expedition to the Caucasus, which came to nothing because Germany was by then already retreating from the east (p. 477).

Schäfer joined the Ahnenerbe (the SS research organization) and became the head of its Institute for Central Asian Research; other members of the Tibet expedition joined him there. He tried to make the institute more independent (and even renamed it after Sven Hedin), but with limited success. At one point he and Ernst Krause, who had been the cameraman of the Tibet expedition, were asked to help record certain medical experiments at Dachau, but upon learning of their murderous nature, Schäfer managed to get them both out of the assignment (p. 472). Thus one gets the impression that insofar as Schäfer was complicit in the war crimes of the SS, it was not by having done anything heinous himself, but by having known that heinous things were being done by others and yet not resigning from the organization (pp. 455, 471). At the end of the war, his institute was ransacked and its collections scattered; Schäfer spent a few years in POW camps and was eventually cleared by a denazification tribunal without too much trouble (p. 482).

By contrast, his colleague Bruno Beger, the anthropologist of the Tibet expedition, was more complicit than that. At Himmler's suggestion, he began planning a study of fat-bottomed Jewish women to see if there is a connection between Jews and Hottentots; fortunately this bizarre study did not seem to proceed any further, but it shows what sort of crazy theories Himmler had the Ahnenerbe people investigate (pp. 488–9). Rather more serious is Beger's involvement in the collection of specimens for a certain Dr. August Hirt of the anatomy department at the Strasbourg University. Together with another colleague Beger went to Auschwitz, selected 115 prisoners of various races and ethnicities, and carried out anthropometric measurements on them (pp. 513–15); later their corpses, preserved in alcohol, were delivered to Strasbourg (p. 517). Beger was eventually put on trial for his involvement, in 1971, found guilty of being an “accomplice to murder”, but sentenced only to time served (pp. 493, 527). An interesting question here, I guess, is whether (some of) those particular prisoners would have survived if Beger had not selected them; this being Auschwitz, it is unlikely, but not quite impossible.

The book ends with an interesting chapter recounting Hale's meetings with people who still remembered Schäfer's expedition when he was doing research for this book in 2002. Schäfer had died in 1992, but Beger was still alive. Of the native attendants employed by the expedition, Hale found one still alive in Sikkim, and talked to the son of another, as well as to an old man who remembered seeing the expedition as a child (pp. 532–4). It's lucky that he wrote the book when he did; by now, almost twenty years later, they are probably all dead.

Errors galore!

So, as I said before, this was a very pleasant and readable book, if perhaps a tiny bit longer than I would have liked; but I do have one complaint about it: I don't remember the last time I found so many errors in a book. They are mostly minor ones, to be sure, and yet you can't help wondering — if they were so sloppy and careless about these, how much can you trust them on bigger things that you can't easily verify by yourself? Anyway, here are the ones I've noticed:

• “a nomadic Tibetan people called the Kalmyck” (p. 53) — but surely the Kalmyks are a Mongol people, not a Tibetan people;
• Erich von Däniken is twice described as an “Austrian hotelier” (pp. 66, 538), but he is Swiss, not Austrian;
• the Teutoburg(er) Forest is twice misspelt as “Teutoberger” (p. 125);
• “Signora Ciana, the wife of the Italian foreign minister” (p. 137), but he was Ciano and I don't think Italian women use special female forms of surnames the way e.g. Russians do;
• “Himmler's Freundes” (p. 138, referring to a group of industrialists who supported Himmler), but surely it makes no sense to put two plural suffixes on the same word, first the German -e and then the English -s;
• “After receiving his Doktorarbeit” (p. 150); this word means the dissertation, but from the context it's clear that what Hale means is the degree that one gets after writing and defending the dissertation;
• “play a leading roll” (p. 162);
• “Günther's Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanene Aliens” (p. 167) — this should obviously be Indogermanen Asiens, but the intriguing question is how such an error could even happen; was it OCR gone wrong?
• “letze” (p. 184) should be “letzte”;
• “Braunau am In” (p. 226) should be “Inn”;
• Czechoslovakia is described as having a “restless mixture of Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Ruthenians and, in the Sudetenland, Germans” (p. 231); how could he forget the Slovaks? o.O
• “hair lip” (p. 246) — intriguing, but wrong;
• “He bagged argali (wolves)” (p. 265); argali are actually sheep, so we might be dealing with a rare case of sheep in wolf's clothing :)
• Odilo Globocnik is described as “an Austrian Croat” (p. 454); I am of course perfectly happy to foist that horrible man on the Croats, but alas, everything I've ever heard about him explains his surname as a result of Slovenian, not Croatian, ancestry;
• Sigmund Rascher was “hanged on the gallows at Dachau [. . .] in 1944” (p. 474); but the wikipedia says that he was only arrested in 1944, kept in various camps, and then shot at Dachau shortly before liberation in 1945;
• “Vorontersuchung” (p. 493) should be “Voruntersuchung”;
• “Wehrissenschaftliche” (p. 499) should be “Wehrwissenschaftliche”;
• “Goodrick-Clark” (p. 540) should be “Goodrick-Clarke”;
• “Erlebnisse diplomatischen Geheimagenten” (p. 562) is missing an eines;
• “Euphorian” (p. 563), the publisher of Hedin's German Diary, should actually be “Euphorion”.

One thing that is not necessarily an error, but that did strike me as odd: at one point, Hale mentions in passing that “Rock, like Hedin, was homosexual” (p. 419). I don't really know anything about Joseph Rock, but I've read enough about Hedin that I would expect to have heard about his homosexuality somewhere else as well if it were true. There seems to be quite enough evidence that he was attracted to women; see e.g. Wolfram Dirks' psychological study of Hedin, Sven Hedin — ein Mensch im Widerspruch, p. 155. I wonder what Hale's source for his assertion is; but this is one of the main downsides of the book — it is very sparse in quoting sources. There is less than one endnote per page, and often you can go several paragraphs without knowing what source exactly supports them.

ToRead:

• Schäfer wrote several interesting-sounding books about his expeditions, which makes me regret that my German is so rusty: Berge, Buddhas und Bären (Mountains, Buddhas, and Bears, 1933) about his first expedition, and Dach der Erde (Roof of the World, 1938) and Unbekanntes Tibet (Unknown Tibet, 1938) about the second (p. 177).

