# Are we being fair to Hitler? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 25, 2010, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935 "2010-07-25T11:21:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2010, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/81 "2010-07-28T22:58:09Z")
> [@Stoneburg](#): > > Mao and Stalin killed **more** than Hitler. So if it wasn’t the most successful in regards to eradicating groups and it wasn’t the most successful in amount of people killed… why is it regarded as the worst? My opinion: Because the people were white and it happened in Europe. The victims of Stalin’s were white and the murders happened in Europe too. I think Hitler gets more blame than Stalin because he lost the war, and fascism was pretty strongly discredited in the US and Europe. There was, however, in the US and Europe, a leftist presence, especially in academia, which, while not necessarily in love with Stalin, was at least sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Communism. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/82 "2010-07-29T00:13:45Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > > [@Stoneburg](#): > > > > Mao and Stalin killed **more** than Hitler. So if it wasn’t the most successful in regards to eradicating groups and it wasn’t the most successful in amount of people killed… why is it regarded as the worst? My opinion: Because the people were white and it happened in Europe. > > The victims of Stalin’s were white and the murders happened in Europe too. I think Hitler gets more blame than Stalin because he lost the war, and fascism was pretty strongly discredited in the US and Europe. There was, however, in the US and Europe, a leftist presence, especially in academia, which, while not necessarily in love with Stalin, was at least sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Communism. There is also the issue of methodology and style. The Nazis positively reveled in the evil of what they were doing - the SS wore black uniforms adorned with skulls. In contrast, Stalin and Mao’s killers were positively drab and bureaucratic. More significantly, the organization of the Nazi death camps betrays a pathological inversion of the notion of advancement and progress - the heights of science put to ensuring the depths of depravity. Starving people to death kills people just as dead, and more starved under Stalin and Mao than were exterminated in the Nazi camps, but starvation lacks the memorable aspect of organizing efficient factories of death combined with conducting hideous experiments on people [though I understand the soviets indulged in a bit of that as well, it isn’t as well known]. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/83 "2010-07-29T02:40:05Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > More significantly, the organization of the Nazi death camps betrays a pathological inversion of the notion of advancement and progress - the heights of science put to ensuring the depths of depravity. Starving people to death kills people just as dead, and more starved under Stalin and Mao than were exterminated in the Nazi camps, but starvation lacks the memorable aspect of organizing efficient factories of death combined with conducting hideous experiments on people [though I understand the soviets indulged in a bit of that as well, it isn’t as well known]. The Japanese did some horrendous stuff in this regard, too. Witness [Unit 731](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731). They possibly surpassed the Nazis in that form of brutality. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/84 "2010-07-29T03:51:09Z")
> [@bullrun](#): > > Adolf was just a little moody…that’s all. IF he had some paxil or zanex or something similar…he would have been just another vegetarian politician. > (sarcasm) Instead, his drug of choice was [amphetamines.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Addiction_to_amphetamine) ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/85 "2010-07-29T04:10:57Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > > [@Cisco](#): > > > > > [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > > > > > In fact, Porsche stole the design for the Tatra T97 for the KdF-Wagen. The design of the two cars is identical. > > > > :dubious: I’d like to see some support for this. I read a book about the history of the Volkswagen, and granted that was a few years back, but I don’t remember anything like this. > > There’s this, from this Tatra website: > > [http://www.tatra.demon.nl/cars\_history\_T97.htm](http://www.tatra.demon.nl/cars_history_T97.htm) > > I can try to find more info. Want to see something interesting? [![](https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/LaPucelle/Malta/M-BVW-6.jpg) ](https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/LaPucelle/Malta/M-BVW-6.jpg) This is the car that got Dr. Porsche fired from Mercedes. I found it hidden in the back of a car collection in france. Essentially ignored, but possibly the most significant car there. > [@Wikipedia](#): > > In 1926, Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft and Benz & Cie merged into Daimler-Benz, with their joint products beginning to be called, Mercedes-Benz. Porsche’s concept of a small, light-weight Mercedes-Benz car was not popular with Daimler-Benz’s board, however. He left in 1929 This car was built somewhere before 1929. Call it starting in 26 or 27. It’s… just a tiny bit before the Tatra, in '36. Now, I’m not saying the rear-mount air-cooled engine didn’t influence Dr. Porsche, but… well, that’s not the only source for those, either. