Sheer Bunker

By Mayo Mohs

ADOLF HITLER

by JOHN TOLAND

1,035 pages. Doubleday. $14.95.

To assemble these thousand-plus pages of bestseller, John Toland interviewed a host of adjutants and field marshals, secretaries and doctors, even the Fuehrer's faithful chauffeur and pilot. Perhaps partly for that reason, the book is lumpy with anecdote and short on understanding.

Toland is all too gullible about some of those witnesses. The book records without serious question things like the claim of Dr. Erwin Giesing that he tried to assassinate Hitler with an overdose of cocaine. Toland also relishes obscure detail to the point of tedium. He includes, for instance, a minute description of the shower facilities at the men's home in Vienna where a young and impoverished Hitler lived for three years just before World War I. Yet in larger matters Toland strays woefully from the record. He asserts that Hitler was "still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome" in 1941, the very time when Hitler was violently attacking Catholicism root and branch in his table conversation. Toland's literary pretensions do not help. A section on Hitler's ill health in 1941 is headed--incredibly --by an epigraph from Keats: "O what can ail thee, Knight at arms,/ Alone and palely loitering?"

Wagnerian Drama. Why then are so many Americans buying yet another book on Hitler? One reason may simply be Toland's dogged thoroughness: he trails each major Nazi to the bitter end, whether it be a cyanide capsule, the scaffold or a bunker in burning Berlin. There may even be some appeal in Toland's flat American tone, which spills over into quotes translated from the German ("Come on, Stauffenberg, the Chief is waiting"). But the principal appeal of the book must rest in an enduring American fascination with the country's last honest crusade and that monomaniacal figure against whom the crusade was waged. As Hitler himself realized, the contest was a stark, Wagnerian drama, and even Toland's dullest pages cannot obscure the sense of inexorable fate that pervades the script. Time after time, Hitler avoids the assassin's bomb, as if some outraged providence refused him anything less than complete and final destruction. Americans were the good guys then, and they obviously like to be reminded of the fact by writers like Toland. Mayo Mohs

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