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Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil is a 1998 book by journalist Ron Rosenbaum which tells of Rosenbaum's struggles with the "exceptionalist" character of Hitler's character and impact on the world or, worse from his point of view, his struggle with the possibility that Hitler isn't an exception at all, but is on the natural continuum of human destructive possibility.
For example, Rosenbaum discusses a theory advanced by Rudolph Binion, a professor at Brandeis University, who believes that Hitler's personality was moulded or deformed by witnessing as a child the suffering of his mother, who died of breast cancer.
Binion says that Hitler's mother was treated by a Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, with the standard remedy of the time, iodoform. But he, Bloch, was excessive in his prescribed dosages of iodoform and given the caustic and scarring effects of this chemical that enhanced his patient's sufering. Binion believes Hitler's rage at this was transferred to the Jewish people as a whole.
Rosenbaum doesn't adopt this, or any other explanation, as his own. He advances it and others as examples of the persistent desire to believe that some simle reductive explanation will render palatable in retrospect an evil so vast.
The book was critically praised and a best seller.