In India books on Hitler and the Third Reich are on the rise for all the wrong reasons. Many youth are falling for revisionist rather than accurate history. "I have idolised Hitler ever since I have had a sense of history. I admire his leadership qualities and his discipline," says one young Indian male; "The killing of Jews was not good, but everybody has a positive and negative side," says another. But the most disturbing: " [Hitler] mesmerised the whole nation with his leadership and iron discipline - India needs his discipline." Hitler was not a good leader, he was not a good politician and any 'positive' sides he had were far outweighed by the negative. He destroyed generations, cities, and almost succeeded in exterminating an entire ethnicity. His regime has forever stained the history of Germany. This is unfortunate considering some of the positive impacts that German culture and science has had on human history.

The myth that despite these atrocities he was a talented, strong and affective statesman are bogus. He was lazy, uneducated and knew next to nothing about politics, economics or the military. He spent much of his time sleeping and watching movies. When he did intervene it resulted in disaster. That these young men don't understand this is testament to the fact they have been reading all the wrong books and material about Hitler and The Third Reich. One not need to go further than the works of Ian Kershaw to grasp this. His two-part biography of Hitler is a masterpiece, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. His other works, including The Hitler Myth and The Nazi Dictatorship are also very valuable. If Hitler was great at anything it was his oratory and propaganda skills. He had a gift for making speeches, unfortunately this helped him delude the masses. He led Germany--to quote Kershaw--"into the abyss." Thus there was nothing really positive at all about these skills.

The Third Reich functioned in an unprecedented way. Hitler would indirectly make it clear through his words what he wanted. But because he knew little about politics, military strategy, and economics, he left it to others to implement. The bureaucracy within the Third Reich operated via a sort of Darwinian process. The lower levels would compete with each other to please the Fuhrer, the one who best realized Hitler's wishes would subsequently be rewarded. It is through this process that his world views of 'race and space' were translated into reality (read Gerhard Weinberg's The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany for more). His desire for racial purity and lebensraum resulted in The Second World War and the Final Solution. Kershaw and other historians have called this "working towards the Fuhrer." Ignorance on this concept has also resulted in the furthering of the Hitler myth to present day societies like in India. While he was central to the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War, it also took the radical accumilization of the Nazi regime to turn his fantasies into reality; a mass bureaucracy of equally responsible human beings. Hitler did not pull the trigger on the guns that executed Jews on the Eastern Front. He did not gather the millions of Jews and place them directly into the gas chamber. How did so many people go along with this campaign of extermination? This is an important question, and it's the reason why we need historical study on the subject.

In a senior Holocaust course I was asked to explain where the Holocaust fits in to historical study. Why study the Holocaust at all? Many have claimed that we should give not one second to studying the Nazis; these monsters don't deserve it. But it is important. Their psychological and genetic makeup is inherint in all of us. We owe it to humanity's progress to acknowledge and understand our ultimate capacity for evil. To ignore this is a slap in the face of every man, woman and child who were both physically and emotionally destroyed by this ultimate low in human history. As I summed up in my paper:

History may not be a discipline charged to prevent repetition of the past, but it is not a profession devoid of any purpose or meaning. If the job of the historian is to understand the past, then it is to also acknowledge the roots and causes of certain human atrocities such as the Holocaust. The horrors of Nazism may have inflicted regression and ignorance in its immediate memory, but today it is one of the most studied historical events. And with that study has come the recognition of mankind's capacity to destroy itself, the power of ideology, our vulnerability, the dangers of passivity and conformity, the will to survive, and the limits of goodness. These are not discoveries with zero implications. They force us to question how we view ourselves, our past and our future.

But there is another reason to study it. As the new trend in India has shown, ignorance has extremely dangerous and immoral implications. While watching the documentary on Fred Leuchter for the first time this year--the so called 'engineer' who tried to prove Auschwitz never gassed any prisoners--I realized just how important the work of historians are. In one of the scenes Leuchter descends into a hole in the ground that was the site of a former cremaotrium. He described it as 'creepy but necessary for his work,' and continued to chisel away at the remaining structure and collect samples. It was this very upsetting desecration that made me realise just why I need to continue to contribute to this historical topic. As historian Van Pelt explains:

So Krema Tomb II was the most lethal building at Auschwitz. In the square feet of this one room, more people lost their life than in any other place on this planet. Five hundred thousand people were killed. If you would draw a map of human suffering, if you create the geography of atrocity, this would be the absolute center. Every year remains of human beings are found. Bones, teeth. The earth doesn't rest.

Next year I will be studying the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and its impact on American memory of the Holocaust for my Masters thesis. Why? So that I can live in hope that someday we will live in a world where no more Fred Leuchters exist.

Suggested Reading:

Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays in Launching the Final Solution

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936:Hubris

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis

Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth

Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany

Eberhard Jackel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power

Henry Friendlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide from Euthanasia to the Final Solution.

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Primo Levi, Survival In Auschwitz

Elie Wiesel, Night

Anything by Omar Bartov

Saul Friendlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews.