Revisiting the evil empire

Hitler: Literary saturation point

5 April 2012

It has come to something when the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, has to meet his German counterpart, Edelgard Bulmahn, to explain the saturation coverage the Third Reich receives at all levels of our education system.

Similar disquiet, at least among relatively sophisticated people, extends to the omnipresence of Hitler in the broadcast media and the publishing industry, where a formula seems like a chronic addiction. My butcher laps up anything on TV about that bloke "'Itler" quizzing me about the Nazi leadership, without offering a discount when the answers are right.

What started as a concern of mainly Left-wing dons in the 1970s keen to display their "anti-fascist" credentials has degenerated into cultural kitsch. It is mindlessly consumed by people whose sense of Europe's long history has been virtually obliterated by governments indifferent or hostile to anything before yesterday's focus group.

German teenagers have a better grasp of British history than their UK contemporaries, who, as consumers rather than pupils, apparently have the "right" to the lurid easy option provided by the Third Reich.

The lamest excuse for Nazi-porn is that it somehow diminishes the likelihood of recurrence of a charismatic dictatorship. Take a look at the politics of California or Italy for the obvious riposte to that claim. Having become as familiar as the wallpaper, Nazi Germany has even lost much capacity to appal.

In this decadent cultural context one approaches Anthony Read's The Devil's Disciples with a certain weary anticipation. Read has decided to update a collective biographical approach first used in the 1970s by German historian Joachim Fest in an excellent book called The Face of the Third Reich. Fair enough, for there have been plenty of decent remakes of old movies, so why not do the same with history books?

Read's title offers the tantalising prospect of a discussion of evil or how Nazism functioned as a religious cult, although he is reluctant to undertake the first and unaware of the difficulties that the latter involves. Is he saying that the regime was a sect, a church, or a religion in itself?

Did it seek to displace Christianity, or reflect notions, such as the divine origins of the nation, that were integral to German Protestantism as it had evolved in the 19th century? Does this explain why Protestant voters were more susceptible to Nazism than Roman Catholics who, after all, belonged to a faith that was inherently international? Read mentions those Nazi leaders who were lapsed Catholics, but the committed and enduring Protestantism of, say, Goering, passes unexamined, as does the entire relationship between the Nazi pseudo-religion and the dominant creed of most Germans.

Avoiding these complications, Read opts for a racy narrative history of the period, structured around the lives of Hitler's major paladins: "the fat one, the lame one, the weird one" as the doughty butcher describes them.

Read's research adds many details, especially regarding the private lives and idiosyncrasies of his characters. It is quite interesting to learn that Goering had a 60ft model railway in the attic of his hunting hideaway at Carinhall, and that he added model aircraft on wires, which he used to bomb the trains without moving his great bulk from an armchair. A larder night-raider, hefty Hermann rigged the rules of tennis so that opponents always landed the ball near enough to ensure he did not to have to run.

Sometimes the detail seems hard to substantiate. How, you wonder, does one know that as the Reichstag burned: " Goering was working late in his ministry when he received the news. He immediately threw on his big camel-hair coat, leapt into his car and drove the few hundred yards to his palace."

In his desire to tell a ripping yarn, the author ignores the variant explanations that historians have for such events as Munich - "a byword for short-sightedness, betrayal and cowardice, a triumph for appeasement and the policies of peace at any price" - for another demerit of the Nazi obsession is that the history of other countries (like our own) comes off second best.

One of the problems of writing about Nazism is the familiar teleology. Here we first encounter Hitler's surviving myrmidons in the Allied holding centre called Ashcan; we leave them laid out after their execution. It is not Read's fault, but one fears we are going to visit that squalid story again and again, with no benefit to our political culture and with an unpleasant aftertaste in the mouth.