Technical Difficulties

Hitler and Geli by Ronald Hayman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book has three major problems, one historical, one methodological, and one conceptual.

The historical problem is unfortunately inherent in the subject matter. We just don't know enough about Angela Raubal to provide material for an entire book. (Weirdly, this is the same problem I had with Michael Wallis's biography of Pretty Boy Floyd, Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.) She was a woman in Nazi Germany, she was only twenty-three when she died, and almost everything she herself put to paper was destroyed. And all the information we do have about her is warped by its proximity to Hitler, who provides a distorting vortex for anything that gets near him.

There's only two things you can do with this problem. One is write a short book, more of a monograph, and we now consider that a non-viable option unless you are an academic and only interested in academic publication. The other is to find something else to fill your empty pages. In this case Hayman's got Hitler standing right there, and I have Ian Kershaw's 2 volume biography of Hitler (Hubris and Nemesis). I know how much space that bastard can take up.

Hayman provides a weak, surface-y biography of Hitler--obviously and strongly influenced by The Psychopathic God (itself a problem we'll come back to in a moment)--which really does nothing for his argument and feels very much like filler. I admit and agree that the lack of material on his subject matter is a problem that he is not responsible for--and just because we don't know very much about Geli Raubal is NOT a reason not to write about her--but I don't think his solution was a good one. He might have done better to do some social history about women's roles and options in Weimar Germany, especially as it transitioned into Nazi Germany. Angela Lambert does an excellent job in her biography of Evan Braun of showing that even without Hitler, Braun had no good path open to her, because no woman in Nazi Germany did. Hayman doesn't show much if any awareness of that side of the problem--it's unfortunately probably not inaccurate to say that he's more interested in Hitler than in Raubal. (If I don't call him Adolf, I don't call her Geli. Fair is fair.)

The second problem, the methodological, is also inherent in the first. Almost all of Hayman's evidence (and sometimes "evidence") for his argument about Hitler and Raubal's relationship and her death is secondhand and hearsay. It's what surviving members of Hitler's inner circle wrote about Raubal or told interviewers about Raubal. And sometimes what they're saying is what somebody else told them about Raubal. In all cases, they can't be trusted because they have their own narrative and their own interests and (post-war) self-exculpation--and those are serious problems because again, Hitler is a distorting vortex. (Henriette von Shirach is probably the closest thing he has to first-hand testimony, and regrettably, I don't think you can trust her as far as you can throw her.) Hayman does not discuss (or seem to be aware of) this problem about his evidence, which makes it even less trustworthy, especially when what he's using as evidence is rumors and gossip about Hitler's sex-life.

And that leads us to the third problem, the conceptual one, which is what Hayman thinks and how he thinks about, well, Hitler's sex-life. As I said, he's clearly heavily indebted to Waite, and the distinctive thing about Waite is his careful, ponderous, by-the-book Freudian analysis of the second-hand evidence, hearsay, and rumors about Hitler's sex-life. The cryptorchism, the impotence, the "deviant sexual practices": Hayman reproduces it all without apparently noticing that we have no evidence of any of it. We have only what people say other people said about Hitler (the pornographic drawings that we have not one single example of) and what can maybe be inferred from what Hitler said about himself, and that kind of inference is a very dicey proposition, even with someone as sublimely un-self-aware as Hitler. Nobody who might have had first-hand experience of Hitler in the bedroom survived the end of the war.

The major conceptual problem comes in the discussion of Hitler's "sado-masochism"--which I put in quotes because Hayman is using Freud's model, which sees sadism and masochism purely as perversions and sicknesses, and shows absolutely no awareness that our thinking has advanced since Freud and that there are other, better, more nuanced and sophisticated models available for thinking about BDSM. (This is the same thing I bitched about at length in my review of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator.) The problem with Hitler's sexual practices, insofar as we have genuine evidence about them, isn't the sadism or the masochism or the urophilia per se; it's that he was forcing unwilling women to participate in fulfilling his sexual needs. (Hayman labels Eva Braun a "victim of Hitler's sado-masochism" and it's not at all clear that's true, either from his perspective of "sado-masochism" being a crime or from the position I would prefer to discuss about consent, just as his calling Renate Mueller a victim of Hitler's "sado-masochism" is pretty misleading. She certainly did not enjoy her relationship with Hitler, whatever it consisted of, and hers is the clearest evidence* we have, as best I can tell from Hayman, about what Hitler's sexual practices were, but the fact that she was victimized by Hitler's government and committed suicide because she thought--rightly or wrongly--that the SS were coming to arrest her is not a direct result of "sado-masochism," Hitler's or otherwise, though you can certainly make an argument it's a direct result of Hitler's paranoia.) It's consent issues, in other words, that we need to be looking at if we want to talk about Hitler's monstrosity, and those need to be carefully separated from sadism/masochism and dominance/submission. And I could really have used Hayman to have--and to impart--a better supported understanding of how all of these things were understood in 1930s Germany instead of going for sensationalism. (And there's another thing he could have been doing instead of rehashing Hitler's biography.)

