86
PARTISAN REVIEW
could be forgiven or forgotten.
In judging the deeds of the Bolsheviks, I have used a literary model,
bringing up Macbeth's effort to justify his murder of Duncan by elimi–
nating Banquo and his son. Now to judge Hitler, I will need a different
model, and I have chosen Raskolnikov, the murderer described by a
modern novelist, and I shall contrast him with Macbeth in just one re–
spect. Raskolnikov had no great purpose in mind when he killed the
pawnbroker. His aim was murder and nothing more, murder as the re–
ward for murdering. Lady Macbeth reproaches her husband with: "What
you would highly you would holily," as if this were a character defect in
him. But this is in fact an accurate description of Macbeth's attitude
prior to his first crime. At a similar moment in his career, Raskolnikov
cannot be so described. What he wants is precisely to act unholily. He
murders to prove himself capable of murder. If Macbeth in his subsequent
murders sought forgiveness for his initial crime, Raskolnikov's first murder
was an attempt to prove himself capable of other, equally unforgivable
deeds.
Here we may glimpse a moral difference between the Nazi and
Communist dictators. I grant that Stalin ordered the torture or death of
many more persons than did his opposite number in the Reich. Yet I do
not think we have
to
place the two dictators on the same moral plane.
Stalin at least wanted to justify the October Revolution, and all of the
Bolshevik crimes that followed from its failure. Hitler, in destroying Eu–
rope's Jews, could not have wanted to do anything more than prove
himself inexorable, for no military advantage was achieved or even aimed
at in the Holocaust. And let us speculate: What if Hitler had been victo–
rious in the Second World War? Would his name have been sacred fifty
years after victory, as Caesar's was in the Roman Empire set up by Oc–
tavius? To be sure, we cannot know what might have followed from
what never occurred. But it is at least possible to think that after the
success of German armies, with the passage of time, there would be some
investigation of Nazi deeds and a critical appraisal of Hitler. Did anyone
expect Khruschev to denounce Stalin only three years after the dictator's
death? Some fifty years after a Hitler victory there might indeed be
motivation for a closer scrutiny of the dictator's deeds. We have just had
the admission by Soviet leaders that the execution of the Polish officers
in the Katyn forest was ordered by Stalin himself What about Hitler's
war on the Jews? It is at least thinkable that some German scholars
would sort out the true facts about the Holocaust and advance the
thought that this adventure in crime had played no part in Germany's
military successes, and that the Auschwitz and Treblinka exterminations
were without military meaning, being motivated solely by the German
