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Book review: Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet

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Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet by Fritz Redlich, M.D. Recommended.

In Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, psychiatrist Fritz Redlich, a Jewish contemporary, attempts to determine how physical ailments and mental disorders may have affected and influenced the Nazi leader.

This type of work, known as a “pathography,” has no set or determined structure. In the first part, Dr. Redlich describes “Hitler’s Life from Birth to Death,” including such topics as “Entry into Politics,” “Ascent to Power,” and “Warlord.” The second part, “Review, Comments, and Interpretations,” delves into more detail about the medical and psychological issues brought up in the first section.

This first part is the more problematic one. Dr. Redlich is not a historian and is not equipped to present or interpret history, especially history as fraught with the unknowns, distortions, and lies that surround Hitler. For example, he refers to the “billy goat story” several times. He notes that Hitler was not known to be cruel to animals as a child, except for the “dubious” billy goat story — a highly unlikely story of questionable origin that no historian would cite as an exception, even with the “dubious” qualifier.

He also discusses Geri Raubal’s death but provides no insight into what actually happened or how Hitler reacted to it. He briefly discusses a few innuendoes that Raubal was murdered, but there is nothing here — about a critical moment in Hitler’s psychological life — that is not covered more thoroughly and carefully in other books (Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, for example). On the other hand, there is sometimes too much detail about Himmler, Goebbels, et. al, which does not particularly relate to Hitler, his health, his psychology, or his actions. Indeed, much of the first section could have been eliminated as it often provides irrelevant information or biographical detail that is explored better in Hitler biographies and Nazi and WWII histories.

In the second part, Dr. Redlich attempts to diagnose Hitler, based on the scant and unreliable information available. He dismisses diagnoses when there is too little evidence or the known symptoms are inconclusive, although given that there is so little information and that neither Hitler nor anyone surrounding him is a reliable source, it is still primarily speculation. Dr. Redlich does conclude that Hitler had Parkinson’s syndrome, of unknown etiology, although at one point he mistakenly refers to it as Parkinson’s disease. He also provides a plausible explanation for Hitler’s headaches.

In his discussion of Hitler’s psychology, Dr. Redlich covers anxiety, depression, sexuality, and other obvious topics (often inconclusively) as well as such things as his lies and ambivalence. Again, there is nothing conclusive to say; many of these questions are still hotly debated by Hitler scholars (for example, whether he believed or came to believe his own fabrications).

The question of cruelty is an interesting one. It’s easy to say that Hitler was cruel, given the death, destruction, persecution, and torture he wrought against dissenting Nazi Party members, Gypsies, Jews, and others. This gets short shrift in Dr. Redlich’s analysis, because it’s not clear that Hitler was cruel in the conventional way many of us might think. Someone who gains pleasure from kicking a dog or witnessing the kicking of a dog is clearly cruel — but generally Hitler did not directly participate in or even witness what was happening in the concentration camps. He kept his distance from it. More discussion of such detached cruelty and distancing, with real-life examples, might be useful.

The reader does learn a great deal about the mundane details of Hitler’s health (including his ongoing problems with flatulence, which Dr. Redlich does not quite connect to his vegetarian diet), about the doctors who treated him, and about some of the medical practices still used in the 1940s (including leeches).

Dr. Redlich’s ultimate diagnosis of Hitler is one that few lay persons would recognize; it is part of the title. Hitler saw morality simplistically in black-and-white terms, he believed he’d been chosen by a higher power to do what he did (and was afraid he would not live long enough to accomplish it), and found a convenient scapegoat (the Jews) around whom to rally his followers. This is a cautionary tale that is especially relevant in today’s international political arena.

It’s important to note that Dr. Redlich’s effort could have been more condensed and focused. In addition, he is not a writer and fails to make what are necessary paragraph breaks to large chunks of text with multiple subjects (as does his editor).

Given how little is known of Hitler and how much of his own history he falsified, it would have been difficult to have produced a definitive work. Dr. Redlich honestly describes his personal reasons for writing Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, which ultimately is not a particularly significant contribution to the Hitler literature. Those who wish to try to understand every aspect of Hitler’s life (including his flatulence and bad teeth) or who wish to recognize political paranoia wherever it rages may find this a must-read.

7 November 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum. Highly recommended.

Explaining Hitler is a misleading title, for the focus is primarily on the Jewish academic community’s attempts to explain Hitler — to put it in grossly oversimplified terms, this is somewhat like the prey explaining the motivations of the predator. The result is that, while Hitler remains a mystery, the academic and personal biases of the explainers are revealed. To each person’s theories and comments Rosenbaum adds his own analysis, finding the flaws with precision.