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/86 "2010-07-29T13:09:37Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > > [@Malthus](#): > > > > More significantly, the organization of the Nazi death camps betrays a pathological inversion of the notion of advancement and progress - the heights of science put to ensuring the depths of depravity. Starving people to death kills people just as dead, and more starved under Stalin and Mao than were exterminated in the Nazi camps, but starvation lacks the memorable aspect of organizing efficient factories of death combined with conducting hideous experiments on people [though I understand the soviets indulged in a bit of that as well, it isn’t as well known]. > > The Japanese did some horrendous stuff in this regard, too. Witness [Unit 731](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731). They possibly surpassed the Nazis in that form of brutality. Yup, but but my impression was that the Imperial Japanese aren’t in the running with Stalin, Mao and Hitler in terms of body count arising purely from massacre - though as a result of their war in China, they killed tens of millions, and certainly indulged in infamous massacres such as Nanjing. Their treatment of prisioners was notorious. In terms of lesser-known massacres, perhaps the worst and least known is that of King Leopold of Belgium - apparently, under his personal supervision, his hirelings killed something on the order of 5-10 million people in the Congo, often horrificly, in one of the lesser-known mass killing episodes. All the more bizzare in that it had no religious or political purpose, and was committed solely for the King’s personal monetary gain. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Scud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/87 "2010-07-29T13:36:50Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > In terms of lesser-known massacres, perhaps the worst and least known is that of King Leopold of Belgium - apparently, under his personal supervision, his hirelings killed something on the order of 5-10 million people in the Congo, often horrificly, in one of the lesser-known mass killing episodes. **All the more bizzare in that it had no religious or political purpose, and was committed solely for the King’s personal monetary gain.** Emphasis added. I was thinking of mentioning Leopold in this thread. But one of the things that makes the Nazi massacres more horrific to me is that there really _wasn’t_ any profit or rational reason behind them; they were committed out of pure hatred & a delusional sense of history. Killing a whole lot of people to make a lot of money is something I can at least understand, horrible as it is. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/88 "2010-07-29T13:46:39Z")
> [@Tom\_Scud](#): > > Emphasis added. > > I was thinking of mentioning Leopold in this thread. But one of the things that makes the Nazi massacres more horrific to me is that there really _wasn’t_ any profit or rational reason behind them; they were committed out of pure hatred & a delusional sense of history. Killing a whole lot of people to make a lot of money is something I can at least understand, horrible as it is. Oddly enough, my reaction is just the opposite: I can better understand killing lots of people out of some admittedly twisted sense of national destiny or as part of a religious or political crusade or racial purification - even though, naturally enough, I detest any such motive with every fibre - than I can being a super-wealthy man like King Leopold, killing people just to swell his already-inflated money-bags. I think because in the former case, at least the people committing the horrors are presumably doing so for some motive larger than their own personal gratification. Particularly in the case of the Communists, one gets the feeling that at least some of them cooperated in murder because, deluded as they were, they genuinely thought they were doing good for the greatest number - that the murders were just temporary pain for a permanent bettering of humanity. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/89 "2010-07-29T13:51:37Z")
This is interesting to think about – from John J. Reilly’s [review](http://www.johnreilly.info/itpome.htm) of Harry Turtledove’s AH novel _In the Presence of Mine Enemies_ (set in the 1990s, in a Nazi Germany that won the war, and is now on the verge of collapse like the Soviet Union in our timeline): > [@](#): > > Stories based on greater success for the Nazi regime than occurred in the real world are not rare. Some of them are exercises in sado-masochism; some seek to show off a detailed knowledge of the Nazi era: I have run across only one that seemed intended as apologetics for the Nazis. In the Presence of Mine Enemies is proof that it is possible to write a novel with this premise that does not further strain credulity with a plot involving spies, Satanists, and interdimensional travel. Still, even the best of these stories ring hollow for me, in a way that goes beyond the inevitable implausibilities of alternative history. > > The Nazis did not come to power with detailed plans to conquer the world. Hitler did suggest from time to time that the problem for his generation was Russia, and that the problem for the next would be America. This is the framework that Turtledove uses for his novel, and it’s perfectly justifiable for fiction. The problem is that it ascribes to the Nazis a unique ability to shape the future according to their designs. History after the Second World War did not turn out quite how the victorious Soviet Union expected. The same was also true for the United States, even after the end of the Cold War. Technological progress had something to do with it, but the differences between one generation and the next were more important. More important still was the fact that styles of life and philosophy continued to change according to the rhythms of modernity, even in the isolated Soviet Union. > > Oswald Spengler, to take my favorite macrohistorian, was often wrong, but about the