• Wilhelm Filchner: Sturm über Asien: Erlebnisse eines diplomatischen Geheimagenten (Storm over Asia, 1924). A memoir by this scientist, explorer and “also a spy” (p. 75); he “produced a racy account of the Younghusband mission in Storm over Asia” (p. 303).

One of Filchner's later books did appear in English: A Scientist in Tartary: from the Hoang-ho to the Indus (1939).

• Edmund Kiss wrote several volumes of “turgid fiction about Atlantis”: Frühling in Atlantis (Spring in Atlantis, 1931); Die letzte Königin von Atlantis (The Last Queen of Atlantis, 1931); Die Singschwäne aus Thule (The Singing Swans from Thule, 1939); all mentioned here on p. 184. Himmler invited Kiss to join the Ahnenerbe and tried to have him included in Schäfer's expedition, but Schäfer successfully resisted this.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun includes brief summaries of all three novels, as well as of what seems to be a prequel, Das gläserne Meer (1930). He uses the spelling “Kiß”, which, judging by some googling, is also how it appeared on the title pages of the books themselves.

• Peter Hopkirk wrote several extremely interesting-sounding books about the exploration of Central Asia and related topics (pp. 563–4): Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia (1980); Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Race for Lhasa (1982); The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (1990); On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire (1994). The last of these is mentioned here on p. 443 with reference to the attempt by Wilhelm Waßmuß, shortly before the WW1, to instigate an anti-British uprising in Persia; which makes him a sort of German counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia.

• A few years after the present book, Hale also wrote Hitler's Foreign Executioners (2011), about the non-German Waffen SS units. Strangely, it doesn't seem to have appeared in paperback (only hardcover and kindle).

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Unrelated but funny: a “miniature tableland” named the “Lingma Thang” is mentioned on p. 309. The ligma jokes practically write themselves :)

BOOK: Howard Smith, "Last Train from Berlin"

Howard K. Smith: Last Train from Berlin. London: The Cresset Press, 1942. vii + 266 pp.

Smith was an American journalist who reported from Germany during the first two years of the WW2, while the United States was (in principle) still neutral. He published this book in 1942, after his return to the USA. I found it an interesting read, but I have much the same complaint as with Arvid Fredborg's Behind the Steel Wall, which I read a few years ago: I wish there was more about what it was like to work as a journalist in wartime Germany, and less about how the war was going, what the internal dynamics of the Third Reich were, and the like — I can read these latter things in the work of any number of later historians who are in a much better position to see the whole picture than someone living in the middle of those events had been. The problem, of course, is that the readers in 1942 very reasonably had exactly the opposite preferences than me in these matters, and authors like Smith and Fredborg wrote for them, not for the likes of me. Still, I enjoyed the book a lot; Smith not only observed things, but also thought about them a good deal, and I found something interesting on practically every other page.

*

Smith first visited Germany in 1936; he had just graduated from college and wanted to travel in Europe a bit before settling down, and he went to Germany because it was cheapest (p. 1). But he also wanted to find out how the Nazi system worked in Germany; he was surprised by how heavily militarized everything in Germany had already become by then (pp. 6–7), and it was clear that an enourmous amount of resources were being dedicated to rearmament (while the standards of living of the civilian population had actually declined since the Nazi takeover of power; p. 12). From this, Smith concluded that the regime was inevitably on a course for war.

In 1937–39, he spent two years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship (pp. 22–8); he was impressed by how keenly the students were involved in political clubs, and he himself seems to have spent more time on activism for the Labour Club than on studying. When war started, he was pleasantly surprised to see that Britain was actually going to stand up to Hitler this time (p. 28), but was disappointed by how uninspired British propaganda was (pp. 31–2). He got himself a job with the United Press and went to Berlin in January 1940 (pp. 28, 30).

There are a couple of odd insults at Hitler's expense that I haven't seen before. I know that his very modest artistic career led some people so mockingly refer to him as a housepainter and the like, but Smith upgrades this to “a second-rate, psychopathic carpenter with a third-rate intellect” (p. 16) and “a wall-paper hanger” (p. 29)!

Interesting factoid of the day: Hitler's half-brother Alois (from their father's second marriage — Adolf was from the third) was running a “little restaurant” in Berlin (pp. 46, 105).

*

Since the war was going well for Germany for the first couple of years, the Nazi regime was bursting with self-confidence and didn't supervise the foreign reporters as closely as later (p. 34). After the first air-raids against Berlin, they were allowed to report freely as the Germans wanted to show how insignificant the damage had been; but as the raids grew more serious, the reporters' access was correspondingly reduced (pp. 43–4).

American reporters were treated particularly well in the first year or so of the war, as Germany still hoped that America would stay neutral; but Smith says that despite these efforts they were not in the least bit favourable to the Nazis (pp. 35–6). But as the U.S. supported Britain more and more, the Nazis became increasingly anti-American; Roosevelt took the place of Churchill as the big bogeyman of their propaganda (p. 153), and American reporters in Germany were increasingly harassed by the Nazi authorities. Some of them (notably Richard Hottelet) were imprisoned for months at a time, without any definite charges being brought against them (pp. 166–7); the offices of the United Press, where Smith worked, were raided by the Gestapo for no real reason other than to intimidate them (pp. 160–6). Despite this pressure, many of them persisted in Berlin, considering that sort of risks to simply be a part of journalism (pp. 169, 172).

To me one of the most interesting things about journalists' memoirs is to see some glimpses of how they work. Smith says he was surprised by the Nazi invasion of Norway, but in hindsight he saw there had been many signs pointing to it (e.g. masses of mountain troops passing through Berlin on the way north), and he resolved to pay more attention next time (pp. 39–40). For example, he tracked the regime's attitude towards Soviet Union by watching anti-Soviet books disappear from the German bookstores in 1939 and then re-emerge in 1941 (pp. 46–7), a hint that the Nazis were planning to make a move against the Soviet Union. Various other signs and rumours soon followed (pp. 48–9).

He had been surprised, and dismayed, by the German military successes of 1940, and in early 1941 he had almost quit his job and left Germany, but then decided to stay when he saw that an attack on Soviet Union seemed to be brewing (pp. 45–6).