But where he really goes off the rails (for me) is in his attempt to do a Freudian analysis of Hitler's career as a dictator and mass murderer, trying to use "sado-masochism" as an explanation for Hitler's aggression against his European neighbors, for his orders to massacre the Poles and the Russians and the Jews of all nationalities, for his scorched earth tactics at the end of the war. And trying to argue that Hitler's "sado-masochism" infected all of Nazi Germany, that that's the explanation for totalitarianism and the rule of terror. Leaving aside the question of how much influence Hitler's personal style had (and I'm willing to be persuaded it had a LOT, but I need some evidence), this argument is completely ignoring the entire history of the German right-wing at least back to World War I, if not much, much farther. The things that Hayman points to as the results of Hitler's "sado-masochism" are things--like everything else about Hitler--that were lying around waiting to be picked up and turned into weapons.

So. Hayman's argument is that Hitler murdered Raubal (or, more likely, would have been convicted of manslaughter), and where the book is actually interesting is in his analysis of the lies the top Nazis were telling (half an hour after they said it was suicide, they were trying to announce it was an accident) and where they contradicted each other and what we can learn from those contradictions. It's not clear whether Raubal died on the day before her body was found or the day before that. It's not clear whether her face was bruised, not clear whether her nose was broken. It's not clear whether Hitler was in the Munich flat when she died or--as everyone loudly insisted--on the way to Nuremberg. Her motive for suicide was thin at best, and the letter she broke off writing in the middle of a word was full of plans for a visit to Vienna. The path the bullet took through her body (entering above the heart and lodging at her left hip) was very peculiar and an almost impossible angle for a suicide to achieve, even if she would have wanted to. Everyone very carefully forgot to look for powder burns on her skin and clothes. Her body was whisked away to be buried in Austria before anyone could suggest an autopsy or an inquest.

It's hard to tell what's genuine hinkiness and what's the effect of Hitler's distorting vortex (and again, Hayman's refusal to admit the vortex into his analysis is a serious problem), but I ended up being fairly convinced that Raubal did not kill herself, even if I didn't buy any of the rest of Hayman's argument about Hitler.

And in the end, I suppose that's my most central disappointment in this book: it's about Hitler when the person I'm interested in is Raubal.


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*The "evidence" we have from Renate Mueller is what the OSS Source Book says (quoting someone, but Hayman's citation isn't clear enough for me to figure out who) that a director named Adolf Zeissler said (and goodness knows when he said it, since it could be any time from 1936 through the end of the war) that Renate Mueller told him in 1936, four years after her experience and at a time when, blacklisted and a morphine addict, she had no incentive to be, and cannot be counted by any stretch of the imagination as, a reliable witness. Hayman does not talk at all about the problematic nature of his evidence here. Or anywhere else.



View all my reviews

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

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I need to start with a tiny nit-picking piece of bitchery: nobody involved in the process of publishing this book caught the vice/vise mistake, and it happened more than once. Germany may have been caught in a vise of its own vices, if you want to be smartassed about it, but it was not caught in a vice. Thank you. Never mind. Two countries separated by a single language as per usual.

This is, as you may already have inferred, a biography for which the word "monumental" is not incorrect. 591 pages for the first volume, 841 for the second. It is, unfortunately, dated, because Kershaw was writing before the David Irving libel trial (I've blogged about books discussing the trial here and here), so there are some things (mercifully, mostly incidental details rather than anything crucial) for which Irving is the only source. Other than that--and while I'm remarking on Kershaw's flaws--his prose style is adequate at best. And it's not surprising, given the length of the project, that we don't maintain a steady state of "best." So you're not reading for the prose here.

Historians of Nazi Germany can be roughly divided into two camps: intentionalists, who believe that Hitler planned every step of the Final Solution, and functionalists, who believe that Hitler didn't plan any damn thing and the functionaries and bureaucrats of the Third Reich made the Final Solution up as they went along. (This is a reductive schema, and most historians, more accurately, fall somewhere on the continuum between the two poles.) Kershaw is a functionalist--which is an interesting perspective to write a biography of Hitler from, because it means that at every turn, he's looking for the least amount of agency from Hitler commensurate with the historical outcome. And what's really interesting about his biography is the degree to which he has to admit that Hitler was indispensible to the Final Solution, that it couldn't have happened without him and that, even though he shied away from direct involvement, none of it happened without his knowledge and approval.

(Functionalism does occasionally lead him into some rather odd corners: he is the only historian of the Third Reich whom I have read who argues that the Fritsch-Blomberg debacle wasn't planned by anyone, that it was bad luck and stupidity on all sides. Even the clusterfuck surrounding poor Fritsch. Although Kershaw does seem to believe that Blomberg knew his wife had been a prostitute and was trying to keep that a secret from Hitler, which seemed to me like a dubious piece of blame-the-victim thinking. But I digress.)

Kershaw is very very good at explaining, not merely the patterns in Hitler's thinking--the way that what he said in Mein Kampf in the 20s and what he did when he came to power in the 30s are of a piece--but the way in which his habits of thought remained consistent, and the ways in which they both brought him to power and caused his downfall. In particular, Hitler habitually thought in polarized binaries. He habitually radicalized any conflict into an all-or-nothing scenario ("Here ve see," as Monty Python say, "ze life-or-death struggle between ze pantomime horse and ze other pantomime horse for ze position in the merchant bank."), and he believed, from first to last, that compromise was unacceptable. Seeing the pattern in his early life makes his "leadership" during WWII, if not exactly explicable, at least comprehensible.

As a functionalist, Kershaw is also excellent at showing the degree to which the other power-elites of Germany were culpable in the Nazi seizure of power and in Nazi Germany's unprovoked and indefensible assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Russia . . . He stresses repeatedly that even though invasion after invasion was Hitler's idea, he couldn't have done it without the willing and frequently enthusiastic cooperation of the Wehrmacht and the rest of the German government. Hitler led Germany into World War II, but he did it with his followers treading on his heels. Kershaw shows the way that "working toward the Führer"--the method by which second- and third- and fourth- tier Nazis and government officials (and the two categories were not necessarily identical) tried to anticipate what Hitler wanted--both meant that Hitler rarely if ever had to issue an explicit order and that any initiative deemed to be what Hitler wanted would inevitably snowball, as everyone tried to jump on board.

Aside from a much better grasp of how Nazi Germany "worked" (and I use the word loosely), I came away from Kershaw's biography of Hitler with a profound sense of the paucity of Hitler's inner life, how wretchedly little there was of him beyond three or four idées fixes (and all of them crystallized and immune to modification after about 1923), wrapped up in ambition and garnished with hate. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

First! Publishers Weekly gives Somewhere Beneath Those Waves a starred review. (OMG ELEVENTY-ONE!!!1!1!)

ETA: since a couple people asked, and since apparently I am drifting along, lonely as a cloud, without a clue as to the correct answer: YES, this book will have both paper and electronic versions, and the e-book should be available near to the release date for the paper book (which is November 22).

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!UBC:
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

( There's a bit of a rant behind the cut-tag. )

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Fountain pen geeks, what do you think about Pelikan inks, particularly the ones available in cartridges? I have been very disappointed in the royal blue, which is a nice enough color but fades horribly--and since I want my inks dark and vivid, this drives me nuts. Should I try any of the others, or should I just give in to my own geekiness and take a bottle of Noodler's Squeteague to live in my desk at work?

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A reminder: matociquala and I will be reading at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge MA at 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 19. Free and open to the public, so please come out!

