The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone (Penguin). £12.99

January 29, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is a useful if limited account of how and why the Nazi’s perpetrated the murder of six million jews. Reading Stone’s book while a genocide takes place in Gaza and Trump’s fascist government carries out state-sponsored murders is a brutal reminder that fascism is on the rise again and did not end with the Nazi’s Holocaust.

Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute in London. He is the author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of the Holocaust (2010).

Stone’s book has a subtitle called ‘The Unfinished History,’ which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:

“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]

It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering North’s question. Stone’s book provides a “brisk, compelling and scholarly” account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent murders from other European nations like Romania and France.

While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late 1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could no longer walk.

Ideology

Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas of nationalism, imperialism and race.

He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of being unleashed under certain circumstances.

While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone tends to downplay Marxist historians’ attempt to use historical science and political theory to understand the Holocaust.

Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism and of Nazi Ideology.[2]

Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International, Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?

Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations, anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or “vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually” the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political lie.

Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3] Heiden’s biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism is worth an extensive examination.

According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.

Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.

Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”

This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding into organised political action to build the international socialist movement that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures, property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this political vacuum was decisive.

[1] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2]wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struggle_Against_Fascism_in_Germany

[3]wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Heiden

[4] Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944)

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

December 27, 2025January 11, 2026 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

(This article is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class)

Emil: Are your people well off?

Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money.

Emil: Then I expect you have plenty.

Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives

“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.”

Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art

The story of Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives illuminates Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the death blow of Fascism. Published in 1929 and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being interviewed by the Gestapo twice.

There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn’t on the school reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones, but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the book will always evoke fond childhood memories.

Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids from 1929 would represent society’s underdogs, at risk from the forces of fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.

The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith gives a flavour of the children’s class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I don’t understand that at all,” little Tuesday declared. “How can I steal what already belongs to me? What’s mine is mine, even if it’s in a stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand,” the professor expounded. “Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don’t really understand these things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue

Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don’t really know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]

As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man, Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday, without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids are victorious in the end.”[2]

Why read Kästner Now

Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as expressions of material conditions.

So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students, Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]

Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and preparing collective struggle.

One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames ‘stupidity’ for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought before they have taken power.”[4]

About the Author

Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due to its popularity.

[1] Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

[2] Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives

[3] See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.

[4] German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History-By Laurence Rees Public Affairs, 2025

June 29, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

We meet ordinary Germans who fell in line with a regime that promised them peace and prosperity. Interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, some still looked back wistfully to the days before the war. “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets,” recalled Erna Krantz from Bavaria. “There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”.

Laurence Rees

The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity.

Isaac Deutscher-

The most appropriate, indeed the only relevant, general proper name for the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust is “Germans.” They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler.

Daniel Goldhagen

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

The Nazi Mind by the writer, historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees has been described as a “groundbreaking narrative history” of the motivations and mentalities behind the Nazis and their supporters. As will be seen in this critical review it is essentially a rehash of his previous histography that not only downplays the social and economic and political forces at play in the Nazis rise to power but compliments Daniel Goldhagen’s theoretical premise that “Ordinary Germans” were to blame for the rise of German fascism and the subsequent murder of six million jews.[1]

Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system to try and gain insight in to the psychological and social composition of the Nazis.

But as this perspective document elaborates “ Nazism was an expression of the most reactionary and brutal tendencies of German capitalism. That is the key to understanding it. Hitler’s rise from a Viennese homeless shelter and the trenches of World War I to becoming a megalomaniacal dictator cannot be explained by the social composition and psychology of his supporters. He owed his power to the ruling elite, which placed him at the head of the state. The millions that Thyssen, Krupp, Flick and other industrial magnates donated to the NSDAP, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, the symbolic figurehead of the army, and finally the agreement of all the bourgeois parties to the Enabling Act are eloquent testimony to the fact that the vast majority of the ruling elite had placed themselves behind Hitler when all other mechanisms to suppress the working class had failed.

