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The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogations of Hitler's Personal Aides
Published by: bamboo (Karma: 148.59) on 14 May 2010 | Views: 3134
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Of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's many obsessions with enemies real and imagined his staggering obsession with Adolf Hitler seems to be one that was entirely justified by history. Between the commencement of the Nazi invasion of June, 1941 and the fall of Berlin in May, 1945 destruction and darkness reigned over the eastern front in an unimaginably bloody war.
Stalin's obsession survived the `apparent' suicide of Hitler on April 30, 1945. I emphasize apparent because Stalin did not believe the initial reports of Hitler's death. "The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin From the Interrogations of Hitler's Personal Aides" was one result of that obsession. Two of Hitler's top aides, SS officers Otto Guensche and Heinz Linge, were captured by the Red Army. Once their role as top, loyal aides to Hitler became clear they were transferred to Moscow. They were kept prisoner there for ten years. During their captivity they were interrogated repeatedly by the NKVD (later known as the KGB) on Hitler's life and times. The resulting dossier was presented for Stalin's eyes only (although it was, apparently, read by other top members of the Politburo) and then locked in the NKVD's archives. The Dossier was `discovered by German historian and researcher Matthias Uhl after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Uhl, along with co-editor Henrik Eberle, annotated the Dossier and it has now been translated into English. It is an extraordinarily riveting inside look at `the heart of darkness'.
The Hitler Book is set out in chronological order. It is a straightforward narrative of Hitler's life from the time he assumed power in 1933 until his death. Both Guensche and Linge were trusted aides to Hitler and even though they were not confidants they had daily access to Hitler for almost twelve years. I wouldn't say there is anything particularly new revealed here. Hitler's reign of terror is well documented. However, the Hitler Book does provide an insider's look at life in the eye of the storm that adds substantially to our body of knowledge of the Third Reich. We read about Hitler's vaunted rages but also see the petty and often vicious jostling for power amongst the members of the Court of the Nazi Tsar. The mixture of sycophancy and deviousness has a powerful effect on readers who may have, like me, often wondered about the nature of people capable of performing the most heinous acts. Hannah Arendt wrote, in covering the Eichmann trial, about the banality of evil, and that banality is also apparent here. Hitler's musical tastes and the often vacuous conversations with Eva Braun and her coterie come to mind in this context.
The book grows more detailed as the tide of war begins to turn at Stalingrad. By the time we get to Hitler's last months in his Berlin bunker the atmosphere becomes increasingly claustrophobic and chaotic as Hitler's life and the life of those in the bunker becomes dominated more and more by paranoia and general insanity. The last third of the book is an intense recreation of the last days of the Third Reich and the last days of Hitler.
There are some glaring gaps in the book. As noted the book was prepared by the NKVD for Stalin so the omission have to be understood in that context. There is much discussion of the Munich Agreement and the appeasement policies of the French and British but there is no discussion about the Hitler/Stalin pact and the negotiations leading up to the pact that was followed in short order by the German invasion of western Poland and the German occupation of eastern Poland. The most glaring omission is any significant discussion of the Final Solution. There are allusions to labor and concentration camps but that is all. This omission is not inconsistent with Soviet domestic and foreign policy in the post war years. Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign and his Doctors' Plot bespeak a mindset that the NKVD editors were most certainly aware of.
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