Oliver Stone is proposing to put together a 10 hour overview of 20th century history for TV that will include a more complex and nuanced view of Hitler than seen previously that explores the external social and economic forces that influenced his development and rise to power.
Is what I was taught in high school and college wrong? The usual snapshot is that while Hitler was obviously influenced by the contemporary political and economic climate and current events of his day he was also evil incarnate and a very, very bad man.
Is this view inaccurate? Does the western historical view of Hitler need to be more relativist and nuanced?
I’m sure that whatever treatment he gives Hitler, it will be lightyears from anything original. It’ll just be a matter of whose offbeat theory he chooses to parrot.
If anyone can be characterized as evil, it’s Hitler. I suppose the only controversial thing, and what Stone is driving at, is there’s no such thing as “evil”. Whatever.
I think they paint a 1-dimensional view and do not consider the context of his behaviors. Anti-semitism is radical today, but culturally it was a common conservative viewpoint in Germany back then.
A good book on Hitler is ‘the young Hitler I knew’, written by his best friend when Hitler was a teenager.
I’m not sure how he is going to portray Stalin as a hero of WW2. Stalin’s incompetence and paranoia almost left the military unable to fight. He killed off most of the officers before the war.
The Russians fought the Germans off, but arguably in spite of Stalin. Not because of him.
I think you could fairly easily argue that Hitler and Jack Bauer are fairly well about the same person, just one happened to be put into a position of power. They’re both massively popular with the people, because they’re fully willing take whatever the most expedient measures are towards the homeland’s success. People don’t need to know more about Hitler, they need to know more about how the idea that Jews and other social misfits were the causes of societies ills were decently well-believed ideas among pretty much everyone. Hitler was just the guy who happened to give the OK to start solving “the problem”.
But if you’re going to do a documentary on popular-yet-inexcusable beliefs leading to mass wrongdoing, you’re better to show many of the examples through history, rather than just the one. Otherwise people are liable to think that it was a distinctly 1940s German issue.
Hitler must be held accountable for the result of his policies. Results that even by the values of contemporary society were disastrous beyond comparison. I think probably Mussolini is the more unfairly and inaccurately portrayed person.
Stone is a guy who’s already shown he’s into marketing fantasy views of history (with “J.F.K.”). Hitler was not a “scapegoat” - he was an unbalanced warmongering mass murderer (words that fit Stalin as well). I’m not sure how you “nuance” all that.
Maybe Stone can bring in Mel Gibson to help with the production. :dubious:
Very few people know this, but The Fuehrer was a terrific dancer!
Describing Hitler in a more historical context, and talking about events and attitudes in Germany that paved the way for what he and his government did, is a good idea and I think it would teach some very useful lessons. But Oliver Stone is just about the last person I would trust to handle something like that.
It’s not a question of nuancing who or what he was, but making the case that he wasn’t spectacularly evil or even exceptional in that domain - he was very much a product of his time. Had he not become *the *Hitler, another just like him would have surfaced from the deep sludge of European antisemitism and xenophobia of the era. Could have been another German, or a French, could have been one of Franco’s buddies - it doesn’t really matter.
The truth is, at the time and all across Europe, a majority of people were, if not 100% keen on the Führer’s ideas, at least willing to say that he was much better than the communists. At least *he *didn’t threaten profit margins nor rile up the proles.
Somehow I don’t think Stone is looking to rehabilitate Hitler. I think he’s looking to give people a picture of a real person who was reacting to external forces rather than some kind of demon that had undue influence on history.
No, he was spectacularly evil even in the context of his time. Yes, casual anti-Semitism was endemic in western life. But no, absolutely nobody was calling for mass extermination or murder. Before Hitler, there had been virtually no organized, state-sanctioned mass violence against Jews in western Europe for 200 years. Eastern Europe, especially Russia, was the “land of the progroms”. German Jews were well assimilated into the general population. The Holocaust came as a complete shock and absolutely not a general “evil of the times”.
I don’t agree with this to the extent that it wasn’t a majority of people who thought he was better than the communists, but more a majority of power. Fascism was seen by industrialists as a way of returning to full employment without strengthening unions, which would lead to wage demands.
