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Mr. JOHN LUKACS (Author, "The Hitler of History"): Because it might
be misinterpreted. I'm dealing with the--the accumulation of the
views, the writings about Hitler in the last 50 years. Now in a way,
it's a biography of biographies.

LAMB: When did you get the idea to do this?

Mr. LUKACS: I had the idea short range and long range. Short range
is because I had another book for which I did not have a publisher. I
thought I ought to write a book. It came to me, and I said, `All
right. This is one thing I'm interested in.' That's the short-range
story. The long-range story is--or, rather--rather, the long-range
version is that very, very far back, in '949, I read an extraordinary
book by a Dutch historian, Peter Haile, "Napoleon: For and Against."
He wrote that book during the German occupation of Holland. For a
while he was interred, then he was let loose toward the end of the
war. Haile said in this book that--he's writing about Napoleon, the
different interpretations of Napoleon during 150 years. He said the
time will come when people will write about Hitler like that, too.

Now obviously, there's no sense of writing a book entitled "Hitler:
For and Against." It's too touchy a subject. But, more important,
unlike in the case of Napoleon, the for-Hitler book, the apologetic
books, are really not very good. As a matter of fact, they're very
bad from a scholarly viewpoint. I'm not only fa--everybody has the
right having his own opinion, but they're not very good. And when I
thought of this book, I picked up Pe--Peter Haile's book 50 years
later--no, 40 years later--42 years later, early '90. And I said--I
reread it, and I said, `Yes, I want to write this book.' So...

LAMB: Where is your home originally?

Mr. LUKACS: Hungary.

LAMB: When did you come to the United States?

Mr. LUKACS: Fifty-one years ago.

LAMB: Why did you come here?

Mr. LUKACS: This was after Russians occupied Hungary. The full
Communist regime wasn't yet established, but I pretty much knew it was
coming. I did some work for Americans and British during the war, so
it wasn't very difficult for me to leave.

LAMB: How old were you when you came here?

Mr. LUKACS: Twenty-three.

LAMB: And where did you go when you came here?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, I came first to--I--I landed in Portland, Maine,
oddly enough. Ther--there was a--a stevedore strike, you know, in the
small ship I went--I--I--I crossed the Atlantic on and landed in
Portland, and I went to New York. I did not know anyone. I had no
relatives and no friends. I knew English rather well. I had my
degree. Very fortunately, because of the GI Bill of Rights, they
needed teachers in different universities to help out, so I got right
away, very luckily, a part-time job at Columbia teaching 19th century
European history. And that was not enough to pay for my everyday
living, but I had some other jobs as translators. And then about
eight months later I got an offer as a permanent member of faculty,
small Catholic girls college in Pennsylvania. I took it and I've been
there--I was there for 46 years until my retirement.

LAMB: What's the name of the school?

Mr. LUKACS: Chestnut Hill College.

LAMB: How big?

Mr. LUKACS: About 600 students. I had many visiting professorships,
but for me, the most important thing has never been my academic
affiliation with where I live. I like living there. I married a--not
a student, you know, a--I don't do this kind of thing--you know, a
Philadelphian girl, and I live there. I'm a stick in the mud. I'm
living in the same place now for 43 years.

LAMB: And where is that?

Mr. LUKACS: It's fairly out in the country, but it's getting
suburbanized. It's Chester County, about 35 miles from Philadelphia,
west.

LAMB: Now if I calculate it right, at 23 years old, you came here in
1957?

Mr. LUKACS: No, '46.

LAMB: Oh, OK. I m--I missed a whole 10 years.

Mr. LUKACS: '46.

LAMB: '46, and you were 23 in '46.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: What did you think or know of Adolf Hitler in 1946?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, a lot but certainly not in a scholarly way because
I lived through the war in Hungary. And Hungary was, because of its
geographical situation and so forth, a sort of ally of Germany in war.
There were many Hungarians, including myself, for varied reasons, who
were against this. I told you that I did some work for the British
and Americans in the war--absolutely minimal and ineffective--helped
me after the war. And so he was, in a way, a little close--too close
to me. We were saturated with the Germans and Hitler and so forth.
And I'm a historian. I be--I--my specialty is not really German
history. I have different specialities. I'm somewhat of a maverick
in this. I moved into different fields as time went on. And I became
interested in this topic about 25 years ago.

LAMB: I--I wrote down, as I went through your book, a bunch of
just--one words or--or just phrases that I picked up about Adolf
Hitler...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...that you wrote, and I'll just throw a bunch of them out and
have you elaborate on them.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: Loneliness and secretiveness.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, he was a very secretive man, and even now there're
important historians who don't understand this. They go ou--you know,
he was very valuable. You know, his speeches were very long, although
during the war, he didn't speak very much. I mean, he didn't have
public speeches. Public speeches were very long. He got physically
worked up during his speeches. You know, it's recorded that he left
the podium in a sweat and all that. And as I told you, were--many
historians, I think, don't see this very well. They say, `Well, he
said everything in Mein Kampf.' You know what? Mein Kampf is just a
mixture of autobiography and program, and there really we have the key
to--oh, not the key--an--kind of a summary of his philosophy and
ideology.

LAMB: Let me just interrupt to ask...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...Mein Kampf means what in G--in English?

Mr. LUKACS: My struggle, my fight.

LAMB: What year did he write it?

