Adolf hitler

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Frank Dikötter has written a lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung (North Korea), François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier (Haiti), Nicolae Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate that it aspires also to be a guidebook of dictator tactics. There are some weaknesses in this broader ambition. These eight men were not altogether uniform in their methods of obtaining, retaining or losing power, and certainly not in their abilities.

I cannot now remember when I first read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). My memory is confused by the fact that I knew the author in old age and was to become his biographer; Trevor-Roper himself told me about the extraordinary circumstances in which he had come to write the book. In September 1945 he had been awaiting discharge from the army so that he could resume his pre-war role as an Oxford don, when he was asked to undertake an urgent investigation into the fate of the Führer. This was then a mystery. In January, as the Allied armies invaded Germany, Hitler had retreated to an underground bunker below the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, to escape Allied bombing; his last months would be spent in these eighteen small and windowless rooms.