I suppose by the time he consolidated power, debate and questioning of Hitler’s qualifications was Not Encouraged or healthy.
And I know from the wartime propaganda that the Allies had no hesitation ridiculing him on his short stature or rat-like visage, etc.
But was there ever a time when the official German propaganda, or Hitler himself, explained why the supposed master race of strapping, healthy, Nordic overlords, ideally blond-haired and blue-eyed, would be, could be, should be led by a runty, darkish, sickly and drug-addled (I guess that wasn’t widely publicized) guy?
Is the explanation that the Aryan stereotype was just an ideal? Or that while he might have lost out on the height and attractiveness lottery, Hitler was a-okay because his family tree still qualified him under their ridiculous x-generations-back-of-German blood test?
Or was it kind of like one of those handful of college football coaches who never actually played ball themselves – the theory being you don’t necessarily have to have the tools yourself in order to be a leader of those who do?
Or did they somehow just skate on by the issue without ever addressing it?
Hitler had blue eyes, and his hair as a child was blond, so he thought of himself as fitting the image.
He also was the leader.
Also, though the blond, strapping Aryan was an ideal, there were plenty of Germans who didn’t fit it. Germans weren’t necessarily supposed to fit it (any more than women today are necessarily expected to look like supermodels). They were expected to be racially German (as defined by the Nazis).
I often wondered the same, as this was also true of many others ie Heinrich Himmler who ended up in charge of almost all of the nazi security apparatus, despite starting out as a chicken farmer.
Worth considering that the germans, then at their lowest ebb as a consequence of defeat in The First World War, faced with potentially enormous reparations, and suddenly plunged into hyperinflation and poverty - saw in Hitler, a saviour. It is a testament to his charisma ( insofar as the populace were seduced by it ), that he was effectively able to hijack the whole nationalist ideal, and mould it into his own warped version of german ‘destiny.’
I was also surprised to read not so long ago, that far from being at the helm of the party from the outset, he first attended a then ‘german workers party’ meeting as a police informer, and was himself taken with ideas proposed by those he was there to observe.
I’d heard on a PBS special years ago, and it my be on wikipedia, somewhere, by now, that there were 3 types of Germans, the blonde Aryan ideal, the darker, squat, Hitler-esque, German – these were sort of a “salt of the earth” type, the worker German, the industrious ones. They were the “do-ers” while the blonde Nordics were the “thinkers”, in the grand German plan. The third type, the mongrels, were sort of Germans mixed with Slavs, still deserving of being Germans, just not likely to be as “elite”
When you look at it, it’s kind of a smart move. If they’d made the elite class look the same as the leaders, people would have seen right through the charade. They almost seemed to imply, once Germany had enough living space, the “work was done” as it were, the hard working Hitler would have stepped down, and retired. Heh. Likely. :rolleyes:
It seems like this is what George Orwell tapped into in the book ‘1984’. The elite Upper party don’t live in the lap of luxury, they have power, but only for it’s own sake.
It seems like the US does something similar. The US president always seems to be flaunting some sort of blue collar, dirt under the nails persona. It seems like they’d never mention their straight A grades in Law school, when they can instead talk about how much sleep they’ve lost filibustering some obscure bill that was just there to serve the little guy.
Well, he wasn’t quite the retard, Slingblade character that the US propaganda machine tries to make him, and other Nazis out to be. He had at least some college education, and his parents were somewhat affluent. Perhaps not aristocrats, but professional. We try to fool ourselves into thinking that the ‘educated’ cannot become something that we do not love, but it happens.
His father was a teacher and his uncle was a tutor to the Bavarian royal family. And is there really propaganda that Himmler was retarded? The man was evil, he was crazy, and he was kind of a hick, but I’ve never heard him described by anybody as stupid.
It didn’t used to be like this. There was a time when people didn’t mind having an aristocrat as president - Roosevelt and Kennedy are two great examples; both elites and they never tried to hide it. The “Imperial” presidency. And people liked it.
Now for some reason the American public has gotten it into their heads that the president should be a “down to earth” guy who could “be your neighbor” and is “the kind of guy you could have a beer with.” I personally WANT to know that the president is smarter than me and smarter than most Americans, but apparently this opinion is in the minority.
Goering was also quite bright, apparently. At the Nuremberg trials, he was found to have one of the highest IQs of all the accused (with the highest belonging to Schacht).
He wasn’t very good at his job. Goering messed up Dunkirk, messed up the Battle of Britain, and messed up Stalingrad. He also was corrupt as hell and used his position to loot everything he could get his hands on, and he spent the war in a constant morphine daze.
Was Goering also not himself of Jewish origins? Distantly, but still - you would think that a “real Aryan” wouldn’t have even a trace of the Jew-gene. Didn’t we have a thread about this?
We did. Goering was descended, in part, from a prominent Jewish family that had converted to Christianity in the 15th century. This wouldn’t have been considered a problem. It wouldn’t have even prevented him from joining the SS (which required that you prove Aryan ancestry back to 1800).