# Does contemporary western history paint an inaccurate picture of Adolph Hitler? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 11, 2010, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493 "2010-01-11T08:38:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/21 "2010-01-11T18:14:03Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > 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… I think we are essentially on the same page, though might disagree a little on timing. I’d agree that Hitler could have stood in a completely free election and won by a landslide probably any time from 1938 to mid 1942. I was looking more at the Nazi rise to power - you have got the coalition pretty much the same way I see it. Not sure who you are counting as the religious, by the way - one of the great tragedies of Weimar for me was how the Catholic political structure viewed the far right, including the Nazis, as less of a threat than the SPD. I don’t think the coalition reached over 50% of the population, though. It certainly, with the backing of industrialists and very biased policing in particular in Prussia had more than 50% of the power that mattered. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/22 "2010-01-11T18:15:20Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > 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. Exactly. Wait a minute. You’re forgetting one important point. **ZOMG HITLER!!!** ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/23 "2010-01-11T18:24:27Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Does contemporary western history paint an inaccurate picture of Adolph Hitler? It’s **Adolf** Hitler, for one thing. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/24 "2010-01-11T18:37:51Z")
> [@villa](#): > > I think we are essentially on the same page, though might disagree a little on timing. I’d agree that Hitler could have stood in a completely free election and won by a landslide probably any time from 1938 to mid 1942. I was looking more at the Nazi rise to power - you have got the coalition pretty much the same way I see it. Not sure who you are counting as the religious, by the way - one of the great tragedies of Weimar for me was how the Catholic political structure viewed the far right, including the Nazis, as less of a threat than the SPD. I don’t think the coalition reached over 50% of the population, though. It certainly, with the backing of industrialists and very biased policing in particular in Prussia had more than 50% of the power that mattered. Ah, sorry for the confusion, but I wasn’t speaking of Germany stricto sensu, rather of the general zeitgeist of European politics and popular opinions of the 30s/40s (mostly, I’ll admit, through the lens of research in French history, French newspapers of the time, biographies and personnal accounts etc…). ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/25 "2010-01-11T18:42:07Z")
Oh OK. Then yes, I pretty much agree with you. In fact, I at least a little bit surprised France didn’t succumb to fascism before Germany. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/26 "2010-01-11T18:46:10Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Oliver Stone I almost stopped reading there. First clue of historical inaccuracy in the first two words of the OP. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/27 "2010-01-11T20:38:45Z")
Stone may be after pointing out that there are different ways to look at history. It’s a narrative of what happened. There are alternative narratives, such as paranoia. I suppose that was what JFK was about. Oswald killed JFK, in my opinion, but with help. Most Americans believe that, yet it is not taken seriously by mainstream historians, even as a dissenting version. Fact is, we are not sure that Oswald didn’t have help, yet we behave as though we are absolutely certain and that people who suspect that he had help are crazy. Hitler was a human being. His sort of program had been done before and will be attempted again as it has been successfully since in other countries. If we dismiss him as an evil aberration we make it easier for someone else to do all that crap. The political aftermath of 9/11 was similar in may ways to the political aftermath of the Reichstag Fire. We need to understand that it is human beings who are manipulative in these ways and that we as human beings can be manipulated. Hitler wasn’t some one of a kind monster, his hatred is a potential in virtually all of us. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/28 "2010-01-11T20:42:26Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > 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. So it’s adopting the thesis of [_Hitler’s Willing Executioners_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler's_Willing_Executioners). ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/29 "2010-01-11T21:17:24Z")
I think American students need to be taught more about the history of German unification. Just a hundred years before Hitler, Germany was a patchwork of more-or-less independent states. Nazi Germany’s desire for territory was not so different from previous generations, who fought to extend a unitary German state. While aggressive expansionism is wrong, it’s not in the same class of evil as genocide. I think Germany gets a bad rap for unification and expansionism (by lumping it together with genocide), when it was only doing more recently what other western European states had done in previous centuries. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/30 "2010-01-11T22:11:41Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > 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. Except that this has not been the accepted explanation of the Nazis’ rise to power. Hitler doesn’t get all the blame in the view of historians or works of popular culture, nor does the “collective guilt” of the Germans. Nuanced views have been part of the picture for a long time and are not something that we need Stone to bring to the table, assuming he’s capable of something more than some batshit crazy conspiracy theory. > [@Marley23](#): > > Very few people know this, but The Fuehrer was a terrific dancer! That’s more like it. We want someone who’ll present the Hitler we knew, the Hitler we loved…the Hitler with a song in his heart. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/31 "2010-01-11T22:28:51Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Oh OK. Then yes, I pretty much agree with you. In fact, I at least a little bit surprised France didn’t succumb to fascism before Germany. _bitterly_ Oh, we made up for the lost time… ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/32 "2010-01-11T22:32:38Z")