Mr. LUKACS: He wri--he wro--he dictated it in 1924, '25.

LAMB: How old was he then?

Mr. LUKACS: He was then 36 years old.

LAMB: And in '24 and '25, he lived where?

Mr. LUKACS: He was arrested, because in 1923--in November '923 he
tried to lead a nationalist uprising in Munich. It failed 'cause the
army and the police did not obey him, did not go over. Then he was
arrested, and he was put into a kind of confinement under rather
comfortable circumstances in a castle in Bavaria. He was not
there--he--he didn't stay there longer than a year. He was surrounded
by his friends. Then he dictated this book. But more important than
the book is that it's during that time that a great change occurred in
him. He said, `No re'--he said to himself and also to others, `We're
not gonna start a revolution. We're gonna get into power in Germany
constitutionally, democratically, through the will of the people,'
which is what he achieved.

LAMB: Go back to loneliness and secretiveness.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, yes.

LAMB: How about loneliness? Why was that mentioned?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, I would say all important national leaders are, to
some extent, lonely, and I would say the secretiveness is more
telling. This is not just an interpretation of a historian. I have
several instance--I mention in the book when he actually said to
people, `You will never really know what I think.'

LAMB: You sa...

Mr. LUKACS: And many of his decisions he kept to himself.

LAMB: I wrote down here that you--he didn't want things written down.

Mr. LUKACS: No, he was not a--he said--even later, he said, `Mein
Kampf, forget it.' He said, `Mein Kampf ought not to be read. It
ought to be spoken.' He was a man of the spoken word. And unlike
other leaders of the second World War, even Stalin, who made many,
many, many marginal notes, Hitler didn't write very much.

LAMB: D--when was the first time you read Mein Kampf?

Mr. LUKACS: I cannot tell you. Probably during the war and
certainly ha--cer--certainly didn't read it very carefully.

LAMB: You say he was close to his photographers.

Mr. LUKACS: Very much. He was very modern in this sense, also in
others. He ve--he was very much--he was not a vain man, but he was
very much obsessed--well, not obsessed but preoccupied with his
pictorial image. He would go through photographs taken of him
constantly and say, `This,' and, `Not that.' Some thing's were
airbrushed out. At the normal age of 47, 48, which happened to me,
happened to all people, he needed glasses. He never allowed himself
to be photographed with glasses.

LAMB: Is there any photograph you've ever seen...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah. Yes, we have a couple with the glasses. He
also--as you probably know, he was very disciplined--disciplined. He
was vegetarian, all that for all kind of different reasons, but he
said, `I cannot allow myself to be seen with a potbelly.' So that was
one element of his self-discipline, but he was very pictorially
oriented.

LAMB: Say he had remarkable--remarkably little interest in
literature.

Mr. LUKACS: I didn't say that.

LAMB: Somebody did.

Mr. LUKACS: No. Somebody did. No, no, he didn't. He--he was a
rather avid reader in his youth, self-educated. There is now--this is
after my book was done. I understand that a list of his books of his
apartment exists somewhere in the National Archives in Washington.
There is a room somewhere where we have his private--about 6,000 books
of his private library. I--I learned this from an article after I
read this book. It has nothing to do with my book. No, he was--he
was quite a reader.

LAMB: A--and the reason why I said, `Somebody said it,' when I wrote
this down, as you know, you've got a footnote almost on every page.

Mr. LUKACS: I had to do that, Mr. Lamb, because if I don't have a
footnote, this book would have been five times that long.

LAMB: Sometimes the footnote's longer than the page itself. They
kind of--what--what's...

Mr. LUKACS: They have to be, because they illustrate. You see--I
mean, this--this is a book about what people have written about him;
where, in my opinion, they were right; where, in my opinion, they were
wrong. That belongs to a footnote.

LAMB: All right. Here's another one I wrote down. He was a thigh
slapper.

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, well, that's a very minor thing, but it has
something to do with something very interesting. There is a
photograph of Hitler that's reproduced everywhere in history books.
He's dancing a jig. When the news comes to him that the French had
surrendered, capitulated, that picture is fake. Long story behind
this. There was a film strip with somebody faked up, you know, and so
it gives the impression--makes him ridiculous, makes him jump up and,
you know--no, he did not do this. He had a habit occasionally when he
was very enthusiastic, very ...(unintelligible) slapping his thigh,
you know. He didn't do this very often. But that thigh s--slapping,
through editing, through racing of the film, became a jig, and this
enters many history books that Hitler couldn't control himself, he was
dancing a jig at this news. Not true.

LAMB: Parkinson's disease with nine months to live.

Mr. LUKACS: It seems that way. I have read a fair amount of books
about his illness in the last period of his life, and it seems to
be--we don't have the medical records, except fagme--fragments--seems
convincing that he had Parkinson's toward the end of his life.

LAMB: By the way, when did he die and how did he die?

Mr. LUKACS: He died at the very end of the war, as you know, on the
30th of April, when the first Russian patrols were about 100...

LAMB: 1945.

Mr. LUKACS: ...'945--were about 150 yards from him. And he shot
himself. First, he poisoned and shot his favorite dog, then his wife,
whom he had just legally married, Eva Braun, and then himself.

LAMB: And by the way, there was a footnote where--where there was
some indication from somebody that he had an illegitimate child in
France.

Mr. LUKACS: Not true.

LAMB: Hated his father.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, that's difficult to say. He certainly disliked
him. And again, this is not Freudian psychoanalysis. We have--I'm
sorry, I have found several instances to confidants where he would
actually say that. He said, `I feared and disliked my father.' It's
very interesting that in Mein Kampf he doesn't say that. In Mein
Kampf he writes very respectfully of his father.

LAMB: It also is in your book that he was broken with grief from the
death of his mother.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. His relationship to his mother was extraordinary.
He adored his mother. All witnesses say that they have seldom, if
ever, seen a young man who was so devoted to his mother.

LAMB: When did his parents die?

Mr. LUKACS: His father died in 1903, his mother in 1907.

LAMB: And that was before he was 19 years old.

Mr. LUKACS: That was before he was 19 years old.

LAMB: It was said more often than o--than once in this book that he
had an extraordinary memory.

Mr. LUKACS: He seems to have had that, yes.

LAMB: What's the evidence?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, he would remember extraordinary things, not just
from literature. He would--I mean, his generals in the war were
amazed how he remembered details about armaments, armor, projectiles,
velocities, I mean, technical information.

LAMB: By the way, have you ever seen him in person?

Mr. LUKACS: No.

LAMB: He's an ex-Catholic.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, he's an ex-Catholic, if you wanna put it that way.
He was baptized a Catholic, didn't go to church and so forth. I
wonder whether, on the base of canon law, that makes him an
ex-Catholic. He was baptized.

LAMB: He had a disdain for economics.

Mr. LUKACS: He had a great disdain for economics, which worked
him--worked very much to his advantage.

LAMB: How?

Mr. LUKACS: Because he had no ec--he knew that economic programs,
even in a depression, do not appeal to people, you know. When--I
can--I can give you many examples of this. It's very important. The
Nazi Party, which had an enormous success in Germany--you know, he
really came to power democratically. He had something close to the
majority party. They practically had no economic program. He
appealed to something else. And to give you another example, you see,
he called himself, which is correct, a national socialist. He united
nationalism with socialism. Socialism, which at that time and even
now, is very often considered as an international thing. You know, he
said, `We are--we are socialists, but we are national socialists.'

Now let me just come back to economics. So then somebody asked him
'934--it was somebody--a confidant, `Well, now you're socialist. Are
you gonna nationalize the industries? Are you gonna nationalize
Krupp,' you know, the great arms--he says, `No. Why should I
nationalize the industries? I'm nationalizing the people.' So it
didn't make a damn bit of difference whether Krupp or Monasime and so
forth, you know, were nationalized or not. They did what he wanted
them to do.

LAMB: How tall was he?

Mr. LUKACS: He was about--I can't tell you exactly--I think 5'8" or
something like--5'9". I tell you something that's not in the book. I
knew two people--don't ask me who they were--who knew him rather
intimately, two women. I knew other people who knew him, but they are
very intelligent women. One of them's a scholar, the other's not, and
don't ask me their names. Both of them said, `You know, he had very
ugly feet.' This was news to me, a kind of feminine instinct.
Independent of each other, they told me that.

LAMB: I also wrote down from your book, `He has--had a large,
triangular nose.'

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. I must say that I noticed, as to put in my book,
he had a very large angular nose. We know this. He did not mind
this. There's a sketch that he drew of himself, and that's very
apparent, you know, the very large nose. There's something slightly
brutal in the nose. There is some reason to believe--but, of course,
this we do not know--that that's why he cultivated his moustache.

LAMB: You say he was an artist.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, `was an artist'--he certainly had artistic
abilities. He wanted to be an artist. If he had been accepted into
Viennese academy of arts, he would not have had a political career.
His art's also interesting because he wanted to be a painter and he
was not that bad. But then gradually--and that's very difficult to
determine when--his interest moves from painting to architecture.

LAMB: He believed in God.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, I think so, but, you know, belief in God, Mr.
Lamb, is a question of quality, how.

LAMB: At some point, I read that he w--in your book he was not a
sadist.

Mr. LUKACS: That's a very important point. He certainly was one of
the most brutal but, even more than brutal, hate-ridden person. He
hated. He said this. He said--he would say this early in his career,
`We Germans must know how to hate, hate, hate. We have to hate our
enemies.' And he says this, you know, and--but this was something
mental. You see, a sadist--a sadist--sadism, in my opinion and, I
would say, conviction, is a weakness of the flesh. A sadist takes
real physical pleasure seeing how other people are tortured or beaten
and so forth. We have no evidence of this with him. He
never--for--for example, you know about his hatred for Jews. He never
wanted to see what happens to them. He did not even want to see
statistics of how many Jews were killed.

LAMB: Who was Dr. Bloch?

Mr. LUKACS: Dr. Bloch was an extraordinary man who died here in the
United States. He was the physician, the Jewish doctor who took care
and tried to cure Hitler's mother. He was the man about whom Hitler
several times said, `There are a few noble Jews in the world. Dr.
Bloch is one of them.'

LAMB: Who is Sebastian Hafner?

Mr. LUKACS: Sebastian Hafner is an ...(unintelligible) and I think
he's dead now or very ill. He's a first-rate German journalist, very
much interested in history, who wrote one of the best books about
Hitler.

LAMB: If you don't mind, let me read a footnote on page 257 that
might be a good stepping off point for the rest of the discussion.

Mr. LUKACS: All right.

