HITLER, Adolf ....an accumulation of thoughts about...

Below the following enumeration you will find, first, a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books, about a Neal Acherson review of a Hitler biography, and prior to that, over the course of the second half of 2017, my thoughts about this person whose actions had such profound secondary consequences on my life, and the aftermauth of whose doings continue to effect, and of course not only me.


1] my mother stopping nursing at my age 9 month because she was engaged in opposition as of 1934, handing me over to an ugly puritanical prison-keep of a governess who derived from my father's family...


2] My half-Jewish halfsister Grace and her mother leaving for London in 1938... Grandfather von Alvensleben, who barely escaped the Night of the Long Knives, spent most of Hitler's 12 year reign in four different concentration camps, however, happened to on vacation as it were to become a featured player in my first screen memory which is of Christmas 1939, in my memoir SCREEN MEMORIES.



3] Inception of bombing of Bremen, spring 1940, expulsion from my paradise..,and the 2nd Screen Memory.. travel from 1940 to the end of 1943 to various houses safe from bombing attacks... and a visit to my parent’s place in Berlin during a major air raid during which the zoo is bombed and I hear or fantasize I hear the animals screaming.


4] Father's arrest after the 20th of July due to his participation in the conspiracy... see “The 19th of July” in my memoir Screen Memories.  My mother's followed later when she was entrapped by the Gestapo.

http://www.lukasverlag.com/ebooks/titel/317-gestapo-im-op.html

http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/08/main-moravian-night-discussion-page.html  

5] Back in Paradise no end of bombing attacks, day and night, a shot-up B-17 barely nearly crashes into our house.



6] The arrival of no end of previously unknown refugee cousins at our place outside Bremen in spring 1945, also covered in Screen Memories.



7] The end of the war in Spring 1945, occupation first by the Brits then by the American armed forces. Parents and grandfather have survived and start telling me what transpired, and I become the pet of the local OSS contingent who favor those who opposed Hitler.



8] 1947 I read how my grandfather was tortured at Buchenwald and something in my clicks and I realize I have to get the hell out of the murderous country.



9] I emigrate at age 13 to the U.S My mother who is now married to one of the OSS men who favored us has preceded me.



10] I translate and publish a variety of books related to Hitler and the Third Reich, among them the poetry of Nelly Sachs,  OH THE CHIMNEYS, Gertrude Kolmar’s DARK SOLILOQUY, Kempowsky’s Did you ever see Hitler?, Hochhut’s TELL 38, the story of Maurice Bavaud.



11] A psychoanalysis brings me into contact with the authors of the two formidable analysts, Fritz Redlich &  Ted Dorpat and their Hitler monographs that I cite in the letter below.



Several thoughts haunt: 


a] Hitler needed an echo for his rants; a lost war will amplify these kinds of echoes.


b] Absent Hindenburg appointing him as Chancellor would Hitler have come to power later??? was a 2nd World War inevitable?


c] The pathetically ineffectual nature of the German elite’e resistance to Hitler - it’s bird’s cry “Wasn’t there a captain with a side arm?” continues to haunt. At one time I was going to write a book about  Oberst Kurt Grosscurth, one of the participants in the resistance, but there was no book there, he died too soon, captured at Stalingrad, but the research was worth it.  As you can also read in SCREEN MEMORIES, all on my own I became a child warrior nationalist, courtesy of the radio, a nationalism that did not survive the revelations starting Spring 1945. I dont recall ever hearing Hitler speak, who stopped addressing the German people once the war had started in 1940, but I recall giving the Hitler greeting with the wrong arm one morning in primary school in 1944 and the SS teacher slapping me for doing so; the fellow ctd to be a bastard after the end of the war; the high pitched voice of Goebbels and the women hovering around the radio when he spoke.   





  


https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/neal-ascherson/hopping-in-his-matchbox?utm_source=LRB+themed+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20170727+themed&utm_content=usca_nonsubs


re:  ascherson/hopping-in-his-matchbox? 

As the grandchild of Werner von Alvensleben whose alleged threat to call out the Potsdam guard to arrest Hitler, according to Hitler, was the proximate cause for the “Night of the Long Knives” that eliminated the remainder of the opposition to complete imposition of the Hitler dictatorship, I am someone who, therefore, has had reasons to dwell on these matters his own life long. von Alvensleben

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

was go-between Hitler’s predecessor General von Schleicher and Hitler, and once had H. for lunch (which at but one remove makes me shiver even at this remoteness), and he made fun of Hitler’s ambition to be the new Napoleon stuck in Russia; forgetting it seems, as his fellow conservatives then did, that the Nazi Party had been murdering for a decade and that matters like the Reichtagsbrand and atrocities such as the Night of the Long Knives  were first nature to them. What Mr. Acherson does not seem to know and therefore is unable to appreciate is that Hitler was a valiant runner at the front for five years and that the effect of being exposed to mustard gas, but especially the effect of a huge shell exploding very close to him,   according to Ted Dorpat’s  Wounded-Monster-Hitlers-Trauma-Malevolence, one of the two major psycho-analytic monographs [the other being Fritz Redlich’s Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet) are the cause of Hitler’s life-long post traumatic forever belligerence and need to be at war and to exterminate; after all, subsequent if not simultaneous to the Jewish people on his list were the Slavs, specifically the Ukrainians.

Sincerely,


Michael Roloff