Hi CobaltBlue; More on the subject of Hitler as a human being, LOL.
I recently got around to reading Granta #79, and it has an article about the Hitler family doctor, who happened to be Jewish. Some excerpts:
The Search for Dr. Bloch
Jason Cowley, Granta #79, Fall 2002
Early in 1943, an operative of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA, made his way to an unkempt attic apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Creston Avenue, the Bronx. The operative, Walter C. Langer, was compiling what would become the world's first psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, and that day he took with him Gertrude Kurth, a psychotherapist who was also acting as his translator. Together they climbed the stairs to see a seventy-one-year-old doctor who two years earlier had fled from Austria to New York: a Jew, Dr Eduard Bloch. Dr Bloch had an interesting story to tell. He had known Hitler at first hand; nearly forty years before he had been the Hitler family's doctor. He had treated Hitler's mother, Klara, during her final illness, as well as the young Hitler himself for various routine ailments. Obviously, in any study of Hitler's personality the evidence of such an an intimate witness to illness and trauma--his mother's death had grieved Hitler deeply--could be important. No less interesting--though its relevance to Langer's research might be debatable--was Dr Bloch's account of how he had escaped the usual fate of Austrian Jews in 1940. Hitler personally, he told Langer and Kurth, had intervened to allow his departure.
In other words, he was a Jew who had been saved by Hitler--from Hitler. This became the conundrum of his life.
...
A meeting with Bloch offered Langer an opportunity to paddle in these psychological streams, to return to the primal scene of Hitler's childhood and adolescence and to what the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper later called 'the darkest, the most formative, and therefore in some sense, the most interesting period' of Hitler's life. Langer believed that Bloch was particularly well placed to provide insight into the years, sometimes mythologized as the missing years, when, from 1908 to 1913, Hitler was a striving but unsuccessful young painter in Vienna. And what did Bloch tell him? That Hitler had been 'a nice pleasant youth'.
...
Edeljude: a noble Jew. Bloch told Langer of how in 1937 a group of local Nazi supporters from Linz [where Bloch lived] had visited Hitler at his mountain villa at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. 'The Fuhrer asked for news of Linz,' Bloch said. 'How was the town? Were people there supporting him? He asked for news of me. Was I still alive, still practising? Then he made a statement irritating to the local Nazis: "Dr Bloch," said Hitler, "is an Edeljude--a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question."'
...
How reliable was Dr Bloch? Perhaps reliable in one important way: he does not seem to have been a revisionist witness, adjusting his experience of Hitler and his family to suit Hitler's later beliefs and behaviour and his then current position as the civilized world's greatest enemy. Largely, he spoke as he had found. He never once condemned his former patient: if anything, he exhibited an understandable touch of wonder at what the mature Hitler had achieved, the improbability of it all. Nor did he ever disparage Klara Hitler, whom he consistently portrayed as a gentle, modest woman, attentive to her children and religiously devout: 'Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature,' he told Collier's. 'While he was not a "mother's boy" in the usual sense, I have never witnessed a closer attachment. Some insist that this love verged on the pathological. As a former intimate of the family, I do not believe that this is true.' To the OSS, he described the 'reciprocal adoration' of mother and son as most 'unusual'.
...
To read the rest of the article, I'm guessing you will have to get the print addition. The other articles in this issue are as follows:
granta.com
-- Carl
P.S. In general, this was not one of the more interesting Grantas, in my opinion. Sorry for failing to proof this, it's late and time for me to go to bed. |
