What lies beneath
BILL TONER SJ :: The Second World War remains an endless source of horrific fascination. Although it ended nearly 80 years ago, it still spawns dozens of books, and occasional films, as more material comes to light. Sixty million people died in the conflict, more than half of them civilians. Not all were casualties of battle; about twenty million were murdered, by shooting, gassing, starvation, and manufactured famines.
A recent book by Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People, is unusual, in that it studies the lives, not only of Hitler, who launched the war, but of twenty people who were close to him and who played a central role in the war, and in the massacres that accompanied it.
The Germans were, and are, a fine people, and it is sad that they have to carry the burden of this war as part of their history. One of Hitler’s closest allies, Albert Speer, who barely escaped the gallows, stated at his own trial, “A thousand years will pass and still the guilt of Germany will not have been erased”.
One of the most striking and disturbing things that emerges in Evans’s book is that none of these people, not even Hitler, could be described as natural thugs.
Hitler himself was quite a good artist, who liked to paint great buildings – you can easily find his paintings on the internet. As a young man he spent so much on opera tickets that he ran into financial trouble. Ernst Rohm, who was head of the stormtroopers (Brownshirts) collected art engravings and was an excellent piano player. Albert Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, played the violin and enjoyed horse-riding. Hans Frank, who supervised four extermination camps in Poland, was a classical violinist who enjoyed theatre. All of Hitler’s team were well-educated and some had Ph.D.’s. Many of them were not notably anti-semitic until they engaged with Hitler.
A question that is constantly asked is, ‘How did these men (and some women) become what they became?’
One of the major unifying factors was that they shared a particularly deep sense of resentment and betrayal after the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, which ended in 1918 after four years of slaughter in the trenches.
In that age of world-wide imperialism, the Germans believed they had fought an honest war and had negotiated an honourable cease-fire. But they were then required to admit total responsibility for the war, agree to pay substantial reparations, were stripped of much of their territory, had to limit their army to 100,000 men, and were prohibited from having an air-force.
The future Nazi’s were among the many who longed for a leader who would restore national pride, especially following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which led to massive unemployment and civil unrest.
When Hitler came along, there is no doubt that he had a semi-hypnotic effect on those who encountered him. Alfred Rosenberg stated that, on hearing Hitler speak, he was won over within the first fifteen minutes as he realized that this was the man to follow. Joachim von Ribbentrop stated, “I noticed particularly the blue eyes… I was facing a man who knew what he wanted and had an unshakeable will and a very strong personality… I was convinced that this man, if anyone, could save Germany”.
We may scoff at all this but should remember that we in Ireland (like people everywhere) are not immune to the magnetism of major personalities. Huge crowds turned out to hear people like Charles Stewart Parnell, Jim Larkin, Michael Collins, Eamonn de Valera, and Ian Paisley.
The frightening thing is, that, given extreme circumstances, men and women everywhere are vulnerable to being led by others into the darkest recesses of their own souls and personalities. We cannot imagine what lies beneath, in those parts of our minds and emotions that are hidden from us when life is going well.
