Orange County Neo-Fascism Rediscovers Hitler : HITLER Born at Versailles Volume I of the Hitler Century<i> by Leon Degrelle(Institute for Historical Review: $24.95; 550 pp., illustrated) </i>

Another book about Hitler being published is hardly news. The Hitler publishing industry churns out titles at almost as high a rate as the folks who write about Napoleon. There is endless fascination, and rightly so, with pathological historical figures. But it is news when a favorable biography of Hitler is published, especially so when it is announced to be the first volume of a projected 14, all to be written by Leon Degrelle, described as a “decorated SS officer of whom Hitler said, ‘If I had a son, I’d want him to be like you.’ ”

Who is this fellow Degrelle whom Hitler liked so well, and can there really be an American publisher willing to publish a 14-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, let alone one attempting to rehabilitate him? As a child in a small German-occupied town of the Belgian Ardennes during World War I, Degrelle recalls “witnessing the unshakable German devotion to duty” and wistfully remembers Christmas, 1917, when the German officers occupying “all the good rooms in (our) house” offered him and his six siblings some gifts from a Christmas tree. This reviewer had an uncannily similar experience, some 23 years later, in Brussels, as a German officer occupying all the good rooms in our house attempted to gain my mother’s good graces by offering me some candy on a dismal Christmas, 1940. In both cases, our mothers turned down the offer. I managed to collect the candy from the hated boche once my mother’s back was turned, while Degrelle was apparently not so lucky.

Still, he now seems to think it was a typical example of the great good will of the German people, while I, perhaps more characteristically, continued to hope for the ultimate demise of all soldiers wearing a swastika. This most peculiar Belgian product eventually formed a Fascist Party in the 1930s and, in the words of the publisher’s blurb, “joined the pan-European crusade against Soviet Communism” by leading a Belgian Waffen-SS regiment on the Eastern Front, one of the many non-German SS military formations. Degrelle managed to escape the final days of the Third Reich by flying a small plane across most of Western Europe to land on a beach in Spain, safe under the protection of Franco’s regime, and soon thereafter wrote and published an account of his Russian campaign.

As for the Institute for Historical Review, located in Costa Mesa, they are perhaps best known for their advocacy of a position that would ordinarily be thought absurd if it were not so frightening: that the Holocaust is a myth. One wonders, incidentally, where the money comes from to subsidize the publication of what can only be called a fascist interpretation of the history of the 20th Century.

Unfortunately, this first volume turns out to be a lot duller than one might expect after reading the publisher’s blurb. In fact, Hitler shows up only on Page 531 of a 550-page book, triumphing over the “scoundrels of Versailles” as he meditates at Napoleon’s tomb shortly after the capture of Paris by the German armed forces in 1940. The first 530 pages set the stage for the coming of “the savior of Germany,” tracing European history from Sarajevo to the Treaty of Versailles and beyond. Despite the publisher’s assurance that sinister secrets are revealed and “the real culprits” unmasked, Degrelle merely trots out a long list of old tales, half-truths and selected incidents to show how Germany was blameless for the start of World War I, and how the “scoundrels of Versailles” were directly responsible for the rise to power of Hitler, hence the title of the book.

In this perfect example of the conspiracy theory of history at work, all the ancient monsters of fascist demonology make their appearance: the anti-Christian Masonic conspiracy, the “specter of Panslavism,” British liberalism, and of course that old standby, the International Jewish Communist Conspiracy. As with most such treatises, the reader soon tires of the endless angry rhetoric, only to be brought up short by the use of the word “Jew” as an epithet, as in: “the Jew Karl Marx.” In fact, this last quote is not from the book under review, but from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” which clearly Degrelle has committed to memory. Throughout, Germany and the Germans (save, of course, those Germans who happened to be either Jews or Bolsheviks, or more likely in Degrelle’s world, both) are the hapless victims of a worldwide attempt at destroying the last bastion of true Christian civilization. And they fall prey, of course, to the famous “stab in the back,” wherein the unmatched valor of the German infantryman is betrayed by the evil Jewish Bolsheviks at home and the scurrilous British propaganda machine abroad.

In the last chapter, Degrelle finally introduces the hero of the tale in fairly rhapsodic terms: Hitler, “the savior of Germany,” “a nationalist and socialist idealist,” a remarkable artist and poet for whom the history of art should be rewritten to take his oeuvre into account, a reluctant politician only answering the call of an oppressed people to lead Germany out of bondage and misery, a man under constant attack by “the press, the bureaucrats, the special interest politicians, the government, the churches, the conservatives, the monarchists, the banks, Jewish financiers and Communists, Freemasons, Social Democrats, liberals, reactionaries, and the army officer corps.” (It is a wonder there were any Germans left to support Hitler!) But he survived and triumphed, thanks in part to “a security system of self-defense” (a wondrous euphemism for the SA and the SS!). And so the book ends, leaving us impatiently waiting for the other 13 volumes to come in which such topics as “Hitler the Democrat” and “Hitler the Catholic” will be expanded upon.