LAMB: Profes--is he Professor Hafner?

Mr. LUKACS: No.

LAMB: He's not a professor?

Mr. LUKACS: No, no.

LAMB: OK.

Mr. LUKACS: He's a journalist of a very high level.

LAMB: I don't see what date this was in--in here, but you--you have
him writing this, `Today's world, whether we like it or not, is the
work of Hitler. Without Hitler, there would've been no partition of
Germany in Europe. Without Hitler, there would've been'--I read it
again--`Without Hitler, there would've been no Americans and Russians
in Berlin. Without Hitler, there would be no Israel. Without Hitler,
there would be no decolonization, at least not such a rapid one.
There would be no Asian, Arab or black African emancipation and no
diminution of European pre-eminence.' And finally he wrote, `Or, more
accurately, there would be none of all of this without Hitler's
mistakes. He certainly did not want any of it.'

Mr. LUKACS: That's rather evident. I certainly agree with that,
yes.

LAMB: Explain more, though, why we wouldn't have the partition of
Germany in Europe and...

Mr. LUKACS: Well, look, when we look at the origins of the first
World War, that's a very complicated thing. It was a chain reaction.
And even today, people debate: `Was the kaiser responsible?' `Is
Germany responsible?' `Was France responsible,' you know. But when it
comes to Hitler, no Hitler, no second World War. I mean, that is
something. I mean, he caused the second World War. Perhaps there
would have been a war again with Germany and Poland, but no second
World War. I mean, he be--he planned and began the start of the
second World War because he thought that the situation then was
advantageous for Germany. There's also a deeper element there which I
mention. It's--it's a very interesting thing, and this is not a--a
psychological hypothesis. We know this from many others.

In the winter of '937, '938, he convinces himself that he doesn't have
long to live. And this, in all probability, contributed to his belief
that if war has to come, better now than later.

LAMB: Do you have any idea how many historians you studied?

Mr. LUKACS: No. I would say--I--well, some of--some of that--some,
I deal with their books. Of course, there were many articles. You
see, sometimes the most valuable things are not in books but in
articles. I cannot give you a number. I would say certainly more
than 100.

LAMB: A man named Fest.

Mr. LUKACS: Fest is--Fest wrote, in my opinion, the best long
biography of Hitler. It was published in...

LAMB: A thousand one hundred eighty-four pages.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, it is. Yes. And still very readable. He wrote
this in--around 1970, published 1972, was published in this country,
too. I mean, I criticize Fest here and there, so forth, but it's the
best--I still--I think the best long biography of Hitler. There is
coming--one is coming now by an Englishman whom I greatly respect. I
mention his book. His name is--his name is Ian Kershaw. His book, I
think, on Hitler will be published within the next two years. I think
Kershaw's got it.

LAMB: Where is Mr. Fest from?

Mr. LUKACS: Fest is a German. He had some political in television.
He was the--for a long time, the chief editor of the best German
newspaper.

LAMB: Translated in English, by the way? Is this book available out
here in the United States?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, yes, yes. Yes, yes. The Fest--and it's rather
successful. He writes books. He had just last year published a book,
which I must say I haven't read yet, on the German resistance to
Hitler.

LAMB: You say in your book that William Shirer, former Chicago
Tribune reporter...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...author of "Rise & Fall of the Third Reich"...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...was superficial.

Mr. LUKACS: Very superficial. Shirer wrote one good book. He was
in Berlin in 1940, '41, when the war was going on, but as you know,
the United States was not yet at war with Germany. He wrote a book
called "Berlin Diary," which made his fame, which is a very
interesting book. You know, he was one of the few Americans left in
Berlin during that time. During 1960 he wrote "The Rise & Fall of the
Third Reich," which is really very superficial, doesn't tell us
anything new. But there's an interesting thing about it. This--the
appear--this book was very successful. And it's interesting because
in the United States, it was at that time that interest in Hitler and
the Third Reich began to rise again. See, the interesting thing is
that after the war, for a very long time, there was no interest in
Hitler. You know, books on Germany were not on the market. And about
'59, '60, this interest begins again, and Shirer just hit it right.
And this a little bit corresponds with Germany, too, because it's in
the '60s that the first really serious books in Germany about Hitler
began to appear.

LAMB: What do you think the impact is in this country of the
television channels that do history, running lots of Hitler
doc--documentaries and...

Mr. LUKACS: I can't tell this because I watch television very
little.

LAMB: You don't get any feedback among students or images that...

Mr. LUKACS: No. Well, I'm retired from teaching now. The great
trouble is--and I mentioned this in the book and I said this
elsewhere, too, that the--especially in this country, but in Germany,
too, there is--Hitler is regarded as a freak, as a demon, as a madman,
and there are two very bad outcomes of that. First of all, if he was
a madman, a freak and so forth, he's not responsible for what he did.
You know, you got a madman, he's not responsible, you know, and--the
second consequence is not minimal either. By thinking about him and
by thinking about the entire Nazi period like this, we have brushed it
under the rug. You see, we don't every think about it very much.
`This was interesting, fascinating, but the man was a madman,' you
know. This relieves him of responsibility. Well, the Germans like to
do this, too. You know, I just came back from Germany. The book was
published in Germany. And in Germany, there is--this is
understandable, you know. It's not--it's not right, but it's
understandable. There's a German tendency to say, `This was a crazy
episode. It doesn't belong to our history.'