Honestly, I don’t know any credible historical accounts of that era that don’t include the social and economic factors that gave rise to the Nazi party and its ascent into total control over Germany. Which, in my opinion, is far more important to what made Hitler tick.
The Nazi’s all come across as brutal anti intellectual failures with a grudge against progressive Wiemar Germany, which despite popular opinion, was actually succeeding in the mid to late 20s.
The fact that they were able to go from a fringe group of disgruntled nutters to The power of Germany says more about the average German of the time than the hardcore Nazis.
Where Hitler comes in is the fact he was man that reorganized and pushed the party to power. He was Charismatic Leader who was able to cement all their petty hatreds of the group into print and grand foaming speeches, but was savvy enough to take advantage of the fears of the German conservatives and moderates at the start of the Depression to catapult himself and the party into power.
On a “isn’t that interesting” footnote. The advent of sound on film, probably was one of the biggest stroke of Luck for the man in gaining support beyond Munich. There is a silent film of one of his speeches which, even at the time, would not have impressed. Add his voice and he was able to find like minded folk throughout the country.
This seems fairly unlikely, or at least something that would be limited to the upper and intellectual classes.
It’s essentially impossible to keep any large scale conspiracy secret. Take for example that within a year of gassing-murders being started, Witold Pilecki heard about it in Poland, infiltrated Auschwitz, and was sending out information. For information not to bubble up to the sort of people who would, after the war, write newspaper articles and books about being surprised, you’d have to have a fairly large supply of blue collar people who were happy enough to not feel it worthy passing the information on.
If Jews were well integrated into society, the massive reduction in their population would be fairly obvious. Regardless of whether they were being killed or not, that they were being rounded up and taken away to mysterious places would have been known no matter who you were.
Partly agreed, however remember that a great many of the lower classes bought the rethoric of those in power, and another part of them hopped on the Hitler bandwagon because communism also stood for abolition of religion. When you add up the more rabid antisemites, the industrialists, the order-above-all-else crowd and the religious, I’d say that yeah, a great deal of people thought he wasn’t so bad, at least up until he started sending tanks all over the place. Some even after that.
For that matter, I don’t reckon the German hoi polloi particularly enjoyed being bullied by the Gestapo & the Schütze ; having their sons shot off in Bumfuckgrad, Russia or El-Bumfuck, Tunisia ; being sent to labor camps as unionists or slackers etc…
Extermination or murder ? Maybe not, at least not by the majority. Discrimination, beatings, lootings, depossession and transportation however… The Nazis just took it a step further, and some admired them for it. Some, sadly, still do.
How about constant disorganized violence tacitly condoned by the state ?
I’m sorry, what ? Every occupied country saw the trains going away. Every non-occupied country heard the plea of would-be refugees and turned them down. It’s not like the deportations were hush-hush. Or came as a big surprise.
I’ll grant you that the sheer abomination of the camps and the systematic murder *were *shocking - because people thought the Jews were “merely” sent off to prison and/or used as slave labor in factories. And many were OK with that. You simply won’t find “discrimination/violence against Jews” counted against him in mainstream anti-Nazi speeches of the time.
Besides, it’s not like the Solution was a peculiar whim of his. In part because it was for the most part Himmler’s brainchild to begin with, but mostly because each and every Nazi higher up was in on it as well as, of course, every single guard and camp manager directly involved. Either all of them were as spectacularly evil as Hitler, or Hitler wasn’t particularly evil in context.
I think the interesting question is not why Hitler was like he was, but why the German people put him in a position of power and acquiesced to his policies. Scapegoating Hitler is an easy way of pretending that people as a whole are not capable of immense evil.
My impression is not that Stone intends to present Hitler as sympathetic or misunderstood, but that it’s overly simplistic to blame the phenomenon of Nazi Germany all on the sheer force of personality of one man. Hitler exploited what was already there, he didn’t create it. He’s the personification of Nazi Germany, but it was really a runaway, national social pathology, not just one guy robotically hypnotizing people. Hitler didn’t create the German rage or the anti-semitism. Those things created Hitler.