The members of the National Socialist movement originated, at least up to its seizure of power, almost exclusively from the middle classes. It recruited from among artisans, peddlers, the civil employees and peasants, whom the war, inflation and crisis had robbed of any faith in democratic parliamentarianism and who longed for order and an iron fist. At the head of the movement were officers and NCOs from the old army, who could not reconcile themselves to Germany’s defeat in World War I. However, the programme of the National Socialist movement was anything but petty bourgeois. It translated the basic needs of German imperialism into the language of mythology and racial theory. The dream of a “thousand-year Reich” and the hunger for “Lebensraum (living space) in the East” expressed the expansionist urge of German capital, whose dynamic productive forces were constricted by Europe’s closely meshed system of states. Racial hatred provided consolation for the German petty bourgeois in the face of his absolute powerlessness and prepared him for a war of extermination.”[2]

Program and perspective

One of the most notable aspects of Laurence Rees’s entire body of work, and that can be said of most historians writing on this subject, is the cursory attention given to issues of program and perspective. In all his books virtually nothing is said about the actual policies pursued by the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, from the German Communist party which demoralized and split the working class, and cleared the way for the Nazi victory. This disinterest dates back to when Rees wrote to me in 2008, saying “I’m afraid I simply didn’t have space to include a discussion of these issues- fascinating as they are – in the Behind Closed Doors book. I decided to begin the story in 1939 and therefore felt it wouldn’t be helpful to refer back to this history. I’m sure others would have written the book differently, but for better or worse, that’s what I thought was the right way forward. Equally, I’m afraid I can’t go into my views on Trotsky here, as I would need several thousand words to represent my thoughts on that intriguing time properly. I believe my friend, Professor Robert Service, is currently writing a comprehensive biography of Trotsky, so it will be exciting to see his thoughts on the subject.[3]

As I said to Laurence Rees at the time, Robert Service was a regrettable choice of historian to assist him with Trotsky. In 2010, Robert Service wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky.[4] The Marxist writer David North called the biography “character assassination”, writing that Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.”[5]

While there are some things to like about Rees’s new book unfortunately it is a reflection of the current historical consensus that ordinary Germans played a crucial part in the rise of Nazis and bear indirect responsibility for the murder of six million jews in the Holocaust. Rees not only believes that “ordinary Germans” were to blame but “such horrors occurred not because the Nazis were Germans, but because they were human beings”.

Rees’s belief that all humans, given the chance, can be murdering fascist monsters echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, who believed that forces of human evil lurk deep in man’s soul or psyche. They can easily gain ascendancy, as they inevitably must, over the restraining moral influences of civilisation.

As North says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argued that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation, and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than it had been before that time. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.[6]

There is little new about this “new history”. Daniel Goldhagen’s book[7] set the benchmark for this so-called theory. Although a substantial number of historians condemned his book,[8] It still went on to poison the minds of a younger generation, which swallowed hook, line, and sinker his right-wing historiography.

Brandi Lopez, one of those younger historians, wrote in a 2016 essay: “The term ‘ordinary men’ was used throughout several of my sources.” It was about the people that became the leaders of the Nazi party, Hitler’s right hand men as well as the people that became soldiers following his orders blindly and in the end becoming willing executioners. These individuals began as ordinary men, farmers, fathers, and everyday people. In Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” Goldhagen’s basic thesis is that most German people became willing executioners in the Holocaust. He states, “eliminationist’ hostility toward the Jewish people was so deeply ingrained in Germany”, that’s how the people were willing to do whatever it took to rid the country of them.

In Laurence Rees’s “Auschwitz: A New History”, he mentions Hoss and his story. His family was a simple farming family, and for them to sell their goods, they had to go through a Jewish man. His father and mother ingrained in him that the Jewish man was scamming them out of money, and the reason his family struggled was because of this. Most of the people that were in the sample size said they resembled more of “real Nazis” than an “Ordinary German”. This article explores the theories of the perpetrators, the evidence, and ultimately, the sample size itself. Some graphs display a visual representation of the number of men who identified with a specific occupational rank, such as elite occupations, lower-middle-class workers, etc. [9]

The best refutation of Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans” is by the Marxist David North, who wrote: The methodological flaw of Professor Goldhagen’s book is indicated in its title: Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by “ordinary Germans?” For those of you who would like a textbook example of an “abstract identity,” this is it. This is a category that is so broad, it is capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of Jewish parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an “ordinary” one? Is it a hefty girth and a fondness for knockwurst and sauerbraten? Is it blond hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the nude? Is it a talent for abstruse philosophizing and a passion for 300-pound Wagnerian sopranos? A concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes cannot be of any scientific value in the cognition of objective reality. But if we should attempt to include in our definition more serious sociological characteristics, the worthlessness of the concept of “ordinariness” becomes immediately apparent. In 1933, German society possessed a complex class structure. Was the “ordinary German” at the time of Hitler’s accession to power a factory worker, a ruined shopkeeper, a demoralized member of the lumpenproletariat, a heavily indebted peasant, an East Prussian land-owning Junker or an industrial magnate?

