Reading Hitler's War, David Irving's massive, exhaustive study of WWII as seen from Hitler's perspective, is riveting but spiritually exhausting. We will never have a more sympathetic portrayal of Hitler and his motives, at least not one consistent with the purely factual record, but what vapid company the Führer turns out to be. Even the glamor of evil can't redeem him and his henchmen from their utter banality, from the sheer colossal mind-numbing stupidity of their fear of and paranoia about "world Jewry". As they grow in power their puny souls seem smaller and smaller -- consistent with the bunch of clever, fanatical, provincial hacks they were. It will be to Germany's eternal shame that it consented to be led in momentous times by such mediocre shadows of men.
A useful specific for the soul-sickness induced by Irving's book is Ken Burn's 15-hour documentary The War. It's not without its passages of moral self-congratulation, but its greatest value lies in its willingness to confront the darkness that the war summoned up in the victors, especially in the young men who had to fight it on the front lines. In the filmed interviews, the American combat survivors -- old men looking back on the war after more than half a century -- still tremble when they recall what they had to do, still seem mystified that they could do it.
Like the Germans and the Japanese, the good guys in this war learned to kill without mercy -- even to kill defenseless civilians and unarmed prisoners. And sometimes they experienced an exhilaration in killing. The experience shook their souls and by the evidence they never really got over it. The fact that they won a "good war", or a "necessary war" as one of them prefers to call it, didn't heal the wounds within.
Hitler, and the Japanese warlords, sought to glorify the merciless killing of war -- sought to embrace it as a given of nature. The soldiers of the great democracies may have recognized it as a given of nature, but their refusal to glorify it, to accept it willingly as a part of who they were, even in a just cause, makes for a startling contrast to the supposed "realism" of a man like Hitler. It gives the heart a little breathing space in a heartless world.