Why Does Hitler Have So Many Children?
This past week White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was not the only politician to compare one of his adversaries to Adolf Hitler. In response to criticism for introducing a bill nullifying the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, North Carolina General Assemblyman Larry Pitmann compared Abraham Lincoln to Hitler saying, “Lincoln was the same sort of tyrant [as Hitler], and personally responsible for the deaths of over 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional.” Branding your opponent as similar to, or worse than Hitler, is not a new phenomenon; after 9/11 former University of Colorado Boulder professor Ward Churchill was cashiered for referring to the victims in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns.” Barack Obama was compared to Hitler for supporting the Affordable Care Act; and in 1962 a journalist in The New York Times compared John F. Kennedy to Hitler, saying, “President Kennedy surpassed Hitler and Tojo in…savagery and tyranny. United States Imperialism is the sworn enemy of peace and the most ferocious enemy of people all over the world.”
Given the ubiquity of figures both public and private comparing their adversaries to Adolf Hitler one wonders…why? Why exactly did “Hitler” and similarly charged phrases like “the Holocaust,” “the camps,” “the Third Reich,” and “Nazis” make the semantic shift from proper nouns to shorthand for irredeemable, unimaginable evil? Moreover, why does Hitler have so many children? Why do we compare modern horrors to Hitler so easily, but not Stalin or Mao or Kagame?
Some might argue the comparison is justified because of scale. Millions died in the Holocaust, but “only” hundreds of thousands in Rwanda. Stalin and Mao are easily responsible for the deaths of many millions, but perhaps those figures aren’t as meaningful because they include mass starvation as well as active killings? I doubt the tendency to reflexively brand enemies as Hitler has much to do with numbers since I frequently speak to members of the public about the Holocaust who tell me they assume a few thousand or even one million people died at the hands of the Nazi’s and their collaborators, when we know the figures are many times that. Of course, anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows that the difference between zero and one is unimaginable, unquantifiable grief, so I doubt scale has anything to do with our tendency to label our opponents as Hitler.
No, Hitler has become the default catchall for evil because we need him to be the ultimate evil. Turning Hitler into evil incarnate is the only way we can live with ourselves.
In the vernacular the Nazis have been considered pure evil since at least the Nuremberg Trials, the war crimes tribunals held by the allies after World War II to seek justice for the victims of Nazi tyranny in a legitimate and civilized forum. The Nuremberg Trials ended by 1949 not because there were no more defendants to be found, but because there was no more political will to prosecute. With the end of World War II the Western Allies, led by the United States and our wartime ally the Soviet Union, quickly grew suspicious of one another, and grew apart. Both sides wanted their political and economic systems (democratic capitalism vs. totalitarian communism) to be the dominant one on the European continent. Putting Germans and others responsible for the Holocaust on trial, and “dredging up” what was called, only four years after Auschwitz was liberated, “the past,” was deemed counterproductive in winning over the locals. As the West and East grew ever more hostile, their willingness to work together to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice atrophied until it simply petered out. So who was responsible for the Holocaust? The public was told, why the Nazis, of course! And where are these Nazis? Dead. In prison. Vanished. Everyone left on the continent was a potential ally in the new cold war, not an enemy…certainly not a perpetrator of genocide. The Nazis were the ultimate evil, and they are all gone. Of course we know scores of Nazis and other perpetrators of heinous war crimes returned to comfortable lives in Europe or South America or even the United States, but the public was led to believe by both sides that the crimes of the Holocaust were perpetrated by Nazis and Nazis alone, and they are no more. We are safe from them.
As the US Holocaust Memorial Museum told us last November, “the Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.” The words which begin genocide are often words of dehumanization. The Nazi’s regularly invoked the language and imagery of disease to dehumanize Jews and other victims of Nazi tyranny. Jews, Roma/Sinti and other targets of the Third Reich were branded untermenschen, subhuman, by the Nazis. In Nazi newsreels, images of Jews being deported were overlaid with images of rats scurrying through gutters. In Eastern Europe the Nazis displayed posters conflating Jews with the lice that transmitted typhus. When your enemy is no longer human it becomes easier to kill them. When that subhuman enemy is a disease-carrying threat, killing them becomes a necessity. But just as the Nazis were quick to dehumanize their “enemies,” the victors can be just as quick to dehumanize the perpetrators.
When I speak with members of the public about the Holocaust I often hear the Nazis referred to as monsters or beasts…something other than human. Dehumanizing the killers protects us from the cold, hard, awful truth that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not monsters or beasts or aliens. No, the Holocaust happened because millions of ordinary people, no different than you or me, made choices. Those choices resulted in the deaths of millions of ordinary people, no different than you or me. The Holocaust happened because people made choices and the Holocaust ended because people made choices.
Hitler has so many children because we like to think of the Nazis as the ultimate evil, and that evil is somehow inhuman, just like the Nazis. The perceived inhumanity of the Nazis inoculates us against seeing ourselves as capable of evil, and our opponents as something altogether different from ourselves. But that is not true. The perpetrators, victims, rescuers, liberators, and bystanders were all made from the same genetic material. The same genetic material from which you and I are made. The only factor which separated these groups is that they simply made different choices. Knowing how similar we are to what we have branded as the ultimate evil can be frightening, but that same similarity also means we have the same capacity to rescue as Raoul Wallenberg, the same opportunities to stand up for our neighbors as Sophie Scholl, and the same ability to resist as the Bielski brothers.
So, the next time you are tempted to draw another branch off the Hitler family tree, adding a new name, whether it be Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad or your local congressman, instead of branding them one of Hitler’s children ask yourself what it means that we are all Hitler’s twin.
Samuel J. Aronson is an Assistant Dean in the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC. He studies the role of science and technology in the Holocaust.
