That’s still on the form too, or it was five years ago when the wife renewed her 10-year visa to the US.
I suspect that in a few ceturies Hitlern will be remembered for having at one time been the master of Europe and having required the combined forces of the three most powerful nations on earth to conquer them. The Holocaust and his other actions will be less emphasised by people who are not close in time and space to it. Tamerlane has a play written about him in London, he is still disliked in Lahore.
Le Pen was right, regretably the Holocaust and and all other genocides are footnotes in history.
For a board dediciated to “fighting ignorance” there seem to be a lot or pretty ignorant opinions here. This sounds a bit like revisionist history from the perspective of disaffected suburban kids whose knowledge of World War II mostly comes from Call of Duty.
In the interest of fighting ignorance, I will attempt to factually answer the OPs questions:
Well, first of all, most of Europe was not fighting an aggressive war or expanding territory. Much of Europe was still reeling from the effects of The War to End All Wars (AKA WW I).
Hitler may not have invented war (is there an non-aggressive war?) but his war killed something like 50 million people, involved most of the world and destroyed most of Europe. Did you have another war in mind that comes close to that scale?
Um…because other nations weren’t committing genocide and certainly not on that scale? And it’s not as if we give Mao, Pol Pot or Stalin a pass either.
Your racially insensitive comments aside, there tends to be a natural bias for all civilizations to view themselves as the most civilized. A European war and genocide tends to have a bit more immediacy to us than one in Asia or Africa.
This is a big part of it. Some genocides are a byproduct of bad or misguided economic or political policies or a result of long ongoing fueds between pre-industrialized tribes. The meticulous planning and implementation of the holocaust using modern industrial methods makes it that much more premeditated and evil.
Genocides aren’t rated by their success at eradicating a particular group. And it was still pretty effective in some countries.
How many genocides can you name where over 12 million people were killed (not counting 20 million Russians)? I can only think of a few.
Tamerlane was considered a romantic figure because his actual deeds were more or less rumour in late Renaissance England. The Mongols - who though earlier, were better known to westerners - tend to be remembered as monsters of cruelty; in fact, many of the horrors actually practiced by Timur the Lame (like making towers out of skulls) tend, in the popular mind, to be attributed to the Mongols, or Tartars (as they are sometimes known).
The very word “tartar” has taken on the secondary meaning in English of “violent”: saying (of someone) that they are a “real tartar” means, basically, that they are a violent person: tartar | meaning of tartar in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE
So, some premodern massacres can have very lasting impacts on human memory. The world has not forgotten the fury and horror of the nomad invasions.
Ceaser in Gaul? Alexander in Bactria and Gandhara. Khalid in Iraq? The Taipeng Rebellion? The Russians well pretty much everywhere?
POint is even if genocides or massacres are recalled they are usually point 16 on the factsheet on that person/empire.
It depends very much on the circumstances of the massacre, and the relationship of the victims to the folks doing the remembering.
SOME warlords are remembered for centuries as evil, massacring bastards; their very names become symbols of evil. Others have their massacres obsured or ignored and only the military glory of their conquests remembered.
In short, some end up remembered like Alexander and others like the Mongols or Nazis. This is not a function of time alone - Alexander was popular immediately after his death, although his empire did not long survive him.
In short, when folks (at least, western folks) remember the Nazis a thousand years hence, my guess is that they will fall very firmly in the same category as “mongols” - so that, for example, calling someone “a real Nazi” will still not be a complement. The exact details of their crimes may not be remembered with any specificity (just as the exact details of Mongol crimes are not really remembered), only an overall impression - of truly vile nastiness.
Wake up LIB ER ALS!
You know, it’s not like people remember Ghengis Khan or Atilla the Hun as great humanitarians.
Centuries from now, people will be yukking it up watching old reruns of Hogan’s Heroes while yearning for those simpler times with those zany Nazis.
Oliver Stone has recently weighed in on this a bit:
You don’t need instant communications when you can plan and plot worth a damn. King Philip IV of France managed to hit the grand majority of French Templar holdings at once, simply by sending messengers to his men all over France, with orders not to open the letters until day X.
That’s the cool thing about not having modern communications : your opponents don’t have them either.
Of course, his ploy only worked because even his own people were scared of disobeying him - it probably would have only taken one overly curious chief of police and one talkative scullery maid for the word to go out and ruin it all. Even with the Templar purge going more or less perfectly according to plan, some Templar cells had been warned in advance, and King Philip never got was he was *really *after : the gold.
One thing that Hitler’s government accomplished, which I think gets overlooked, is that it created the template for a strong, authoritarian modern government. When people discuss Nazi Germany, there’s a tendency to reflexively mention something about how the German people acquiesced to the crimes of the Nazis, but that glosses over how effective the Nazis were at propagandizing and eliminating dissent. There was really no way for the conscientious citizen to resist and become a martyr because the regime would simply make him or her disappear, and offenders could expect further retaliation against his or her family.
