Lies You've Been Told About Hitler and Why: The Hitler of History (1998)

factcheka
Published on Jun 9, 2022
Read the book: https://amzn.to/38TK93C

From around 1977 onwards, Lukacs became one of the leading critics of the British author David Irving, whom Lukacs accused of engaging in unscholarly practices and having neo-Nazi sympathies. In a review of Irving's Hitler's War in 1977, Lukacs commented that as a "right-wing revisionist" who had admired some of Irving's early works, he initially had high hopes for Hitler's War, but he found the book to be "appalling".[16] Lukacs commented that Irving had uncritically used personal remembrances by those who knew Hitler to present him in the most favorable light possible.[17] In his review, Lukacs argued that although World War II ended with Eastern Europe being left under Soviet domination, a victory that left only half of Europe to Stalin was much better than a defeat that left all of Europe to Hitler.[18]

Lukacsâ€™s book The Hitler of History (1997), a prosopography of the historians who have written biographies of Hitler, is in part a critique of Irvingâ€™s work. Lukacs considered Irving to be sympathetic to the Nazis.[7] In turn, Irving has engaged in what many consider to be antisemitic and racist attacks against Lukacs. Because Lukacs' mother was Jewish, Irving disparagingly refers to him as "a Jewish historian". In letters of 25 October and 28 October 1997, Irving threatened to sue Lukacs for libel if he published his book (The Hitler of History) without removing certain passages which were highly critical of Irving's work.[19] The American edition of The Hitler of History was published in 1997 with the passages included, but because of Irving's legal threats no British edition of The Hitler of History was published until 2001.[19] As a result of Irving's threat of legal action under British libel laws, when the British edition was finally published the passages containing the criticism of Irving's historical methods were expunged by the publisher.[20][21]

In The Hitler of History, inspired by the example of Pieter Geyl's book, Napoleon For and Against, Lukacs examines the state of Hitler scholarship and offers his own observations about Hitler. In Lukacs's view, Hitler was a racist, nationalist, revolutionary and populist.[22] Lukacs criticizes Marxist and liberal historians who claim that the German working class were strongly anti-Nazi and argues that the exact opposite was the case. Each chapter of The Hitler of History is devoted to a particular topic, such as whether Hitler was a reactionary or revolutionary; a nationalist or a racist; and he examines the roots of Hitler's ideology. Lukacs denies that Hitler developed a belief in racial purity in Vienna under the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, Lukacs dates Hitler's turn to antisemitism to 1919 in Munich, in particular to the events surrounding the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its defeat by the right-wing Freikorps. Much influenced by Rainer Zitelmann's work, Lukacs describes Hitler as a self-conscious, modernizing revolutionary. Citing the critique of National Socialism developed by German conservative historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter, Lukacs describes the Nazi movement as the culmination of the dark forces which lurk within modern civilization.

In Lukacsâ€™s view, Operation Barbarossa was not inspired by anti-Communism or any long-term plan to conquer the Soviet Union as suggested by historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, who claims that Hitler had a stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan), but it was rather an ad hoc reaction forced on Hitler in 1940â€“1941 by Britainâ€™s refusal to surrender.[23] Lukacs argues that the reason Hitler gave for the invasion of Russia was the real one. He claimed that Britain would not surrender because Winston Churchill held out the hope that the Soviet Union might enter the war on the Allied side and so Germany had to eliminate that hope. However, other historians have argued that the reason was just a pretext.[24] For Lukacs, Operation Barbarossa was as much anti-British as it was anti-Soviet. He argues that Hitler's statement in August 1939 to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, the Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt ("Everything I undertake is directed against Russia"), which Hillgruber cited as evidence of Hitler's anti-Soviet intentions, was part of an effort to intimidate Britain and France into abandoning Poland.[25] Lukacs takes issue with Hillgruber's claim that the war against Britain was of "secondary" importance to Hitler compared to the war against the Soviet Union.[26] Lukacs has also been one of the leading critics of Viktor Suvorov, who has argued that Barbarossa was a "preventative war" forced upon Germany by Stalin, who according to Suvorov was planning to attack Germany later in the summer of 1941.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lukacs