If all these elements of diverse social strata are to be lumped together as “ordinary Germans,” it simply means that the concept of “ordinariness” does not reflect the internal antagonisms and conflicts of German society as it existed in 1933. What Goldhagen, therefore, offers his readers is not a scientific examination of German society as it really was constituted in 1933, but rather—and it is unpleasant to say this—an idealized portrait of a homogeneous society that uncritically substantiates the Nazi myth of a unified German Volk, defined by race and blood.[10]

Another problem with Rees’s book is his take on the Holocaust; for Rees, the political, social and economic reasons for this terrible event are not important. What is essential for Rees is the psychological reasons behind the Nazis genocide of the Jews. Rees joins a long list of writers and historians for whom the Holocaust is unfathomable and should not even be attempted to be understood.

If a Marxist like Isaac Deutscher- can write “The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity. “What chance do the rest of us have?.

North answers, “ The situation is rationalised too often with the argument that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it simply defies a rational explanation. If, as Adorno said, it was no longer possible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it was presumably also no longer possible to place much confidence in the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Historical science and political theory were seen as powerless in the face of such unfathomable evil.[11]

As I mentioned earlier, there are some aspects to appreciate, but overall, Rees’s work perpetuates a very right-wing historiography. As Leon Trotsky once said, “Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners

[2] National Socialism and the Holocaust-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/09.htmlthe theory

[3] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/

[4] Trotsky A Biography-Robert Service-Pan 2010

[5] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html

[6] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[7] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 1 Feb. 1997 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

[8] Historians criticise Goldhagen’s book-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/11/gold-n17.html

[9] Lopez, Brandi J., “German People and the Holocaust” (2016). Capstone Projects and Master’s Theses. 12. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/12

[10] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[11] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

Hitler’s People- The faces of the Third Reich 624pp. Allen Lane. £35. Richard J. Evans

May 16, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”.

Leon Trotsky

“For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody. Here lies the utterly compelling paradox.

Richard Evans

“Because I knew better, I was disturbed from the start by the one-sided delegation of blame on German industry, banks, etc.”

Gotz Aly

Although the figure of Adolf Hitler looms large over Richard Evans’ new book, it is first and foremost a biographical study of Hitler’s inner circle. It offers a new way to understand the rise of Fascism in Germany without conceding too much ground to other historians, such as the right-wing Daniel Goldhagen, who blamed “ordinary Germans” for the rise of Nazi Germany.[1]

Never one to shy away from controversy, Evans, in his introduction, makes the bold claim that without Hitler, there would have been no attempt at a “Thousand Year Reich”, and the Holocaust would have never happened. I am at a loss the see how Evans would have come to that conclusion. I am pretty sure that the German bourgeoisie would have found a willing executioner somewhere amongst its Petty Bourgeoisie.

But if we are going to indulge in counterfactuals, a better one would be the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said, “ Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place – on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring – of this, I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders … But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin, the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway”.[2]

Evans draws upon previous writers, such as Joachim Fest’s bestseller The Face of the Third Reich, published well over half a century ago. The book is meticulously researched and uses large secondary literature as well as recently published primary sources. As Mary Fulbrook correctly states, Evans “ stands on the shoulders of giants,” acknowledging his debt to Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler has so far not been surpassed.

