Gladstone: 1809-1898 Book

While their foul subject was fresh, the first post-war English historians, in early before the smoke had cleared, smelt the Devil. (Clive James)


I liked reading The Last Days of Hitler (1947) much more than I liked watching Downfall. Trevor-Roper's reunion of English historical styles'Gibbon's irony, Strachey's titter, Carlyle's bilious verve, if not his love of strongmen and Germany'makes even the flatulent fug of the Führerbunker, its Sardanapalan delirium, enjoyable to read about:

Pacing up and down in the Bunker…he would wave a road map, fast decomposing with the sweat of his hands, and explain to any casual visitor the complicated military operations whereby they would all be saved. Sometimes he would shout orders, as if himself directing the defenders; sometimes he would spread the map on the table, and stooping over it, with trembling hands he would arrange and rearrange a set of buttons, as consolatory symbols of relieving armies. In the tropical climate of a court, emotions and beliefs quickly change their direction. No one except Hitler still believed in Wenck's army, but no one disagreed with his reassurances; and in a moment of time the chorus which had been chanting lamentoso, the dirge of despair and suicide, would suddenly break out allegro vivace, with a triumphant welcome for the army of Wenck.

Trevor-Roper was a young Oxford don given wartime leave to assist the intelligence services. He studied radio intercepts and tracked the turf wars of German Army Intelligence and the SS. After the war, to forestall a posthumous Hitler cult, on one hand, and to refute Soviet claims that Hitler was alive and being secretly rehabilitated by the Western Allies for a renewed anti-Soviet crusade, on the other, Trevor-Roper was assigned, in September 1945, to establish the facts of Hitler's last days and death. His mission entailed the pursuit, arrest and interrogation of fugitive members of the Fuhrer's entourage; he also dug up a copy of Hitler's will buried in a garden, and shadowboxed with the stony Soviet authorities who had recovered Hitler's corpse but kept mum on Stalin's orders. "Conceivably," he writes in the introduction to the 1956 edition, "when we remember the narrow and recondite fronts upon which inter-Bolshevik struggles are fought, the question of Hitler's death, and the official doctrine about it, may have been the symbol of some deeper tension in Russian politics." Part of what I like in this book is its origin as an intelligence report, the survey of a world in which Hitler wasn't yet a memory; even the 1956 introduction is far from confident that Nazism will never rise again. Trevor-Roper sees the Soviets sharing the West's fear of Nazi revival, but dispelling Hitler's ghost with a distinctive political exorcism. For instance, even when the Soviets did admit Hitler's death, they mentioned only the poison-taking, denying his "soldier's death" by pistol:

Why then did the Russians expurgate the revolver from their version of Hitler's death? There is a perfectly rational explanation which, though conjectural, may well be true. The Russians may well have concealed the manner of Hitler's suicide for precisely the same reason for which Hitler chose it: because it was a soldier's death. I myself suspect that this was their reason. After all, it is in line with their general practice. Previous tyrannies of the spirit have sought to crush defeated but dangerous philosophies by emphatic, public executions: the gibbet, the block, the bloody quarters exhibited in terrorem populi. But such spectacular liquidations, however effective at the time, have a habit of breeding later myths: there are relics of the dead, pilgrimages to the place of execution. The Russian Bolsheviks have therefore preferred in general a less emphatic method: their ideological enemies have slid into oblivion in nameless graves at uncertain dates and no relics of them are available for later veneration. I have already suggested that it was for this reason, and in accordance with this philosophy, that they concealed the circumstances of Hitler's death, hid his bones, and destroyed the scene of his suicide and Nordic funeral. It may well be that when such total concealment was no longer possible and they decided to admit the facts, there was one fact which they thought it expedient to alter. The soldier's death might seem to the Germans heroic. Suicide by poison might well seem to the Russians a more expedient version.

If this is so, it raises an interesting general question. For my book was also written, in the first place, for exactly the same reason which made the Russians frown on it: to prevent (as far as such means can prevent) the rebirth of the Hitler myth. It would thus seem that we and the Russians, in this matter, seek exactly the same end by diametrically opposite means: they by suppressing the evidence, we by publishing it. Which of these two methods is the more effective is arguable. I will only say that I personally believe in my own. For when has the suppression of the truth prevented the rise of a myth, if a myth is wanted? When has the absence of genuine relics prevented the discovery of false relics, if they are needed? When has uncertainty about a true shrine prevented pilgrimages to a false one? And besides, there seems to me in the Russian argument, if I have correctly described it, a somewhat sinister implication. If they fear the truth, does it not seem that they believe in its power: that they think that Hitler's reign really was inspiring, that his end really was glorious, and that secrecy is necessary to prevent the spread of such a view? It is a view which I do not share. It seems to me, having perhaps too naïve a faith in human nature and human reason, that Hitler's reign was so evil, his character so detestable, that no one can be seduced into admiring him by reading the true history either of his life or of his melodramatic and carefully stage-managed end.