There's an interesting chapter about the momentous occasion on October 9, 1941, when Hitler's press chief, Dr. Otto Dietrich, stepped before the gathered reporters and announced that the Soviet Union was as good as defeated (pp. 60, 62–3). He was supposed to announce the successful progress of a new German offensive started a week or so before, but he seems to have got a little carried away, perhaps because he knew that some major good news were sorely needed by the German public, which was getting weary of the war in view of the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't showing any signs of imminent collapse, contrary to many confident predictions made at the start of the German invasion of Russia (p. 71). The American reporters figured that Dietrich's statement was probably true, since a lie of that magnitude would come to light soon enough and cause him enormous embarrassment (p. 63). The German public, too, was tremendously elated (although Goebbels prudently prevented the German press from quoting Dietrich's statements directly, p. 65, and had the triumphalism toned down over the next few days, p. 77), and began dreaming of the prosperity and opportunities that would soon open up in the forthcoming German colonial empire in the East (p. 76). Soon, of course, reality began to set in and the regime's media lost all credibility with the German public (pp. 78–80).

By the way, you've got to love mid-20th-century slang: by attacking the Soviet Union, “[s]heerly on the bases of geography and numbers Hitler had pulled a boner.” (P. 52.)

*

One interesting change that Smith describes as occurring in 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the massive and surprisingly fast decline in the amount and quality of food and consumer goods available to the German population (p. 96). During the times of easy victories in the first couple of years of the war, Germany was able to cover its deficiencies by looting the resources of the occupied countries (p. 85), but these were being looted too quickly (for a time there had actually been a kind of unnatural prosperity in Germany; p. 86), and had been largely exhausted by the time the German invasion of the Soviet Union began.

Smith describes the various ways in which the Nazis tried to cope with the resulting shortages: for example, first they reduced the meat rations; then, fearing the bad effects on morale of further reductions, they simply supplied less meat to shops and restaurants without officially decreasing the rations (p. 89), resulting in massive queueing as people tried to buy meat before the shops ran out. Various other foodstuffs were replaced by ersatz versions concocted with foul-smelling chemicals of dubious nutritional value (p. 93). The territorial gains made in Russia in the first few months after the invasion didn't really help either, as the Soviets had evacuated all industry to the east before retreating (p. 104).

All this led to an overall air of seediness and a decline in industrial production (pp. 100, 103). “I never thought it was possible for a country to go so universally trashy so quickly.” (P. 116.) The people's health declined, they turned pale, weary and irritable, and resorted widely to drugs and patent medicines in an effort to regain some energy (pp. 119–21). The seediness even extended to government: “the whole Nazi civil government is in a state of unbelievable chaos” (p. 125) because Hitler and the other bigwigs largely lost interest in anything but military affairs.

Smith makes an interesting observation that by late 1941, most Germans weren't supporting the Nazi regime out of any real enthusiasm for it any more, but because they were afraid what would happen to them if Germany lost the war (a fear which Nazi propaganda, of course, was very keen to stoke; p. 123). The only section of the population that still believed zealously in the Nazi system were the children, who had been exposed to its propaganda full-time all their lives (pp. 127–8) and to whom the regime had always taken special care to appeal (p. 225).

There's an interesting chapter on the development of the Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Smith begins with the observation that “when people become discontented, they can get angry at one of two things: at conditions, or at people. The one reaction is generally that of maturity; the other, of immaturity.” (P. 130.) This latter reaction is often deliberately encouraged by the ruling elites to give the people an easy scapegoat for their problems, and Smith points out that this was the basis both of anti-Semitism in Germany as well as of the anti-black activities of the KKK in America (p. 130). Anti-Jewish propaganda and persecution actually slackened a little in the first couple of years of the war, when the German people were pretty content due to the string of easy victories, but it was ramped up again once the campaign against the Soviet Union started to go badly (p. 132). By late 1941 the Jews still remaining in Berlin were being ‘resettled’ to the East (pp. 138–40). Smith's understanding was that they were mostly being taken to occupied Soviet territories to be worked to death building roads and the like (p. 140). Of course we now know that a lot of Jews were killed outright without being put to work, but most of that would have started in 1942 (e.g. the Wannsee Conference was in January 1942), after Smith's departure from Germany.

When the requirement for Jews to wear the star of David on their clothes was introduced in September 1941, it proved unpopular with the German public; and the authorities apparently tried to justify it with the bizarre fake claim that the U.S. authorities had similarly forced German-Americans to wear a swastika on their clothes :S (pp. 146–7). What is also interesting is that apparently the Nazi authorities didn't make this latter claim openly and officially, but had their low-level officials put it into circulation amongst the public as a rumour (p. 147).

It is deplorably popular nowadays amongst libertarians and other such vermin to claim that nazism was a form of socialism — iT's RiGhT tHeRe In ThE nAmE, bRo! — and I was glad to see that Smith doesn't go in for that sort of nonsense in the least. “Too many observers have allowed themselves to be fooled by the fact that, for reasons of expediency, Hitler chose to call his party the National Socialist German Workers Party” (p. 181), but his mass support during the years of his rise to power really came from the small bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, much more than from the proletariat; and if you look at the practical results of Nazi policies, the only class that really benefited from them was the topmost layer of capitalists. “The state is allegedly national ‘Socialist’, but for a socialist state it maintains the finest, fattest crop of unadulterated plutocrats you ever dreamed of.” (P. 125.) “In actual fact, Nazism is the most reactionary and vicious form of capitalism hat has ever existed” (p. 179). The economy was controlled by a system of boards that consisted mostly of the biggest capitalists in their respective branches of the economy, and their profits flourished enormously; meanwhile the workers found their wages and their standards of life decline steadily from year to year; and the petite bourgeoisie — the small business owners, shopkeepers and the like — found themselves squeezed out of the market by big business even harder than before Hitler's rise to power (pp. 182–4, 188). Nazism “is not socialism, but a form of capitalism that is virtually feudalistic in safeguards granted to and preserved for the wealthy, as well as in the total servitude it demands of those who possess nothing but their hands and brains to work with.” (P. 184.) The SA, being the mass organization through which a certain kind of revolutionary aspirations of the lower middle class could perhaps express themselves, was gradually sidelined by Hitler and, in August 1941, as good as shut down for all practical purposes (pp. 190–2). The disappointment of the lower middle class can be summarized in the bitter joke: “What is the difference between Germany and Russia? In Russia the weather is colder.” (P. 195.)