However not wanting to be too negative Mary Fulbrook’s’ Bystander society, Laurence Rees The Nazi Mind and Gotz Aly Hitler’s beneficiaries is now joined by Richards Evans in promoting a view point that not only Nazis but large swathes of the German population were responsible for war and the subsequent Holocaust. Indeed, Evans does not go quite so far as Daniel Goldhagen so in her review Fulbrook, is critical of Evans’s attack on historians like Daniel Goldhagen, who shift the blame for the holocaust away from the Nazis and blame “ordinary Germans”. She writes, “ Antisemitism of varying hues is, of course, a refrain throughout, but oddly, the Holocaust remains slightly out of focus, with only cursory and slightly misleading summaries of key controversies, as between Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen. Evans rattles rapidly over several approaches, ending up – surely unintentionally? – by implying that recent scholarly consensus around “interpretations that stress the specificities of the German situation” necessarily entails support for Goldhagen’s ahistorical reification of a supposed German mentality of “eliminationist antisemitism”.

In noting the impact of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933, on “individuals of ‘non-Aryan descent’ or in other words, Jews”, Evans, in effect, compounds Nazi assumptions by omitting to point out that “non- Aryans” covered even individuals with only a single Jewish grandparent, some previously unaware of any Jewish ancestry or not considering themselves Jewish by religion, let alone “race”. The intricacies of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 are similarly skated over too briefly, inadvertently buttressing the notion of clear distinctions between “Jews” and non-Jewish Germans. The complexities arising from historical assimilation and high rates of conversion and intermarriage in Germany could have been explored in more detail in the chapter on Luise Solmitz.”[3]

That Evans approaches the problem of German Fascism through “the potted biographies of 18 men and five women” can only take one so far. Although Evans does not subscribe that all Hitler’s henchmen were made up of madmen or psychopaths, his grasp of how these men and women were not only able to pursue a genocidal war and murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust is tenuous at best. The first step of any historian studying this subject is to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Unless this is undertaken first, then Historical science and political theory will be seen to be helpless in the presence of such unfathomable evil.

In his review of Evan’s book historian Richard Overy makes this startlingly inaccurate point “Those who gravitated to the Nazi movement and gained power and status as a result made a conscious decision. Evans is at pains to emphasise that Germans did have a choice in whether to reject the regime, or what it asked them to do, and he cites at the end the story of a German woman from Hamburg who fled to Denmark in protest when her Jewish employer was arrested. At the same time, he rightly reminds us that this was a regime rooted, ultimately, in the exercise of terror. Under such circumstances, the room for choice is limited. Outright rejection of the regime meant a couple of SA thugs on the doorstep dragging you off for a beating, or worse; choosing to oppose risked the guillotine or the camp. The number of brave people who did reject was small. For most people, choice was circumscribed.”[4]

Overy leaves out one minor detail: the defeat of the German workers’ movement. When fascism came to power, the working class ceased to exist as an organised political and social force. Neither Evans nor Overy examines the role of Stalinism and Social |democracy that led to the rise of Fascism and the smashing of the workers’ movement.

In Evans’ book, the socialist movement is all but invisible. Not a single reference is to be found, in the course of his book, to Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel or Wilhelm Liebknecht. He does not mention the anti-socialist laws of 1878–90 implemented by the regime of Bismarck. The Social Democratic Party, the first mass party in history, which by 1912 held the largest number of seats in the German Reichstag, is not mentioned. There is no reference to the 1918 revolution or the uprising of the Spartacus League. These omissions cannot be explained as an oversight. Evans cannot deal with the German socialist movement because its historical existence represents a refutation of the theoretical premise of his book. There was a socialist opposition to German Fascism. The German working class were betrayed by Stalinism and Social democracy.

As the Marxist writer David North points out, “ the victory of fascism was not the direct and inevitable product of anti-Semitism, but the outcome of a political process shaped by the class struggle. In that process, the critical factor was the crisis of the German socialist movement, which was, it must be pointed out, part of a broader political crisis of international socialism. Hitler’s rise was not irresistible, and his victory was not inevitable. The Nazis were able to come to power only after the mass socialist and communist parties had shown themselves, in the course of the entire postwar period, to be politically bankrupt and utterly incapable of providing the distraught masses with a way out of the disaster created by capitalism. Yet without an examination of the emergence of the German socialist workers’ movement, it is impossible to understand the nature and significance of modern anti-Semitism.[5]

Although Evans is coming to the end of an illustrious career, he still maintains his indifference to orthodox Marxism. Not only does he ignore the writings of the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky on the rise of German Fascism, but a simple study of his other major works including the superb The Class, the Party and the Leadership pamphlet would have yielded an infinitely better understanding of the rise of German Fascism than countless academic studies that he has no doubt studied.

