Hitler: Secret File and Myth Construction.

It is not an apology for Nazism to observe this fact: any publication of a document on Hitler still arouses genuine interest. There is in the character such a vertiginous darkness that it cannot fail to interrogate—with the ambivalent anxiety of approaching accursed territory—the human being in search of meaning and understanding about this dark period of modern history. Perhaps this is a way of circumventing what, from Primo Levi to psychoanalyst Anne-Lise Stern (Deported Knowledge, Seuil, 2004) via Lanzmann, the survivors of the death camps articulated as an absolute of psychological destruction. Their ultimate attempt to mentally grasp the height of horror was broken short by the SS response: “Hier ist kein warum!” (here there is no why).

It is fitting to salute two recent publications that have, in an extraordinarily complementary manner, further lifted the veil on the mysteries that still surround the leader of the Third Reich. Two German historians, Matthias Uhl and Henrik Eberle, have uncovered the “secret file on Hitler” ordered by Stalin after the Allied victory. Proof that the author of “Mein Kampf” raised many questions; the victor of Stalingrad doubted his suicide. To the point of asking his secret police to obtain from direct and reliable witnesses the details of the circumstances of his disappearance. The capture in May 1945 of the Führer’s personal aide-de-camp and butler made it possible to largely satisfy the demands of the “Father of the People.” The two prisoners were thus extensively and scrupulously interrogated on the period extending from Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 to his final moments in his Bunker. Handed to the Kremlin leader in December 1949, this “secret file” was exhumed from Russian archives in 1991 and recently published in Germany. Preceded by critical commentary on the historical material capable of enlightening readers on necessary precautions for use, the work published in French by Presses de la Cité offers a wealth of unpublished elements on the dictator’s behavior in his moments of intimacy on the Obersalzberg but also in the presence of his generals during his military meetings. Subordinates executing, by conviction, the Führer’s caprices, the two former collaborators had ample opportunity to closely observe the reactions of the one they served. From the dictator who intended to rule the world, we learn that he compulsively examined in minute detail the files of German soldiers wishing to marry a foreigner met in one of the conquered countries. Or that he himself censored the newsreels from the front, then charged Goebbels with orchestrating their propaganda. Apart from his thirst for conquest and his concealment of this strategy from Western chancelleries, the most interesting aspect certainly resides in the highly unpredictable character of the Reich leader’s decisions. While his inner circle could sometimes be concerned about this, the euphoria of early military successes surrounded Hitler with an irrefutable halo of glory. It took the first defeats to highlight his angry obstinacy and erratic assessments of the general situation. Before these, in the final years, became pure and simple denial. The aide-de-camp and butler thus witnessed the inability of his General Staff, whose attitude hardly distinguishes fear from fascination, to confess to him the disasters of Stalingrad or to contradict him on a tactical maneuver that everyone knew was doomed to failure. Which shows that the Hitler myth functioned even in the Berchtesgaden hideaway.

This myth is precisely the heart of the book by another historian, a British one this time, whose translation has just been completed by Flammarion Editions. Ian Kershaw has, in a sense, been interested in the other facet of the Hitler character: the unalterable cult that the German population devoted to him until the reversal of 1943. Hence the keen interest in reading this publication coordinated with the previous one. The author completes initial research based on Bavarian archives which he subsequently extended to confidential internal reports on the opinion and morale of the main party organizations and to documents exfiltrated by the democratic opposition in exile abroad. The “view of the Führer by ordinary citizens” constitutes his basic material. From this he develops a reflection on the mechanisms that ensured Hitler’s control and exercise of power. The author’s particularly fine study shows the difference in treatment reserved by Reich citizens, on one hand, for the Führer and, on the other hand, for the NSDAP, its local representatives and affiliated organizations. As much as the former, Ian Kershaw tells us, was “adulated” and sacralized, so much were the latter, most often, despised and widely feared.

Was Hitler merely the fruit of personal magnetism skillfully highlighted by fantastic propaganda work and iconic creation? “The Führer myth was created by his supporters before Hitler adapted to the role,” Kershaw explains. Or that he seized it. The obligation for party members of the fascist salute “Heil Hitler” in 1926, imposed on other officials by the Reich Minister in 1933, was not the least of the artifices in this vast machinery of imagery. The archives clearly show that the operation encountered necessary “compensatory mechanisms” on the part of the German people. The emotional and affective registers from which they testified, on birthdays or holidays, gratitude to the charismatic leader, powerfully contributed to the completion of his deification. This latter, according to the historian, occurs following his Munich speech of March 14, 1936 when Hitler “begins to believe in his own myth.” The most astonishing thing perhaps lies in the following fact: despite the resistance of part of the Catholic clergy, in spite of popular fears about the consequences of war, even after the first setbacks, criticism never managed to reach, much less alter, the representation of the Führer. It concentrated almost exclusively on the subordinate levels of the Nazi party and administration. As the débâcle loomed, relentless censorship made recriminations even more diffuse, less perceptible. It took all the author’s psychology to find traces of it in the death notice formulas of soldiers who fell at Stalingrad: the families’ choice indicates a fall in the mention “for the führer” to leave only the more general one, of the “people” and the “homeland.”

On all these subjects, the two works provide cross-confirmations and therefore precious ones. No reader, if demanding on the questions raised by contemporary history, should recoil from this double acquisition. The fact, as the authors of the Hitler file emphasize, that it was written for Stalin should in no way diminish the acuity of these direct testimonies. After all, they are barely more than half a century old. An infinitesimal time regarding the terrible suffering whose peoples, each in their own way, still bear the consequences. All the more reason to assent to the reflection of the British historian for whom the profound reasons that enabled the veneration of a character like Hitler in a part of the industrialized world are hardly reassuring.

The Hitler File, the secret file ordered by Stalin based on interrogations of Hitler’s two close collaborators, presented by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, Presses de la Cité Editions, 2006, 496 p., 23.50 Euros.

Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth, Flammarion Editions, 2006, 405 p., 24 Euros.