Page 218 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

Conclusion 205

tionalist,” put it well: “Hitler had not decided on the Final solution as the
culmination of any long-held or predetermined plan, but . . . he had made
a series of key decisions in 1941 that ordained the mass murder of european
Jews.” 7
Yet it is striking that Western diplomats—British, French, and ameri-
can—were so prescient. their warnings, close to predictions, do not mean
that the Holocaust was inevitable. But for the student of history, they are
very significant because they help to explain the widespread, although far
from universal, indifference of Germans to the murders in the east. the
policy of extermination was not an altogether novel idea. it had been “in
the air,” so to speak, for some time.
Certainly, most of the Western diplomats in Germany in the 1930s could
not have been surprised by the Nazis’ final solution of the Jewish question.
they had pointed out that in Hitler’s mind the Jews represented a menace
not only to the German economy and culture, but to all of Western civili-
zation. He saw himself (together with Mussolini), as he said in one of his
more delusional moments, as the most effective defender of the West. to-
day, this extreme animus of Hitler may seem surreal and utterly absurd, but
it is worth emphasizing that Western diplomats early on raised questions
about the Führer’s mental state, and they were troubled that a man with
such a psychological makeup was exercising dictatorial power in a major
country. On more than one occasion they warned their governments that
the absolute ruler of Germany was unhinged and therefore a great danger
to their countries. the first such warning was issued in June 1933 by sir
Horace rumbold, when he wrote to london that many diplomats in Ber-
lin felt that they were “living in a lunatic asylum.” His successor, sir eric
Phipps, did not use these words to describe the atmosphere in Berlin, but
in several dispatches he indicated that the Führer’s behavior was strikingly
abnormal for a national leader. Phipps also depicted Göring, the second
most powerful man in Germany, as consumed to an irrational degree with
his own importance. Perhaps most interesting, even the third British am-
bassador to Hitler’s Germany, sir Nevile Henderson, who saw much good
in National socialism and was an ardent proponent of appeasement, at one
point, in september 1938, also suggested that Hitler was deranged, that he
had “crossed the border-line of insanity.” the French ambassador, andré
François-Poncet, was less consistent than his european colleagues in his as-
sessments of the Führer, but even he sent several dispatches to Paris that de-
picted the dictator as abnormal. this aspect of Hitler’s personality was not
mentioned by the american diplomats, but their descriptions of Hitler’s