Trotsky writes, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.

The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its free creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot immediately improvise a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading party. The Marxist, i.e. dialectic and not scholastic interpretation of the inter-relationship between a class and its leadership does not leave a single stone unturned of our author’s legalistic sophistry.[6]

Richard Overy, at the end of his review, poses the question Could it happen again? The simple answer to that question is that it already has. Trump in America is the first fascist in the White House. In the English-language edition of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany Christian Vandreier makes this point “In Germany, for the first time since the end of the Nazi regime a far-right party [Alternative for Germany—AfD] has 90 deputies in the federal parliament. “Why Are They Back? is about how this shift to the right was politically and ideologically prepared. “The fascists are not a mass movement but are a hated minority. However, the ruling elite is once again promoting fascism and right-wing ideology to suppress opposition to its militarism and worsening social inequality… That is why an independent movement of the working class is the only way to fight this danger.”

Notes

Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)

Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971),

F.L. Carsten, The German Workers and the Nazis

Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany, Christian Vandreier

Trotsky, Diary in Exile (London 1958), pages 53-54. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/00-preface.html#n2

The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy- Mehring Books 2025

Chance and necessity in history: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky compared

January 200 Ann Talbot

[1] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 3 Mar. 1997

[2] Trotsky, Diary in Exile (London 1958), pages 53-54. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/00-preface.html#n2

[3] Ordinary people: The Führer’s accomplices, high and low https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/hitlers-people-richard-j-evans-book-review-mary-fulbrook

[4] Hitler’s People by Richard Evans review-https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/hitlers-people-richard-evans-review

[5] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[6] The Class, the Party and the Leadership https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm

Review: The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg-Uwe Neumahr, translated by Jefferson Chase Pushkin Press, 352pp, £25

February 23, 2025February 23, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ 1 Comment

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record upon which history will judge us tomorrow.”

Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

“War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.”—Ben Ferencz

The leader by will of the people differs from the leader by will of God in that the former is compelled to clear the road for himself or, at any rate, to assist the conjuncture of events in discovering him. Nevertheless, the leader is always a relation between people, the individual supply to meet the collective demand. The controversy over Hitler’s personality becomes the sharper the more the secret of his success is sought in himself. In the meantime, another political figure would be difficult to find that is, in the same measure, the focus of anonymous historical forces. Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.

Leon Trotsky- What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)

This is an interesting and well-researched book on the writers who covered the Nuremburg Trials of leading Nazis after the Second World War. The magnitude of the trials drew in journalists and writers from all over the world. Writers John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, William Shirer, and future German politicians such as Willy Brandt all observed the trials. The title of the writers’ castle was because the journalists were housed in the Schloss Faber-Castell castle in Stein, a nearby town.

Neumahr is a German author and literary agent, and his book is less about the crimes of the Nazis but more about the writer’s reaction to the crimes of the Nazis. As Neumahr points out in the book, not all journalists or writers cover themselves with glory. Even a cursory glance at their reports of the trials shows that some resorted to outright lying and presented less-than-objective accounts of the proceedings. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, offered a first-hand account of the courtroom he never went to.

Others brought their ideological baggage with them, which showed in their articles. Erika Mann was the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. Because of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, (she was considered a Jew by the Nazis) she held an abiding hatred of the Nazis, which coloured her writings on the trial. The French Stalinist writer Elsa Triolet wrote many misleading and downright false reports to support her belief that the Anglo-American judges and lawyers were pro-Nazi.