Smith's departure from Germany was not without a touch of excitement. Relations between the U.S. and Germany had been deteriorating for some time and by late 1941 it was almost impossible for journalists like him to work. The German authorities stepped up their pressure and, no longer content merely with censoring them, increasingly tried to pressure them into including actual German propaganda talking-points in their reports and broadcasts (p. 259). At that point Smith decided to quit and return to America, but the Nazi authorities refused to let him leave unless his employer, the CBS, sent a replacement, evidently to function as a hostage to prevent Smith from badmouthing the Nazis after returning to America! (P. 260.) Fortunately the Germans allowed Smith to leave once the CBS promised to send someone, without waiting for that someone to actually arrive. Smith crossed the border into Switzerland in the morning of December 7, 1941 (see pp. 264–5 for a wonderful description of the contrast between the bleak, dreary Berlin and the peaceful and prosperous Switzerland; it was like stepping from a black-and-white movie to a colour one). In the evening of the same day, Pearl Harbor was attacked; had Smith waited but half a day longer, it would have been impossible for him to leave Germany.

*

Smith concludes the book with a couple of chapters discussing how nazism might be defeated. There was some internal opposition, coming from the communists (with whom a lot of German workers still sympathized; p. 203), the catholic church (p. 205), and the traditional Prussian officer class (p. 209); but in Smith's view it was unlikely that any of these would topple the regime from within. Besides, Hitler had protected himself well by building up institutions such as the Gestapo and (as a sort of counterweight to the army) the Waffen-SS, both of which were absolutely loyal to him (pp. 213, 226). Apparently Himmler even suggested setting up an SS air force and navy, but Hitler did not adopt this plan (p. 218).

As for defeating Nazi Germany from outside, Smith says that the situation actually looked fairly promising. As of his writing, probably in early 1942, Germany was clearly getting badly exhausted in her unsuccessful attempts to defeat the Soviet Union, and was meanwhile also facing a lot of resistance in other occupied territories (pp. 230–1). Smith expresses admiration for the tenacity of the Soviet defense (p. 240), and says the democratic Allies should emulate the Soviets' commitment to total war: “there is still too much slack in our war effort” (p. 239). He even finds a good word for the pre-war purges in the Soviet army: “Had Russia not ‘liquidated’ a few thousand officers and bureaucrats, there is little doubt that the Red Army would have collapsed in two months, and left us holding a bag, many times bigger, containing Hitler and all Europe, and most of Asia. Had we liquidated a few, the war might never have happened.” (P. 240).

But his boldest suggestion is to carry out sweeping social and economical reforms in the Allied countries as a way of giving the German public a vision of what a better post-war order might look like (p. 247). Countries like the U.S., Smith says, had mostly achieved “political democracy [. . .] in which each individual possesses one unit of political power”, but they were far from the state of “economic democracy [. . .] in which each individual has approximately one unit of economic power” (p. 250). This inequality in turn leads to political inequality because the rich people can influence the political process far out of proportion to their numbers. He ends with some concrete proposals: nationalize the mines and the arms industry, and give independence to the colonies, immediately where possible, or in at most five years (p. 253).

I was really pleasantly surprised to see such openly leftist ideas, as I wouldn't have expected anyone but dreary boring Marxist doctrinaires advocating such things back then, and it's clear enough that Smith is not one of those — it's obvious from the style of the book if nothing else, for it is the style of your typical hard-boiled, red-blooded 1940s American journalist. Anyway, as we now know, some of his ideas would in fact get implemented, though in a massively watered-down form; there was some nationalization of industries in the first few decades after the war (probably more so in Europe than in the U.S., though), and the colonies did eventually get their independence, though not as quickly or as smoothly as he had suggested. Alas, the forces of capital then rallied again and we now live in a more unequal society than at any point in the last hundred years.

ToRead:

• Stephen Roberts: The House that Hitler Built (1937). [Also an updated edition in 1938.] Mentioned here on p. 123: “as nearly perfect a picture of that strange complicated mechanism [i.e. the Nazi system] as it was in peace time, as it is possible for a human to draw.”
• Jan Valtin: Out of the Night (1940). An autobiographical work of somewhat doubtful authenticity, mentioned here on p. 228.

BOOK: Volker Ullrich, "Hitler: Downfall"

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: A Biography. Volume 2: Downfall 1939–45. Translated by Jefferson Chase. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. 9781847922885. x + 838 pp.

I read volume 1 of Ullrich's biography of Hitler a few years ago (see my post from back then), and liked it quite a bit, so when I now saw volume 2 in a bookstore (my first visit to a bookstore after keeping away for more than a year due to the coronavirus epidemic :)) I bought it at once and started reading it. The first thing I noticed is that although both of my volumes are paperback editions, vol. 2 is in a slightly larger format than volume 1, and the type is perhaps also a tiny bit larger. Annoying — I wish the publishers were more consistent about these things. But looking at the ISBNs, it seems that what I got is a bizarre chimera of an edition: if I search for the ISBN from my copy of the book on amazon, it finds the *hardcover* edition, while the paperback edition shown on amazon has a different ISBN (9780099590248). So I guess that my copy uses the format of the hardcover edition but is bound as a paperback, with a different RRP (£20 for my copy, £30 for the hardcover as shown on amazon and £18.99 for the paperback as shown on amazon) and a different imprint (my copy has Bodley Head as the imprint, same as the hardcover on amazon, while the paperback on amazon has Virago as the imprint — same, incidentally, as my copy of volume 1).

Vol. 2 picks up where vol. 1 left off, just before the outbreak of WW2. As the author says in the introduction (p. 2), Hitler was very closely involved in controlling German military operations during the WW2, so a biography of this part of his life is inevitably also something of a history of the war, at least of its European and Middle-Eastern aspects (as opposed to the East Asian and Pacific ones). I was a bit worried about this since I'm not really interested in military history, but now having read the book, it wasn't too bad at all. Although we do hear a good deal about military operations, the narrative nevertheless keeps coming back to Hitler and his various other activities, so I never really had the time to get bored with the military stuff. Besides, there are a lot of things to cover in a book like this, so it can never stay on one subject for too long, and there's no risk of it getting boring.

