Monday, July 28, 2025

the confirmed unteachability of mankind

 Key quotations:

Nearly 80 years have passed since George Orwell observed that the word “fascism” has “now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” That’s still basically true.

Thus did these men join, as Churchill memorably put it, “that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.”



https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-the-nazis-teach-us-anything-e7cbd3ca?st=zybGsu&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink


Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?

Historian Thomas Weber shows how a trove of interviews with fugitive Reich officers reminds us how dangerous human nature can be.

July 25, 2025


Stanford, Calif.

It is a melancholy irony that the most cataclysmic event of the 20th century—the rise and fall of Nazi Germany—has so little ability to instruct us in the 21st. The facile use of “Nazi” and “Hitler” against political enemies, the use of “holocaust” and “genocide” about any grim event, histrionic worries that this or that politician is the next fascist dictator, and a thousand movies replete with stiff, trench-coated officers of the Reich—all of it conspires to make what happened in Germany from 1933-45 seem cartoonish, unreal. Nearly 80 years have passed since George Orwell observed that the word “fascism” has “now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” That’s still basically true.

Now would be a fine time to figure out how to talk about Hitler and the Nazis in more thoughtful ways. Consider:

Miscreants in the grip of lies wander the streets of Western cities looking for Jews to menace. Students on America’s finest campuses harass Jews and celebrate Hamas. Every week brings appalling headlines: the residence of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor set afire by an arsonist; two Israeli embassy staffers murdered by a man saying he “did it for Palestine”; elderly people firebombed by an ogre in Colorado; a man known for loathing the Jewish state nominated as Democrats’ candidate for New York mayor.

The problem comes from the left, but not exclusively so. Just as progressives’ flirtation with “anti-Zionism” blossomed into old-fashioned Jew hatred, a collection of young male would-be intellectuals on the unruly right proudly dabble in “revisionist” interpretations of World War II: Maybe the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was far lower than six million, says one; maybe the war’s real villain wasn’t Hitler but Winston Churchill, says another. Podcasters Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have each given respectful hearings to these sophomoric prophets of the “manosphere.”

Till recently I thought it impossible for 21st-century Americans to learn anything useful from Germany’s Nazi experience, so prone are we to reduce the whole episode to bromides. But a conversation with Thomas Weber, a German-born historian associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, gave me a little hope.

The occasion for my visit to Stanford’s campus was Hoover’s recent purchase of a large collection of interviews with former Nazi officers recorded in the 1970s and ’80s. The interviews—which took place mostly in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, where the subjects had fled—were conducted by the photojournalist Gerd Heidemann and preserved on cassette tapes, now digitized and available online. Heidemann died in December at 93.

Among the officers interviewed by Heidemann: Walter Rauff, an inventor of the mobile gas chamber used to murder 100,000 Jews; Willem Sassen, an SS officer and war propagandist; Karl Wolff, a senior aide to both Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler; and Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Vichy France—“the Butcher of Lyon,” as he was known—who supervised the torture and murder of Jews and members of the French resistance.

The Heidemann interviews were of course conducted in German, but they are accompanied by artificial intelligence-generated English translations. The translations contain significant inaccuracies, but Mr. Weber and colleagues are improving them.

The testimonies available in these recordings have a unique importance. The Nazi fugitives interviewed by Heidemann assumed, wrongly, that he sympathized with their cause and plight. They believed he was assisting Wolff with his memoirs, although this was likely a bit of disinformation fed to them by Heidemann to gain their trust. Other things he did to gain their trust weren’t so easy to explain: He bought a yacht once owned by Hermann Göring and hosted a party on it attended by former Nazi officials. This attracted accusations that he admired the Nazis. Heidemann disputed this charge. His most persuasive argument: credible evidence that he coordinated with the Israeli Mossad in finding Nazis hiding in South America.

His aim, he maintained, was to find and interview Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, and Josef Mengele, the diabolical “doctor” of Auschwitz. He could only do this by seeming to befriend their Nazi confrères. In fact, Bormann had died in 1945, Mengele in February 1979, but this wasn’t known at the time. On the evidence, Heidemann wasn’t a Nazi admirer at all but a journalist willing to go to insane lengths to break stories that satisfied his readers’ curiosity.

The Nazi fugitives’ misreading of Heidemann, in any case, led them to speak to him frankly, without euphemizing what they’d done or pretending they hadn’t done it—very much in contrast to the courtroom testimonies of other former Nazi officials in the postwar years. Barbie, for example, recalls with delight an occasion when he and others killed and rounded up Jews in Amsterdam. “It was a house-to-house fight,” he tells Heidemann in one interview, laughing. “The Jews from upstairs and us from the street. They threw chamber pots at us, and we threw grenades back. Hahaha!” Later the same night, he adds, “We had a party. Man, we were wasted. It was such a good group of guys, a camaraderie I never found again.”

Another chilling moment: Rauff recalls the expulsion of Jews from Tunis. “We won’t start with a massacre—we’re short of people,” he says. “We’ll start a Jewish labor camp.” He goes on, in the self-exculpating way war criminals often speak, to claim that his actions probably saved Jewish lives.

The striking thing about the recordings, to my ear, is how unscripted, faltering and entirely human the interviewees sound. There is something to Hannah Arendt’s argument about the “banality of evil”—that Nazi functionaries appeared normal in most areas of life but were too weak and selfish to resist the evil when it came—but her idea lets off human nature too easily, or puts the source of evil neatly elsewhere. Mr. Weber mentions Thomas Mann’s 1939 essay “Bruder Hitler,” in which the German novelist admitted that he could see something of himself in the psychopathic dictator who at that time held Europe under his fist.