LAMB: How did they treat you when you were there?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, it was a mixed bag.

LAMB: What do you mean?

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah. Well, I had some very good reviews, but I had
some academics who criticized the book, and I'm used to this. I've
written 19 books. But their criticisms were--difficult to say, but
they were kind of personal, let's--and--and not--I will say not
terribly important.

LAMB: When they attack you personally, how? What--what--what do they
go after?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, they--they don't--they--they just say, you know, I
mean, it's--it's--it's--it's--it's only happened with academics. They
say, `We've worked on this for so long. What is he doing on our
turf?'

LAMB: Meaning that wor--they worked on the history.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. Yes. Yes.

LAMB: Some other historians you write about. Alan Bullock, you say,
was the most successful of all Hitler biographers.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. He was...

LAMB: Who is he?

Mr. LUKACS: ...an Englishman. He's still alive. He's Lord Bullock
now. He's 86. He wrote the first serious English biography of Hitler
in 1952. It's still pretty good and pretty readable. You know, the
English write very well. You now, they don't write this academic
jargon and all that. But the book is outdated and has many errors.
For example, he says, `There's no use'--I mean, Hitler said everything
in "Mein Kampf." You know, I mean, what he did. People should have
read him because he just--he--he--he is what now, in Germany, this
debate, which doesn't make much sense--he s--intended a debate in
Germany now between intentionalists and functionalists.

You know, academics like big words. Intentionalists mean that Hitler
had his intentions from the very beginning and he tried to fulfill
them. Bullock says this. The functionalists say, `No, the machinery
of the Third Reich was very complicated and Hitler'--there are some
people that say Hitler was a weak dictator, which I think is nonsense
because a lot of decisions were made that he really did not do well.
You know, you run a country, like, 85 million, you can't decide
everything.

LAMB: By the way, you used a figure a--at the early part of your book
I wanted to ask you about because it was different than...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...what we hear a lot.

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: That 4.5 million Jews died in the Holocaust?

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. I was--I was attacked for that just last week.
All my American reviews have been very good, and I'm very pleased with
that. I was cr--no, I wasn't attacked--I was criticized by this
interview: Philadelphia Inquirer. I got this number years ago from a
great historian of the Holocaust, Jewish incidentally, Gerard
Reitlinger. Rite--Reitlinger and Hilberg wrote the best books on the
Holocaust. That's where I got the number, you know. And it's very
difficult. We do not know. And I think that's a very petty thing to
criticize someone. I just mention it in passing. I don't analyze it.
You know, this was a horrible thing--4.5 million or 6 million.
Does--what difference it make?

LAMB: When it comes to the Holocaust, you mention in here that that
word wasn't even invented until '60-something?

Mr. LUKACS: Exactly. You know, just like I--you remember we talked
a few minutes ago about how interest in the Third Reich begins to
revive and Hitler, '59-'60; that there was, in spite of the terrible
things that have happened, especially in America, there was not
great--there was no great interest of what happened to the European
Jews--there was some--until about the 1960s. I mean, the very word
Holocaust--somebody has to look it up. It appears here and there. I
think I mentioned it appeared in an English publication that started
1944. But it becomes a usable word--you know, a frequent word--I
would say, in the late '60s.

LAMB: Come back to some historians in a moment.

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: I want to go back to some of the things I wrote down about
Adolf Hitler...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...that you had in the book: that he rose late and ate late.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, it's interesting. So did Churchill and so did
Stalin, you know. Hitler--very, very rare did he get up early.

LAMB: What do you think that means?

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah. Nothing. I don't know. I'll tell you one thing
that's interesting. He--I told you that he was not vain, but that he
put a grade of emphasis on his appearance; you know--you know, told
you about no glasses and so forth. Even his butler--you know, his
footman--could not see him in his underclothes. I know this from one
memoir of his secretary, not a terribly important thing. Yes, he got
up late and, of course, he wore people out because he had this late
conference--sometimes his conference of generals went on till 3:00 or
4:00 in the morning.

LAMB: You--I--at least I found in your book that he was a fast reader
of books and had an astonishing memory.

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: We talked a little bit about that earlier.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: But the fast reader of books--what's the evidence on that?

Mr. LUKACS: I cannot tell you. Some people around him noticed that.

LAMB: Did you--did I--but in the reading category--and I'll see if I
can find the fellow's name--is it--is it Carl May? Was that his name,
the...

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, yes. That's a very interesting thing. Carl May is
not very well known in America. He was a German. He's known all over
Central Europe. Even I read some of his books when I was a young
man--or boy. They are stories about the American wild West, and
Hitler read them avidly, in his late teens, and he reread them during
the war. He once actually says to Heinrich Himmler, `We should have
our troops read Carl May.'

They are wild West stories, you know; I mean, cowboys, Indians and so
forth. Some of them are German-Americans. He--I didn't mention his
book--Carl May died when Hitler still lived in Vienna, in his 20s. He
went to his funeral. And Carl May was not a Nationalist or a Nazi.
The only thing we can see that--of course, you know, it's cowboys and
Indians; cowboys win and all that. And some of his heroes from his
wild West stories were German-Americans. But Carl May cannot be
regarded as a source of Hitler's ideology. But I mention it because
very few people have noticed this. Hitler knew more about the United
States than people give him credit.

