Evening star., 1946-01-03
A Warming for Generations

With the finding and publication
of his political testament" and
other personal documents. it seems
beyond doubt now that Hitler-as
reported some weeks ago by British
intelligence officers and German
WltnesseS-died in can atmosphere
of nightmare and hysteria, full of
Self-pity and self-justification,
suicide with his Eva Braun, his body
consumed by flames, supreme
egotist, psychopathic preacher of
hate and colossal prevaricator to
the very end.
He wrote his testament" Just
hours before he destroyed himself,
but nowhere in it is there any evi-
dence that he felt the slightest
tWinge of conscience as he prepared
to cross the threshold into world
which even he. despite his apparent
lack of spirituality and Christian be-
lief, might have dreaded at the last
moment as a place where conceiv-
ably he would be obliged to face
terrible Judgment. In his final hours,
as the savage and essentially pagan
world of Nazidom came crashing
down, the only thing Hitler feared,
seemingly, was the prospective
shame" of being taken captive and
tried as criminal.
The trial at Nuremberg is proving
beyond doubt that this man and his
regime wanted war and conspired to
bring it about and that they pursued
deliberate, cold-blooded policy of
determination, particularly against
the Jews. Yet on the eve of his
death, facing the unknown, facing
what even to his mind must have
seemed to be at least the possibility
OF supernatural justice, Hitler, who
had made the lie an instrument of
policy during the whole of his adult
life, had the temerity to keep on
lying. Despite all the evidence now
before mankind, he wrote in his
testament" that he had always been
man of peace and that "interna-
tional Jewry and its helpers" not he,
were responsible for the agony let
loose upon the world in 1899. The
only thing he did, he said, was to
'love" his people and lead them in
history's most glorious and heroic"
struggle for existence.
Then, as if in defiance of any pos
sible judgment awaiting him beyond
cremation, he boasted of how he had
seen to it that the Jews would be
exterminated during the war, "even
though by more humane means than
war"-the horror camps, the gas
chambers, the merciless beatings,
the systematic starvation, and all
the other refinements of the Nazi
policy of mass slaughter Finally,
after condemning the traitors"
Goering and Himmler, he called
upon his followers now and In the
future to emphasize how he had
died-in other words, to use him as
an example and a legend-in order
to keep alive and increase in Ger
many hatred against the Jews and
every one else who brought about
his downfall
All this, it must be remembered
the repeated lie, the unmitigated
hate, the total lack of repentance
was written by man on the verge
of leaving this world to meet his
Maker. Could it have been possible
that Hitler, having employed un-
truth for so long, came actually to
believe that it was truer than truth
itself? Or is it all to be explained
the hating as we'll as the lying
simply by saying that he had a sick
and twisted genius which made him
incapable of distinguishing right
from wrong?
Whatever the answer, whatever it
was that made him darkly perverse
even in the last moments of his life,
he seems certainly to have come
close to personifying Nietzsche's
narrowing ideal-the creature be-
yond good and evil, the negation of
the humane and Christian man. Let
his name stand for generations in
that somber light-as a warning of
what can happen when such spirits
are appeased until it is too late to
stop them from running wild in the
world.