Hitler’s dancing skills aside, the man had “colossal flatulence” ([I kid you not](http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article10240701.aspx)). Perhaps Stone wants to air out that side of the Führer? In fact, given Stone’s well-recognized investigative tenaciousness, I’m sure he’ll get to the bottom of it. ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/33 "2010-01-11T22:49:22Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > This seems fairly unlikely, or at least something that would be limited to the upper and intellectual classes. > > 1. 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. > > 2. 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. I don’t mean that it was a shock when it was discovered after the war. I mean that it was a shock as it was happening, that such a thing could be taking place in Germany, a country which had had no pogroms for two centuries and in which Jews had been thoroughly assimilated into the general population. > [@Kobal2](#): > > Discrimination, beatings, lootings, depossession and transportation however… Where were these taking place in western Europe before the Nazi rise to power? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/34 "2010-01-11T23:00:39Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > That’s more like it. We want someone who’ll present the Hitler we knew, the Hitler we loved…the Hitler with a song in his heart. [Hitler On Ice!](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybuKQf9p5jg) ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/35 "2010-01-11T23:30:01Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > So it’s adopting the thesis of [_Hitler’s Willing Executioners_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler's_Willing_Executioners). That book was one of the exact things I was thinking of. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/36 "2010-01-11T23:34:58Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > Except that this has not been the accepted explanation of the Nazis’ rise to power. > > Hitler doesn’t get all the blame in the view of historians or works of popular culture, nor does the “collective guilt” of the Germans. Nuanced views have been part of the picture for a long time and are not something that we need Stone to bring to the table, assuming he’s capable of something more than some batshit crazy conspiracy theory.That’s more like it. We want someone who’ll present the Hitler we knew, the Hitler we loved…the Hitler with a song in his heart. I think the overwhlming popular perception is of Hitler exerting an almost supernatural power and control over masses of people. Oliver Stone has done exactly one “conspiracy” movie in his career, by the way, and that involved probably the most commonly subscribed conspiracy theory of the 20th century. The characterization that Oliver Stone typically engages in advocating batshit conspiracy theories is a baseless one. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/37 "2010-01-11T23:36:47Z")
> [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](#): > > Where were these taking place in western Europe before the Nazi rise to power? I can say France and the US for sure, I’ll let better knowledgeable Dopers fill in the blanks. In France, the kind of rampant antisemitism that got the spotlight during the Dreyfus Affair only grew, until groups such as Action Française opined that Jews should be forbidden to work at all, which would evidently have led to every last Jew leaving the country (or so they hoped). Other groups sought to remove Jews from the WW1 veteran benefits’ roster which, since it also distributed pensions to widows and war orphans, and considering the heavy losses of that war was many a family’s principal source of income. Jews were also routinely discriminated against for employment, housing etc… As for generic violence, breaking of shop windows and the like, just you check any local newspaper of that era. Really, throw a dart at random. You’ll be sure to find at least a throwaway mention of one such incident. Any year, any month. Hell, according to the ever helpful yet America-centric Wikipedia, you might even check the Detroit papers as late as 19 **43**. And finally, regarding your assertion that German Jews were well assimilated in the general population, I can only shake my head in disbelief. Does the word “Judenzählung” mean anything to you ? How about “der Dolchtoß” ? ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/38 "2010-01-12T00:06:59Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > [J]ust you check any local newspaper of that era. [Let’s see . . .](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/58693) hmm, no, I don’t see anything at first glance . . . ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/39 "2010-01-12T01:03:37Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > As for generic violence, breaking of shop windows and the like, just you check any local newspaper of that era. Really, throw a dart at random. You’ll be sure to find at least a throwaway mention of one such incident. Any year, any month. Hell, according to the ever helpful yet America-centric Wikipedia, you might even check the Detroit papers as late as 19 **43**. In Twentieth Century America, persons of African ancestry were subjected to discrimination and violence far worse than that visited upon pre-Nazi western European Jews. And yet, if an American politician of that era had advocated and implemented a program of _total extermination_ of African Americans, I would indeed regard that person as (to use your words) “spectacularly evil and exceptional”, and far more than just a “product of their time”. And if you wouldn’t, we aren’t going to agree. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/40 "2010-01-12T01:40:27Z")
> [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](#): > > In Twentieth Century America, persons of African ancestry were subjected to discrimination and violence far worse than that visited upon pre-Nazi western European Jews. > > And yet, if an American politician of that era had advocated and implemented a program of _total extermination_ of African Americans, I would indeed regard that person as (to use your words) “spectacularly evil and exceptional”, and far more than just a “product of their time”. Was every single member of the KKK spectacularly evil, then ? Man, lots of spectacular people back then. The world must have been a 24/7 Cirque du Soleil. OK, less snark, more actual arguments : So would the Germans have, had the final solution been made public. It hadn’t. For the record, the pre-war program of euthanasia for the crippled, mental cases etc… of German citizens had already made quite a splash, and that one too had been kept under wraps. According to most historians, the Shoah was for the most part an open secret but the point is, despite his fiery rethoric Hitler never outright said “We’re killing the Jews right now. No, really, I’m not kidding. All of them. Millions. No, you guys, don’t laugh, I’m serious as the Russian Front. Look, I’ve got a Powerpoint presentation and everything. NO, Herman, the pics are not photoshopped, FFS ! I swear to Siegfried we’re gassing them by the trainload !”. So, while many people \*did \*hear about Auschwitz and similar camps, the majority of people in the know was mostly split between those who were dismissing these “rumors” as exaggerations and propaganda, and those who didn’t think it was that bad. Actual protestors were few and far between, whether in Germany or abroad. Up until the (non photoshopped) pics surfaced. And the bitter cynic in me can’t help also thinking : until the Germans really, unequivocally lost the war. I’ll also reiterate my earlier argument : it wasn’t just Hitler’s mad plan, every Nazi higher up was in on it, so were the guards, so were the Konzlagerführers. So probably were the ordinary citizens of the towns and villages surrounding the camps themselves, because of the stench alone. If they \*all \*were outstandingly evil people… why ? How ? Did they have Evil genes or something ? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493.md?page=3)