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GERMANY'S REAL EVIL
GENIUS
Not Hitler The Sadist, But
The German People
BY PROFESSOR WALTER MURDOCH
THERE is a passage in Goldwin
Smith's "Three English States-
men," published in 1868, in
which he sums up his opinion of
Napoleon. "Pitt came in to conduct a
war, and this time a necessary war;
for I am convinced that with the per-
fidy and rapine of Bonaparte no peace
could be made; that the struggle with
him was a struggle for the independ-
ence of all nations against the armed
and disciplined hordes of a conqueror
as cruel and as barbarous as Attila. The
outward mask of civilisation Bonaparte
wore, and he could use political and
social ideas for the purposes of his
ambition as dexterously as cannon; but
in character he was a Corsican and as
savage as any bandit of his isle. If
utter selfishness, if the reckless sacri-
fice of humanity to your own interest
and passions be vileness, history has no
viler name. I can look with pride upon
the fortitude and constancy which Eng-
land displayed in the contest with the
universal tyrant."
The first thing every reader will be
inclined to say about this passage is
that, for something written 70 years
ago, it wears a singularly modern air.
Write Hitler for Bonaparte, strike out
the reference to Corsica, and the thing
might have been written yesterday. "A
conqueror as cruel and as barbarous as
Attila," "history has no viler name"—
the cap will fit either dictator with equal
exactness. That is one's first thought.
But first thoughts are apt to be un-
just. A little reflection will show you
that the comparison between Hitler and
Napoleon, which has become a com-
monplace, is quite unfair to Napoleon.
The resemblance, to which Hitler was
probably the first to draw attention, is
but skin deep. There is, of course, no
denying the likeness of their external
careers. Napoleon was an Italian who
had no love for France and who did not
care how many Frenchmen he sacrificed
on the altar of his megalomania.
Hitler is an Austrian who makes use
of Germany as Napoleon made use of
France. Napoleon, with that wonder-
ful instrument in his hand, and with
the brain of a first-rate strategist in-
side his skull, made himself master of
country after country, and ruled,
through his puppets, the continent of
Europe. Whether Hitler has the brain
of a first-rate strategist it will be for
military historians to tell posterity,
all we know is that his strategy has
been, so far, brilliantly successful.
Napoleon was baffled by Russia and
defeated by Britain; Hitler will be
baffled by Russia and defeated by the
British Commonwealth. Napoleon
died, after a few years of inglorious
snarling and whimpering, on an island
in the Atlantic; Hitler has announced
that there are no longer any islands in
the world, but some equivalent of
Saint Helena will somehow be found
for him — if he lives long enough.
*
BUT it was not of Napoleon's
career, but of his personal charac-
ter, that Goldwin Smith was
speaking. Here, too, there are
some points of resemblance. Napoleon,
for instance, was a shameless liar. He
was without a conscience, and jeered
at anyone who was afflicted with
scruples as an "ideologue"; he broke
his word habitually! He betrayed those
who trusted him; in short, he was a
man who stuck at nothing. There
are other resemblances.
All the same, let us be just to Napo-
leon. He was vile, but he was
not wholly vile — or not until absolute
power had corrupted him as it corrupts
everybody who achieves it. He was
the child of the Revolution; and he set
out to stamp as realities the ideals
which had inspired the Revolution. He
found France menaced by ancient
tyrannies; and he set her free. Never
forget the true word spoken by Mrs.
Browning about the effect of his down-
fall—
"And kings crept out again to feel the
sun."
If he shed torrents of good French
blood, let us remember also that he
gave France the "Code Napoleon"—
on which the laws of many other coun-
tries are based. And let us not forget
that, by all accounts, men lived as hap-
pily in the countries he conquered as
they had lived under the rulers he de-
throned. When he occupied a count-
try, he did not turn it into a house of
torment.
We may agree that the defeat of
Napoleon was necessary, if freedom
was to survive. He did not believe that
mankind was fit for freedom. He
thought the world needed a master;
and he thought himself called upon by
destiny to be its master. It was
Britain's inexorable duty to stand
across his path, and, in saving herself,
to save the world. Naturally, during
the mortal contest, the British people
came to regard him as wholly evil; and
simple folk believed the story of his
eating a baby every morning for break-
fast — a fine early example of propa-
ganda.
But, looking at him from a distance,
we can see that he was not wholly evil.
So long as men were willing to accept
him as master, he preferred them to
be happy rather than miserable. It is
simply not true to say that "history
has no viler name." Unfortunately
for humanity, history has many viler
names — for example, the name of the
Emperor Caligula, one of whose di-
versions was to watch slaves being tor-
tured to death while he dined. Napo-
leon's place is not with such foul be-
ings as Caligula or Hitler; for he had
not the instinct of the torturer.
It is true, of course, that Napoleon
was the cause of a far greater mass of
human misery than Caligula was in a
position to bring about. I am now
speaking of personal character: in the
biography of Napoleon you will read
of no such fiendish malignity as makes
the heart sick when you read of it in
the story of Caligula. In the matter
of personal traits, it is with Caligula
rather than with Napoleon that we
must rank Adolf Hitler. That unhappy
man, who tortured others, is himself
tortured by the foulest of all diseases
that can afflict a human being, the
disease of sadism. He found, ready to
his band, a nation already deeply
tainted with this disease, taught it to
regard the virus as a virtue, and sent
it forth torturing and to torture.
A year ago I should have thought
such words rhetorical and unreal. I
will admit that I simply did not believe
the stories of the abominable physical
tortures and mutilations endured by
the victims of Nazi spite; I thought
them on a par with the stories of the
Corsican ogre; they seemed to me to
be quite incredible. Alas! The piled-
up evidence leaves no room for doubt.
Fighting against conviction, I have been
convinced. I now know that the worst
stories — stories too horrible to be
printed — are true. History holds no
record of cruelties more appalling than
those inflicted on thousands of inno-
cent men and women by creatures,
worthy of their infernal master. What
the world is to do with that host of
young sadists will be a terrible post-
war problem.
*
BUT I have left the point of this
article to the end. That point
is, that personalities matter less
than we are apt to suppose.
What sort of man Hitler is, or is not,
is a trivial question. He, like Napo-
leon before him, is a creature of cir-
cumstances. France after the Revolu-
tion had come to an impasse where she
was bound to accept the leadership of a
man of the Napoleonic stamp; he saw
his chance, and seized it: if he had died
as a boy, somebody else would have
stepped in. We must look on both
Napoleon and Hitler as symbols rather
than as individuals. Hitler is a sym-
bol of the state of mind Germany had
got into before she would accept such
a being as a demigod.
Both men made their appearance at
certain stormy moments in history, as
in a great commotion of the waters some
strange sea beast might come to the
surface from unimagined depths of
ocean. If we want no more of such
men, we must contrive to avoid a re-
petition of the circumstances which
produce them. The heartening thing
about the Churchill-Roosevelt declara-
tion of war aims is that both leaders
plainly recognise this; they see that to
defeat Hitler is not enough; by hook or
by crook we must manage to make the
world, including Germany, the kind of
place that does not bring forth Hit-
lers. When the fighting men have fin-
ished their tremendous task, this other
task will remain the supreme problem
of statesmanship; not to be solved by
a few gifted statesmen, but by the in-
telligence, the goodwill, and the reso-
lution of us all — and the sooner we
face it the better.
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