How, then, should we look upon Hitler’s place in history? Primarily, as the inspiration of the most lethal and destructive war in history, and of the most terrible genocide the world has ever seen. He left behind him not just physical, but also moral, ruination such as history has never previously experienced. He represented an extreme pathology of modern society. He showed us the most radical face of modern inhumanity – how an advanced society can undergo a breathtaking descent into modern barbarity that’s quite without precedent. That’s what, with the passage of time, we can see was historically defining about Hitler. Never before Hitler’s time had we seen so clearly what human beings are capable of.
Secondly, we do have to acknowledge that he was an extraordinary individual, however repulsive. Every now and then through the ages, history has produced a remarkable individual – someone who shapes his era and leaves behind a drastically altered society. The crucial point here, I think, is Hitler’s apocalyptic vision of war as revenge and redemption, to reverse the results of the First World War, and to destroy those he held responsible for it.
But, thirdly, we shouldn’t mystify Hitler’s personality. The uniqueness of Nazism can’t be reduced to that strange personality. Another time, another place, and Hitler would have had no impact at all. He couldn’t have derailed a modern society without that society itself making a major contribution to its own fate. What we can see is how special the conditions had to be to give Hitler his appeal, to make him the spokesman and representative for such widespread hopes and expectations, as well as fears and anxieties. At a time of comprehensive crisis of state and society, Hitler seemed to offer so many the hope of national salvation. Expectations of national rebirth were projected on to him. We can see how time-bound these were. We shouldn’t be complacent about the future. New forms of fascism and racial intolerance rightly appal and worry us. Even so, Nazism isn’t on the march again. And future threats to world peace are unlikely to arise within Europe. Sixty years on, the generation that might celebrate Hitler’s memory and reputation is nowhere in sight. The world is a very different place. We are still in a way captivated by Hitler’s vision, but now in a wholly negative way. This, too, is part of Hitler’s legacy. We now have a society whose prime values of human rights and dignity, however often they are breached in practice, are the exact opposite of Hitler’s. The revolution of destruction that he spawned and the symbol of evil that he has become have left him with a place in history that he never imagined.
What will that place in history look like when we come to the hundred-and-fiftieth
anniversary of Hitler’s death? Using unseemly ‘body-counts’,
it is often claimed even now that, somehow, Stalin was ‘worse’ than
Hitler. Certainly, Hitler and Stalin can both be viewed as very different spearheads
of grotesquely inhumane forms of utopian social engineering. But it’s
as if, somehow, acknowledging the terrible crimes of Stalin should make us think
Hitler wasn’t so bad. So there is a concern that Hitler’s evil will
be relativised over time. It was once famously said that the Nazi past was a
past that will not pass away. That’s been true up to now. But as the generations
that directly experienced Hitler’s era pass away, so, inevitably, Hitler
will become a part of detached history, rather than a lasting, emotional trauma.
And with growing distance will come shifting perspectives. We don’t view
massacres in the distant past like we view those of yesterday. After all, we
devote little attention to moral condemnation of Ghenghis Khan and other horrors
of more distant history. So will we come to look more favourably on Hitler in
time, by-passing the enormity of his crimes? Historians are only good –
sometimes - at predicting the past. They’re no better than anyone else
as soothsayers. But what we can do is to remind ourselves of the essential point
about Hitler: he represented the most fundamental and frontal assault ever launched
on all that we associate with humanity and civilisation. Unless those values
themselves are undermined and destroyed in ways we can’t at present imagine,
even a hundred years from now our descendants will surely still continue to
think of Hitler as the complete abnegation of all that we hold good and precious.
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