Much as with vol. 1, one thing I really liked about Ullrich's approach is that he also describes Hitler as a person and not only as a political actor. Here in volume 2, this means that we witness his constant physical and psychological decline. Partly that was probably due to the stress of knowing that the war was lost, which he must surely have realized somewhere around 1942 at the latest (p. 626), though we see him constantly faking optimism when talking to other people well into 1945 (and often enough managing to convince them that not all is lost yet; pp. 381, 398, 531, 768 n. 65); but partly his decline must have been due to overwork and an irregular lifestyle (p. 534). He took on a lot of work in running the military campaigns that a normal political leader would have left to the generals; therefore he routinely stayed up all night and then slept until noon (pp. 192–3, 227, 439, 547).

As the war went on, he increasingly gave up all semblance of social life, all forms of exercise and entertainment (e.g. previously he had enjoyed watching movies, but then gave it up supposedly because it would be unseemly to have this sort of fun while the war is going on), and mostly just stayed cooped up inside his various bunkers and field headquarters (p. 528). He lost his zest for public appearances and speeches, and even his ever-loyal propaganda minister Goebbels had the hardest time persuading him to make the occasional radio address (pp. 516, 526, 543).

In March 1943, Göring remarked that Hitler had aged 15 years in the span of 3.5 years. (P. 345. I couldn't help being reminded of how you often hear similar things about American presidents, with photos to prove it; a president's term lasts four years but when you compare the photos before and after it, you see he has aged by more like eight. And that's even without fighting on the losing side of a total war.) By the last year or so of the war, we see Hitler shuffling around as a frail husk of a person, prematurely geriatric at the age of 55, his hand trembling violently, his eyesight failing so that they had to use special typewriters with extra large letters to write documents for him to read, etc. (pp. 443, 474, 546). We see his physician, Theodor Morell, constantly having to administer pills and “pick-me-up injections” (pp. 512, 533) just to get him on his feet and keep him working. [“Dr Köster's Anti-Gas Pills contained strychnine”, p. 498 :))]

A recurring theme in this book is his unwillingness to delegate, or to trust the people to whom he had delegated something; he kept expecting impossible things from his generals and then firing them when they invariably failed to do what he wanted (pp. 228, 317–19, 522, 540). [“Yes, we produce a great many field marshals, but we also use them up quite swiftly.” — Helmuth Greiner to his wife, 27 Sept. 1942 (p. 766, n. 13).] His tendency to take big risks paid off well in the first years of the war, with unexpectedly easy successes in 1939 and 1940, where his generals had wanted to be more cautious; this got Hitler used to the idea that he was a military genius (p. 113) while his generals were incompetents who lacked the ‘indomitable will’ and ideological commitment on which, in his view, such military successes depended (pp. 235, 428). As the war began to turn against Germany, he increasingly blamed his generals for all the failures, and his relations with them kept on deteriorating. I don't doubt that Germany would have lost the war in any case, but his meddling in military matters seemed to often just make things worse for them, e.g. when he insisted on never retreating (pp. 316, 331, 432, 625), even if that meant that large numbers of German soldiers would end up surrounded and captured by the enemy.

Speaking of delegation, it's almost funny when, late in the war, he pretty much ran out of generals to fire and replace, so he appointed Himmler, one of his most loyal henchmen, as the commander of one of the army groups. Unsurprisingly, leading the defense against the Red Army turned out to be a bit more difficult than herding helpless Jews into cattle cars and gas chambers, and Himmler proved an embarrassing failure in his new position (pp. 553, 555).

And speaking of the holocaust, there's an interesting chapter about it, in which I was particularly struck by how gradually the Nazi policies on that subject got worse. The idea of outright killing all Jews they could get their hands on came comparatively late (p. 248). Before the war their idea of getting rid of the Jews was to have them emigrate from Germany. This began to change in 1941, when they forbade any further Jewish emigration (p. 239); this surprised me, but unfortunately the book doesn't go into any details as to why they made that change. In any case, the war also brought a move towards more aggressive anti-Jewish policies; partly the Nazis believed, in accordance with their ideology, that the Jews were a dangerous internal enemy and must be removed before the war could be won, and partly they now had so many more Jews under their control due to the occupation first of Poland and then of Soviet territories (pp. 246, 252), that waiting for them to emigrate would be impracticable. They toyed with the infamous Madagascar plan for a while (pp. 250–1), but that had to be abandoned as Germany never achieved the sort of naval and air supremacy (especially over Britain) that would allow them to transport such masses of Jews there (p. 253). The next idea, deporting Jews somewhere into occupied Soviet territories (pp. 256, 267), was blocked by the German failure to defeat the Soviet Union. Killing the Jews outright was a natural next step, and the Nazis soon moved towards it, at the end of 1941 (p. 291).

[On a semi-related note: it is of course well known that the euthanasia programme against the mentally ill was a sort of prelude to the holocaust, involving many of the same people and some of the same techniques. What was new to me is that William Shirer, the American journalist who reported from Germany until late 1940, managed to actually carry out some investigative journalism on this subject and found that the disabled and mentally ill were being systematically killed; “[u]sing death notices taken out in local papers by the victims' relatives, Shirer was able to name three of the killing centers” (p. 246). He wrote about this in his Berlin Diary, published after his return to America.]

While reading about this, I couldn't help feeling how tragic it is that they were in such a damnable hurry about everything. To be sure, genocide is morally wrong no matter what method you use to do it, but it could nevertheless be done so much more humanely than with mass killings, if only they hadn't been in such a hurry. Emigration would have been sufficient, especially if coupled with a Chinese-style one-child policy for those who did not wish to emigrate; and to make emigration easier, the Nazis should of course have refrained from ruining the Jews economically. It wouldn't have required any violence or murder, and could all have been over in a few decades. For people who claimed they were building a thousand-year Reich, the Nazis were surprisingly impatient.

Hitler's role in the holocaust is an illustrative example of his style of leadership. He didn't need to issue any explicit orders or anything of that sort; it was enough for him to ‘make his wishes known’ to his henchmen (pp. 276, 278, 290–1), and they would then practically vie with each other to implement them. In fact this would strike me as a very good approach to leadership if it were applied to some good cause: surround yourself with people who believe in the same goals as you do, and who will work towards those same goals without you having to give them orders for every little thing.

Of course, there are other things about Hitler's style of leadership that are less commendable. We see numerous examples of his manipulative, divide-and-conquer approach: he would give his minions overlapping spheres of responsibility, thereby making sure they would regard each other as rivals and expend their energies on the inevitable squabbles that ensued; this in turn made Hitler's position unassailable and indispensable, as he was the only source of authority that could resolve such disputes (p. 610).

