The Hitler Virus

The Insidious Legacy of Adolph Hitler

Peter Wyden

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781628722604
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

More than a half-century after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker, the dictator's legacy and influence lives on, precisely as he predicted before putting the gun to his head. In the spring of 1945, as it became increasingly clear that the Nazi cause was lost, Hitler dictated his final political testament to his secretary: "Out of my personal commitment the seed will grow again one day, one way or another, for a radiant rebirth of the National Socialist movement in a truly united nation." The next day, Hitler ended the Nazi regime by committing suicide. Respected author and publisher Peter Wyden, who himself escaped the Nazis, has returned to Germany many times over the years and, to his dismay, he has found evidence that Hitler's last testament was startlingly accurate.Though the Nazi cause had been exposed and vilified worldwide, it is still clandestinely cherished by many. In the process of documenting manifestations of Hitler's far-reaching influence, which he termed the "Hitler virus, " Wyden discovered that its carriers were not merely to be found among the older generation but an alarming number of outbreaks of the virus are among the young adults, who find in Hitler a moral and spiritual guide, aided and abetted by a new breed of right-wing academics who make the rewriting of history their mission and a new generation of politicians whose agendas are frighteningly close to those of young Hitler. In these often chilling pages, Wyden recounts the results of his research and points out that the Hitler virus is, indeed, still a cause for concern worldwide.

BOOK 1

THE END THAT NEVER WAS

1

WHEN THE PAST BECOMES THE PRESENT

It was in 1993 that I learned of the audience response to a TV documentary on Auschwitz, shown the previous year on the German network equivalent of Sixty Minutes.

The program had focused on the memorial that was installed after the Holocaust at the most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps, reporting that the remnants of remembrance were by now decaying and encouraging atonement in the form of contributions for repairs. The feedback from some viewers, however, did not exactly reflect sentiments of generosity.

One wrote, ‘I’d be happy to make a sizable contribution if it would make Auschwitz functional again.” Another took offense at pictures showing shoes worn by slaughtered Jews and piled up as booty for transport to the Reich. “I was a soldier in the Wehrmacht long enough to know German orderliness,” this viewer protested. “Taking those confiscated shoes and throwing them into a random pile, such a thing would never have been allowed.”

I thought I wasn’t reading right, even though I was hardly a stranger to German anti-Semitism. With my parents, I had fled from Hitler in 1937, not too long after Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, or Night of the Broken Glass). I was thirteen. Along with all other Jewish kids, I had been expelled from my junior high school because the Führer wished Jews removed from “public life.”

This disgrace was just as well, because I had lived in fear of my environment for some time. My homeroom instructor quite seriously taught in our “racial hygiene” course that the Jews were descended from the devil. My fellow students glared and checked me out for horns; on class excursions they bunched up behind me to sing a popular tune about the joy that comes when Jewish blood spurts from their knives.

Such boyhood experiences seemed very distant indeed in the 1990s, for in the intervening half century I had watched the Germans undergo a radical transformation, or so I thought. I had returned often, first in American uniform with the U.S. Military Government in 1945, and later as a tourist and author, roving widely to research books about the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, and the divided lives in the two Germanys.

In my adult years, I had felt comfortable among the Germans, never quite at home but not unsympathetic. I made a lot of new friends, mostly younger men and women from the media and politics, my usual crowd, and they struck me as enlightened democrats, often more appreciative of their freedom than many Americans because of the repressive regime under which their parents had been forced to live. Yet there were a number of signs and statistics that I found disturbing.

Some poll results caught my eye as soon as I began to acquaint myself with up-to-date efforts to take the collective German pulse. In 1992, nearly forty-seven years after Hitler’s suicide, 42 percent of German voters, nearly one-half, declined all responsibility for wartime treatment of Jews. Some 32 percent went further: they said they believed that “the Jews are guilty of complicity when they are hated and persecuted.”

