Roamer's Column

There is a remarkable photograph of Adolf Hitler, seated, concentrating his gaze on a model of his birthplace, Linz. In his mind, the town was to become the culture centre of Europe, as Rome had been the culture and spiritual centre of Christianity. If Christ can have a focal point from which His Church could radiate throughout the world, why then, the town where Hitler was born, a man who was the alpha and omega of Teutonic legend, the man who would ravish the barbaric East and subject Europe to his yoke, that town too could and would be the New Centre of Culture.

The strange thing was not that Hitler had such a dream but that he was still dreaming it as late as February 1945 when the Russian army was nearer to Berlin than Hamburg is to that city and the Americans and British were about to cross the Rhine. "In the tower" he is quoted as saying in the Preface to Frederic Spotts' book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, "I want a carillon to play - not every day but on special days - a theme from Bruckner's Fourth, the Romantic Symphony".

Nor was Linz a one-off. Victorious in the West in the summer of 1940, his mind turned to a daring construction programme that, it has been computed, would have cost 150 billion marks to complete. Buildings, he is quoted by Speer as saying, were more important than battleships. "A reconstructed Berlin will attract countless foreigners, and the money these tourists will bring to Germany will pay for the interest on the loans". In such simplistic terms did he view the resurgence of a Reich that would equal and surpass the building programme of the Old Rome.

None of this came to pass. For one thing, he could not rest with the idea that Russia was still to be conquered if his policy of Lebensraum (living space - for Germans, naturally) was to be fulfilled. And Communists, like the Jews, were only there to be exterminated; or, if that presented insuperable logistic problems, subjugated.

None of it came to pass because, for one thing, the war he launched against Russia the following summer in 1941 was two summers later being lost. He doggedly refused to accept this fact of life in the bunker where he spent the last months of the war. There, in that bunker, he conducted a campaign that increasingly bore no resemblance to reality.

The Ardennes offensive, launched on December 16, 1944, was to be his last real fight, but the German army simply did not have the wherewithal for a counter-attack that could turn the tide of war. Even as the offensive developed, German troops on the Eastern Front were about to face the might of the Red Army. Briefed about this by one of his most famous Generals, Hitler and his court dismissed Guderian's warnings. Himmler contributed what was to be the most fatuous comment of the war: "I don't really believe the Russians will attack at all. It's all an enormous bluff".

Thus far had madness overtaken reason in Hitler's rapidly diminishing geographical space. This was the same Himmler who was to make overtures behind Hitler's back to President Truman and Mr Churchill when he was certain that Hitler had resolved to commit suicide - and, he thought, could present himself as the new German leader.

Understandably, the Führer's fury knew no bounds. As it became clear that Eva Braun's brother-in-law knew about Himmler's machinations and had kept the news to himself, Herman Fegelein was summoned to the bunker from his mistress's bed and summarily executed. It was not a time to be whoring on the wrong side of the bunker.

Of madness

For it was madness, no other word, to take on the world in an armed struggle that could have had no outcome but the one that is being celebrated today on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. I said there could not have been any other outcome. It did not feel like that in the summer of 1940 when Belgium fell, the Netherlands fell, France fell - Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland had already received their coup de grace.

There are those who say that had Hitler not unleashed his armies against the Soviet Union in June 1941, had he not opened that second front, he could have consolidated his hold over Europe, sent his generals south-eastwards to Asia Minor and lived lord and master over a vast tract of a continent that was attached like a snout to the huge body of the Soviet Union. But this is to posit not merely the improbable; it is to misread Hitler's mind. The Führer was certain of one thing above all else. There could not be a future for a Greater Germany unless the Soviet Union were destroyed. It was either his victory or the victory of Communism.

For both men, Hitler and Stalin, there was no alternative to the titanic struggle each one saw himself winning. Both men understood with a terrifying clarity that they and the ideologies they espoused could survive by crushing their opponents at home, the enemy within, and ultimately, inevitably, by the supreme violence that the clash of ideologies had to provoke. It was a matter of time and a matter for preparation, hence the cynicism and short-term practicality of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

Hitler was not ready in 1940 to take on the Soviet Union. Stalin was even less prepared for the final reckoning between the two systems. Each saw an utopia ahead - the State supreme before it could wither away to usher a paradise on earth since there was no paradise in heaven, thus Stalin; or a racially pure society exclusive of vermin, a term that took in Jews as well as Communists, thus Hitler. Either utopia could only belong to one victor and in the event to neither of these two men.

The problem for Hitler was that after 1936 Britain and France were starting to needle him; not much, mind you, there were still almost three years of appeasement ahead, but the lines, however squiggly, were being drawn. Hitler found himself muttering to himself, as Macbeth had before him: If it were done when 'tis done, t'were best it were done quickly. If Lebensraum lay to the East, then it was in the East that the process had to be initiated. He could not get to direct grips with his arch-enemy in Moscow unless he advanced nearer to his frontiers. Czechoslovakia and Poland had to go. It was only then that the Final Battle between Good and Evil as the two dictators saw these, could begin, only then that the war of the titans could commence.

