![]() ![]() ![]() He states his conclusion with finality: For Hitler this was not an ordinary war, “This was a racial war in which the extermination of six million European Jews, not dealt with at all in Kennedy’s book because it did not seem to belong to the normal arsenal of military strategy, was a paramount war aim. Then what was it? Evans points to one factor more than any other: the often misunderstood nature of Hitler’s war aims. “German science and technology were second to none in their capacity to innovate.” Was it the Allies’ weapons and technological superiority, as Kennedy suggests? “In the end this made little difference,” Evans asserts. Was it the Allies’ remarkable success in cracking the German military codes with the now famous “Enigma” machine? Again, that played a part, Evans believes, but code-breaking has been given a glamorous triumphalist history which, he points out, ignores Allied intelligence failures and German intelligence successes. Was it the Allies’ superiority in economic resources that gave them victory? Evans joins Kennedy in rejecting “the crude economic determinism” of that claim. Evans offers respect to many of Kennedy’s observations but advances a very different thesis, one that takes us to the very cutting edge, the state of the art of the argumentation about Hitler.Įvans goes beyond the Kennedy thesis to look at other, rival, explanations for Hitler’s military defeat, and in so doing reveals just how unresolved so much about the interpretation of Hitler and the Holocaust still is. Ostensibly it’s a review of a book by Yale’s Paul Kennedy - one that claims the key to the Allied victory had less to do with some flaw within Hitler, in the Nazis, or in their war plans, than with Allied superiority in technology (Kennedy’s title: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War). One that puts him at one side of what has been perhaps the longest-running schism in “Hitler studies” as Don DeLillo called the field - the schism between the “intentionalist” and the “functionalist” schools of explaining Hitler and the Holocaust. But Evans sharpens the point and reminds us of what I think some historians and intellectuals have lost sight of.Įvans’s essay is entitled “What the War Was Really About” and you could think of it as Evans’s Hitler explanation. Something that had been, in essence, argued by Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lucy Dawidowicz, as I note in my book. Published in the December 5, 2013, issue of the New York Review of Books, Evans’s essay reasons its way back from Hitler’s conduct of the war, and the German military defeat, to say something important about who Hitler was. But if I had to choose the most significant - and dramatic - recent contribution to the most central debate, it would be an essay on Hitler’s war aims by Sir Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich at War, who has become one of the most authoritative sources on the subject. They haven’t in the 15 years since Explaining Hitler was first published. The debates over the “true nature” of Hitler and Hitler’s crimes may never come to rest. Have we come any closer now to explaining Hitler? When Rosenbaum offered to send us his new Afterword to an updated edition of Explaining Hitler that DaCapo (a division of the Perseus Book Group) will bring out this summer, my answer to him was three words: “Dear god yes.” Here, appearing for the first time, is Ron Rosenbaum’s characteristically brilliant response to all the important updates that have occurred in Hitler studies in the past 15 years. David Remnick called Explaining Hitler : “ A remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.” You can read Michiko Kakutani’s original New York Times review here. Rosenbaum found a morally pitch-perfect way to address our craving for answers without pretending to have an answer. ![]() ![]() As historian Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews ) knew, sometimes gazing at the accumulated facts is more eloquent than any single line of inquiry into “why” can ever be.Īnd yet we can never stop asking why. In the book Rosenbaum assessed the most common and uncommon “theories ” about what made Hitler Hitler - from the misleadingly simple (he had one-testicle, a Jewish grandfather, a sordid love affair with his half-niece, etc.) to the intellectually complex (George Steiner’s “three-fold blackmail of transcendence,” Claude Lanzmann’s assault on explanation itself) - and found that virtually every historian, philosopher and psychologist who had written about Hitler had projected his or her own preconceptions about the nature of evil onto the story, a story no single interpretation could possibly contain. RON ROSENBAUM’S 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, is a critique of “Hitler studies,” the term coined by Don DeLillo, and it remains for me a key experience in my life-long reading about the Third Reich. ![]()
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