It’s one thing to be brutish oppressors; it’s quite another to cunningly use the sticks and carrots of government to guide the population in the direction you want them to go to great effect. Hitler’s government were masters of this, and managed to set a historical example for future regimes which the world must be vigilant in opposing.
Bismarck laid the groundwork for this with his benevolent despot form of social democracy. The more the government gets involved in day to day life (in Bismarck’s day, the positive sides of government involvement in education and pensions were the only sides anyone saw), the more opportunity they have to control the populace. A lesson not irrelevant to modern Western civilization.
My take on Hitler is that like any felon he has to take his victim as he finds them. His belief that he’d be vindicated was based on a lot of shaky assumptions, starting with the certainty of German victory and the ability to bury lots of stuff under nacht und nebel, going through his 1920s-bred assumption that extreme eugenics theories would be vindicated as the science of the future.
I am really not interested in lightening up on Hitler but it took an entire social structure to do all of that.
Hitler was not responsible for the social psychology of the German people. Centuries of European culture went into creating that.
Ever heard of the Black War?
What happened to the people of Tasmania?
Are Europeans the Borg of planet Earth?
psik
I knew a married German couple at university back in Texas. They were NOT Hitler or Nazi fans by any stretch of the imagination. However, the wife did mention that Hitler did have his good side. Said he was responsible for the autobahns, the Volkswagen and dragging Germany into the industrial age. She did NOT believe this excused him in any way for his evilness, but rather was just pointing out that they do recognize some good things about him in Germany.
Your university friends were misinformed. The autobahns started construction in the Weimar Republic, Volkswagen didn’t actually deliver any cars for civilians until 1946, and Germany industrialized from 1850-1870, and by 1900, Germany was one of the leading producers of synthetic dyes, industrial chemicals, and artificial fertilizers.
So? The Volkswagen was Hitler’s conception, and even partially his design.
Sorry for the nitpick, but I don’t see how Germany can ever be described as ‘tiny’. As it does now, in the 1930s the country had the biggest population in Europe outside of the USSR/ Russia. A quick googling shows that in 1939 the USA’s population was less than twice that of Germany, even before Germany started expanding its territories. Even with its reduced modern boundaries Germany is almost as big as Montana, not that acreage has a close relationship with a country’s world significance.
Well, what can you expect from a couple of Krauts? 
But Cisco is right, he was the driving force behind the Beetle. From Wikipedia:
In 1933, Adolf Hitler gave the order to Ferdinand Porsche to develop a Volkswagen (literally, “people’s car” in German The epithet Volks- literally, “people’s-” was also applied to other Nazi sponsored consumer goods such as Volksradio. Hitler required a basic vehicle capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph). The ‘People’s Car’ would be available to citizens of the Third Reich through a savings scheme, or Sparkarte (savings booklet), at 990 Reichsmark, about the price of a small motorcycle (an average income being around 32RM a week).
And the autobanhs may have been planned by the Weimar Republic, but they were not built until Hitler. Again from Wikipedia:
**"The construction of the Autobahn system began in 1933 under Adolf Hitler as a public works project, providing government jobs to unemployed Germans, which had already been planned in the Weimar Republic. The Autobahn also possibly served another purpose: the road connection between various regions within Germany could make military defense and logistics much more efficient and rapid in response.
“Upon assuming power in January 1933, Adolf Hitler enthusiastically embraced an ambitious autobahn construction project as part of his program of public works to help fulfill his promise to reduce unemployment. On 27 June 1933, the Reich government enacted the “Law on the Establishment of a ‘Reichsautobahn’ Enterprise.” In accordance with Section 5 of this law, Hitler appointed Fritz Todt as Inspector General of German Roads. Soon, over 100,000 laborers worked at construction sites all over Germany. Sections 1 and 5 of the same law assigned responsibility for the oversight of the ‘Reichsautobahn’ enterprise to the German railway company, the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (DRG). However, this arrangement was terminated on 23 January 1935 by a decree transferring control of the enterprise to Todt, on the grounds that the DRG had not given the necessary priority to the project.”**
And wait a minute! What’s this about industrialization:
“Hitler oversaw one of the greatest expansions of industrial production and civil improvement Germany had ever seen, mostly based on debt flotation and expansion of the military.”
Fair enough, how ‘bout : middlin’ size.
There’s a joke recounted in The Third Reich At War in which a German soldier is being shown a globe, and he sees the big pink area that is the British Empire, and the huge red area that is the USSR, and the big yellow area that is the US. He then asks to see Germany, and they show him a blue spot in the middle of Europe. He then says “Does the Fuhrer know this?”