Neumahr’s approach is “biographical and kaleidoscopic”. Given the highly political nature of the trial, it is a little strange that NeuMahr rarely delves into the politics of prosecutions or the writers that covered it, which is a big weakness in the book. As Bill Niven points out, “In most cases, he is as much, if not more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen protagonists before, during and after their time at the Faber-Castell castle than he is with their actual journalistic response to the military tribunal. Neumahr is especially interested in all the social goings-on at the castle, whose guests – despite the separation of male and female quarters and, eventually, of Soviet reporters from all others – enjoyed a high level of fraternisation. Neumahr follows the various relationships of his protagonists. Erika Mann moved into the castle with her partner and fellow reporter Betty Knox (whom she referred to as her ‘beloved lunatic’) despite the press camp being run by the American military, for whom homosexuality was a punishable crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US judge at Nuremberg, had an affair. As Neumahr tells it, this was something of a relief for both parties: ‘Like Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually frustrated’, he writes, because ‘she hadn’t had sex with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on Gellhorn, we learn about her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, while the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet – who stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel and not the castle – focuses heavily on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.”[1]

The book’s strongest part is how Neumahr relates to how many writers and journalists were morally tarnished by political bias or other prejudices. This applies to author Eric Kästner[2]. One of my favourite childhood books was Emil and the Detectives. Despite having his books burnt by the Nazis in 1933, Kastner made a career for himself under the Nazis.

According to his Wikipedia page, “ The Gestapo interrogated Kästner several times, the national writers’ guild expelled him, and the Nazis burned his books as “contrary to the German spirit” during the book burnings of 10 May 1933, instigated by Joseph Goebbels. Kästner witnessed the event in person and later wrote about it. He was denied membership in the new Nazi-controlled national writers’ guild, Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller (RDS), because of what its officials called the “culturally Bolshevist attitude in his writings before 1933. During the Third Reich, Kästner published apolitical novels such as Drei Männer im Schnee (Three Men in the Snow) (1934) in Switzerland. In 1942, he received a special exemption to write the screenplay for Münchhausen, using the pseudonym Berthold Bürger. The film was a prestige project by Ufa Studios to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment, an enterprise backed by Goebbels.

In 1944, Kästner’s home in Berlin was destroyed during a bombing raid. In early 1945, he and others pretended that they had to travel to the rural community of Mayrhofen in Tyrol for location shooting for a (non-existent) film, Das falsche Gesicht (The Wrong Face). The actual purpose of the journey was to avoid the final Soviet assault on Berlin. Kästner had also received a warning that the SS planned to kill him and other Nazi opponents before the arrival of the Soviets.[8] He was in Mayrhofen when the war ended. He wrote about this period in a diary published in 1961 under the title Notabene 45. Another edition, closer to Kästner’s original notes, was published in 2006 under the title Das Blaue Buch (The Blue Book).”[3]

Neumahr’s intention was never to write about the political nature or the duplicity of those prosecuting the Nazis. As Bill Hunter points “During this ten months, while the prosecutors of Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union, listed the sickening crimes of Nazism, world events showed the hypocrisy of the prosecuting Allies. Even while the aggressions of the Nazis were being recounted. British imperialism was maintaining a regime of terror and oppression in Greece, suppressing the colonial peoples struggling for freedom, and strafing Indonesian villages.The British prosecutor prated about justice. Meanwhile, Dr Kiesselbach, according to Tribune 6 September a declared opponent of de-Nazification was placed by British imperialism in charge of the German “Central Office of Justice”.

While the courtroom resounded with castigations of Nazi oppression and racial discrimination, American imperialist suppression was active in the Philippines, and lynch law was rampant in the Southern States.The prosecutors denounced the occupation methods of the Nazis. Yet, even while the French prosecutor mouthed phrases of indignation, the agents of French imperialism were torturing the natives of Indo-China and burning their villages.The miseries of slave labour under the Nazis were related to the court at the same time as 10 million Germans were uprooted and wandered homeless as a result of the wholesale expulsion policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. In the face of world events during the trial, who can deny that at Nuremberg, the pot called the kettle black, blackening itself still further even while doing so?[4]

[1] The Writers’ Castle’ by Uwe Neumahr review- https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/writers-castle-uwe-neumahr-review

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_K%C3%A4stner

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_K%C3%A4stner

[4] Bill Hunter on the Nuremberg Trial-). It was published in Socialist Appeal in October 1946. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/otherdox/nurember.htm

BOOK REVIEW: Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power-By Konrad Heiden (translated by Ralph Manheim) Paperback 614 pages

January 1, 2025 ~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“Heiden was a young socialist student in Munich when he first saw Hitler speak. It was 1923, the year of inflation and political chaos in Germany. Heiden was not impressed by what he saw: a self-centered demagogue at the head of what he calls the army of uprooted and disinherited.”