“I was involved with the film ‘Goebbels and the Führer,’ which came out last summer,” Mr. Weber tells me. “The filmmaker [Joachim Lang] and I were often asked, Are you worried that you’re humanizing Hitler and humanizing Goebbels? Our answer was, ‘No, we would be worried if we were not humanizing them.’ Because they were human, and if you make them demons, well that is very comforting, but it is not reality.”

Mr. Weber can speak with authority on the point. His books “Hitler’s First War” (2010) and “Becoming Hitler” (2017) explode the image the Nazi leader projected of himself in “Mein Kampf” as a determined nationalist from his youth. In fact, Hitler in the years after World War I was ideologically adrift and nearly settled on communism as his lodestar. He may have been a sociopathic manipulator, but he was still a confused, arrogant man. A human, alas, not a demon.

Our conversation turns to the nature of evil, and to Mr. Weber’s frustration with scholars and media commentators who define Nazis as uncomplicated in their malevolence and so forestall any useful discussion about what they thought they were doing and why. The Nazis, he says, “didn’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘What evil can we do today?’ ”

This is a point I hadn’t appreciated until I recently read Claudia Koonz’s book “The Nazi Conscience” (2003). Nazi officers and functionaries didn’t see themselves as genocidal monsters at all; they were convinced that their behavior was virtuous and promoted the interests of the German Volk.

Here Mr. Weber makes an arresting point. He thinks almost everything written about Hitler gets his conception of evil completely wrong. “Almost all the biographies say that for Hitler, Jews were the personification of evil.” But that is wrong, Mr. Weber says. “The Jews, for him, were a great danger, but not because they themselves were evil. He explicitly said it’s totally beside the point if individual Jews were good or evil. Some were good, some were evil. For Hitler, Jews endangered the Reich because of their Rassenbestimmung” —Mr. Weber pauses to think of the right way to translate the term—“because of their racial destiny or racial determination, which made it impossible for them to act in any other ways than parasitically.”

According to Hitler, says Mr. Weber, “just as it would be pointless to put moral blame on the tuberculosis bacillus for destroying the body, it is pointless to call the Jews evil for what they’re doing. You still had to exterminate them.”

The Nazis’ nihilistic solution won’t be repeated, God willing. But the dark logic described by Mr. Weber has soft imitations in our own time. Today’s antisemites are forever explaining that they don’t condemn Jews, as Jews, at all; they are anti-Zionists, or they revile the Israel “lobby,” or the settlements, or the Netanyahu government.

Another remarkable feature of these interviews—also, unfortunately, a deeply human one—is the absence of any acknowledgment of personal wrongdoing. From the mid-1930s to 1945 these men knew they were obeying the dictates of science and reason, their brutality supported by a century of academic inquiry on Nordic racial fitness and the corruption that was Jewry. All any of it had brought was ruin and shame on a world-historical scale, but these exiles acknowledge no sins and asked for no remission.

Some of the exiled Nazis, Mr. Weber explains, say, or imply, that “it was wrong to kill so many Jews, but they blame it all on Müller or Himmler”—the Gestapo chief and SS head—“who thought they had to go that far for the Führer.” Some of them excuse what they did by denying the scale of the Holocaust (I note Barbie speaks often of the die Sechs-Millionen Lüge—the six million lie—also a popular trope in the antisemitic manosphere.) But mostly, Mr. Weber says, they still thought “the Jews really had been the greatest threat to the survival of Germany and Europe. So in their minds they were right to try to kill them.”

Thus did these men join, as Churchill memorably put it, “that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.”

The recordings probably would be better known if Heidemann hadn’t ruined his credibility in 1983 by claiming to have acquired Hitler’s memoirs, supposedly lost after the war. The so-called Hitler Diaries, published in the German magazine Stern to global fanfare, turned out to be a forgery (though one sufficiently sophisticated to have also fooled the famous Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who vouched for them).

Despite the weariness of the subject, I have to ask about the charge of “fascism” in contemporary American politics, so persistently does it arise in some quarters. “I’ve been interviewed on that topic a lot,” Mr. Weber says. “I was asked to write a chapter for a book, ‘Fascism in America: Past and Present,’ and I was the odd one out. I just said—I think irritating my friends a little—that ‘fascism’ is the wrong invocation.”

The people “most often described as fascists—Donald Trump is one but there are many others—they are deeply individualistic,” Mr. Weber points out. “They reject collectivism. In many ways they reject the power of the state, or want to limit it. . . . Sure, you can come up with some kind of definition of fascism in which collectivism and a strong state are no longer essential criteria. But in that case fascism has just become”—back to that Orwell line—“another word for ‘bad things’ or ‘things we don’t like.’ ”

I gather that what bothers Mr. Weber most about loose charges of fascism is that they relieve everyone—accused and accuser alike—of the duty to study the inner lives and motivations of the original fascists. “We make a mistake, I think, when we don’t take these perpetrators seriously, or when we assume they’re all stupid and driven by revenge and pure emotion,” Mr. Weber says. “Hitler was a man of ideas. . . . He really wanted to understand the nature of things. People dismiss this. They say, Yeah, he read with confirmation bias. Well who doesn’t?”

Mr. Weber suggests the failure to understand the Nazi era, even among academic historians, may arise from a deficit in self-reflection. “It’s very easy to dismiss stupid and vicious beliefs of people in other times. But we also have to think about our own time, and maybe of our own propensity to believe stupid and vicious things.”

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.




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