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And, for a fifth thing and happy Friday, have some lovely pictures of wet fishing cat kittens

Ayçoberry, Pierre. The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945. Transl. Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 1999. [library]

Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2008. [library]

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These were an interesting unintentional pairing. The Ayçoberry was exactly what it says on the tin: a social history of the Third Reich. It didn't tell me anything I hadn't read in other social histories of the Third Reich, and it stood out mostly because the author's intellectual quirks.

The Fritzsche, on the other hand, was both a social history and a determined, patient, compassionate, but unforgiving attempt to understand why the citizens of Germany went along with the Nazis. He used a lot of primary sources--diaries and letters--and while many of the diarists were people I'd encountered before, some of them weren't, and the way Fritzsche used his material offered me new insights about how and why the Third Reich happened.

Read, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.

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Massive (nine hundred plus pages), extremely readable history of the second-tier Nazis: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Bormann. After finishing this, I never want to hear anybody going on about how men are more rational than women and aren't controlled by their emotions and all the rest of that chauvinist bullshit, because these guys? In-fighting and backbiting and temper tantrums and hysterics--it's exactly like high school, only somehow, these guys are running Germany and organizing the Holocaust and, oh yeah, there's that little matter of World War II.

Read has an unfortunate tendency to accept the "homosexual"="morally bad person" equation I've complained about before (Ernst Röhm and Walther Funk were morally bad people, true, but is that really about their sexual preferences?), but he's very good at deconstructing the self-presentations, both public and private, of Göring and Goebbels, who are the only two Nazis smart enough to make it difficult.

Brustein, William. The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

For better transparency, that subtitle should read "The Sociological Origins of the Nazi Party," because that's what Brustein is doing. He's analyzing the data provided by NSDAP member cards, and doing so in a very narrowly sociological framework. His thesis is that the support of ordinary Germans for the Nazi Party can be explained entirely by rational economic self-interest. No need to talk about Hitler the demagogue or the German tradition of anti-Semitism--it all comes down to the Nazis' proposed economic programs.

Don't get me wrong: Brustein's data are fascinating, and I think his work does help explain why the Nazis did better among certain social groups. But I don't buy his thesis that the rise of the NSDAP can be satisfactorily explained by people making well-informed, rational, economically-motivated decisions.

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Deakin, F. W. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. 1962. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.

Short version: No matter what he says, Hitler is not your friend.

Slightly longer version: This is a very top-down history of the Italian involvement in World War II. It deals only with Mussolini (and Hitler) and the ministers and generals and Party bigshots. One of the blurbs describes it as "impersonal," and I would agree. Deakin's interested in untangling the incredibly snarled political knot of the end of Italian fascism. He's not interested in any of the players as people, and he's certainly not interested in the Italian workers or soldiers (or, god forbid, women) whose lives were being destroyed by the machinations of these petty tin gods.

At the same time, as long as you're willing to go on the ride he wants to take you on, this is an excellent book. Deakin is painstaking and exhaustive; he makes no excuses for anyone; and although he does not discuss ideology or the reprehensible things that the Nazis were doing in other parts of Europe, he's not trying to make them look like anything but the toxic assholes that they were. And he does an excellent job of showing how Italy was doomed by the irrational, self-deluding decisions made by Mussolini, and by the really terrifying inability of anyone to say no to Hitler. (It's pathetic watching the German generals make puppy dog eyes at Mussolini in the hopes he can talk sense to Hitler about Russia.) It's frightening and appalling how much of World War II can be reduced to these two men, and the fact that they were both destroyed by it is very cold comfort.

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Koch, H. W. Hitler Youth: The Duped Generation. Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

I bought this book mostly for the pictures, which is not a decision I'm feeling bad about. Koch's other book about the Hitler Youth provides all the history and detail, and the pictures are fascinating, revealing, and OMG creepy. Koch also offers a few more tidbits about his own experiences in the HJ, such as this comment on induction into the Jungvolk:

This [probationary] period was concluded with a special test, combining sport, close combat, and questions of an "ideological" nature (mainly a knowledge of the history of the NSDAP) and culminating in a "test of bravery" which (as in the author's case) could take the form of having to jump in full dress and boots from the window of a first floor [American second floor] block of flats.
(Koch 78)

Not great on its own, but fantastic as supplementary material.

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Overy, Richard. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 2001.