Richard Overy

“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside those of the twentieth century, the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

Leon Trotsky-From What Is National Socialism

“fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”

― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

First published in 1944, Konrad Heiden’s superb biography of Adolf Hitler culminated in 20 years of study and political opposition to Hitler. The book covers from the 1920s up to June 1934. Heiden wrote and researched it in near real-time, and it is one of the best biographies on the subject of Hitler and the rise of German fascism. As Robert Gale Woolbert, in his review, correctly writes Heiden’s book is “A profusion of detail and brilliant psychological understanding. The analysis is not only of the man but of his movement and the economic, social, and intellectual disorder on which it fed and finally attained success”.[1]

While many modern-day historians, such as Daniel Goldhagen,[2] have placed the blame for the rise of German fascism and the Holocaust on “ordinary Germans,” it was, however, a shock to see Gale Woolbert’s 1944 review containing and defending the same right-wing theory. Wollbert writes, “Where many will feel that Heiden’s explanation breaks down is in his unwillingness to place responsibility for Nazism squarely on the German people or any important class or group among them. This ability to dodge the necessity of rigorous and honest self-criticism seems to characterize even the German liberals and German Jews who have suffered most at the hands of their countrymen.[3]

Despite being over eighty years old, Heiden’s book has a contemporary relevance. It should be read alongside Leon Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism by all those who want to understand the development of fascism of the past and the present. The British Historian Richard Overy writes the introduction. Overy highly praises and defends the book against those who have sought to downplay its significance.

Since its publication over eighty years ago, there has been a veritable cottage industry solely devoted to the study of Hitler and German fascism with varying degrees of success. But as John Lukacs writes in his book The History of Hitler, “We are not yet finished with Hitler (“[wir sind] mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig”), wrote two members of a younger generation of German historians, independently of each other, in the 1980s–and this is so in both the broader and the narrower sense of “finished.” The first of these should be evident. History means the endless rethinking–and reviewing and revisiting–of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again. There is nothing profound in this observation since this is what all thinking is about. The past is the only thing we know. All human knowledge springs from past knowledge. All human thinking involves a rethinking of the past.

This is true in the narrower sense, too, involving the historical profession. The notion that once the scientific method has been applied accurately, with all extant documents exhausted, the work will be finished, and the result will be final (“the final and definitive history of the Third Reich, certified by German, American, British, Russian, liberal and conservative, nationalist and Jewish historians”) is a nineteenth-century illusion. There are probably more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, while there is no certainty that the 101st may not furnish something new and valid. What may matter even more than the accumulated quantity of the research (note the word “re-search”) is the quality of the revision. What is its purpose? In the broader sense, the purpose of historical knowledge is more than accuracy; it is understanding. In the narrower sense, the purpose of a revisionist historian may be exposé, scandal, sensation–or the more or less unselfish wish to demolish untruths. It may be his desire for academic or financial success, to further his advancement in the eyes of his colleagues, or, in the greater world, to gain publicity, or to further the cause of a political or national ideology–on which the treatment of his subject sometimes depends. There will be evidence in this book that this applies on this occasion–to the historical treatment of Hitler too.”[4].

Hitler has legitimately long fascinated historians, but the fascination of sections of the British ruling elite and aristocracy[5] who saw Hitler as an ally against Bolshevism is not so legitimate. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a huge publishing success–in England and the United States, especially before the war. During my research for this article, I paid a trip to the London Library to find other work by Heiden on Hitler and the Nazis (a term that Heiden coined). I don’t know who was surprised more, me or the librarian, to see a copy of Heiden’s History of National Socialism published in 1934 in London by Meuthen and Co. Ltd with a gold embossed swastika on both the spine and cover. Perhaps all the more galling since Heiden was an active socialist. You can draw your own conclusions.

