Gerald Reitlinger (1900–1978)
Author of The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945
About the Author
Works by Gerald Reitlinger
The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (1961) 108 copies, 1 review
The Economics of Taste, Volume 1: The Rise and Fall of the Picture Market 1760-1960 (1964) 16 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Reitlinger, Gerald Roberts
- Birthdate
- 1900
- Date of death
- 1978
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Westminster School
University of Oxford (Christ Church)
Slade School of Fine Art - Occupations
- art historian
non-fiction author - Relationships
- Robert Byron
- Short biography
- Gerald Roberts Reitlinger (born 1900 in London, United Kingdom - died 1978 in St Leonards-on-Sea, United Kingdom) was an art historian, especially of Asian ceramics, and scholar of historical changes in taste in art and their reflection in art prices. After World War II he wrote three large books on Nazi Germany. He was also a painter and collector, mainly of pottery. Reitlinger's major works were The Final Solution (1953), The SS: Alibi of a Nation (1956), and between 1961-1970 he published The Economics of Taste in three volumes.
- Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- London, England, UK
- Place of death
- St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, England, UK
cerebral hemorrhage - Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the then very recent experience of the horrendously chaotic and destructive national socialist experiment in Germany.
We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. show more Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed.
In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust.
He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system.
From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one.
There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless.
His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time.
He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency.
As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand.
Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available.
The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler.
The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State.
The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army.
Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks.
Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another.
Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer.
Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever.
Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war.
Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away.
This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army.
When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political.
The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it.
It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force.
It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown.
The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief.
Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions.
From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit.
I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State.
I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this.
He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945.
It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system.
Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories.
What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end.
The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying.
Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting.
Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles.
Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills.
This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable.
As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one.
Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history.
Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes.
There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. show less
We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. show more Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed.
In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust.
He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system.
From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one.
There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless.
His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time.
He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency.
As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand.
Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available.
The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler.
The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State.
The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army.
Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks.
Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another.
Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer.
Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever.
Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war.
Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away.
This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army.
When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political.
The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it.
It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force.
It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown.
The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief.
Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions.
From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit.
I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State.
I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this.
He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945.
It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system.
Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories.
What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end.
The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying.
Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting.
Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles.
Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills.
This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable.
As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one.
Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history.
Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes.
There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. show less
Published in 1960, this book stands the test of time. The author used many of the best primary sources of his day. Many of these same primary sources are, for some reason or other, dispensed with by many of todays historians. That being said, there are very few decent books on the German Occupation policies in Russia during WWII, and this book still remains near the top. Highly recommend.
History of the Nazi's plan to exterminate all Jews of Europe
Based almost entirely on original German documents, including the captured files of the SS leadership, The SS: Alibi of a Nation gives a final account of the Nazi Praetorian Guard. With steadily mounting tension, the story moves from the origins of the SS before 1923 to its supremacy, twenty years later, as the most appalling instrument of political and military terror known to history.
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