# 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:** 4
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/61 "2010-01-12T19:33:58Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > There is probably a reason why the actual extermination camps were all located outside Germany. The German populace never had to interact with death camps while the Poles and others living near the camps were being watched by occupation soldiers. Yes and no. While no extermination camps were in Versailles Treaty Germany, Auschwitz and Chelmo II were built inside of Greater Germany, in territory the Nazis had annexed from Poland and claimed was part of the Reich itself. The others were, IIRC, in the General Government Area of Occupied Poland. > [@tomndebb](#): > > This is not a claim that the German population was unaware or innocent of what was going on, but to note that this was not a case of extermination being undertaken directly before them. No, and the Germans did try to keep it somewhat secret - hence Himmler’s speech along the lines of “this is a page of our history that can never be written.” But, especially pre-gas chambers, the security was incredibly poor. Einsatzgruppen members sent and brought photos of the massacres home on leave, and without a doubt told their friends and relatives. Germans might not have been aware German Jews were bring killed rather than just deported, but it was pretty damn clear to them Russian Jews were. > [@tomndebb](#): > > The question of evil is rarely binary. Aside from Denmark, no nation under Nazi domination actively worked to oppose the deportations or death camps–individuals did and, sometimes, the councils or populations of some cities did, but active opposition was pretty infrequent. It took sixteen years of active propaganda (six from _Mein Kampf_ to the Reichstag fire and another ten to the Swansee Conference), before the Germans, themselves, actually embarked on the deliberate effort at extermination. > I am afraid that all people can be persuaded to either support or accept evil. A genuine understanding of how that can happen is probably a good thing while simplistic references to evil leaders or evil societies is probably not helpful. (I do not see **Kobal2** ’s post as simplistic, but it provided a decent starting point for my comments.) I think you mean the Wannsee Conference, unless the Nazi leaders ended up on vacation in South Wales, which I doubt. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/62 "2010-01-12T19:44:58Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Churchill was honest & straightforward and Atlee wasn’t? Since reading comprehension has never bene much, I will quote my own line “…last honest and straightforward _ **statesman** _…” - B/I mine. I mean t say that he was the last statesman present, and the last man to simply be one. He did not try to appear to be one, he did not try to pretend to be something he wasn’t. Nobody, not Atlee, Brown, or Thatcher, can make the same claim. Secondly, I find your criticism uninsightful and shallow. He certainly tied the Empire to resisting the Nazis. That does not mean he did not see the Nazis as evil, something which had to be destroyed and not tolerated, ever, period. > [@villa](#): > > Yes and no. While no extermination camps were in Versailles Treaty Germany, Auschwitz and Chelmo II were built inside of Greater Germany, in territory the Nazis had annexed from Poland and claimed was part of the Reich itself. The others were, IIRC, in the General Government Area of Occupied Poland. The is a case of tedious definitions being used to create an absolutely false conclusion. There was not a substantial German population in the areas where the Death Camps were located, and there was no opportunity for widespread news of it to be disseminated mong the home population of Germany. And I really don’t think one should much apply Hitler’s own definitions when convenient. > [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > The world might have been a better place if Hitler had spent his time kicking puppies. That might be true, but this is, however amusing, irrelevant. Hitler was human, and considerably so. We don’t like hm because he was one such who showed just how depraved humans can become, not because he was somehow specially evil. The point is that he amply demonstrated numerous nonevil behaviors and had many evil ones he avoided. For example, he is not known to have been physically abusive, or to have abused his girlfriend/later wife/co-suicide. He apparently treated animals well (whihc, given his views and treatment of Jews, is ironic at best). He was capable of at least superficial emotional ties to others and was personal wounded at the loss of Reinhard Heydrich. Perhaps the oddest thing about Hitler is how normal he was. He was apparently not a psychopath or sociopath. This is no Karla Homolka, eagerly embracing a spiral of depravity and joining in on the fun of sociopaths. Even Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, comes across not as a supervillain but as a rather sad, pathetic, and even silly man who could easily have been a clerk. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/63 "2010-01-12T19:51:34Z")
> [@Freudian\_Slit](#): > > He made GWB sympathetic? I thought of that movie as “Look at the incompetent moron.” It seemed to make him out to be somewhat well intentioned, with father issues up the wazoo, but he also came off as pretty lazy and stupid. That seems pretty sympathetic, to me. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/64 "2010-01-12T19:56:59Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Yes and no. While no extermination camps were in Versailles Treaty Germany, Auschwitz and Chelmo II were built inside of Greater Germany, in territory the Nazis had annexed from Poland and claimed was part of the Reich itself. The others were, IIRC, in the General Government Area of Occupied Poland. OTOH, even attempts to begin settling Germans in those regions was hardly well under way by the time the camps fully came on line. It was still pretty much Polish villagers surrounding the camps. > [@villa](#): > > I think you mean the Wannsee Conference, unless the Nazi leaders ended up on vacation in South Wales, which I doubt. 🙂 Yeah, yeah. I can’t type, either. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/65 "2010-01-12T19:58:22Z")