Another recurring subject in this book is how crappy Hitler's allies and potential allies were, with the exception of Japan (but that was far away) and possibly Finland. At one point he had some talks with Franco about Spain maybe joining the Axis, but Franco demanded huge parts of French colonial territory as a reward while avoiding making any concrete promises of his own. Hitler apparently said later that “he would ‘rather get three or four teeth pulled than go through that again’ ” (p. 136) :))

Speaking of the personal side of Hitler's life, I couldn't help being impressed with what we see of Eva Braun here. She comes across as a rather sympathetic character, and you can't help wishing that she had fallen in love with some decent man rather than with Hitler. In the last year or so of the war, she seems to have been pretty much the only one to bring some cheerful mood into the eternally depressed atmosphere of Hitler's bunker (pp. 445, 573); and at the end, she didn't *have* to stay with him and commit suicide, but she chose to anyway (pp. 510, 545, 584): “I owe him everything nice in my life, and the only thing I can do for him is to stay by his side.” (P. 771, n. 46.)

The book ends with a very interesting chapter on ‘Hitler's place in history’. There is some not-very-productive discussion about whether he counts as a “great man” (p. 627) — which surely depends a lot more on what exactly we mean by “great” in this context than about any inherent characteristics of Hitler himself — but the author strikes what seemed to me as very commendable middle ground. On the one hand, Hitler would not have been able to become what he was, and accomplish what he did, if the political, social, economic etc. conditions in Weimar Germany had not been what they were (pp. 613–14). (For instance, if the old elites concentrated around Hindenburg hadn't been so insanely hostile to democracy and the labour movement, they might not have had Hindenburg appoint Hitler as chancellor, but someone else.) This speaks against the ‘great man’ theory. But on the other hand, Hitler would also not have been able to accomplish what he did without a number of individual, personal characteristics and abilities (pp. 608–9). There were plenty of nationalist agitators in early Weimar Germany, but none who could move the masses with his oratory the way Hitler did. He was also very good at adapting his message to the audience (e.g. saying different things to rich industrialists than to a beer hall full of lower-middle-class people), and he was a very capable organizer, as can be seen from the fact that the Nazi party almost fell apart while he was in prison. So, in the end, it took both personal characteristics and the right environment to make Hitler what he was.

Now that I've read the second volume of Ullrich's biography, I think I like it even better than after the first volume, and if someone asked me which biography of Hitler he should read, I think I would recommend Ullrich's rather than Kershaw's. But that might be just a biased opinion because it's been a long time since I've read Kershaw's book. They are both excellent, but I do think that Ullrich's is a little more well-rounded.

P.S. I noticed a small translation error: on p. 329 Laval is described as the “French chief of state”. This attracted my attention because surely the chief of state was Pétain; but it turns out that the German edition has it right: “Regierungschef” = head of government, i.e. the prime minister, which is exactly what Laval was.

P.P.S. A fine contribution to my collection of anti-lawyer quotes: “Today Hitler states clearly and unambiguously that everyone who was a lawyer was in his eyes either born defective or would become so.” :)) (A remark from 29 March 1942, quoted here on p. 718, n. 33.)

ToRead:

• Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Mentioned here on p. 594.
• Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 645 (n. 14) and elsewhere.
• Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937–1939 (Munich, 1980). Mentioned here on p. 646, n. 62. Burckhardt was the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig in the last few years before the outbreak of the WW2, at which point the Nazis annexed Danzig to Germany and kicked him out. He was from the same prominent Basel family as the famous Jacob Burckhardt, author of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
• William L. Shirer, This is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany, 1938–40 (London, 1999). Mentioned here on p. 654, n. 5 and elsewhere. A posthumous collection of his radio broadcasts.
• Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin: An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War (1942). Smith was an American journalist who reported from Germany in 1940 and 1941. Ullrich mentions the German edition of his book, Feind schreibt mit: Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent erlebt Nazi-Deutschland (Berlin, 1982), on p. 689, n. 221.
• Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 773, n. 81. Among other things he was very interested in Frederick the Great (in whose footsteps he imagined himself to have been following), and he particularly liked Thomas Carlyle's 19th-century biography of Frederick. This rather surprised me; wasn't there anything suitable by some German biographer?

BOOK: Volker Ullrich, "Hitler: Ascent"

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: A Biography. Volume 1: Ascent. Translated by Jefferson Chase. London: Vintage, 2017. 9780099590231. x + 998 pp.

It's been quite a long time since I read Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler, so when I heard that a new two-volume biography by Volker Ullrich is in the works and is being praised in similarly high terms, I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to read it as well. This is volume 1, covering the period up to the outbreak of the war (a slightly different cutoff point than in Kershaw's biography, where volume 1 ends in 1936). It seems that volume 2 will be published in German later this year, so hopefully I'll get to read it in an English paperback edition in two or three years' time.

Naturally one wants to compare the work of these two biographers, but I'm not in a particularly good position to make such a comparison as it's been so long since I read Kershaw's biography. I'd say they are both well written and complement each other nicely. Kershaw famously emphasized the structural aspects of Hitler's rule (and his coming to power), and even went so far as to say that Hitler was completely consumed by his political activity, had no real private life outside politics and was completely uninteresting as an invididual apart from his politics. This is perhaps the most notable difference between the two biographers, as Ullrich includes several interesting chapters about Hitler's personality, his relations to women, and the ‘Berghof society’ — the group of various more or less important people that often socialized with Hitler at his alpine retreat and functioned in a way that reminded me a little of a monarch's court. An interesting factoid: apparently he had an “insatiable appetite for cake and sweets” (pp. 120, 264, 407).

So in this way Ullrich's biography definitely has a few things that Kershaw's doesn't, but the converse is also true. In the earlier parts of the book in particular I had a feeling that Ullrich is moving faster through Hitler's early life than Kershaw did, and in a few places I remembered that Kerhaw's biography had interesting details that are not present in Ullrich's (e.g. the discussion of how Hitler could end up in the Bavarian army in the WW1 although he was an Austrian citizen; Ullrich p. 53; Kershaw, Hubris pp. 89–90). If I had to recommend just one of these two biographies, I don't know which one I should choose; but I think ideally one would want to read both of them.