A novel thought: Were Jews now doomed to be implicated in their own mass murder? There probably were more believers in this bizarre notion than the overt poll statistics showed, because more than the reported number of voters were likely to hold poisonous convictions; no doubt they just didn’t want to disclose them to poll-takers.

Another poll in the new millennium revealed that 79 percent of Germans see May 8, 1945, as a day of liberation rather than of defeat. However, if one considers different age groups separately, 87 percent of people under the age of thirty think of May 8 as a day of liberation, while only 67 percent of those over fifty do. On a more positive note, 95 percent reject the “Auschwitz-lie” that the Allies invented the Holocaust in order to demonize defeated Germany

The poll findings helped me understand what I had been reading concerning a certain school of thought that was expanding into a cottage industry It was nurtured by “revisionist” history books, propaganda tracts camouflaged as academic journals, sensationalist telecasts, political assemblies, “news” headlines. They chorused denial that the Holocaust ever took place or else they found ways to dismiss events long documented beyond reasonable argument.

“Hoax,” concluded these accounts. “Myth,” they insisted. “Where did the smoke go?” cried one young man direct from the Auschwitz catacombs during a grisly TV program I saw. “Ja,” he kept demanding, “where did the smoke go?” He was striving to legitimize the Leuchter Report, a popular tract by Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a German citizen who was raised in Canada and was living in Boston. An “engineer” without an engineering degree or training, Leuchter informed audiences of his findings that nobody was executed in Auschwitz.

The cause had other prominent spokesmen. “A shell game” — so the British “historian” David Irving told large audiences in flawless German. The murdered millions? “They were whisked into new homes, lives, and identities in the Middle East,” he declared, “leaving their old, discarded identities behind as ‘missing persons.’“

For years, Irving functioned as the well-paid mouthpiece for Dr. Gerhard Frey, the wealthy head of the right-wing DVU — the Deutsche Volksunion, or German People’s Party — and publisher of the National-Zeitung, whose red banner headlines, “What Really Happened at Auschwitz,” “What Really Happened at Dachau,” and similar revelations, were a weekly diet for some 100,000 subscribers.

To keep from withering in todays democratic German society, such extremism, however marginal, required an underpinning more respectable than the heiling, shaved-head neo-Nazi hooligans I had watched marching on American television. And, behold, at least one impressive source of credibility wasn’t hard to find.

As a class, German professors occupy an unusual status, simultaneously revered and mainstream, and the buzz among intellectuals punched up a history professor, Ernst Nolte, of whom I had just begun to hear. My regular reading, the liberal Spiegel magazine and the weekly Die Zeit, obviously did not think highly of him. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the daily whose readers like to compare it to the New York Times, was, however, a staunch advocate of Nolte. Fan and foe alike accorded him the treatment of a hot property, a VIP. Respectful attention and lots of printed space was his. Radio and TV also catered to Nolte’s views.

His picture showed a ramrod figure, bespectacled, austere in a vested dark suit that fit like a uniform. He had lately turned emeritus from the faculty of Berlin’s Free University, a liberal-oriented creation of the American occupiers. His thick books about the rise and philosophy of fascism and communism had enjoyed applause from academics. These works ranked too highbrow for popular consumption, however — the language was too convoluted, the bite too antiseptic. His latest 500-pager, Streitpunkte (Points of Contention), was said to whip up new waves about the very basics of National Socialism.

The reviewers were right: there were fresh interpretations here. The Nuremberg Laws of racial discrimination were described by Nolte as a statesmanlike move to restrain anti-Semitic violence. The gassings were likewise acts of moderation, surely more humane than shooting naked people in front of their newly dug graves, as had been customary. Hitler, moreover, deserved admiration for having produced an economic miracle and for creating a military machine without equal.

All this seemed thought-provoking, especially since it did not originate with the likes of David Irving and Fred Leuchter. It was a trend known as “the Intellectualization of the New Right.” And did the “New Right” live only in an ivory tower of self-delusion? Was it a small, isolated elite? I picked up the hint of an answer in the breath-takingly beautiful Bavarian mountains, where I had once gone to summer camp. It suggested otherwise.

