Your own private Adolph Hitler

SUCH is the fixation in the West with everything Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the story of the Third Reich’s dramatic rise and fall is just so familiar to everyone that it seems like we all have our own little piece of the megalomaniacal German dictator. Hitler is the most talked about/written about public figure of the 20th century. The obsession with Hitler and the Nazis since the end of the Second World War, now into its eighth decade—in cinema, in television dramas and documentaries, in popular literature, in scholarly dissertations and books from academe, in popular culture, in social media—is not only not abating but on the upsurge if anything🄰.

It seems as if every aspect, every scintilla, of the Nazi regime and every chapter of Hitler’s life, before and after attaining power, has been turned over, sifted through and scrutinised diagnostically to the nth degree. One explanation for the blanket coverage is the sheer volume of available material on the subject. We might not have the personal letters exchanged between the Führer and his mistress Eva Braun and we know that the existence of the Hitler Diaries was an outrageous sham fiction, but the Nazis, unlike other mass misery-inflicting, totalitarian regimes, left behind a plethora of filmic, photographic and written documentary evidence, to enable a compelling picture of the nature of the Third Reich to be pieced together [‘Why are we still fascinated by Hitler?’, John Jewell, Journalism, Media and Culture, 11-Sep-2013, www.jomec.co.uk].

Why does Hitler and Nazism continue to exercise this central role in the thinking of so many people? This question has continued to exercise the minds of international scholars, historians, political scientists, not to mention the average punter, ever since the 1940s.

The fact that the Third Reich remains relevant to our contemporary society—illustrated in a number of ways and forms—is a factor that keeps Hitler and his extreme right cronies in the forefront of peoples’ consciousness. There is the moral objectionableness of the Nazi regime per se. The nature of the regime was horrifically egregious to a degree that is sui generis, and the catastrophic consequence of its rise as a world power, total global war and mass destruction, stands as a lesson and a reminder for all nations of what happens when a hitherto cultured and advanced, democratic nation loses its moral compass and goes madly off the rails .

Hitler and the Nazis were not your ordinary garden variety mass murderers…when you weigh up the mega-scale and severity of the Nazis’ atrocities its hard to escape the conclusion that Hitler personified absolute evil. He and his vilified movement represent a moral abyss. Moreover, Hitler and by association German Nazism is the yardstick by which we measure the very essence of evil! Whenever someone or some institution acts in a brutal manner which we find anathema we tend to reach by reflex for the Nazi card (it might be prompted by something as everyday basic as an encounter with overbearing officialdom or a neighbourhood bully). As Roger Moorhouse put it, these “simple stereotypes (have made the term ‘Nazi’) part of the cultural furniture” [‘Why is the Public so Obsessed with the Nazis?’, Roger Moorhouse, History Today, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Mar 2020), www.historytoday.com].

We are reminded of the magnitude of the Nazis’ criminality whenever the media outs some elderly individual who is accused of having been a Nazi functionary or collaborator and is (sometimes) brought to trial – the most recent, nonagenarian Oskar Groening, “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015. At such times Nazism is thrust back into the spotlight once again (assuming it has ever left it)🄱. Then there’s the raft of large corporations who were associated with and in many instances benefitted from the dominance of the Nazi Party in the Thirties and Forties—household names from the business world such as Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bayer and Siemens—all still operating profitably today.

Although the German state capitulated in May 1945 and the Nazi empire was completely dismantled, the spirit of Nazism didn’t end with WWII. The postwar era has seen a rebirth of the movement in the form of neo-Nazi groups which sprang up across Europe and beyond🄲. Many of these far-right organisations still operate, espousing racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant views, including in democratic Germany itself (Alternative for Germany – AfG), their continued existence a reminder that the ashes of an abhorrent past are not entirely extinguished.

Endnote: “The Nazi cinematic universe” Hollywood and European cinema in the postwar era has been awash with Nazi war movies, by far the biggest contributor to the war genre movie. Moviegoers have been assailed with a constant bombardment of films with various Nazi themes and stories…victims of the Holocaust; Allied POWs escaping from Nazi prisons; the Nazis invading Britain, France, Norway, etc; and so – a veritable avalanche of wartime action capers, many borrowing freely from popular fiction to embellish the history with fanciful tales of supposed Nazi plots.

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🄰 a good example pertaining to social media of the Nazi fixation is Godwin’s Law (AKA Godwin’s Rule of Analogies) – it states that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will bring up the subject of Hitler or the Nazis

🄱 this aspect of the Nazi memory does of course have a tangible end-date, given every active participant in WWII war crimes still alive would today need to be nearly 100-years-old or older

🄲 including in Allied countries who had fought against the Third Reich such as US, UK, Australia and France