Something I particularly liked about this biography is that it uses an interesting combination of chronological and thematic arrangement. Many chapters cover a certain topic over several years and thus overlap chronologically with other chapters that cover other topics in the same period; but overall the arrangement of the chapters still proceeds chronologically.

As always with such works, I couldn't help feeling impressed at the enormous amount of books, memoirs, primary sources etc. cited in the endnotes, though they aren't terribly useful for me as a potential source of things to read since they are nearly all in German — even when a book initially appeared in English, Ullrich usually cites its German translation (if available), e.g. in the case of Nevile Henderson's memoir, The Failure of a Mission. In the earlier chapters, I was interested to see a number of references to an English-language book that I have read myself some time ago, namely Where Ghosts Walked by David Clay Large.

One thing that bothers me a little about these historians — I remember getting the same impression while reading Richard Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany — is how each of them tends to select a small handful of prolific diarists or letter-writers and quotes their opinions again and again to illustrate how people reacted to some historical event. So whenever the Nazis do something in this book, we get to hear what Victor Klemperer, Harry Kessler, Thea Sternheim, Louise Solmitz (a schoolteacher from Hamburg), or Willy Kohn (a Jewish teacher from Breslau) wrote about it in their diaries, what Bella Fromm wrote in her memoirs, what Elizabeth Gebensleben wrote in her letters to her daughter in the Netherlands, etc. Now, it's not of course a bad idea to illustrate the reactions of the population to an event by quoting from diaries and letters, but one cannot help wondering why that particular group of six or so people should be considered so important that their opinions must be quoted again and again. Of course, it's obvious why — because they wrote down their opinions about a lot of contemporary events and these opinions have been preserved and conveniently published in books, so that a historian can study them and quote them with a tolerable amount of effort. There were probably millions of other people in Germany who also wrote letters or diaries, but those aren't so easily accessible. Still, I couldn't help wishing that a broader range of opinions had been included when quoting diarists and letter-writers. But this shouldn't be seen as a criticism of Ullrich specifically, since the other historians do the same, as I said above.

I have one or two other minor quibbles about this book. One is that there are more typos or misprints than I am used to in this sort of books — in my experience so far, Penguin hasn't usually been that careless. The other minor complaint is that the translator has perhaps been a little *too* thorough in translating from German into English, often preferring to use a clunky English phrase instead of keeping a German word. I found this a little confusing at times, not being quite sure what the very frequent phrase “ethnic-popular” is supposed to mean until I realized it was a translation of völkisch. I think it would have been helpful, when mentioning the English translation of the name of some Nazi institution, event, concept etc. for the first time, to include the German original in parentheses. Also on the subject of translation, I couldn't help being a bit confused at a couple of uses of the phrase ‘to read someone the Riot Act’ (e.g. p. 729). According to the wikipedia, this is a common English idiom, but it felt odd to see it used in the context of Nazi Germany, since the Riot Act is obviously a piece of British legislation rather than German one. But apart from these minor and irrelevant quibbles, I think the translation was fine and very readable.

Another problem is not in any way the fault of the book, but of the subject matter: it's a bit depressing to read about Hitler's rise to power and then about his increasingly violent persecution of everyone and everything that stood in his way. How unfortunate it is that the Weimar Republic had so many enemies in the upper strata of society! It's tempting to fantasize how little it would have taken for things to turn out so much differently. From 1930 or so, the squabbling parties in the Reichstag found it impossible to support any chancellor with a majority of votes, so the chancellors from that point onwards ruled with presidential decrees supported by president Hindenburg (p. 224). The latter was very conservative and not at all keen on the Weimar republic — his ideal would probably be to restore the monarchy — so he appointed various conservatives and nationalists as chancellors over the years, Hitler being the fourth or so of these.

How little it would take to prevent Hitler from coming to power — if Hindenburg had just kept appointing his crusty old barons from traditional conservative parties as chancellors; or if, instead of Hindenburg, there had been a leftist president, they could have social democratic chancellors ruling by presidential decree instead of conservatives and nationalists; or better yet, what if the concept of a chancellor ruling by presidential decree instead of by parliamentary support had not even been included in the Weimar constitution. . .

Or a few years later — how differently things might have turned out if France and Britain had marched boldly across the German border the moment Hitler started violating the treaty of Versailles! Sometimes it feels as if the whole of Hitler's career almost up to the very outbreak of war was nothing but one long series of failures by other people to stop him.

I guess it's easier to say these things in hindsight than at the time they were happening. The problem of how to preserve democracy in circumstances where a considerable proportion to the public seems indifferent to it and some people are even actively hostile to it is as pressing as ever, and I'm a bit pessimistic about whether we have learned anything from the failure of the Weimar republic. We see populists of various kinds coming to power all over the world, and it isn't obvious to me what can be done to stop them.

ToRead:

Here are a few potentially interesting books mentioned in the endnotes, or by people who are mentioned in the endnotes:

• Martha Dodd: Through Embassy Eyes (1939). A memoir by the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany. Ullrich quotes what appears to be the German edition of this memoir, titled Nice to meet you, Mr. Hitler!.
• Bella Fromm: Blood and Banquets (1943). Fromm was a Jewish-German society journalist who emigrated to the U.S. in 1938. Ullrich quotes the German edition of her book, Als Hitler mir die Hand küsste.
• Sir Nevile Henderson: Failure of a Mission. A memoir by the last pre-war British ambassador to Germany.
• Harry Kessler: The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918–1937. Kessler was an artist and writer of liberal political leanings, who lived in exile in France after 1933; this selection from his diaries has been waiting unread on my shelf for a number of years. Ullrich often quotes from the 9-volume German edition of his diaries.
• Sebastian Haffner: Germany: Jekyll & Hyde (1940). Mentioned here on p. 163. The title refers to the two Germanies, existing simultaneously, mentioned by Haffner in his preface: one is “a peaceful, civilized people who are oppressed by their present rulers”, the other consists of “cheering masses at Hitler's meetings”.
• Dorothy Thompson: I Saw Hitler (1932). A book based on her interview with Hitler in 1931; she was convinced he would become a dictator some day (p. 263).
• William Shirer: Berlin Diary (1941). The author was a noted American journalist who worked in Berlin from 1934 to 1941; he later wrote a famous history of the Third Reich.