In Berchtesgaden, so I was reading, some 340,000 pilgrims a year still trooped to the Fuhrer’s sacred mountain, his “Eagle’s Nest,” paying $12 per ticket for their homage. They were known as “brown tourists,” and 70 percent were Germans.

I concluded that attention needed to be paid to the outward as well as the clandestine manifestations of what by then I had dubbed in my mind “the Hitler virus,” and decided to return once again to Germany.

2

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

For a moment I thought my hearing was playing tricks on me. I was talking with Professor Ernst Nolte, the historian, at seventy-one my contemporary, in his gloomy, cavernous apartment off Kurfiirstendamm in Berlin. Our topic was Adolf Hitler. Nothing remarkable about that. The Führer remains a popular ghost in German conversation, sometimes as a demon, sometimes as a quasi-member of one’s family, a father figure who made it big in Berlin.

“I don’t consider him the embodiment of evil,” said Professor Nolte pleasantly. He was the same grave, old-school figure in his gray vested suit, the picture of decorum and scholarly rectitude that I had spotted earlier in his author photo.

In his low-key manner he kept on chatting in the same vein, much as one contemplates the weather. Nothing so flagrant was said as to deny that the Holocaust occurred; merely that, as he had written, the gassing of Jews proved to Nolte that “painless death was intended.” On balance, National Socialism did not seem such a bad idea to the professor. It incorporated “positive elements” that nowadays tended to get overlooked. His concern was apparent: the world was being unfair to the Führer.

Geographically, I was at home. Literally I was born under enormously high ceilings, much like those in Nolte’s residence, only a few minutes distant on Kantstrasse 128 in Charlottenburg. From childhood I also remembered how awed the Germans are by ranking academics and reminded myself not to fall into that trap.

It is a slippery task to respond to Nolte and his breed in any surroundings, including the United States. The outrageousness of their views takes one’s breath away. My profession taught me long ago not to act shy or stand silent, yet some defining encounters with bigots can paralyze one’s speech. The afternoon with Nolte — his Frau Professor served the obligatory Kaffee und Kuchen, along with homey small talk — was one such occasion.

It reminded me of a snowy winter in the wheatfields of western Kansas. As a young reporter for the Wichita Eagle, I was interviewing a farmer who could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. Oil had been discovered under his fields and he was suddenly rich. In the line of duty, I inquired how it felt to have so much money.

“OK,” he grumped, “but the Jews got it all.”

Even after pausing to collect myself, I was regrettably unable to squeeze out a word; nor could I summon a reaction to Professor Nolte in 1994.¹ My Kansas farmer — I still see his sly face in front of me more than forty years later — had lost his shirt through his own stupidity. He had gambled away his millions by uninformed speculation on the volatile Commodity Exchange. Apparently, that institution was equated in his mind with “the Jews.”

Nolte’s Weltanschauung springs from more ideological sources, but did such archconservatives share something that transcended traditional anti-Semitism? And was this something — or someone — rooted in a peculiarly German phenomenon?

At a guess, Hitler was the common denominator. Surely he was more than a vague symbol in today’s turbulence. He had made it materialize to begin with; was he still making waves? When Nolte put forth his creative circumlocutions in order to “renegotiate and diminish the national mortgage of guilt” (in the memorable phrase of a sharp British observer), was the professor appeasing a great German psychic hunger? Was the denial of the Holocaust more than an invention and a lie? Was it perhaps a need, because if the Holocaust didn’t happen one did not have to feel guilty?

Perhaps these ever-pending psychic leftovers from Nazi rule helped to explain why a Hitler apologist like Nolte was being invited to write articles for leading newspapers, why even magazines that opposed him and his views published pages and pages of interviews with him, and why this dry and forbidding figure was such a popular guest on television.

