Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "The Hitler of History: Hitler's Biographers on Trial" By John Lukacs. Published in 1997, Lukacs's work is not another biography of Hitler; rather, it is a work of historiography, an account of how historians, journalists, politicians and even novelists had tried to interpret Germany's most calamitous leader. Lukacs examines why some saw Hitler as a nihilistic madman, others as a cynical opportunist, others as an ideological fanatic, others as a master politician, others as the embodiment of modernity and others still as a throwback to barbarism. Lukacs argued that Hitler’s place in history is inseparable from how historians have chosen to portray him.

Lukacs was a Hungarian-born historian who fled Communist Hungary to the United States, where he taught at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia for almost half a century. He was a clever, entertaining writer, specializing in 20th-century European and American history, especially World War II, Churchill and Hitler.

Lukacs insisted that Hitler was not a throwback to medieval barbarism or ancient tyranny. Rather, he was a distinctly modern leader, born in the age of nationalism, mass democracy and mass media. Lukacs rejects the idea that Hitler was a cynical opportunist. He believed Hitler had two genuine, lifelong convictions: Hitler hated the Jews and he hated the Bolsheviks--indeed, he took the two to be one and the same. Everything else--foreign policy improvisations, shifting alliances, even attitudes toward Great Britain or France--was subordinate to those twin hatreds.

Lukacs goes through a number of major historians and thinkers, including Alan Bullock, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, A.J.P. Taylor Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel, and examines their view of Hitler’s motivations, responsibility and place in history. He evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of their interpretations.

According to Lukacs, Hitler was not just another tyrant; he was a singular figure of the 20th century. Unlike Stalin, Mussolini or Mao, Hitler’s power came not merely from repression but from the active consent and enthusiasm of millions. Millions followed Hitler willingly — he expressed something real within the German people of the time. Hitler was not insane in any clinical sense; he was rational within his own ideological framework. His hatreds were obsessive, but his political instincts were shrewd, even brilliant.

Indeed, Hitler's rise was all the more extraordinary in that he had no money or social standing or distinguished military record. Hitler even lacked a German nationality; he did not become a German citizen until 1929.

Lukacs's analyses of the works of some of the leading historians of Hitler and Nazi Germany are the most worthwhile parts of the book.

One historian Lukacs takes issue with is A.J.P. Taylor. Taylor had famously argued that Hitler was neither uniquely wicked nor uniquely responsible for the outbreak of World War II. Hitler's foreign policy was opportunistic and improvisational, and not driven by a coherent agenda. Hitler wanted to revise the widely-perceived unjust Versailles settlement, much as other German leaders did. The outbreak of war in 1939 was as much the result of Allied miscalculation and blunders as of Hitler’s aggression. In Taylor's account, Hitler was not a monster but a normal German statesman pursuing traditional German goals.

Lukacs acknowledges Taylor’s brilliance, wit and iconoclasm, and agrees that Hitler was an improviser and gambler who was not working according to some master-plan. However, Lukacs thinks Taylor went far too far in normalizing Hitler. By portraying Hitler as just another German statesman, Taylor minimized Hitler’s ideological obsessions, especially his anti-Semitism.

When it comes to David Irving, Lukacs admired his talent for archival digging. Irving uncovered documents others had missed, presented findings that have enriched the factual base of Hitler studies. On the other hand, Irving’s judgments are fatally compromised by his sympathies, in particular by his obvious admiration for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Lukacs stressed that Irving’s use of sources was often tendentious: quotations ripped from context, inconvenient evidence ignored.

Lukacs also addresses the works of many other historians, including German historians such as Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, who disputed the uniqueness of Nazi crimes. Nolte had argued that Nazism cannot be understood as anything other than a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution. In his telling, Auschwitz was a copy of the Soviet Gulag, implying that there was nothing unique about the Holocaust. Lukacs disputed Nolte's causal relationship: Hitler was not merely a responder to Bolshevik terror; the Holocaust was central to Hitler’s mission, not a defensive reaction to communism.

Lukacs is more sympathetic in his treatment of Hillgruber, who had argued during the famous Historikerstreit that the Wehrmacht had acted heroically in 1944-45 in protecting the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe from the marauding Red Army. The heroic stand of the Wehrmacht had enabled millions of Germans to escape westwards. Hillgruber had also criticized the July 20 plotters as sentimental moralists. If Hitler had been killed in 1944, the Eastern Front would have collapsed more quickly than it in fact did, thereby endangering the lives of millions of German civilians.

Lukacs doesn’t deny the scale of German civilian suffering in 1944–45 — expulsions, rapes, massacres — nor the discipline of Wehrmacht units trying to cover refugee flows. He recognizes that what happened to the Germans was indeed a tragedy. But Lukacs faults Hillgruber for the tone and balance. German suffering, though immense, was a consequence of a war Hitler himself had unleashed. He thought Hillgruber’s framing risked making the Wehrmacht defenders appear more heroic than they deserved, while inadvertently marginalizing Hitler’s central crime.

Whether one agrees with Lukacs's assessments and critiques in "The Hitler of History: Hitler's Biographers on Trial," they are always interesting and intellectually stimulating.