About half this massive book is transcripts of interrogations; the other half describes and explores the circumstances under which the interrogations were conducted in the run up to the Nuremberg trials. Fascinating particularly for the ways in and degrees to which the Nazi criminals avoided admitting their culpability (ranging from Ley's suicide to Hess' half-faked, half-genuine hysterical amnesia to Speer's calculated self-reinvention); fascinating (also infuriating and appalling) for the hypocrisy of the Allies, who were not only retroactively creating crimes to try the Nazis for, but were very carefully tailoring those crimes so as to avoid tarring themselves with the same brush. It's not that I think the Nazis shouldn't have been held accountable--because obviously I don't think that; it's the way in which the Allies deliberately rigged the game so as to hide their own questionable actions.

Both Hitler and Mussolini were convinced, near the end of World War II, that they could make a deal with England and America so as to turn and go after Stalin. And the problem is that there's a lot of ways in which that's what should have happened. Not the deal-making part, which was a bedtime story for frightened dictators, but the unconscionable double standard whereby England and America condemn the Nazis but ignore the exact same crimes being committed by the Soviets (not to mention turning over Russian POWs who are begging to be protected from their own government, Winston Churchill, I am looking at you) . . . I don't know what the right answer would have been, or if there even was one, but that wasn't it.

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Roseman, Mark. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

This is my very favorite kind of history, the kind that says, "here's a mysterious thing that happened, let's look at all the evidence we have and see if we can figure it out." Roseman's mysterious thing is the conference at Wannsee (notorious for being the one place where you can actually pin down Nazi leaders talking about exterminating the Jews), and he does a wonderful job of contextualizing it and analyzing the evidence we have, and ultimately situating it persuasively in the progress of the Final Solution and the dance in the upper echelons of the Nazi government between amassing as much power for yourself as you could and sharing out the culpability to as many patsies as possible. This book is concise and elegant and I'd love to be able to write history like this.

Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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This was a very disappointing book. My early disquiet and dissatisfaction were not assuaged by more nuanced and careful argument later in the book. Particularly on issues of sexuality, Kater's discussion ranged from the vague to the infuriating. He never reliably distinguished between "sexual promiscuity" and sexual assault,* nor did he ever explain whether he was measuring "sexual promiscuity" by the Nazis' yardstick or some other measure, or indeed trying to analyze it at all. Although he did at least discuss the experience of German girls, he did so with a semi-covert chauvinism.

He also had a bizarre double standard. When talking about German boys, he expanded the category of "boy" to include "young soldiers" and then, less explicitly, "all soldiers," and thus spent a great deal of time talking about things, such as the siege of Stalingrad, that had no direct relevance to his ostensible topic. (Also, although he mentioned the atrocities committed by them and the effect on his "young soldiers," the Einsatzgruppen appear in his text like inclusions of alien material. There cannot possibly be any Hitler Youth or former Hitler Youth in them.) He remembers to put in the verses about German war crimes and the brutality of German soldiers, but over all, he presents the "young soldiers" as victims. And then, in the section on German girls in war-time, comes this sentence: "However, insofar as many young and older women had assisted their male superiors in creating a system that facilitated ever-greater human abuses, including their own continuous exploitation, German women were by no means without blame" (Kater 232). Here, he's using the opposite rhetorical strategy. Where, with the male Germans, he expanded the category of "boy" to include men, here he's expanding the category of "woman" to include girls, and saying that, where the men are tragic victims just like the boys, the girls are complicit criminals just like the women.

To be clear: I think the question of guilt and complicity in Nazi Germany is an incredibly complicated and difficult one. It's not that I think that women should be exonerated, or that the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were not cruelly exploited by their officers and government. But I object to the shoddy way Kater has constructed his argument.

I also object, while I'm at it, to Kater's tendency toward moral judgments, especially his unexamined belief that democracy must be morally good. While I agree that Nazi totalitarianism was certainly morally bad, I'm too aware of the corruption endemic in, say, the entire history of the American government to think that democracy is automatically going to be better or that it's somehow a sign of the stunted growth of German youth that they did not immediately embrace democracy with great glad cries at the end of World War II.

So. Poor prose style, poor organization (by which I mean his paragraphs were a mess, not the overall structure of the book, which was fine), fallacious rhetoric, and flatly unnuanced argument full of unexamined assumptions about morality, politics, warfare and violence, sexuality, and gender roles. This book did provide an English-language synthesis/summary of material on the HJ and the BDM that hasn't been translated, and for that I found it useful, even if still frustrating.

