I spend a lot of time in a wellspring of Athenian dialogue called Reddit and one complaint I always here is how the evils and atrocities of Hitler and his band of Nazis always overshadow the evils committed by other regimes like Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Some people understandably blame the general illiteracy of most modern people. More conspiracy-minded commentators claim it’s because Naziism was a traditionalist-conservative movement, while Universities and Media are more comfortable discussing the evils there than discussing whatever Leftism is embodied in the supposed communism of Stalin or Mao.
But Hitler doesn’t just overshadow communist regimes, he casts a long shadow over all forms of evil committed in world history and effectively usurped the devil as the prime patriarch of all things malign, even in literate circles. I think there are 3 reasons that explain why.
Reason 1) Naziism’s evil is uniquely uncanny to our assumptions about the world
Mass slaughter was supposed to be the product of the purportedly inferior societies of Asia and Africa - not European societies and their Eurocentric prodigies in America and Australia. So the argument went among predominantly white men of the 1940s who made up the bulk of historians, media-moguls, and politicians with the greatest influence to direct the narrative of what to make of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Western civilization (as it’s often dubbed) was supposed to consist of science, reason, and Christianity-come-humane-secularism. And Germany was supposed to represent the peak of the West. The bulk of Nobel-prizes in chemistry and physics during the 1920s and 1930s came from Germany. This was the home of Kant and Hegel, the most significant pro-Enlightenment philosophers of the 19th century, and the cultural center of the world, second only to, maybe, Paris. These people are supposed to be too smart and advanced to do something so unseemly as mass butchery. That was supposed to belong in the realm of those people in China and Russia, etc., not the intellectual and cultural cornerstone of Europe. The result of this assumption is a sense of uncanny when looking at the evils of Naziism that enthralls mainstream media outlets and scholarship more so than other, even similar, forms of industrial-scale horrors.
Doubtless humanity’s capacity for evil in all its forms boggles the mind and still defies explanation. But the contradiction here is that the ever-so-Enlightened modern people of self-proclaimed Western civilization have always been capable of brutalities that had simply gone underappreciated or unexamined. Consider King Leopold, the British Empire, white expansion of the American frontier, and the Triangle-Trade. These were and are simply rendered more insignificant in our conscience but, when explored, show the sheer evils of Naziism to not be as unique or mysterious as originally thought.
Today, Eurocentric assumptions are held under closer scrutiny, in many circles, than they were in the past. Nonetheless the lingering effect of the underlying assumptions of earliest commentators, primary sources, and popular media still prevails and promotes an unfounded existential quandary that invokes fascination beyond comparative disasters. But all this begs the question: why is Naziism exposed for what it is while other evils are largely dismissed? That brings me to reason 2.
Reason 2) Hitler Lost
You can talk about the evils of Stalin and Genghis Khan, but the fact of the matter is, they fundamentally won. For Stalin, this complicates his narrative since he can now drape himself as the war-leader who defeated Hitler. For Genghis Khan, the greatest pre-industrial mass-murderer in history, this meant his empire got to last long enough to make significant positive contributions to the civilizations his empire conquered. Some people, including Dan Carlin, whose podcast I greatly enjoy, think there will one day, maybe in the far distant future, be a book sympathizing with Hitler that will go mainstream. I disagree for the simple fact that he lost. His narrative never got to spread and take shape after his death like it did for Stalin and he never got the chance to live long enough to show redemptive qualities Genghis Khan or Cyrus the Great.
Reason 3) Germany was forced to repent
It’s a powerful commitment Franklin Roosevelt made, to the chagrin of many of his generals but to Churchill’s grateful approval, to commit Allied powers to not only the defeat the Axis powers but to only accept the terms of unconditional surrender. Such a public commitment undoubtedly cost more lives to end the war as it pushed Axis powers to defend themselves more desperately to the last man rather than coming to the negotiation table. But such a commitment gave us the Nuremberg trials where survivors were found guilty in the court of law. There is rarely such a damning and incontrovertible condemnation of the evil actions of such powerful men, and it created a narrative where it is far more difficult to think of Nazi Germany in any other way than for the monstrosity it was.
Compare that to how the international order spoke of the Soviet Union after its collapse. Anne Applebaum in her book, Gulag, theorizes why politicians and other people did not speak so harshly about the vanquished. It comes down to the fact George H.W. Bush, and other world leaders, prioritized peace and reconciliation with the new Eastern bloc over retribution and contrition. Leaders were not held accountable and the feelings of people who thought highly of the fallen regime were treated sensitively in the name of moving on to a more peaceful era.
The same is true for the American Civil War. The priority of the United States of government was reconciliation, forgive and forget, over retribution, or accountability. Famously Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was never tried in a court of law for leading this act of treason. Writing his own best-selling multi-volume account of the Civil War from his own perspective. Thus, we have public statues honoring the men who fought, and had numerous people killed, to preserve slavery and see elected officials attempting to rewrite history textbooks to undermine the evils of said slavery.
In a world with such vast powers to brush aside and minimize the evils of people of whom it is inconvenient to even acknowledge, it took unprecedented actions to ensure Nazi Germany did not receive such a privilege.
There’s an unsettling thought here. If you take Hitler’s second book, Zweites Buch, seriously, and I do, then Hitler’s explicit plan was to conquer Eastern Europe (including Russia) and to do to the Slavic people what the United States had done to the Native Americans. End goal was to create a superpower of Europe that would beat the United States at its own game. Can you imagine the sheer bloodshed? What’s so ironic is the devastation Hitler would have caused in this worst timeline would have been infinitely greater, and yet he would probably not be as broadly condemned as he is today.
When you see how precarious the standard is in deciding who is evil and who is “controversial”, or even who is “good” for that matter, the first temptation might be despair at the sheer injustice that regularly goes unacknowledged or embrace a relativism that says nothing is evil if you get away with it and have a strong PR team. But my hope, as much as I have a say in how my work is read once it’s published, is for readers to examine the nature of evil more closely and how and why we find ourselves tolerating and excusing evil daily. My other hope is that readers understand how earnestly important it is that action is taken against atrocities when they arise instead of relying on the perceived cosmic justice of legacy or the history books.
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