LAMB: Back to the historians. A.J.P. Taylor--who died just
recently, I believe?

Mr. LUKACS: No, died about five, six years ago, yes.

LAMB: Yeah. Sometimes that feels like it's recently.

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah. I know. I know.

LAMB: What did you think of his work?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, he's a maverick. I had a run-in with him
once--not a bad one--criticized each other many years ago. He's a
good writer. Sometimes he exaggerates, has a one--what is--a
one-dimensional view. He wrote a book about Hitler and the coming of
the war, which is very valuable in one things but there are great
errors in it, too.

LAMB: John Toland sat right there were you are sitting.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: You talk about him in your book.

Mr. LUKACS: I criticized John. I knew John and--but I really think
that his book on Hitler is not very good.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, the de...

LAMB: And, by the way, he said...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...he sold two million copies of it.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, good for him, you know. I'll be glad if I sell
15,000. But--no, no, no, I never--I'm never envious of anyone
who--who makes money writing books. Good for him. He did work a lot.
The positive things about John Toland is that he did what some
historians didn't do; he investigated, interviewed many people,
perhaps more than 100 people, who were close to Hitler--his secretary,
his cooks, aides, adjutants and so forth--and got some material out of
it. The--the--the--John, however, is a little bit of a
sensationalist. He had a--kind of a nagging admiration for Hitler in
some ways, and that pops up here and there. And everybody has the
right to admire somebody. That's human freedom. But sometimes this
comes out in the text. He gives him too much benefit.

LAMB: David Irving.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, Irving is now threatening to sue me. The trouble
with Irving is--Irving is also very talented. He has no leg to stand
on because the only thing I tell about him that might be libelous--and
that's even questionable--that he does admire Hitler. He doesn't hide
it.

LAMB: Who is he?

Mr. LUKACS: He's a young Englishman who always admired the Germans,
went to study in Germany, went to work in a German factory when he was
very young and wrote umpteen books about the Second World War and
Hitler. Now the trouble is that most people dismiss Irving. They
say, `Well, Irving is a Nazi,' or a neo-Nazi and all that, but they
don't look at his details. What I did in this book, I said, `I have
to deal with Irving because Irving is important.' And I try to point
out, again, probably in the longest footnote of the book, where Irving
said things that are not provable and not documented.

LAMB: Why does he do it, do you think?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, he's not a professional historian, but he is
fascinated with this and he's carried away.

LAMB: What do you think of--you know, if you've read 100 historians'
books...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...what do you think, overall, of the history of Hitler?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, I say that this is an endless story. You know,
history is revisionist by nature. You know, the historian deals--I
said it in a book--unlike the law, you know, legal evidence and
historical evidence are very different. In law, you can't try someone
twice. It would be multiple jeopardy. In history, we look back and
try a person over and over, over again. And I think that, by and
large--and this is mostly the merit of German historians--there
are--we--we have a--not a more rounded, a more detailed knowledge of
the man than we had 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It never will be
complete. History cannot be complete, whether it's Hitler or an
ordinary man. What goes on within him is between him and God. Only
God knows.

LAMB: Where do you do your writing?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, at home, at my desk.

LAMB: And--and what time of day do you write?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, early--from eight to 12.

LAMB: Hard? Easy? How would you characterize your writing?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, it's a very hard job, but I can't help it.

LAMB: Nineteen books.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, that's not so much, you know, in 50 years. And
it's not the number that counts. You know, there are some people
who've written 100 books and they're no good.

LAMB: Which one sold the most?

Mr. LUKACS: I don't--I cannot really tell you. None of them sold
very much, but that's perfectly all right.

LAMB: The second one, I see on your list here is Tocqueville, "The
European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau."

Mr. LUKACS: That's a funny thing you should mention it because that
certainly sold least. It was a Doubleday. And just the day before
yesterday I had a telephone call from somebody who wants to reprint it
among the Liberty Fund books--they are conservative books--and
actually offers me some money. It's funny.

LAMB: Why? Did they tell you why?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, he likes it.

LAMB: Well, I count it because we have spent a lot of time with
Tocqueville over the last year.

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, well, Tocqueville is a great man.

LAMB: I--I counted in your book nine different pages...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...in which you brought him up. And you use him extensively in
here to describe what?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, let me tell you. Tocqueville, who is mostly known
wrongly for his "Democracy in America"--it was a very great book, but
he wrote many other things--was probably the Plato or the Aristotle of
the Democratic age, you know, because his book even, "Democracy in
America," is not about America. It is about America but only as a
model of democracy. It's about democracy.

And there was a period of my life, when I did that book, when I
thought that, `I'm gonna be a Tocqueville scholar.' And I did scholar
the article of work on Tocqueville. But then I changed my mind,
partly because Tocqueville had become, by that time, a cottage
industry, you know, and I didn't want to get involved in that. And
there's another thing. The most valuable--some of the most valuable
things in Tocqueville are his letters. He was a tremendous
correspondent, you know. And even now--there are 23 volumes of his
collected works now in French, and even now we don't have all his
letters. You know, ul--ultimately, there's going to be 28 or 29
volumes.

LAMB: How many languages do you speak?

Mr. LUKACS: I speak a few languages, which has something to do with
the fact that I'm Hungarian. And, you see, the Hungarian language is
not related to any other language. It's not a Slavic language, not
Germanic, not romance, too. Hungarians have a need to know foreign
languages.