Hitler explanation ranges from the deeply personal (abusive father, infection by a Jewish prostitute, mother’s painful death under the care of a Jewish physician) to the inevitable influence of historical forces (post-war inflation, depression). Rosenbaum discusses the personal in depth, including Hitler’s rumored Jewish ancestor and bizarre relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal, the convolutions each theory takes, and the lack of facts or reliable information to support any of them. For example, Rosenbaum astutely points out the only real “proof” of the abusive father is Hitler’s own assertion and sarcastically suggests that there is reason not to trust Hitler’s word. One argument that immediately comes to mind that Rosenbaum only briefly alludes to later is that millions of people have abusive fathers, bad experiences with individual members of ethnic and other groups, and so forth, yet do not turn into war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions. In short, these theories might explain Hitler’s anti-Semitism, but not the results.

What is disturbing about so many of these explanations (some of which are advocated by such noted people as Simon Wiesenthal, who favors the Jewish prostitute theory), and more sophisticated ones that appear later in the book, such as George Steiner’s, is their insistence that a Jew or a group of Jews is responsible. In these theories, a Jewish ancestor, a Jewish prostitute, an Eastern Jew with a different appearance, or the Jewish “blackmail of transcendence” and “addiction to the ideal” is responsible for Hitler — implying Hitler is not responsible at all. Although the egotistical and monomaniacal Claude Lanzmann, maker of the documentary Shoah, is too self-centered and angry to clearly articulate the basis for his belief that Hitler explanation is inherently “obscene,” it could be because so much “explanation” has found a way to point a finger at the Jews, directly or indirectly, while minimizing Hitler. Perhaps for that reason, Lanzmann is interested only in how the Holocaust was accomplished, not with the motivations of Hitler or his followers. The major flaw is that Lanzmann has missed the point by dictating that his rule of “There is no why” must apply to all other individuals — and the irony of that.

As Rosenbaum repeatedly points out, no explanations for Hitler are acceptable that excuse him — that look to a bad experience with a Jew rather than to, for example, the influence of anti-Semitism surrounding him in Austria and Germany. Again, however, it can be said that anti-Semitic influence has surrounded many people (as Rosenbaum notes, pre-war France was more anti-Semitic than either Austria or Germany) who have not killed, let alone killed millions.

Rosenbaum’s approach is excellent, pairing individuals with complementary or opposing viewpoints, e.g., Lanzmann and Dr. Micheels, the theologian Emil Fackenheim and the atheist historian Yehuda Bauer in “The Temptation to Blame God.” Even revisionist David Irving is given a chapter. Rosenbaum saves what seems to be his preference for the last chapter — Lucy Dawidowicz’s belief that Hitler decided on The Final Solution as early as 1918, based on what he said and did not say over time, and on the “laughter” that is transferred from the Jewish victims to the Nazi victors. While this does not explain the origins of Hitler’s evil, it pinpoints the time frame and removes the notion that he was ambivalent or experienced a sense of moral ambiguity. Dawidowicz’s Hitler knows early on what he wants to do and lets insiders in on the “joke” he finds it to be. Presented in this way, Dawidowicz does seem to have come closest to the truth about Hitler. After all, how can one capable of ambivalence ultimately kill millions?

To me, one critical question is not why or how any one man became evil or chose an evil course of action, for the explanation could simply be that the capacity for evil in an individual may be higher than most of us are capable of realising or accepting. That is, everyday evil like John Wayne Gacy’s is accomplished in isolation and is therefore limited in scope. The intent and the desired scope given opportunity remain unknowns. The more frightening question is why and how so many chose to follow Hitler. I do not necessarily mean the German people, per se, but the thousands of bureaucrats, managers, and soldiers who physically carried out The Final Solution, knowing exactly what this entailed and what it signified. Hitler seized the opportunity offered by the political and social situation to institutionalize his personal evil. A single man may envision and desire genocide, but it takes followers and believers to carry it out. Explaining Hitler (or Stalin or Genghis Khan) is not enough to explain the scope of this particular human evil. Without followers, there are no leaders. And without followers, millions of Jews (and Cambodians and Indians and so forth) could not have died. The evil that is so hard to face goes well beyond Hitler to a place that no one could truly wish to discover.

18 January 2004
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf