I’m with you, buddy. Never again.
Though I found that will above interesting. It’s so…human.
That’s the part that everybody forgets; what Hitler did was not inhuman, it was very human. What he did has in style, if not in volume, happened since then too. It’s scary to realize that he was not an inhuman monster, but rather an examplar of a type of person which is all too common in the world.
That’s what was so fascinating about the movie, Downfall. Hitler is portrayed as very believably human. He isn’t portrayed sympathetically, exactly but he isn’t potrayed as superhuman either. That’s one of the things we have to come to grips with is that Hitler was not some supernatural demon but was a human being. He can happen again.
I, too, think it’s important to remember that Hitler (and his ilk) was human. Not only does it mean that he can happen again, but to demonize him as evil incarnate seems to absolve him from responsibility.
Haven’t seen Downfall, but I did just see Triumph of the Will yesterday. Speaking of raving in the original German.
He didn’t scare me as much as Himmler and Goebbels, though. Brrr…
I don’t mean to pick on you particularly, Dio, but why is this such a great revelation to people? Of course he was a human being, and of course wars of aggression and genocide can happen again. Heck, it has happened again since WWII. I mean, are there really people who have trouble dealing with the fact that Adolf Hitler was a person?
Is the scarier question, as far as humanity’s future is concerned, that Adolph Hitler could exist, or that Adolph Hitler could (very nearly) succeed?
I’m already up!
Of course, if you believe in Hell, then it would follow that you believe God is the one who decides who goes. Speculating on the residents is a bit of a waste of time isn’t it? I like to think that God needed to create a Hitler in order to advance His larger agenda. To this end, Hitler performed as designed and could very well be among God’s favored creations. Like Ma Theresa, George Armstrong Custer and…ok, everybody else that ever was created by His hand.
Or do you just want a Hell to exist, independent of divine management, for people that piss you off? Get outside yourself.
Alessan – a great deal more than 6 million. Estimates vary from site to site. This one has even more Ukrainians killed that Jews, which I’ve never heard before.
http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/history/cahr/holocaust.htm
Note I said “at least”. The other people murdered by the Nazis were just as important and their deaths were just as tragic as those of the six million Jews. It’s just, well, more personal (which is not te same as important). It’s my family, and it could easily have been me, too.
If you want to, I’ll amend my statement. There are many millions of people whose deaths interest me more than that of Adolf Hitler.
IIRC, incidentally, the Ukrainians were killed whosesale by both sides. First by the invading Nazis, and then, after they started collaborating with the invaders, by vengeful Soviets.
Well, I guess I’m just a petty, smallminded person for being glad that Adolf Hitler is dead, and hoping that, if there is/was some kind of “life” after death, he’d be facing some kind of punishment for the suffering and millions of deaths he’s responsible for.
But y’know, as a matter of fact, I do personally believe that Hitler went to the same place that Custer, Theresa, Genghis Khan, Beethoven and myself have gone or are headed. That is, what’s left of them is still where some living person last left them. Buried or burned or left to rot in the open—in the end, just another slab of dead meat.
And, frankly, I’m a lot more comfortable living in a meaningless universe where I share oblivion with Hitler, than I would in a universe so designed that I’d follow him into Paradise.
I disagree. Mao and Stalin, while absolutely brutal to their own people, did not precipitate a World War. There is vastly more blood on Hitler’s hands.
I don’t believe the name of Hitler should be attached to personal culpability for the war.
meh…ain’t the paradigm I buy into either. 
Are you kidding? Why not?
As with Airman, I’m astonished. Why not?
Dio is right, without any question in my mind. No question that people do have trouble dealing with that fact. It is much easier to demonize and forget than it is to analyze and understand. I am very comfortable that the former is what 95% of people have done regarding Hitler.
I made a similar post in Cafe Society under the discussion of whether anyone had read Mein Kampf (I’d link it, but I’m fairly clueless how to do a clean link).
It’s one thing to know intellectually that Hitler was human, it’s another to real feel it emotionally. Hitler is hard to get a handle on in that way. For the most part he is iconized as the ranting dictator with adoring mobs in black and white film footage. From those images, it’s difficult to get any sort of cognitive ingress into what he was as a person. He has been almost defensively mythologized and held out at a distance. I think a lot of people are loathe to try to understand him psychologically because they’re don’t really want to know how ordinary he was.
I also think that it’s probably not wise to lay the crimes of Nazi Germany completely at the feet of Hitler himself as if the millions of Germans who participated in it had no control over their own actions or beliefs or decisions about who to put in power. Antisemitism existed in Europe for centuries before Hitler was born, he didn’t invent it, he just exploited what was already there. Hitler did not create antisemitism, antisemitism created Hitler.
And war has existed for even longer. Does the fact that war was pre-existing exempt a nation’s leader from responsibility for starting another one?
I know the answer to this, and so do you.