Nazis he was mostly right. He understood that the movement was in many ways simply incompetent. He saw them as nothing more than an incident in the era of Western modernity, an era which he expected to last through the 21st century. The end of the story for the modern world might, he thought, be a new Roman Empire. If it materialized, the sun would set on the West in a kind of political and spiritual peace. The alternative, as he saw it, was mere collapse and barbarian chaos. In either case, he had a lively sense in the 1930s that the end of history was still many generations away, and that the Nazis were dangerously deluded about their own importance. > > That, really, is the problem with most stories based on unbroken Nazi success. The premise takes the Nazis at their word about the importance of the movement, and credits them with the ability to make a peaceful desert of a world that should still have several generations of tumult remaining to it. This is anachronistic both forward and backward. It is unreasonable to expect to see Spengler’s imperium mundi in any timeline much before the 22nd century. It is equally unreasonable to see the mesmerizing power that political ideology held in the 1920s and '30s transposed to the early 21st century. Even Philip Dick, in The Man in the High Castle, probably stretched a point when he put a world of fanatical Nazis in the 1960s. Certainly we know that, long before the Communist regime collapsed, there were few real Marxists in the Soviet Union. > > Popular uprisings rarely overthrow ideologies; rather, even the secret police eventually lose interest. Is that true? Is it impossible for ideological enthusiasm for anything to be sustained for more than one generation, in a given society or in the world at large? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/977dab/32.png) [@Captain\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/90 "2010-07-29T13:54:32Z")
Hitler was a strange looking guy in the first place, and that mustache of his did not help either. For most of us who do not speak German, we see this strange, wild looking fellow speaking in a loud almost angry growl. Hitler should of took what Chamberlin gave him in 1937, kicked all the Jews out of the country and started making cars and computers. Hitler is actually admired by a lot of people, but rarely are these people allowed to present this admiration to the public. Anything that has to do with Nazism in Germany is banned. It is also against the law to deny or to question the validity of the Holocaust. To do so would brand someone as an anti-semite. Honestly, the Jews got more mileage out of Hitler that they could possibly imagine. Jesus being a Jew helps too. You can’t love Jesus and hate the Shapiro’s (unless he’s your estranged wife’s divorce lawyer). The Jews have to remind the rest of humanity about their Holocaust. Even now, there seems to be something about "The Holocaust’ every damn day. Talk to an American Indian. There are not many left, but they can occasionally be seen out in Bumfart, New Mexico selling fireworks and peyote out of a stand. Ask him, how many of his people are still around. Not many. Where did they all go? No one talks about that holocaust either. There have been several “holocausts” that were as bad or worse than the official Holocaust itself. Armenians murdered by Turks by the millions. Ukrainian Kulaks starved to death in the 1920’s. The Khmer Rouge slaughter in the 1970’s and basically extrajudicial killings by the thousands from many nations around the World. Probably within a 100 years, there will be a holocaust of white people because of our diminishing populations. We’ll all be branded anti semites, homophobes, mouthbreathers and what have you. A Spanish inquisition against Beaver Cleaver. And it wont be pretty. There really hasn’t been another guy like Hitler before or since. He was an original. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/91 "2010-07-29T14:06:21Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Is that true? Is it impossible for ideological enthusiasm for anything to be sustained for more than one generation, in a given society or in the world at large? Probably the topic for a new thread - but in my opinion, popular ideological movements tend to have very similar life-cycles. They start, essentially, as utopian-revolutionary millenial-type movements: this is the most pssionately ideological phase. The life-span of this phase is typically short. Most movements simply fade into obscurity when the millenium fails to occur, when the revolution doesn’t, in fact, change the world into a utopia, etc. If they survive this stage, it will be because they are taken over by some sort of pragmatic leadership. The leaders, while still mouthing the slogans of the revolutionaries, secrety no longer think in terms of revolution or utopia: they are simply using the movement as a vehicle for personal and political aggrandizement. Stalin is an example of this. If the movement survives this stage, it may reach the stage where it simply fades into the culture - becomes the form or structure of the culture, a stage on which people go about their daily lives, almost totally devoid of independant meaning. Think of the Church of England vs. early Christianity is an example. The secret to understanding Hitler and the Nazis is, I think, that almost everyone assumed - wrongly - that Hitler was in effect sort of like Stalin: merely mouthing the slogans of ideology, but really just using the movement for personal power. They thus thought, again wrongly, that they could work “with” him. Really, Hitler was that rarest and most dangerous of creatures, a genuine believer in his own radical (and irrational) ideology who manages to survive to actually lead his movement. This could not have survived him, I think. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/92 "2010-07-29T14:28:14Z")
> [@Captain\_Midnight](#): > > Hitler should of took what Chamberlin gave him in 1937, kicked all the Jews out of the country and started making cars and computers. From Hitler’s POV, that would have made his whole political career pointless. He was thinking a **lot** bigger than that – not in terms of total world conquest, but something nearly as grandiose. Hitler’s principal war aim was to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia – not simply to destroy Soviet Communism; not simply to conquer Poland and Russia and exploit them like a colony in Africa; but to destroy them utterly as nations, and build a greater Germany on their bones, thus transforming Germany into a continental power to rival the United States. All this is well-documented from Hitler’s own words. From [_Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties,_](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Twenties-Perennial/dp/0060935502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196390812&sr=8-3) by Paul Johnson, Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”: > [@](#): > > Hitler’s aims can be reconstructed not merely from Mein Kampf itself, with its stress on the ‘East Policy,’ but from his early speeches and so-called ‘Second’ or Secret Book of 1928. This material makes it clear that the ‘cleansing’ process – the elimination of the Jews – was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the Jews. He admired the Jews as ‘negative supermen’. In his Table-Talk he said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they would occupy all the key positions: this was because ‘blood purity’, as he put it in Mein Kampf, ‘is a thing the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth’. The Germans, on the other hand, were poisoned. That was why they lost the First World War. Even he was poisoned: that was why he sometimes made mistakes – ‘all of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood’. Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total disaster was iminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it would take a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become ‘lord of the Earth’. (Mein Kampf.) > > What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted belief that ‘cleansing’ could make Germany the first true superpower, and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, secondly, his absolute conviction that the ‘Jewish race-poison’ and Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin’s Russia was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he believed the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. Hence the object of his policy was to combat ‘an inundation of diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in Russia’. Thus the ‘cleansing’ fit in perfectly with the resumption of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale. > > Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be accomplished without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, create a solid economic and strategic power base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination. > > No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjusting the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy with a brutal determination that has seldom been equalled in the history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynamism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases must be accomplished while he was not only still alive but at the height of his powers. It was this impatience which made him so dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German newspaper editors in November 1938, after his great Munich triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it. Same book, Chapter 11, “The Watershed Year”: > [@](#): > > Hitler’s ultimate aim was to create a German Volk of 250 million. He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the colonization process clearly, he was vague on where the settlers were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the Volksdeutsche from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 8 milllion at most. His colleage Alfred Rosenberg considered the idea of ‘drafting’ Scandinavian, Dutch, and English settlers, being racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with decorations. The Crimea, after being ‘cleansed’ of Slavs and Jews, was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the South Tyrol. Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European Russia, a new Volk civilization was planned. As Hitler described it: > > > [@](#): > > > > The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be Europeanized! . . . The ‘Reich peasant’ is to live in outstandingly beautiful settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers . . . . That is why we are now building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German settlements will lie. For we will not open up Lebensraum for ourselves by entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must be on an altogether higher level! > > As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besancon Bisanz. Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the North,’ with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St. Peter’s Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’. New crops, such a perennial rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’. Pride goeth. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2010, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/93 "2010-07-29T15:15:20Z")
> [@Captain\_Midnight](#): > > Probably within a 100 years, there will be a holocaust of white people because of our diminishing populations. We’ll all be branded anti semites, homophobes, mouthbreathers and what have you. A Spanish inquisition against Beaver Cleaver. And it wont be pretty. If it didn’t happen in South Africa, it ain’t gonna happen. ---
**Author:** ![Stoneburg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df705f/32.png) [@Stoneburg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoneburg)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2010, 8:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/94 "2010-07-30T08:40:21Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > > [@Stoneburg](#): > > > > Mao and Stalin killed **more** than Hitler. So if it wasn’t the most successful in regards to eradicating groups and it wasn’t the most successful in amount of people killed… why is it regarded as the worst? My opinion: Because the people were white and it happened in Europe. > > The victims of Stalin’s were white and the murders happened in Europe too. I think Hitler gets more blame than Stalin because he lost the war, and fascism was pretty strongly discredited in the US and Europe. There was, however, in the US and Europe, a leftist presence, especially in academia, which, while not necessarily in love with Stalin, was at least sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Communism. Russia isn’t really considered part of Europe. It’s way off to the east, the capital and most of the country is in Asia and it’s not as culturally integrated as the rest of Europe, doesn’t even share the same alphabet. The Slavic ethnic group was (is?) also subject for much racism. That probably helped too. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2010, 9:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/95 "2010-07-30T09:07:45Z")
I remember reading in _Dune Messiah_, set 10,000 years in the future: > [@](#): > > “Stilgar,” Paul said, “you urgently need a sense of balance which can come only from an understanding of long-term effects. What little information we have about the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with the Genghis Khan.” > “Ghengis… Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m’Lord?” > “Oh, long before that. He killed… perhaps four million.” > “He must’ve had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Lasbeams, perhaps, or…” > “He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing - a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.” > “Killed… by his legions?” Stilgar asked. > “Yes.” > “Not very impressive statistics, m’Lord.” > “Very good, Stil.” Paul glanced at the reels in Korba’s hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I’ve killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I’ve wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since - " > “Unbelievers!” Korba protested. “Unbelievers all!” > “No,” Paul said. “Believers.” > “My Liege makes a joke,” Korba said, voice trembling. "The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the shining light of - " > “Into the darkness,” Paul said. “We’ll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad’dib’s Jihad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this.” A barking laugh erupted from his throat. > “What amuses Muad’dib?” Stilgar asked. > “I am not amused. I merely had a sudden vision of the Emperor Hitler saying something similar. No doubt he did.” ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/977dab/32.png) [@Captain\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2010, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/96 "2010-09-02T07:16:17Z")
1.) Hitler was a very strange looking person. He just was. That silly blocky mustache did not help his fugly-ness. His speeches, especially to someone who doesn’t know German, is this really nutty looking man screaming and pounding his chest. I think Hiter is a source of fascination. I have always been fascinated about him and know a lot of his background and life. His father was an old (as in senior citizen old) tax collector who married Hitler’s mother, a young women who was the old bastard’s niece. Her name was Klara Pozel. Hitler’s father was married before and had two children, a son named Alios and a daughter. Alois Sr. and Klara has several children, but only Adolf and a younger sister named Paula survived. The father died when Adolf was about 14. He hated his father, so no loss. He was actually a very average student, except in art and history. His mother, whom he dearly loved, died when Adolf (known as Addie in the family) was 18 of breast cancer. That’s pretty tough for a teenage boy to take, to lose both of his parents before adulthood. However, Herbert Hoover’s parents also died when he was young and he didn’t turn out evil. Hitler was homeless for some time in Vienna, sometimes staying in flop houses and whatnot. Hitler was only drunk once in his life and hated the experience. He also hated smoking. National Socialist Germany was the first country to put bans and limits on cigarette smoking in buildings and health warnings. He joined WWI and became a corporal. Hitler had a dangerous assignment to send messages from the front to other officers in the field. It was dangerous duty. He was temporarily blinded after a gas attack and stayed in hospital when Germany surrendered. Thie surrender really pissed Hitler off, and cemented his hatred for the Jews to whom he felt was running the country. After the war, Hitler became a political spy for the German government, which was being threatened by a communist revolution. Hitler on one of his missions walked into a German Workers Party meeting in a beer hall or meeting place. He liked what he heard and became their speaker and eventually their leader. More people joined their movement and in 1923 they attempted to take over Bavaria in the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler went to jail for nine months of a five year sentence where he wrote Mein Kemph or “My struggle” in English, the most hated book of all time. 2.) The Nazis exterminated Jews. The Jews are not going to let anyone forget that. Since Jews run the vast majority of the media, they churn out stories everyday about the Holocaust to keep it fresh. The media also has written a lot of crazy, untrue stories about Adolf Hitler, but since he is the most hated man in all of history, no one would dispute it, no matter how outlandish the lie is. Most Christians, especially the “born again” bunch hate the Nazis because Jesus was Jewish. Israel gets a pass from this group for any war crimes they do against the Palestinians. Some Christians claim that Hitler was used by God to bring the Jews to Israel. In their minds, Hitler was something of an evil antichrist figure trying to kill the seed of God. Catholics in the Third Reich and the position of the Vatican in WWII has caused a great rift between Catholics and Jews which perpetuated Pope John Paul II to visit a synagogue, the first pope ever to do so. 3.) Hitler invaded countries at will, in mid 1942 or so, he had troops in every European nation except for Ireland, UK, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden. After WWII, there was a lot of animosity towards the German people. The British lived under terror of bombs from the sky (hear Goodbye Blue Sky by Pink Floyd) ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/97 "2010-09-03T05:45:59Z")
> [@Captain\_Midnight](#): > > 2.) The Nazis exterminated Jews. The Jews are not going to let anyone forget that. Since Jews run the vast majority of the media, they churn out stories everyday about the Holocaust to keep it fresh. Are you implying it _should_ be forgotten, or that using it as a basis for fiction and nonfiction treatments is somehow unethical or improper? > [@](#): > > The media also has written a lot of crazy, untrue stories about Adolf Hitler, but since he is the most hated man in all of history, no one would dispute it, no matter how outlandish the lie is. Meh. It’s the “banality of evil” aspect that gets me. I don’t have to imagine Hitler as some kind of demon - him being a vapid schnook who found a receptive audience is bad enough. ---
**Author:** ![Knorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/58956e/32.png) [@Knorf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knorf)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/98 "2010-09-03T07:31:41Z")
Heck, there’s God-sanctioned genocide right there in the Bible. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/99 "2010-09-03T13:17:13Z")
> [@Captain\_Midnight](#): > > Hitler is actually admired by a lot of people… Lots of people also believe in witchcraft and creationism and space aliens. That there are a lot of morons doesn’t really tell us much. Ignorance isn’t a point of view. > [@](#): > > Honestly, the Jews got more mileage out of Hitler that they could possibly imagine. Well, maybe not the six million of them who he killed. I’m a bit surprised that the salient response to the OP hasn’t been made; the reason Hitler is treated worse than people who slaughtered millions back in the Olden Days is that Hitler didn’t live in the Olden Days. It would be silly to take, say, a Roman who lived in the time of Julius Caesar to task for some of the social attitudes they would hold, because they didn’t live in a time or place to learn and understand the social attitudes we have now. Modern liberalism and pluralism didn’t exist in 50 BC, and so it would be ridiculous to expect someone who lived then to magically adopt such attitudes. But if someone in 2010 thinks they can own slaves and treat women like possessions, we’d rightly put them in jail, because a reasonable ands sane person today understands that those things are unacceptable. Adolf Hitler doesn’t have the excuse of growing up millennia before the Enlightenment. It wasn’t a great time in Germany and Austria, but Hitler’s rejection of commonly understood definitions of right and wrong, his embracing and furthering the concepts of racial warfare above all other ethical obligations, was unbelievably extreme by the standards of the civilization he was born into. Sorry, he doesn’t get a pass ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2010, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935/100 "2010-09-03T13:49:03Z")
> [@Captain\_Midnight](#): > > 2.) The Nazis exterminated Jews. The Jews are not going to let anyone forget that. Since Jews run the vast majority of the media, they churn out stories everyday about the Holocaust to keep it fresh. The media also has written a lot of crazy, untrue stories about Adolf Hitler, but since he is the most hated man in all of history, no one would dispute it, no matter how outlandish the lie is. > > Most Christians, especially the “born again” bunch hate the Nazis because Jesus was Jewish. Israel gets a pass from this group for any war crimes they do against the Palestinians. That’s a whole barkful of crazy. Jews do not run the vast majority of the media and the fascination with Hitler, and Hitler’s/the Nazi crimes, isn’t confined to Jews. Hell, you admit to being fascinated with Hitler yourself, and I presume you aren’t Jewish. The reason that stories about the Holocaust are “churned” out is because it is a painful, horrifying but facinating situation - the most civilized of European nations, heirs to the legacy of Kant and Mozart. dsecending into the worst sort of barbarism, on an industrial scale. It brings to mind all sorts of questions about the nature of civilization itself. Most Christians do not hate Hitler or the Nazis because Jesus was Jewish; that fact never historically prevented anti-semitic discrimination by _Christians_. Rather, most Christians hate Hitler and the Nazis becase they violated the norms of civilized behaviour that most Christians claim to abide by. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-being-fair-to-hitler/547935.md?page=6)