Britain and France had other thoughts. In a sense, therefore, the battle against Russia was already lost even if the Western allies could do precious little about that battlefield, except indirectly. Contrary to his convictions even Hitler could not sustain war on two fronts. The problem with all this is that it took millions of men, women and children to die before it was all over, cities destroyed, economies wiped out.

Parenthetically, is it not strange and wondrous to muse that Stalin's question as to how many legions the Pope commanded should have been answered in such a non-violent manner after 1978, when a man from a far country, a country under the Communist yoke, ascended to the throne of St Peter and led his people out of communism without firing a single shot? What would Hitler have made of that?

Götterdämmerung

The end of Hitler, probably the most documented finale in history (one has only to read the vast bibliographies of any scholarly book on the German leader to realise just how substantive and substantial the telling of the story of Hitler by so many authors has been) and that of the State he had single-handedly created and, finally, destroyed, was the end of much else besides.

Ironically, the Bolshevik foe he had set out to destroy ended up the occupier of half Germany for the next 45 years. As ironically, Bolshevism was a spent force by 1992. The two most evil dictatorships of the 20th century in Europe had gone the way of all tyrannies.

Over 50 million lives were lost during the war, the lives of many times more than that shattered. If London and Coventry received the attention of the Luftwaffe it was nothing compared with the destruction rained upon Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin as the war was being brought to its end. Six million Jews from all over Europe had been murdered and even in his last will, which he dictated hours before he shot himself, Hitler was blaming world Jewry for the war.

Nobody under 60 in Malta or anywhere else for that matter was born when it was all over and swathes of people under 30, probably 40, would be hard put to it to give a name to commanders of the British and American armies, to the Reichsführer SS, let alone to that of the Führer's dog. It was the latter who was to be the first in the bunker to have the poison capsules Hitler had ordered for himself and which his wife Eva Braun insisted she too was to share.

Recent anniversaries may have made sure that this lack of knowledge would be filled. About the war itself, the battle for North Africa, the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese, the blitzkrieg on Poland, on the Soviet Union, films and documentaries have made them more familiar, as have books on epic battles like El Alamein, Stalingrad and the D-Day landings.

War was not televised then; there were no television cameras roaming the battlefields, no close-ups of BBC and NBC reporters informing viewers of the latest state of play between the armies, no visuals of the horror of the battlefield. One wonders what the outcome would have been had the explicit horrors of the Great War and the Second World War been brought to the sitting rooms of Britain and the United States? At what stage would the Pilgers have started to recommend negotiations? At what point would the war have been declared unjust?

Today, when the fallen, the wounded, the psychologically damaged, the civilians who were bombed in their homes are remembered there may be cynics who will remark that we have not learned much from the terrible experience. It had all been in vain, hadn't it? Wars were still being fought. Soldiers were still dying. Civilians were still being killed. Atrocities were still being committed.

This is only true up to a point and masks a larger truth: we would have been far worse off had the war not been fought. And it is in this sense that one pays homage to the millions who died that we may live in the freedom to which we are now accustomed. The nemesis of Hitler paved the way for the eventual hubris of Europe and the problem today is what Europe is doing with its victory.

Post bellum, bellum novum est

For those who lived in the post-war Soviet Union or Eastern Europe the same cannot be said. For millions in this camp the calvary of Hitler was to be followed by another one, the calvary of Stalin and his successors all the way to 1985 at least. The spring of 1945 had to wait until the autumn of 1956 before the stirrings in Hungary that were brutally snuffed out, until a false spring broke in Prague in 1968, until the Seventies when Solidarnosc broke out like a rash on the body of Communist Poland, until the autumn of 1978 before a Polish priest made his huge contribution to the dismantling of Communism in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe all the way to Moscow.

It took time for the consequences of the Götterdämmerung in 1945 to play themselves out. It took time for the curtain to fall on the funeral pyre of Bolshevism. During those 45 years, what crimes were not committed in the name of the Revolution? Today, as the guns are silent all over Europe, as the identity of the new Europe faces its greatest challenge we cannot be immune to the new dangers that come mainly from within.

A new war is being waged for the soul of Europe and, indeed, for the soul of the world. It is one that Pope Benedict XVI will surely address. Aware as he is that, in the words of Pope John Paul (Memory and Identity), "it was evangelisation which formed Europe, giving birth to the civilisation of its people and their cultures", the new Pope will make Europe's re-evangelisation a factor that will inform his pontificate.

There is, it seems, no end to this war. The enemy here is not visible as a soldier representing a false and insidious idea, cannot be killed on a battlefield as we know a battlefield to be. He is the guy next door, the girl next door, the abortion clinic round the corner, the evildoers who have embarked upon a culture of death in the name of a late 20th century Enlightenment.

The weaponry is not made up of missiles of mass destructions but the end result has been the mass destruction of more unborn children than the total of casualties of the Great and Second World Wars, Korea and Vietnam