It would be a mistake to see this book as another Hitler biography. Heiden was an active socialist in opposition to Hitler and German fascism. He was a member of the German Social Democratic Party(SPD). Heiden, son of a German trade union official, had studied Hitler for 23 years. So much so that, according to Dorothy Thompson, he followed Hitler “like a Javert tracking down his man.”[6]

As David North writes in his excellent review of Goldhagen’s book “ The History of the German social democracy, in the years when it represented a revolutionary mass movement of the working class—that is, from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War I in 1914—is one of unrelenting struggle against anti-Semitism. The exigencies of the political struggle in the working class required an intransigent attitude toward all forms of anti-Semitic propaganda. Aside from democratic principles and moral considerations, the Social Democratic Party saw the association of anti-Semitism with demagogic anticapitalist rhetoric as an attempt to disorient the working class and subordinate it to the political representatives of the middle class.”[7] Heiden completely agreed with the program of the SPD and fought for it with every waking moment. The Gestapo hunted him, and he only just escaped with his life.

I have been unable to ascertain whether Heiden read any of Leon Trotsky’s writings on German fascism, but some of Heiden’s analysis of the class nature of German fascism would not look out of place in the work of Trotsky. Heiden writes, “They drew to them “the flotsam, the stragglers living on the fringe of their class . . . the unemployed . . . the declassed of all classes.” In all ages, this has been the way of counterrevolution: an upper layer that has lost its hold in society seeks the people and finds the rabble. The officers were out to find a demagogue, of whom it could be said that he was a worker. They found their leader in the lowest mass of their subordinates. The spirit of history, in its fantastic mockery, could not have drawn an apter figure.[8]

Perhaps Heiden’s most important contribution has been to understand and explain the nature of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was, according to Heiden, a by-product of his all-consuming hatred of the proletariat. Hitler, he explained,” hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into a product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this production process. All his life, the workers were, for him, a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass. Everything that he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies. Herein lies the key to an understanding of Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labor movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because it was led by Jews; the Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement.” Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism.”[9]

It would be fair to say that history has not been very kind to Heiden’s Marxist analysis of the rise of Hitlerite fascism. The modern-day Marxist writer David North rescued Heiden from the “condescension of history.” Apart from North, Heiden has largely been ignored, and his opposition to the right-wing historiography that is so loved today that “ordinary Germans” were responsible for fascism has been written out of today’s history books. ~~Heiden shared the same fate when he was~~While still alive~~. His~~ Heiden’s books and Marxist analysis came under heavy attack.

In an article called The Mass-Man: Hitler, Hans Kohn starts by praising Heiden’s work, saying, “Mr. Heiden’s extremely well-written book is based on expert knowledge of the biographical material and the political background of Hitler’s rise to power. The dramatic terseness and vividness of its narrative have lost nothing in the excellent translation. Its brilliant analysis of German and, curiously enough, also of Russian politics makes the book not only a journalistic masterpiece but an authentic work of historical scholarship.

Kohn’s real opposition to Heiden comes to the fore when he writes, “Yet the crucial question of the essentially German nature of Hitlerism is not answered: Mr. Heiden seems to regard Hitler as representing the mind not only of the German masses but of the modern masses everywhere. Though he perceives the deep tie binding Hitler to the German masses and them to him, he often writes as if Hitler had to conquer the German masses against their innermost will. Hitlerism then appears as an international movement which could have happened anywhere and which found in Germany only its accidental starting point. Such an opinion underrates the deep roots of Hitlerism and Stalinism in the intellectual soil and the social structure of Germany and Russia, and at the same time, the intrinsic strength and the survival value of Western civilization.”[10]

Perhaps the most provocative and repellent review of Heiden’s work comes from the pens of the New York Times. They claimed Heiden was a propagandist and uncritically reported: “To the leaders of the Third Reich. Heiden was a hated and sought-after enemy. One of the Nazis’ acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books. The writer was a propagandist of a special kind-one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision…. In 1932 his first book, History of National Socialism, was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over… In 1933, he fled.”[11]

Despite giving world governments significant examples of the Nazi’s intentions and his books contained some of the earliest first-hand reports of Jews who fell victim to torture and internment at Dachau near Munich, Sachsenhausen or Oranienburg near Berlin, or Buchenwald near Weimar following the mass arrests of 1938 western capitalist governments did nothing to prevent the subsequent Holocaust.

Heiden is well worth reading today, and it is to David North’s credit this great historian of the 20^th century can be read in the 21^st century.