Who Was Hitler?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 10

Who Was Hitler?

N the early nineteen-thirties the photograph of a man named Adolf Hitler began to appear in the newspapers. At first he was shown in a trench coat, often with an arm thrown upwards in salute; but later he went into uniform, and was seldom out of it. His face was not very interesting; the eyes were vague, the nose a trifle too sharp, the mouth impressive only when it was wide open for speechmaking, at which times it became insatiable. And, of course, there was the tooth-brush moustache, perhaps the most deceptive moustache in history-for Hitler was not ridiculous: he was dangerous. This face was before the public during 12 bad years; and by 1945, when the Nazi leader committed suicide in Berlin-the rumble and thud of Russian guns around him |-there could have been few (people in British countries who were not heartily sick of him. Today, 12 years after his death, a generation is growing up to whom Hitler is not much more than a name connected with the Second World War. Younger readers who turn to the special article on page 6 may therefore make their first full discovery of the Night of ‘Long Knives, and perhaps only those over 40 will be able to feel again the tug of old anxieties. For in 1934, when Hitler climbed a little higher with blood on his hands, Germany was committed to Nazism. It was the beginning of the evil dream which ended in war. Older people who lived through those years know the full story. They remember the persecution of the Jews, the concentration camps for political prisoners, the cold brutality of Himmler and _ his Gestapo, the propaganda machine of Dr Goebbels, and the English publication of Hitlers Mein Kampf, in which with great effrontery the dictator set out his aims and hopes for the conquest of Europe. But by then he was acting instead of writing. His policy of aggression little by little ("These are my last territorial demands in Europe") was going briskly, forward. The Rhineland was reoccupied; Austria and Czechoslovakia were swallowed; and the democracies, watching in

helpless fascination, saw what could be done with fifth columns, propaganda, "wars of nerves," lies and treachery. People who followed events from afar, reading of them in the newspapers, were given a sharp education in the techniques of dictatorship. For many, alas, it was all too bad to be true, and only when war came could they be convinced that the nightmare was real, Since then nothing has been quite the same. Evil things have happened in recent years, and have been allowed to pass with half-hearted protest; they were not as bad as they would have seemed 20 years earlier. After Belsen and Buchenwald there had to be new standards in wickedness. How can the lessons of those years be passed on? It is the old dilemma of education, the gap between generations which can never be closed. Already the Night of Long Knives is a story of far-off things. Even the names of leading players in that sordid drama are unfamiliar to the young: they are like names in a history book; and history, as everybody knows, is what happened long ago. True, the lessons of Nazism have all been set down. For those of us who were old enough to see what happened to the world when a great nation was enslaved, the truths are all quite plain: it is tedious to repeat them. But the young must learn at second-hand. And so often, when the old try to pass on their knowledge and experience, they fall into platitudes. They explain that freedom demands endless vigilance, and in their minds may be memories of storm troopers marching; but for those who listen without memories there are only words that have been staled by repetition. The Night of Long Knives became a news item for the second time because one of the conspirators was belatedly on trial. There will be other rumours of Nazism before the whole mad story passes finally into history. Hitler's ghost: will walk again, though perhaps more faintly at every reappearance, until a day comes when it may be asked: "Who was this man?" It will be to the world’s sorrow if he is for-

gotten too soon,

M.H.

H.