> [@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. You mean, post-medieval, pre-Nazi western European Jews. If one goes back to the Middle Ages, there was plenty of rounding up and actually physically slaughtering western European Jews to compare to America’s lynchings. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/66 "2010-01-12T20:01:03Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Since reading comprehension has never bene much, I will quote my own line > > “…last honest and straightforward _ **statesman** _…” - B/I mine. > > I mean t say that he was the last statesman present, and the last man to simply be one. He did not try to appear to be one, he did not try to pretend to be something he wasn’t. Nobody, not Atlee, Brown, or Thatcher, can make the same claim. Secondly, I find your criticism uninsightful and shallow. He certainly tied the Empire to resisting the Nazis. That does not mean he did not see the Nazis as evil, something which had to be destroyed and not tolerated, ever, period. You’ve said nothing to suggest that Atlee was either not a statesman, or that he was not honest and straightforward. He was, in fact, from all I have read, all three. Hence my objection to your comment. Which has nothing to do with reading comprehension, so I would appreciate you not being patronizing. Atlee too had a goal, believed in it, explained it, and led people toward it. And to be honest, that you find my criticism unsightful and shallow doesn’t bother me an iota. The fact that you have ignored the central parts of it shows how much you have swallowed the hagiographies of Churchill. You ignore his completely class war based domestic policies, and his brutal racism, both of which would have put him on the side of the Nazis had he not seen them as a threat to the Empire. If you look at his political record, he was an opportunist, whose only principles lay in the defense of inherited wealth and social privilege. There was nothing in his outlook that would have prevented him tolerating a Hitler led regime, especially as a bulwark against the Bolsheviks, even if that regime had got its hands a little bloody with the Jews. > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > The is a case of tedious definitions being used to create an absolutely false conclusion. There was not a substantial German population in the areas where the Death Camps were located, and there was no opportunity for widespread news of it to be disseminated mong the home population of Germany. And I really don’t think one should much apply Hitler’s own definitions when convenient. Again, the fact that you fail to understand the reason behind my comment doesn’t justify the patronizing tone. I mentioned it because it is a common assumption that all the death camps were in the far East. They weren’t. The most deadly was indeed set up in an area that Hitler thought of as part of the German Reich. And, if you had gone on to quote the next comment I made, you would have seen that I acknowledged the attempts to keep the camps themselves somewhat secretive, but noted that the cat was pretty much out of the bag about the slaughter before that. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/67 "2010-01-12T20:13:25Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > It took sixteen years of active propaganda (six from _Mein Kampf_ to the Reichstag fire and another ten to the Swansee Conference), before the Germans, themselves, actually embarked on the deliberate effort at extermination. [Die Wannseekonferenz](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088377/) … your spellchecker must be set to Brit ---
**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, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/68 "2010-01-12T20:17:41Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > bolding mine > > There is probably a reason why the actual extermination camps were all located outside Germany. The German populace never had to interact with death camps while the Poles and others living near the camps were being watched by occupation soldiers. True as far as extermination camps are concerned, but “normal” concentration and forced labor camps were no less abominable in their treatment of prisoners - and [one such camp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp) sat right outside Berlin. 30.000 dead from disease, brutalities, malnutrition, summary executions and medical experiments must have stunk up the place a bit. > [@](#): > > I am afraid that all people can be persuaded to either support or accept evil. A genuine understanding of how that can happen is probably a good thing while simplistic references to evil leaders or evil societies is probably not helpful. (I do not see **Kobal2** ’s post as simplistic, but it provided a decent starting point for my comments.) That’s also my point of contention with **Freddy the Pig**. Calling Hitler a monster does one thing, and one thing only : putting him outside the realm of humanity. He’s a monster, I’m evidently not a monster, I’m not like him, he’s not like me, I’m safe and could never be Hitler. But Hitler was not a mutant from outerspace - he was just this guy. He could have been me. And, conversely, couldn’t I have been him ? I mean, I’m no antisemite, but I do believe guys who mistake plurals for possessives and vice versa should be rounded up. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/69 "2010-01-12T20:28:06Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > There is probably a reason why the actual extermination camps were all located outside Germany. The German populace never had to interact with death camps while the Poles and others living near the camps were being watched by occupation soldiers. I don’t understand this. Friends of mine have visited the Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg) Concentration Camp, which is located in a suburb of Berlin, about a 15 minute drive from the center of the city. Surely that is within Germany? Or are you making some kind of distinction between concentration camps in general and specifically extermination camps? Even so, killing 100,000 people in a suburb of Berlin could hardly go unnoticed. ---
**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 12, 2010, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/70 "2010-01-12T20:47:43Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > I think the overwhlming popular perception is of Hitler exerting an almost supernatural power and control over masses of people. Why would you think this? > [@](#): > > 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. “Other people believed it” is no excuse for someone in Stone’s position trying to turn Jim Garrison into a hero - when Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw was one of the worst abuses of prosecutorial power of the 20th century. > [@](#): > > The characterization that Oliver Stone typically engages in advocating batshit conspiracy theories is a baseless one. He’s also been frequently criticized for [ignoring evidence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Stone) in favor of personal views in his films. I don’t think Stone is capable of bringing any fresh insights to bear on Hitler and his rise to power. Hopefully any documentary he does won’t be some hopped-up version of “It wuz the Allies’ fault!” designed to garner ratings and controversy. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/71 "2010-01-12T21:42:16Z")
Oliver Stone is an idiot. His documentary on Hitler will more than likely wind up showing that there was a vast conspiracy to keep Adolph out of art school and that he was simply misunderstood and didn’t get enough hugs. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/72 "2010-01-12T21:59:04Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > I don’t understand this. > > Friends of mine have visited the Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg) Concentration Camp, which is located in a suburb of Berlin, about a 15 minute drive from the center of the city. Surely that is within Germany? > > Or are you making some kind of distinction between concentration camps in general and specifically extermination camps? Even so, killing 100,000 people in a suburb of Berlin could hardly go unnoticed. 100,000? Kobal2 and Wikipedia say 30,000. 😉 In any event, the people murdered there _tended_ to be Soviet POWs and political prisoners, neither of whom would be considered on the same level as one’s next door neighbor who happened to be Jewish. In addition, the deaths were carried out over a period of seven years, reducing any daily totals, and those executed were often killed in their own mass grave and buried, immediately, reducing the amount of odor that would be expected. Dachau was certainly as bad and others were also scattered across Germany. However, the fact that the victims tended to be foreigners (POWs) and political prisoners would have made it easier for the locals to view them as “other.” In addition, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and the other labor camps were labor camps, giving the fig leaf of cover that deaths, there, were not deliberate murders. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/73 "2010-01-12T22:07:54Z")
> [@Clothahump](#): > > Oliver Stone is an idiot. His documentary on Hitler will more than likely wind up showing that there was a vast conspiracy to keep Adolph out of art school and that he was simply misunderstood and didn’t get enough hugs. Perhaps Stone can do for Holocaust revision what _JFK_ did for grassy knoll theories. If Leni Riefenstahl were alive, she would be turning over in her grave. If Stone has any balls. maybe he can include some pink triangle references in his fantasies. Let’s see him take a nice nuanced view of that. Regards, Shodan ---
**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:** [January 12, 2010, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/74 "2010-01-12T22:19:03Z")
Could be worse. Uwe Boll could be making _Beyond Castle Wolfenstein._ ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/75 "2010-01-12T23:02:41Z")
Perhaps someone should explain to Stone that he is a director, and not one of [The Producers](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395251/)? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/76 "2010-01-12T23:05:13Z")
> [@villa](#): > > You’ve said nothing to suggest that Atlee was either not a statesman, or that he was not honest and straightforward. Once again, you’ve utterly failed to comprehend that I was qualify Churchhill as a true Statesman, with an utterly distinct meaning from “Politician”, and my description of him as an Honest and Straightforward Statesman is not particularly complimenting his truth-telling, but rather his nature. Nor is this simply a matter of the times; Churchhill was simply a different kind of leader from anyone after him, and much to the better. > [@](#): > > And to be honest, that you find my criticism unsightful and shallow doesn’t bother me an iota. The fact that you have ignored the central parts of it shows how much you have swallowed the hagiographies of Churchill. Not at all. Unlike you, however, I can comprehend the imperfect actions of good people in an imperfect world. I have noticed that you, repeatedly, expect people to act as gods, somehow holding themselves above the grime and grubble of dealing with the fatc that the world is largely led by unpleasant people, and that one tyrant may be a neccessary evil to stop another. Frankly, I’ve seen your opinions of a great many people and events on this board. You seem to be of the sort which amuses itself by imagining that the nasty facts of cares and difficulties, or even the personal prejudices of men in different times and places, make them worthy of your despite. And I utterly reject any form of that nonsense. > [@](#): > > I mentioned it because it is a common assumption that all the death camps were in the far East. They weren’t. The most deadly was indeed set up in an area that Hitler thought of as part of the German Reich. You only revealed that you were playing word games. The clear, obvious, and unambiguous evidence is that Hitler clearly wanted to keep the Death Camps well, well away from the German population. Secrets and rumors he could tolerate; but they were