LAMB: How much of your study of Hitler in German--or the German
historians have you read in German? Do you read German?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, most--yes, I read German. Most of them--most of the
Germans--all of the Germans I've read in German.

LAMB: So when you have a book like this, that has a footnote on every
page...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...100 historians that you're involved in, and you sit down and
write between eight and 11--noon in the morning...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: ...where do you find all that information? How do you catalog
it?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, well, I read the books, then I make notes, just what
you have done. Then I type them up and then I decide--well, before
that, I decide the plan of the book. The plan of the book is not
about the historians. The plan of the book is seven or eight
chapters: `What are still problems with Hitler?' And then I take--I
don't have a laptop, I don't have a computer. Then I take a penknife
or a razor, you know, and cut up these notes--snip, snip, snip, snip,
snip--Fest, three; Heffner, five and so on and say, `Where am I gonna
use this?' But the--but don't frighten people away, Mr. Lamb. This
book has long footnotes, but at the risk of presumption, it's a rather
readable book.

LAMB: Well, I've read it, so--I mean, I--I've read all those
footnotes and I can--I can attest to that. I got through it.

Mr. LUKACS: But you wouldn't say otherwise.

LAMB: I--I don't know. But go to the--the basic themes. What are
the six or seven questions in your mind that are left unanswered?

Mr. LUKACS: Which are still outstanding. Well, it goes chapter by
chapter. The--the second chapter--you see, in the first chapter I
surveyed historians in general rather the evolution of our knowledge
of Hitler. You know, I dealed with them chronologically. The second
chapter is very interesting, and I'm not alone in this now. Things
are shifting around. The accepted view was, which Hitler very
strongly emphasized in "Mein Kampf," that his main ideas had
crystalized in Vienna. Doesn't seem that way.

LAMB: Where was he born?

Mr. LUKACS: He was born in an Austrian village on the German border,
went to--went to Vienna when he was 17. No, it seems that the turning
point in his mind happened in Munich, and this has some importance.
And it's interesting because ...(unintelligible) and stuff. Let me
just tell you one example. He come--he comes to live in Munich--well,
he lived in Munich before the war, but for a very short time. He--at
the end of the war, he goes to Munich to live. He's...

LAMB: World War I?

Mr. LUKACS: World War I. He is now 30 years old. You know,
everything we know about him indicates that up to the age of 30 he was
not a talkative man. He was rather tight-lipped, except here and
there. Then in Munich--and this is only one element--he discovers
that he has a great speaking ability and he becomes a speaker. And
that's the beginning of his political career. But that's only one
important--the Vienna-Munich thing is not important--not unimportant.
The second chapter, for which I have been criticized--that's about the
only thing where I received serious criticism in Germany. Was he a
reactionary or a revolutionary?

LAMB: Chapter three.

Mr. LUKACS: And I say that he was a revolutionary, which he himself
says. There's no question about it. I mean, he uses the word
reaction as a bad word. He says, `Churchill is an old reactionary.
Churchill'--you know, he hates reactionaries. He himself says a
revolutionary. And he did achieve some revolutionary things. But,
you see, the Germans don't like this because, unlike the United
States, unlike France, unlike Britain, the Germans never had a
successful revolution. You see, when a--Germans tried to have a
democratic revolution in 1848, 1849 Frankfurt, they failed. And so in
Germany, revolutionary is still a positive word, you know? When I say
revolutionary, people say, `Oh, he's praising Hitler,' I don't. I
don't like revolutionaries. I like reactionaries.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LUKACS: Because you stop reacting when you're dead. Then you
don't react anymore. All human thinking is, in a way, reacting. And
we have to react against many accepted ideas. Right now, what the
world is coming to, we have to react against the accepted idea of
progress.

LAMB: Give us an example.

Mr. LUKACS: Well, you know, that technological progress, pollution,
progress in pornography, technology, freedom of speech, behavior and
so forth. It's not that good.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LUKACS: Because there is no--because human nature does not
change. The--the human idea of progress li--is a human invention, you
know. There is no evolution in human character and in human mind.

LAMB: How do you stop the change?

Mr. LUKACS: You don't stop the change, but you have to look at the
quality of the change. Is--change, in itself, is not necessarily
good. Just like sta--just like stability, change can be good or bad.
Stability can be good or bad. It's a question of quality. And,
unfortunately, computers, quantification, numbers, technology--we
emphasize, we look, we--our judgment of quality has become weaker and
weaker. And all human life, everything in our life, is a problem of
quality.

LAMB: Professor Lukacs, you have a footnote on page 61 about Winston
Churchill, and it's the one that--where he describes Hitler in the
hospital.

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah.

LAMB: And you--and later on, in--in a number of cases, you talk about
Churchill having great insight into Hitler. How did he get this
insight?

Mr. LUKACS: That's absolutely extraordinary. I don't want to
mention my previous books, but I did--I wrote a book called "The
Duel." It's out of print now. And that dealt with the
Churchill-Hitler relationship, but only during 80 days in 1940 when
Hitler came very close to winning the war. And Churchill and--and
Churchill had one asset--was not enough to win but it was a tremendous
asset--was a duel of minds. And he understood Hitler better than
Hitler understood him. And Hitler understood people pretty well. He
did not quite understand Churchill. Churchill had a fabulous
understanding of Hitler.

LAMB: How'd he get it?

