Just an Ordinary Man

By LANCE MORROW

HITLER'S WAR by DAVID IRVING 926 pages. Viking. $17.50.

Northwestern University Professor Arthur R. Butz raised hell last winter after he argued that the Holocaust was a gigantic hoax. A newly expanded and somewhat sanitized version of Hitler's Table Talk has been prepared in West Germany. At first such offerings seem variations on Comedian Mel Brooks' idea for a Busby Berkeley-type musical called Springtime for Hitler. In fact, they help to distort evidence and pervert history.

British Writer David Irving participates in the Hitler revisionism, though in a subtler fashion. His peculiar book, indefatigably researched for ten years and written to the size of a small footlocker, begins with a vaguely Brooksian premise: Hitler was "an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with graying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments.'' He was not, Irving continues, the lone maniac exclusively responsible for bringing down European civilization in Goetterdaemmerung. This singular chronicle of World War II displays a quiet and sometimes fascinating empathy for its subject, viewing the battle maps as they looked to the Fuehrer in his dank bunkers with their mosquitoes and their fanged names--"Werewolf," "Wolfs Lair." Irving describes Hitler's medications and mashed-apple breakfasts, and offers a little touch of comedy when a hapless secretary blunders into a war conference wearing shorts and carrying a tennis racquet.

The author, who has written books on the Luftwaffe and the firebombing of Dresden, reveals strange priorities of indignation. "The war in the air," he writes, "reached a climax in prenuclear barbarism as over 40,000 civilians were burned, blasted, or poisoned to death in Hamburg." Irving does not raise his voice in quite that way when confronting the systematic liquidation of 6 million European Jews.

In fact, Irving advances a novel thesis that has already infuriated some historians. His question: What did Hitler know about the extermination of Europe's Jews, and when did he know it? Nearly everyone has assumed that the Fuehrer himself ordered the final solution. Irving argues to the contrary that: 1) Hitler did not know about the programmed executions of the Jews until some time in 1943 or 1944, and 2) "the incontrovertible evidence is that Hitler ordered on Nov. 30, 1941, that there was to be 'no liquidation' of the Jews."

According to this thesis, "Hitler's was unquestionably the authority behind the expulsion [of the Jews]; on whose initiative the grim procedures at the terminal stations of this miserable exodus were adopted, is arguable." Irving believes that Heinrich Himmler und the SS "pulled the wool over Hitler's eyes," keeping him in ignorance even while the gas chambers were working at capacity. It is also possible, the author argues, that the Fuehrer possessed a familiar characteristic of heads of state--a conscious desire "not to know", what in a later era was called deniability. "My own hypothesis," says Irving, "is that the killing was partly of an ad hoc nature ... chosen by the middle-level authorities in the eastern territories overrun by the Nazis, and partly a cynical extrapolation by the central SS authorities of Hitler's anti-Semitic decrees." Hitler, the author insists, had wanted to settle the "Jewish question" by relocating Jews in Africa or Madagascar after the war, although when he finally learned about the extermination program, he "took no action to rebuke the guilty."

All of this seems extremely odd. On May 5, 1944, in proclaiming to an audience of German generals that he had solved the "Jewish problem," Himmler declared: "You can imagine how I felt executing this soldierly order issued to me, but I obediently complied and carried it out to the best of my convictions." Nowhere else, Irving claims, did Himmler hint at a "Fuehrer order" behind the genocide. But Williams College Historian Robert G.L. Waite, author of The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, argues that "Hitler had told his entourage to 'put as little down on paper as possible.' That an explicit and clear verbal order for genocide was given by Hitler to Himmler is testified to by many, many people who were in a position to know." Among other things, Waite adds, it seems profoundly implausible that in the absolutist Third Reich, anyone but Hitler could have exercised the authority to murder more than 6 million people, in the process employing badly needed transport facilities and millions of work hours. Helmut Krausnick, director of Munich's Institute of Contemporary History, has concluded: "The extermination policy was decided upon by Hitler ... The unleashing of the terror rested on Hitler's explicit orders."

Eternal Wrath. In January 1939, Hitler told the Czech Foreign Minister: "We are going to destroy the Jews ... The day of reckoning has come." To Irving, macabre questions, absurd precisions of semantics are involved. If Hitler speaks a few days later of "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe," what does he really mean? Transportation out of Europe? Or mass murder?

Hitler's obsession with the Jews was, of course, highly developed long before the outbreak of World War II. The National Socialist Movement, he wrote in Mein Kampf, "must call eternal wrath upon the head of the foul enemy of mankind, the inexorable Jew." As early as 1922, Hitler told an acquaintance: "As soon as I have the power, I shall have gallows erected, for example, in Munich in the Marienplatz. Jews will be hanged one after another and they will stay hanged until they stink ... And that will continue until ... Germany is cleansed of the last Jew."

In the recent tide of Hitleriana, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil" threatens to become the banality of the oogly-booglies--one of history's central evils tricked out in the cheap fascination of Carrie or The Exorcist. Irving solemnly declares himself against that trend; he wishes, he says, to "de-demonize" Hitler, and see him clearly. That de-demonization does something even worse: it ends by viewing the Fuehrer as a somewhat harried business executive, too preoccupied to know exactly what was happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Lance Morrow

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