In May 1941, after the sudden flight to England of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had deluded himself that he could persuade the British to make peace, a joke went round Berlin. ‘So you’re the madman,’ Churchill says to Hess. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy!’ That Hitler was insane was something many Germans came to believe in the later stages of the war. If they had known in 1932 what they knew ten years later, they claimed, they would have voted differently; it wasn’t their fault that six million Jews had been murdered, countless soldiers and civilians on both sides killed, German cities devastated and Germany as they had known it destroyed. The fault was the Führer’s.

LRB 21 February 2013 | PDF Download