All About Eva

HE wore a creased suit and a grey face. She had on a blue dress and a fur cape. They were married in a brief ceremony and they remained married only briefly. When they were cohabiting, he had this funny habit of cracking mildly tasteless and wholly humourless jokes. On seeing a table napkin smeared by her lipstick, he said she could soon get all the lipstick in the world from dead bodies. When he heard that someone had called her a 8220;whore8221;, he got more men to guard him. Whenever he heard her voice when he was working, he would feel chuffed. But she always thought he was not keeping his side of the conjugal rights bargain, even though by 8220;the end8221;, most thought she was pregnant.

8220;The end8221; of course came in that famous Berlin bunker, the most famous double suicide in modern history. Academic interest in Adolf Hitler started from possibly that very minute. Hitler scholarship is an industry with several sub-specialisations and, inevitably, a great variance in the quality of products. Eberle8217;s and Uhl8217;s book is tough to place in those sub-specialities and tough to assess for quality.

The book8217;s authorship8212;the two German historians are editors8212;is unique. Soviet secret service agents 8220;wrote8221; the book. Its original publishing history is unique too. Stalin ordered two of Hitler8217;s aides, his adjutant, Otto Gunsche, and his personal valet, Heinz Linge, be interrogated 8212; whatever that term means in the context of NKVD Soviet secret police methods 8212; and the results were to be given to Stalin. Not too many copies were made, which is not surprising. What is, is that one copy survived Stalin8217;s and decades later his police state8217;s demise.

A dossier on Hitler prepared for Stalin8217;s eyes only8212;there8217;s enough drama in that to make blurb writers employed by publishers drool. But for critics, that poses the danger of missing the wood of new insights for the trees of details.

Adolf8217;s and Eva8217;s often tortuous love life, Adolf8217;s personal hygiene, his mood swings, his technical interest in how best to construct gas chambers, Eva8217;s loneliness, bagfuls of trivia about the inner circle around the Fuhrer, the fact that Hitler thought Goering was incompetent, the exact, frankly mind-numbing details of Hitler8217;s death, these and many other information are packed into this finely edited and annotated book.

At the end of it, though, the reader isn8217;t left with any thing newly discovered about the most studied man of our times. One can see why an obsessive, neurotic Stalin would find table talk8212;Adolf apparently had a great deal to say about how the female staff dressed8212;at Hitler8217;s mountain retreat worthy of lengthy description. But one can8217;t see why it should be equally compelling or, indeed, important for the relatively well-informed Hitler Studies enthusiast.

Hitler scholars may find some nuggets in The Hitler Book. For the rest of us, the book8217;s most telling message is about Stalin, not Hitler. Knowing that the General Secretary was not exactly heartbroken about what the Fuhrer die to the Jews, NKVD 8220;writers8221; kind of glossed over the whole business of the Holocaust8212;the greatest crime ever perpetrated. On noticing this omission, we understand once again8212;and we are reminded of those who will not understand8212;that while the USSR fought the Nazis bravely, there was little to distinguish Stalin from Hitler when it came to using genocide as state policy.

No doubt, had SS interrogators 8220;written8221; a book on Stalin for Hitler8217;s exclusive perusal, they would have glossed over the trifling matter of gulags and labour camps.