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If Payne's book has any special value, it is as a sort of two-inch shelf of Hitleriana, including slightly disproportionate swatches of material from August Kubizek, Hitler's youthful friend in Linz, the usual excerpts from Mein Kampf, and a selection of good illustrations, among them some of the drawings done by Adolf the failed artist. Life and Death is overburdened with amateur psychoanalysis—especially vulnerable from a writer who sometimes seems not to have read the important wartime Office of Strategic Services report, part of which was published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler.
Another new Hitler book, to be published in June, is Horst von Maltitiz's scholarly The Evolution of Hitler's Germany (McGraw-Hill; $12.50), which examines the whole narcissistic era of German history bracketed by the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II. The epoch was one of paranoiac suspicion, which turned Germany inward toward its own bravado traditions and Ubermensch philosophy.
Something far more banal was also at play, however—an invincibly ignorant pride. One of the saddest of the new books is called Against Stalin and Hitler (John Day; $8.95). The author, a former Eastern Front officer named Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt tells how the advancing Germans failed to enlist the struggling Russian Liberation Movement in their assault on Stalin's forces.
It is true that in some areas of the U.S.S.R. local nationalists did greet the Germans as potential liberators. But Strik-Strikfeldt's sketches of the conquering Germans restoring abandoned churches as they went and winning the huzzahs of the downtrodden populace is an astonishingly ingenuous view of the Nazi war machine. As late as 1941, he insists, Hitler had "the opportunity to refashion Europe on a basis of freedom, justice and equality." That is like saying that the jaguar, in mid-attack, could change into an antelope—and it explains much about German naiveté. Anyone who could believe that could believe anything. Mayo Mohs
*Payne offers this as the inspiration of the Nazi insignia. But the ancient symbol, common in Germanic countries, had been used by other right-wing groups well before Hitler.