Making Sense of the Nazi period

In a few days will see the centenary of Mein Kampf’s publication by Adolf Hitler who managed to publish it on July 18^th 1925 after he’d spent 9 months in a Munich prison. I owe this to John Kampfer’s post which told us he’d been rereading the book (in both German and English) to save us the trouble of doing so. In fact an English historian, Neil Gregor, offered in 2005 a guide to How to Read Hitler

Immediately after the war, three Germans (2 historians and a philosopher) tried 

to explain what had happened  
The German Question W Roepke (1946) – one of the historians 
The Question of German Guilt Karl Jaspers (1948) – the philosopher whom wikipedia 
explains thus 
The German Catastrophe – reflections and recollections Friedrich Meinecke (1950)
Since then, material about the Nazi period has become a veritable industry, 

starting perhaps with Karl Bracher whose The German Dictatorship – the origins, 

structure and effects of National Socialism came out in 1971. But Richard Evans 

(with Ian Kershaw) are the 2 Brits who have devoted their lives to explaining 

Hitler’s rise. In Hitler’s Shadow (1989) identifies some of the protagonists

Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, is it time to forgive the Germans? Now that most of those who carried out the crimes of Nazism are dead, should the younger West Germans who constitute the majority of the Federal Republic’s population today learn to be proud of their country rather than being ashamed of it? Have the memories of Germany’s twentieth-century misdeeds been distorted by the legacy of wartime propaganda? Has the moment arrived when we should take a broader and more balanced view, and accept that the evil of Nazism, terrible though it was, did not significantly differ from other evils which have plagued our troubled time, from the Gulag Archipelago to the killing fields of Cambodia?

Over the past few years, these questions have aroused an impassioned debate both within West Germany and outside, as a substantial number of West German historians have argued in various ways that the answer to all of them should be “yes.” This book is an attempt to lay out the fundamental issues in this sometimes angry and convoluted discussion, and to reach as balanced an assessment of them as possible. It is not a polemical book. Polemics, though they can have a useful function in bringing a problem to public attention, tend to obscure the central issues in a controversy, and the aim of winning debating points too easily leads to a lack of fairness and discrimination in the weapons used. Nor is it an account of personalities, though a certain amount of background detail has been provided on some of the principal antagonists in the debate. The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues in the light of what we know about the historical events upon which they touch. To help the reader unfamiliar with this controversy, it also attempts to give an account of the political context in which the debate has arisen, and to point to some of the implications for German and European politics as the twentieth century draws to a close.

A few years later Daniel Goldenhagen put up a different picture in Hitler’s 

Willing Executioners – ordinary germans and the holocaust (1996)

How the Nazis came to power, how they suppressed the left, how they revived the 

economy, how the state was structured and functioned, how they made and waged war 

are all more or less ordinary, "normal" events, easily enough understood. 

But it was probably Ron Rosenbaum who offered the most satisfactory angle 

with Explaining Hitler – the search for the origins of his evil (1998)

It was (it is) about the search. About the differing ways people seek to answer the question “Why?” The differing modes of interpretation, the differing lenses through which one can look at Hitler. And what they reveal about the explainers—about the eyes of the beholders—and the nature of their failure to explain Hitler. The way Hitler escaped the nets of the systems brought to bear upon him.

Explaining Hitler, in other words, is not my got-it-all-nailed-down instruction manual. It’s not a biography; it’s more a dissection, well, an examination of biographies—an essay in intellectual history. I do not have the hubris to declare discovery of a Unified Field Theory of Hitler. No “Theory of Everything” Evil. That doesn’t mean there won’t—or can’t—ever be one, or that it’s not worth the attempt to further clarify what we mean by Hitler, by evil, by origin. Indeed, as I’ve tried to point out in the book, the attempts often tell us more about ourselves, our own self-images, and our cultural predispositions than some indisputable truth about Hitler. “Cultural selfportraits in the negative” was the phrase I used: Hitler is everything we (hope)

Rosenbaum was interviewed about the book

Walter Langer was a US psychologist who, during the war, published 

A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler which was eventually published by the 

Office of Strategic Studies in 1999. He also published The Mind of Adolf Hitler 

– drawing on interviews with someone claiming to be Hitler’s psychologist

But a question which needs asking is - WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM ALL THESE 

PUBLICATIONS? In what sense have they advanced our understanding??

Other Recommended Texts
Germans into Nazis Peter Fritzsche 1998 
The Third Reich in Power Richard Evans 2005
Hitler – a biography Ian Kershaw 2008
Hitler – a biography Longereich 2019