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*It's bad enough when he's talking about the youth groups of Nazi Germany, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, but his discussion of German girls and Allied soldiers is really not any better: "Rapes by French occupation soldiers, in addition to the Russians, were notorious, whereas in American and British zones of influence, the borderline between rape and consensual sex became blurred, since the use of chocolate, lingerie, and cigarettes as barter encouraged covert prostitution" (Kater 241). The line being blurred here is not between rape and consensual sex, but between consensual sex and prostitution--or possibly between rape and prostitution. It's hard to say, since this sentence is all the details we get. All other considerations aside, this is sloppy writing and sloppy historiography, and I'm disappointed in Harvard University Press for letting it slide.

Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich. [Die Frauen der Nazis]. 1998. Richmond Hill, Ontario: NDE Publishing, 2000.

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I don't know whether this book was poorly written or poorly translated or both (my money's on both). The language is clumsy; the scholarship is mediocre to poor (I grant that Leni Riefenstahl's post-WWII, self-exculpating memoir is not a trustworthy source, but when you're countering with Goebbels . . . um, maybe this needs a little more unpacking?); and as a historiographical endeavor, this is a set of eight biographical sketches, to varying degrees of sketchy, devoid of an argument even in those cases when an argument is absolutely crying out to be made. As for example, Geli Raubal. Or the fantastically hypocritical Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, who made a public career out of telling women to stay out of the public sector:

She wanted to communicate to other women her fervent conviction that fulfilling one's duty--quietly in the background and without demanding recognition--was an essential part of the female psyche.

"For mothers it is true that they come to a very quiet and understated power through service, whose sole purpose for ever and ever remains service."

Scholtz-Klink, of course, never served quietly, but traveled constantly from one congress to the next, giving speeches and putting her simple ideas down on paper. In 1938, when her husband started complaining about her numerous party duties, she divorced him.
(117)

And overarchingly, demandingly, the central question about Carin Goering, Magda Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, Gertrud Schotz-Klink, Henriette von Schirach, and even Eva Braun: what was it that made intelligent, ambitious women devote themselves to Nazism and to Hitler, who made no secret at all of the fact that he had no use, either personally or politically, for women who were intelligent and/or ambitious? Some of it is attributable to Hitler's legendary magnetism, but not all of it. Some of it is attributable to the Nazi habit of making exceptions: Leni Riefenstahl, for instance, was able to achieve extraordinary things with Nazi support, and Hanna Reitsch, who isn't covered in this book, is another example. But right at the center of the whole thing is this question that Sigmund doesn't even formulate, much less try to answer: why did these women devote their entire lives--and in the case of Magda Goebbels, her death--to an ideological cause that, from the beginning, utterly and unhesitatingly rejected them?

I'm about fifty pages into Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (1942, 1944), and I just want to note that he's already, more or less in passing, demolished the "we are simple soldiers!" defense. In talking about the Weimar Republic, he says:

The Reichswehr, reduced to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty, continued to be the stronghold of conservatism and nationalism. With army careers now closed to many and promotion slow, there is little wonder that the officers' corps became militantly anti-democratic, despising parliamentarianism because it pried too closely into the secrets of army expenditure, and detesting the Socialists because they had accepted the Versailles Treaty and the destruction of the supremacy of German militarism. Whenever a political crisis arose, the army invariably sided with the anti-democratic elements.
(28)

And let's not forget the role of the Reichswehr in the end of World War I and the "stab in the back" myth. The Reichswehr was intensely involved in politics, and that was hardly a secret.

There was certainly less scope for officers to wield political power in the Wehrmacht, with the shift from a pluralist, struggling government which always stood in a suppliant relationship to the army, to a single-party dictatorship in which the army stood suppliant to the Führer, and the generals may have wanted to be ignorant of Nazi politics, but they got there by trying to make a political deal with Hitler. The fact that the deal went so very badly for them--like any deal Hitler made with anyone, it was "heads I win, tails you lose"--is not a sign of political naivete on their part, but a sign of just how disruptive a force Hitler was in the political arena.

Liddell Hart seems to have accepted the German generals' pose as political naifs in good faith, but a pose is all it was.


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WORKS CITED
Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 1942. Expanded ed. 1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009.