the laughing hitler

Christian W Staudinger, artist

Text from Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum

Chapter 20

Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

It is possible to reconstruct Hitler's personal portrait of his extermination of the Jews in the progression of his chilling images of laughter--the extermination of the Jews in the extermination of their laughter.

We begin with his January 30, 1939, speech, in which the "resounding" laughter of the Jews is now resoundingly choking in their throats. In 1941, he imagines the laughter of the Jews still sounding, if not resounding, but "the coming months" will change that. And twelve months later, he professes no longer to know if the Jews "are still laughing." But whether they are or not, he says he's confident "if their laughter has not already subsided," it soon "will subside" everywhere. And, finally, he confirms for us that not only the laughter but those who once laughed have been exterminated: "Countless ones no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so." 

Dawidowicz cites these passages for the "slips" not for the laughter, for Hitler's retrospective fusion of the January 10, 1939 threat to annihilate the Jews with the September 1, 1939 declaration of war that launched his armies east and made Auschwitz possible. But it might be argued that the laughter imagery is itself a kind of slip that vindicates Dawidowicz's thesis about Hitler more powerfully than his confusion or conflation of dates of declarations and speeches. It seems to vindicate her vision of Hitler as someone who knew always what he wanted to do with the Jews, not someone who hesitated and doubted and suffered nervousness about the enormity of the idea. Rather someone who knew what he was doing and laughed about it.

The unspoken displacement in these passages is, I'd suggest, not so much from one speech date to another, but from one species of laughter to another. The laughter Hitler incessantly conjures up dying in the Jews' throats is reborn in his own. The laughter suffusing those passages is not the Jews laughing but Hitler laughing. It's not the laughter of someone suffering from trepidation about what he's doing. It's not the laughter of someone who still, at an even later date, could think, "My dear Heinie...Would it be possible?"

It's the laughter of someone who knows what he's doing and relishes it to the bone, relishes the coded way he speaks of it, relishes the fact that the relish of the joke is only shared by an esoteric few. It's the very same relish with which he and Heydrich and Himmler, the three architects of the Final Solution. relish their ostensible dismay at the scurrilous "rumor" that the Jews are being exterminated, in that passage in the Table Talk in which the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust share a private joke about both their complicity and their cover-up.

Nor is this the laughter of someone "convinced of his own rectitude," as Trevor-Roper would have it. It's the laughter of someone savoring a secretive triumph, whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature, whose pleasure can only be truly be savored by the cognoscenti aware of the magnitude of the illicit acts that are concealed by esoteric references to mass murder as "subsiding laughter." This is not something whose "enormity" Hitler feared, but something he relished, with obscene gleefulness.

Once I heard a parable about a Jew going into battle who asks a rabbi what he should do if he's captured by the enemy and his only alternative to starvation is to eat pork. The rabbi counsels him that, yes, to save his life he can do what would otherwise be a transgression, an enormity: He can eat the pork. But don't the rabbi adds, relish it: "Don't suck the bone." With his laughter, the laughter he sucked from the dying Jews' throats, Hitler was expressing his obscene relish at the enormity of his transgressions. With his laughter, Hitler reveals extermination is not a matter of rectitude to him, a difficult task done for a stern ideal. With his laughter Hitler reveals he is both aware of and wallowing in the illicitness of his transgression, his conscious evil. With his laughter he is "sucking the bone."