never willing to put what he did into the public eye (not after the “mercy killing” mess). The fact that Hitler eventually saw that region being absorbed into the Greater Germany he was trying to create is not relevant. The fact that the local population was made up of those he saw as foreigners is. Speaking to others, Sachsenausen is nasty but it was not explicitly a Death Camp. It could never have been as . Now, building such a thing may itself have ben a horirble crime, but it was far distant practically and in the German public eye from ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/77 "2010-01-12T23:19:56Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Once again, you’ve utterly failed to comprehend that I was qualify Churchhill as a true Statesman, with an utterly distinct meaning from “Politician”, and my description of him as an Honest and Straightforward Statesman is not particularly complimenting his truth-telling, but rather his nature. Nor is this simply a matter of the times; Churchhill was simply a different kind of leader from anyone after him, and much to the better. In reference to Churchill, you said “[t]o a very great degree, I think Churchhill may have been the last honest and straightforward statesman in British history.” And you are surprised I am interested in the words “honest and straightforward.” Atlee was a statesman. He was also honest and straightforward. He was also, and this is separate, a better human being than Churchill could ever hope to be. By making such a (ridiculous) claim, you are either maintaining that Atlee was not a statesman, or was not honest and straightforward. Or is that more “word games”? It seems to you that using words to mean what they actually mean is a “word game.” > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Not at all. Unlike you, however, I can comprehend the imperfect actions of good people in an imperfect world. I have noticed that you, repeatedly, expect people to act as gods, somehow holding themselves above the grime and grubble of dealing with the fatc that the world is largely led by unpleasant people, and that one tyrant may be a neccessary evil to stop another. And you have done NOTHING to show Churchill as a good person. His views hold him out to be much the opposite. I accept faults. The person I come closest in the time to hero worshipping (and it sure as hell isn’t Bevin or Atlee) had many of them. But unlike Churchill, Nye Bevan wasn’t born into privilege, and didn’t fight tooth and nail to exclude many from such privileges as education and health care. I realize one tyrant may be necessary to stop another, which is why I am always cognizant of the fact that without Soviet Russia, my life would have been very different, if it indeed had existed. But where Churchill was a tyrant was in my country, trying to block progress at every possible point. > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Frankly, I’ve seen your opinions of a great many people and events on this board. You seem to be of the sort which amuses itself by imagining that the nasty facts of cares and difficulties, or even the personal prejudices of men in different times and places, make them worthy of your despite. And I utterly reject any form of that nonsense. Churchill wasn’t a racist by modern standards, he was a racist by the standards of his time. He was an opportunist by the standards of his time. And most of all, even by the standards of his time, he was an enemy of any kind of organized labor. You’ll still find people in South Wales who will spit when they say his name. And also those in in the old Dominions, who suffered disproportionately from his military incompetence. I’m sorry I won’t kneel down at the altar of Churchill. But judging Churchill by the standards of his own time does not paint him in a pretty light. And the tendency of history to focus on leaders and ignore the contribution of others doesn’t alter than one iota. ---
**Author:** ![Condescending\_Robot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a183cd/32.png) [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2010, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/78 "2010-01-13T01:17:55Z")
> [@tagos](#): > > It’s not either/or. The Treaty and the Depression were the seeds in which the Nazi’s grew but that does not rob them or the Germans of the free-will they chose to exercise. > > Putting something in context absolves no-one of anything and neither is it intended to. I guess I just have a problem with people buying into the exact rationale that the Nazis themselves gave, when the facts don’t back it up. Germany got better terms after a war that it started than most military losers of the time (the Ottomans, dissolved and divvied up among the victors; China, all but colonized by Japan and the West on wars of pretext that cost Europe almost nothing, etc) and paid almost nothing of the reparations. By the time Hitler came to power Germany had announced a default on all payments, and didn’t resume them until after Potsdam. The idea that Germany was being crushed under the persecutions of (Jews, Americans, Bolsheviks, whoever) just doesn’t jive with the actual timeline of things, and is too close to the cover story given by the Nazis in order to let people act like animals to avoid raising some alarm bells. The leap to justification is something that people make all the time, especially when their political sympathies mean that blaming something on the U.S. is more attractive than avoiding apologizing for Hitler. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2010, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/79 "2010-01-13T02:28:18Z")
**TWEEEEEET!** The subject of this thread is Hitler, not Churchill. Take that discussion to a separate thread. [/Moderating] ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2010, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493/80 "2010-01-13T02:40:09Z")
An ironic reversal of Godwin’s law, don’tchathink? A thread about Hitler inevitably veering off track away from the Nazis and into some other vilified personage. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-contemporary-western-history-paint-an-inaccurate-picture-of-adolph-hitler/524493.md?page=5)