Page 214 - Was Hitler a Riddle?
P. 214
Conclusion
even today, sixty-five years after the defeat of Hitler, at a time when vast
amounts of archival documents on the 1930s and early 1940s as well as auto-
biographies of statesmen and generals who participated in the major events
of those years are available, questions are still being raised about the true
nature of Nazism. Were the diplomats examined in this study still alive,
they might well be amazed to discover that despite all their reports on al-
most every aspect of social and political developments in Germany during
the 1930s, scholars still cannot agree on Hitler’s aims, the sources of his
ideology, or the overall historical significance of Nazism’s destructive poli-
cies. it would seem to them that, despite their best efforts, they had failed
to solve the question posed by sir Maurice Hankey in October 1933, when
he declared that Hitler was a riddle whose goals and conduct could not be
divined.
in an issue of the American Historical Review published in 2010, the
scholar a. dirk Moses indicated just how divided professional historians
still are on the subject of National socialism. Moses lauded a new school
of interpretation of Nazism that considers it a mistake “to insist upon the
centrality of antisemitism in the Nazi project” and believes it should be
acknowledged that the Holocaust “is not that defining an experience after
all.” instead, Nazism should be viewed as a political movement whose “real
transgression” was not “genocide per se” but, rather, “the importation into
europe of brutal colonial rule over non-europeans.” this interpretation
1
amounts to a partial revival of the thesis advanced by Hannah arendt in
1951 in her influential book The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she argued
that imperialism was one of the main sources of totalitarian movements in