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Trevor G rundy
Fooled by the Hitler memoirs The publication of Hitler’s Diaries in 1983 was the biggest publishing scoop of the 20th-century – a sensation only outdone by the fact they were all fake
T
en years from now, the world will witness a tsunami of books reminding us that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany 100 years ago on January 30, 1933. And, on November 8 this year, historians and Führer-fantasists will recall with horror – or pride – the 100th anniversary of 1923’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s aborted bid to take over Bavaria, an action that culminated in a nine-month stay at Landsberg Prison, where the future despot dictated volume one of his tract Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess, which sold millions of copies and fanned the flames of Jew hate in Germany and other parts of Europe. Almost eight decades after his suicide in a Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler still won’t go away. We can’t get
40 ColdType | April 2023 | www.coldtype.net
rid of him. Today, many of the conditions that prevailed during the Weimar Republic after the First World War return to haunt those with more than TikTok sleep plugs between their ears. So where do we locate the man? Is he still dangerous? In what pantheon does he lie? To whom should he be compared? The journalist Richard Gott asked those questions more than 20 years ago in his review of The Hitler of History: Hitler’s Biographers on Trial by John Lukacs (in New Statesman, 19 March 2001). ”It’s a new century but we still can’t get enough of Adolf Hitler”,
Gott wrote, while praising Lukacs for attempting to recover the figure of the German leader from what Gott called “the mindless demonisation to which he has been subjected.” Others have tried but only in a half-hearted nervous sort of way and unless some startling revelations appear, AH will remain in Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell for a