"I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
RICHARD MARKX GREATIST HIGHT FULL
such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences his wartime table-talk is a book early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Half a century on, there is much to be said. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed.
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