The answer that the authors of Was Hitler Ill? give to their own question is: no. This is because their purpose is to refute, finally and fully, those who have attempted to excuse and exculpate Hitler by arguing that the atrocities and disasters Hitler inflicted upon millions of people during the war were the result of medical malpractice or physical and mental disability. Originally published in Germany in 2009 as War Hitler krank?, this book represents the best-argued and best-documented (though over-footnoted) refutation of mostly witting apologists for Hitler. The book's correct concluding words are that Hitler “was healthy and accountable” (p. 190).

But one hopes this book is the last of its breed. The old Nazis who indulged in this type of defense of Hitler are dead, and neo-Nazis in Germany and elsewhere are not to be reached by scholarly exegesis. Moreover, unlike Holocaust deniers and some neo-fascist movements, Hitler apologists and neo-Nazis are without importance or influence outside their own self-constructed iron cages. Worse, Neumann and Eberle's book concedes too much to the objects of its criticism by engaging in necessarily nearsighted historical pointillism, thereby sacrificing historical perspective that would advance understanding of Hitler's life in the context of his times. One needs to step back—in the sense of our painting metaphor—to connect the dots into meaningful patterns.

To say that Hitler was not ill makes no sense outside the specific political and moral purposes of Was Hitler Ill? First, all human beings suffer from illness. As the authors themselves qualify, “Hitler did not suffer extensively from acute illnesses . . . Hitler also suffered from other [chronic] complaints requiring treatment” (p. 118). Second, it is easy for Neumann and Eberle to document that specific illnesses or treatments had nothing to do with the substance of decisions Hitler made. Such conditions almost certainly affected Hitler's abilities at some junctures or over time, but not his military or racial aims. The authors' determination to root out exculpatory explanations for Hitler's actions even leads them to pose the wrong question, “Was his decision to annihilate millions of people made by a healthy or an ill person?” (p. 144), and to make a ridiculous statement: “It is difficult to determine what exactly prompted Hitler to commit suicide” (p. 184). The problem with the question is that it defines condition and motive in strictly binary terms. And the problem with the statement is that it imagines a single cause rather than the farrago of conditions the authors subsequently discuss.

At the end of this discussion, however, comes a clue to the alternative to the question in the form of Hitler's charge to the nation in his testament of April 29, 1945: “‘merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry’” (p. 185). As the authors rightly note, this was the “core of his ideology” (p. 185), but Hitler's language consistently betrayed concerns and obsessions going well beyond the limitations of the book's judgment that there “is no scientific medical proof that Hitler suffered from any mental illness” (p. 186). The crucial issue at the core of Hitler's experience and significance is not clinical, but historical. Neumann and Eberle argue that Hitler “never suffered from an obsessive mania” and that “there is no question of unconscious ‘control’ or his hatred or identification with any kind of ‘super-ego’” (p. 189). These conclusions violate “Rule 4a” at the center of historical study, that is, almost always avoid absolutes. And the uselessness—or at least insufficiency—of the reductionist and mechanistic labels and diagnostic categories borrowed from psychiatry is underscored by useful accompanying words such as “subjective,” “mental state,” and “fanaticism” (pp. 188, 189). Hitler did not suffer from any specific mental illness that required psychiatric treatment or commitment to an asylum, but was motivated by a fateful mixture of cognition and irrationality.

The larger historical conclusion the authors draw is that “war was not waged and Jews exterminated because Hitler was ill, but because most Germans shared his convictions, made him their Führer, and followed him” (p. 190). It is not clear whether the authors share the view of Daniel Goldhagen on generalized German commitment to “exterminationist antisemitism.” But what is clear is that the book simply dichotomizes “illness” and “health” and so preempts more thoroughgoing insight into Hitler's motives in broader contexts of time and place. The important issue is not the effect of specific illnesses, conditions, or medical interventions on Hitler's thoughts and actions. Rather, it is Hitler's experience of health and illness in constructing his emotional and cognitive response to the world. Hitler's words and actions evidence preoccupation with health and illness together with a conviction that “the Jew” is nothing more—or less—than a bacillus. This central obsession of Hitler and Nazism was a noxious manifestation of concerns of the modern material and medical self of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century over morbidity, mortality, and sexuality. The Third Reich aggravated these concerns by insisting on “racial health” and producing an environment of work and war aided and abetted by doctors and drugs ruthlessly endangering the well-being of almost everyone in Germany and Europe at one time or another over the calamitous course of twelve very long years. The connection between Hitler and Germans was a matter more of shared experience than shared conviction. There is a great deal of documentation for this, including the memoirs and correspondence of writer Heinrich Böll, who, Neumann and Eberle observe, “wrote to his parents from the front asking them to send him [the stimulant] Pervitin” (p. 95). The pointillism of Was Hitler Ill? is underlined here in that the cited source for Böll's experience is not his memoirs or letters but “Peppige Panzerschokolade,” a 2006 article in Die Tageszeitung. Such documentation accords well with the aim of the book: to debunk those who strive to misuse history rather than to enlighten those who seek to understand it.