I thought back to my first return to Germany as a soldier in the spring of 1945. It seemed a time of closure. In the Führer’s dank Berlin bunker shortly after 3 P.M. on April 30, 1945, the Hitler phenomenon appeared to have come to a most inglorious end. The finality of the dictators death seemed immutable and the scene frozen for all time.

Face swollen, hands trembling, Hitler had startled his friend, the architect and armaments minister Albert Speer, by shuffling about, looking for once vulnerable. Fifty steps below the ground, under sixteen feet of concrete topped by an additional six feet of earth, he gave a start every time a heavy Soviet bomb detonated in the real world outside and made the entire fortress shudder.

The Third Reich was tumbling down at that moment and the Führer was about to vanish. Or so it was then assumed by everyone — except Hitler himself

At 2 A.M. the previous day he had asked the youngest of his four secretaries, a war widow named Gertrud (Trudel) Junge, to come with him from the map room where he had just married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, in a makeshift ceremony lasting only a few minutes.

Together, the Führer and Frau Junge withdrew into a smaller nearby conference room, and Hitler, trembling and speaking from notes, began dictating the document he wanted labeled “My Political Testament.” Frau Junge would remember how her hand shook as she bent over her steno pad.

Consulting his notes, he named a new government of twelve henchmen and charged them with responsibilities extending into infinity: “Our task, the consolidation of the National Socialist state, represents the work of centuries to come….”²

Centuries. The dream of the Thousand-Year Reich would not die that day after all. Hitler orated the following prediction to Trudel Junge: “Out of my personal commitment, the seed will grow again one day, one way or another, for a radiant rebirth of the National Socialist movement in a truly united nation.” A day later, in a courtyard littered and deserted, shaking under artillery drumfire, two SS bodyguards hurriedly poured gasoline over Hitlers corpse. He had eluded the fate he had feared most: a Moscow show trial “run by Jews.”

Bleeding from a self-inflicted bullet wound to the right temple and wrapped in a blanket, the body was torched by the flame from a cigarette lighter while nine of the Fuhrer’s close aides, led by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, so briefly his successor, came to attention and silently offered the supposedly final Hitler salute.

Was it all an illusion?

“I can hear Hitler laughing in hell now.” Thus reflected George Shultz, President Reagan’s poker-faced secretary of state, a low-key diplomat not given to fantasy, in his 1993 memoirs.

Shultz was reconstructing the strange 1985 affair at the military cemetery in Bitburg, where the enduring memory of Hitler maneuvered Reagan and Chancellor Helmut Kohl into canonizing departed Waffen-SS fighters who might well have been guilty of hideous war crimes — thereby further immortalizing the Führer, if in another world.

Uncannily, Hitler had predicted his durability earlier, at a time and place subsequently well documented.

It happened on a dazzling, euphoric day in June 1940, in Paris, shortly after 6 A.M., and he had just conquered the city he loved and envied. Viewing Napoleon’s tomb, he noted that its design forced him to look downward in order to glimpse the emperor’s remains. He deemed this poor public relations. As he told Albert Speer, his own memorial would ensure that he was looked up at, not down, and remembered forever.

Fittingly, Hitler s posthumous quasi-survival emerges from the shadows each April 20. That was his Ehrentag, the day of honor, his birthday, and I remembered the occasion vividly: banners, parades, and no school.

During my visit to Germany in January 1994, a headline in the Berlin afternoon newspaper BZ am Mittag said, “Times: Hitler Stops British Soccer.” The London Times was reporting that a championship match between Germany and Britain had been called off because it was set for April 20, the Führers birthday, and riots were feared. An Italian sports journal was also quoted. “Hitler won,” it said. “The cancellation grew from fear of right-wing extremists.”

German sports functionaries were indignant, and one official, Wolfgang Niersbach, blamed American interests. “Eighty percent of the American press is in Jewish hands,” he explained. He singled out the Washington Post, whose owners, the Graham family, if they heard about the incident, were presumably startled by their sudden change of religion.

Later, the cancellation was confirmed, and Sir Bert Millichip, president of the British Fo...