BOOK: Birger Dahlerus, "The Last Attempt"

Birger Dahlerus: The Last Attempt. Translated by Alexandra Dick. London: Hutchinson, [1948]. 134 pp.

For some reason, I'm deeply fascinated by the diplomatic lead-up to the two world wars. All those notes going back and forth, diplomats and politicians meeting and talking, scrambling madly in desperate attempts to preserve peace — efforts which you know in advance to be doomed to fail. It makes for intense, exciting, dramatic reading.

It's interesting how differently the historians treat the two world wars in this respect; for the WW1, they write entire books about the July crisis, the period between the assasination of Franz Ferdinand and the actual outbreak of the war. But in the case of the WW2, they seem to be much less interested in this stuff, perhaps because they figure it's pointless to study those diplomatic manoeuvres anyway since they genuinely had no effect on anything. After all, Hitler was determined to keep moving from one territorial acquisition to another no matter what, there was no way that diplomacy could stop him from doing that, and he only used diplomatic moves to try to mislead the western Great Powers and discourage them from intervening.

Whatever the reason may be, the fact is that of the three histories of Nazi Germany that I've read so far — Shirer, Burleigh, Evans — the only one that treated the diplomatic prelude to the WW2 in detail was Shirer, i.e. the one that all the historians turn up their noses at, never failing to point out that he was a mere journalist and never forgiving him for his tendency to present his history as a straightforward narrative of facts rather than filling it with academic masturbation about historiography, the various internal squabbles between historians, and so on.

Shirer's book has a couple of longish chapters about the frantic diplomatic activity in the last weeks of peace and the first days of the war, and it was probably there that I first heard of Birger Dahlerus. He was a Swedish businessman who had strong ties to both Britain and Germany, and tried to help preserve peace in the late summer of 1939 by acting as a sort of unofficial diplomatic go-between. The present book, The Last Attempt, is his account of these efforts, written in 1945 after the war was over.

It's a short book but quite an interesting read. In March 1939, when Hitler broke his previous promises with regard to Czechoslovakia and occupied the rest of that country, Britain and France issued guarantees to Poland, hoping thereby to dissuade him from making any similar aggressive moves against Poland as well. But Hitler doesn't seem to have been deterred, and presumably thought that in the end they would let him get away with it (and limit themselves to toothless diplomatic protests), as they had done so many times before. So, in the summer of 1939, the Nazis were busily manufacturing a crisis in their relations with Poland, triggering incidents, making threatening speeches, filling their media with furious allegations of supposed mistreatment of the German minority in Poland, etc. By then it must have been a familiar story to everyone in Europe, as they had employed the same tactics against Czechoslovakia less than a year before, and similarly a little earlier against Austria as well. It was not hard to guess that territorial demands against Poland would soon follow, with threats of war if they were not met.

Dahlerus, observing this crisis developing, realized that the Nazis must have thought that Britain would not stand by its guarantees to Poland, a view which he considered disastrously mistaken — from what he had seen of the opinions prevailing in Britain, he was sure that Britain would actually take its guarantee seriously this time. He thought that if only somehow the Nazi leadership could be made to understand this, through direct talks with the British, then peace might still be preserved. He started by organising an informal meeting between a group of British businessmen (his acquaintances) and several German officials (including Göring), held in early August at the country estate of Dahlerus' wife in northern Germany (pp. 36, 43). This went promising enough and was supposed to be eventually followed up by more serious talks involving diplomats, but there were delays and then the crisis intensified quickly over the next few weeks (p. 48). Most of the book then deals with the last week of August and the first days of September, when Dahlerus was flying furiously back and forth between Britain and Germany, hardly ever slept, visited embassies and foreign ministries a number of times, often sneaking in and out by side entrances to evade the press reporters, and was occasionally even so bold as to make suggestions to the diplomats as to what their next move should be (p. 97). On the night of August 26/27 he even met Hitler, who came across as not entirely sane (“Hitler continued as though in a trance [. . .] His eyes were glassy, his voice unnatural”, p. 63; “I realised that I was dealing with a person who could not be considered normal”, p. 71).

Dahlerus' main contact on the German side was Göring, whom he had known since 1934 (pp. 18–9); Dahlerus thought that Göring was in favour of peace and could perhaps influence Hitler in that direction, while some of the other leading Nazis, notably Ribbentrop, were consistently pushing for war (p. 20). “At a meeting in October of the same year, Goering had told me that Ribbentrop had tried to arrange for my plane to crash” (p. 94).

Of course, in hindsight we know that all these efforts were doomed to fail. Hitler had decided some time before that he would occupy Poland (as far as the line agreed upon in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) at the end of August, no matter what; from his perspective the only purpose of diplomacy at that point was to try to discourage Britain and France from helping Poland. As Dahlerus says in a postscript added to the English edition of this book, Göring was in on these plans as well (as it turned out during the Nuremberg trials), so Dahlerus had been merely a naive, unwitting dupe in their game all along (pp. ix, xii).

So I found this book to be a very interesting look at the last days of peace in 1939 from a perspective slightly different than that of historians and of the official collections of diplomatic papers. It is also, perhaps, a sobering look at the consequences of an amateur private individual trying to meddle in diplomacy. One small downside of the book is that it ends on September 4, very soon after the outbreak of the war, so it doesn't describe Dahlerus' later efforts — according to the Wikipedia page about Dahlerus, he made further attempts to encourage contacts and negotiations between Germany and Britain in September and even October 1939 (by which time Poland had been fully occupied). In any case, he must have been extremely naive if he thought that anything could still be done by negotiation at that point. Hitler's idea of a negotiated peace would be to promise a status quo in the west while getting a free hand in the east, while for Britain the first requirement of any peace would be that Germany had to withdraw from Poland. There's no way they could have come to a compromise.

ToRead:

Soon after the outbreak of the war, several countries published selections of diplomatic papers that tried to present the events in a way that justified their side of the war. I read the first couple of the following but not the rest:

• British War Blue Book (also on archive.org)
• French Yellow Book
• German White Book: Documents Concerning the Last Phase of the German-Polish Crisis.
• Second German White Book: Documents on the Events Preceding the Outbreak of the War.
• Polish White Book: Official documents concerning Polish-German and Polish-Soviet relations, 1933–1939.
• Sir Nevile Henderson: Failure of a Mission. A memoir by the last pre-war British ambassador to Germany.