Reconsidering Adolf Hitler: an evil without parallel

The essential message in Ian Kershaw's epic, two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler -- easily the best ever written -- is the uniqueness of the Nazi catastrophe. The man who seduced the German people of his generation, rendering them complicit in unspeakable horrors, was unique. So was the Nazi state he created, the World War he instigated and the Holocaust he unleashed against the Jews of Europe.

"Unique" is a word that should be used warily. The dictionary defines the word as "one and only ... having no like or equal ... unparalleled." What happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945, as millions died and the land was laid waste, qualifies on all counts as a unique example of the barbarity of a supposedly civilized society when manipulated by all the police and propaganda mechanisms of an authoritarian state.

Professor Kershaw, a British historian who has devoted much of his career to the study of the institutions of the Third Reich, places no conditions on his judgment of the Hitler phenomenon. At the beginning of his first volume, "Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris" (W. W. Norton, 912 pages, $21.95), which appeared a year ago, he said Hitler's imprint on the 20th century is deeper than that of any other murderous dictator. For "none of them has seared people's consciousness beyond their own countries, the world over, like the rule of Adolf Hitler."

And at the end of his second volume, "Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis," just published by Norton (1,115 pages, $35), he states flatly that "never in history has such ruination -- physical and moral -- been associated with the name of one man." Hitler represented how "an ill-educated beer hall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac self-styled national savior ... was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known."

Kershaw's meticulously researched work constitutes a direct rebuttal to those German academicians of the 1980s who sought in their Historikerstreit, or historians' disputes, to take a relativistic approach to the Hitler phenomenon and, indeed, to the Holocaust itself.

One German scholar compared what happened in the Nazi era to the Turks' slaughter of Armenians, or Stalin's mass murders in the Soviet era or the decimation of the Cambodian people by Pol Pot. Another contended that since Hitler's "biological politics" considered Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally ill, as well as Jews, as forms of "life unworthy of life," there was therefore nothing particularly Jewish about the Holocaust. And from the far left came the argument that since Hitler was supposedly a lackey of the capitalists, his rule was merely another chapter in class warfare.