Mr. LUKACS: Some kind of genius, very early--very early. Be
it--when every ri--when everyone ridicules Hitler, almost everyone,
three years before Hitler became chancellor, Churchill dined at the
German Embassy in London and said, `This man, Hitler, is very
dangerous. He's gonna be'--and the chancellor--oh no, the secretary
of the embassy thought this was interesting enough he reported it to
the German foreign ministry. Yes. Yeah.

LAMB: You have a chapter--your longest chapter...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...Statesmen and--and Strategists.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: Why did that take so long to discuss?

Mr. LUKACS: Because this has been largely ignored, even by the
German historians. This is--this is very easy to illustrate. See,
Hitler was in power for 12 years. The first six years everything went
well. Then the last six years were the war.

In the beginning of the war everything goes well, but then comes a
catastrophe. The whole world turns around a--against him. And one of
the shortcoming of--not all, but most German historians is they don't
deal with this very much. They say, `Well, of course, then he led to
the Second World War and the end was catastrophe.' You see? And now
his--his mind, his acts, his decisions to the war in--during the war
require or--require more interest than has been generally devoted to
him. That's why it's my longest chapter.

LAMB: The Germans: Chapter or Episode? That's chapt--that's chapter
seven.

Mr. LUKACS: Yes, we talked about this a little bit. I told you that
it's an understandable, though--though--though not quite right, German
tendency of regarding this entire Hitler period as an unnatural
episode in the history of Germany.

LAMB: Now when you went over there to visit in Germany...

Mr. LUKACS: Yes.

LAMB: ...are there many Germans that are willing to admit that this
was a horrible period?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, yes. Almost everybody. Almost everybody there.

LAMB: And the--is there--and--and you say that David Irving...

Mr. LUKACS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LAMB: ...is an apologist for that?

Mr. LUKACS: He's an apologist. But David--no, there are always some
neo-Nazis left. D--David Irving, for example, so far as I understand,
is not permitted to travel to Germany.

LAMB: And, by the way, another little note on the David Irving book
is that you said that John Keegan, an historian, endorsed this book?

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. He said, `This is one of the 50 most important
books on the Second World War,' but he hasn't read carefully enough.
Well, there is stuff in Irving which is very interesting. See, Irving
is a tireless researcher. Irving got hold of materials nobody got
hold of, you know.

LAMB: What do you want people to take away from your book?

Mr. LUKACS: That it's well-written. I'm a stylist. It's not
my--it's not my native language, but I think history that's not
well-written cannot be good history.

LAMB: OK. From a substance standpoint, what do you want them to
learn?

Mr. LUKACS: That we have to look at Hitler and Stalin and every--and
no matter who it is, historically. History is the fourth dimension of
human nature, of the human being. We live in time. We are--we are
the only living beings in the universe who are historical beings. We
live in time. We know we live in time. We know that we are gonna
die.

LAMB: You say that Hitler came close to winning the war in '40, '41?

Mr. LUKACS: Very close. Much closer than people think.

LAMB: What made the difference?

Mr. LUKACS: Churchill. Roosevelt and Stalin won the war, but
Churchill could have lost it.

LAMB: What's the--and we only have a short amount of time--what's the
Lebens Raum folly?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, it's not really a folly. That wa--Hitler was not
alone in this. He had the conviction that Germany, not only in the
Second World War but already before, should have expanded eastward,
not westward, and then large portions of Eastern Europe could be
conquered and even populated by Germans; that Germany is a
overpopulated country. Lebens Raum means, `life space,' they need
more space and so forth. This was a great exaggeration, but many
historians also take him for granted--his words for granted. They
think--and in my opinion, it's wrong--that his entire invasion of
Russia was due to this obsession of his. It's more complicated than
that.

LAMB: How many times was he--attempted murder--how many times did
people try to knock Hitler off during the war?

Mr. LUKACS: Oh, several times. I--I cannot give you the number.
Also before the war, there were--I cannot tell you how many attempts
were made, which happens with dictators very often.

LAMB: So if someone's a beginner and they don't know much about Adolf
Hitler, go over two or three suggestions on where they should start.
Should they read "Mein Kampf"?

Mr. LUKACS: No. No. They should read a good biography of Hitler,
and there are some good ones.

LAMB: And your favorites again?

Mr. LUKACS: I would say Fest is still the best. It's very big.
Then I mentioned some others. Heffner is very good. Heffner is very
short and--start with Heffner. There's a German historian I mentioned
by the name of Deuerlein, unfortunately, not translated into English,
whom I think is the best short biographer.

LAMB: Did you have anything to say about how this cover was made?

Mr. LUKACS: Yes. I said, `Please don't have a cover with his
picture,' but they did nonetheless.

LAMB: And wh--what are they trying to do here with this picture?

Mr. LUKACS: I have no idea.

LAMB: So you don't like it?

Mr. LUKACS: It's all right.

LAMB: Who named this book?

Mr. LUKACS: I did--my wife.

LAMB: And what was the point?

Mr. LUKACS: Well, I thought--I thought it should be called "Hitler
and the Historians" or "The History"--then during dinner, after a few
drinks, she said, `Why not "The Hitler of History"?' Or maybe I said
it and she said, `That's right.'

LAMB: John Lukacs, author of "The Hitler of History," thank you very
much.

Mr. LUKACS: Thank you.

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The Hitler of History