Yes, right up to the day that he poisoned her.
I’m not aware that the KKK ever implemented or even planned genocide.
I have no doubt that if an American dictator were in power today, with control over every aspect of American government and society and power of life and death over every American, and with unlimited power to proffer rewards and inflict punishment, that in a nation of 300 million people he would be able to find sufficient henchmen to carry out any sort of genocide he wanted. That doesn’t mean the country has a natural proclivity for genocide. And it wouldn’t change my feeling, after the fact, that the leader was responsible and was uniquely and exceptionally evil.
Yeah, but he was sad about it, and he had somebody* else do the dirty deed.
I should point out that ‘Hitler loved his dog’ is a shorthand dismissal used in my family for anything that purports to show that some reprehensible loathsome reptile is really misunderstood by the rest of the world by highlighting some homey charming factoid.
*Dog handler Fritz Tornow, who also killed the other dogs in the bunker.
The idea that World War II happened because of the Treaty of Versailles (and, by implication, that Hitler and his followers should be somehow absolved of moral responsibility to some degree) is neither a new concept to anyone who has taken a decent high school history class, nor, strictly speaking, is it true in the sense of adequately explaining events.
Maybe it comes down to the nature of evil. Is it all cackling, hand-rubbing glee as one takes delight in suffering? Or is it more along the lines of the “banality of evil”, where people accept that the simple solution is the best one and put blinders on as they go about their drone-ish lives and the solution they’ve accepted grinds its way into effect, just outside their field of vision?
Here’s what Himmler had to say on the topic:
The ordinary Germans who thumped their chests and said “The Jews must be exterminated!” were bad enough, and I suppose every society has those. But the small group of people who took that inflamed rhetoric and turned it into cold and merciless application – even when the chest-thumpers would have blanched at the thought: those were the real bad guys.
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’m doubtful whether ‘another Hitler’ would have arisen. We know who the top Nazi’s were. Sure - the king-makers who fingered Hitler for support would have likely selected another Nazi but I don’t think any had that terrible combination of drive, charisma and craziness.
Sometimes history can be ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’ but sometimes we have to recognise that the times and a specific, unique individual can come together with results that are not historically inevitable.
Same with Churchill. There was no other ‘man of the hour’ that would have kept the UK fighting against all the odds and galvanised the nation after the crushing defeat in France.
That’s Dolchstoß
Bollocks. Ernest Bevin did as much if not more to keep Britain fighting.
In Up Front cartoonist Bill Maudlin addresses the issue of NAZI vs. German. He was tired of seeing newspapers refer to German soldiers as Nazi soldiers. He writes something to the effect of “With the exception of a few S.S. soldiers I haven’t seen any Nazis.” His point was that they weren’t fighting the Nazi Party they were fighting Germany.
There are some people who think that that Germans were basically nice people who were led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. It’s a rather simplistic interpretation of the past but it exists. I don’t really think that’s the popular interpretation in Germany these days. There’s nothing wrong with taking another look at Hitler. Historians take fresh looks at the past all the time. I’m not sure if I really trust Stone to do a good job but maybe he’ll surprise me.
A truly intelligent and inspired psychobiography of Hitler would probe and illuminate the changes in his character. Many events in his life must have had a profound effect upon his development. He cannot have derived a natural flair for leadership (as many do) from family example. He had a troubled childhood following the death of his younger brother. He was expelled from school. His youthful ambition to become an architect was frustrated; his talent as a painter was unimpressive. He probably contracted a disabling venereal infection; something on which we lack conclusive evidence. Whatever Hitler was like at 25, an impoverished failure living in Vienna, a no-hoper, it is hard to believe he can have shown much semblance of what was to come.
Yet in WWI, from some resource within him he drew a near-suicidal bravery. No personal quality impresses comrades-in-arms as much as personal courage. Hitler seemed to his fellow soldiers to possess the luck of the devil. How easy for him to believe that his very survival, and status as a war-hero, indicated that destiny had something special in store.
For all that, the change in the space of seven or eight years from no-hoper to orator, and from “star turn” persuasive performer at small-time political events to leader of a minor political party is remarkable. He had emerged as a guy worth investing in, and it may have been primarily due to his backers that the next stage of his political career was successful. Power and authority will surely have transformed him again as he rose to the highest office. So too will the medications that energised him to sustain his public appearances – probably to his physical and moral detriment. In the final stages of his life, the strain of impending defeat ravaged his mental health – as it has those of others in a similar position.
Alongside this, one needs to consider that gradual change in wartime of what is considered acceptable. This applies alike to bombing (culminating in Horoshima and Nagasaki), to the treatment of prisoners (Mittelwerk), and to the treatment of the Jews in particular.
In dealing with the personality of HItler there is an ongoing story, and one that requires explanation. This makes simple characterisations of HItler unsatisfactory. Tell me, for example, that he was “evil personified”, and I am really none the wiser.
Well thank you for that cogent interjection. So in keeping with the tone of Great Debates. Well done.
As to Bevin, good organiser as he was he was not in any circumstance going to be called on to lead a government of national unity so no - he was not a ‘cometh the hour’ man.
Neither was he an inspiring leader.
I apologize. I am just tired of the inaccurate lionization of Churchill, a racist, militarily incompetent class warrior who, absent the behind the scenes intervention of Ernest Bevin would have led Britain down a path of collapse and revolution.
Had Bevin not been able to calm the union movement, then all of Churchill’s pretty speeches would have been for nothing. And had Churchill been allowed to use the war to screw the working class, then you would have seen support evaporate pretty damn quickly. Absent coal and steel, then Britain’s contribution stops.
Bevin didn’t need to be Prime Minister to have an influence. And out of Prime Ministers, even Baldwin with his championing of radar had more to do with Britain’s continued participation in the war.
The Nazi “treatment of the Jews” (what a bloodless euphemism!) can hardly be blamed on ‘the pressures of war’ – the first concentration camp was opened 49 days after Hitler gained power, and the first Nazi anti-Jewish laws came about 3 weeks later. That was 5-1/2 years before WWII started.
And that’s not counting the various mob-violence type attacks on Jews before that, which were often ignored by the official authorities.
There is a difference between saying that Hitler was complicated and not a devil and saying he didn’t willingly throw away his humanity in favor of power. There is a difference between saying he was human and saying he was not evil. I do not think Oliver Stone comprehends the distinction (and his backhanded comparison of his treatment of G. W. Bush does not bode well, though I’m sure the usual lefty crowd would love it).
Hitler’s rise was not inevitable. He was cunning, energetic, and charismatic. You can’t treat him as a cackling archvillain like Skeletor or Cobra Commander. He didn’t kick puppies. But there were other fascists and other anti-semites, and yet they didn’t go down the road Hitler did.
Hitler probably started with a vague and impersonal dislike of the Jews. Then he blamed them (as he was taught by many previous German and Austrian politicians and intellectuals), and came to dislike them more. He brought other people in, and they talked about hating the Jews, and they all hated them more. Then they started attacking jews, and hated them more. And then they started imprisoning and exiling Jews, and they hated them even more. And then they started killing Jews, and well… by the time that road ended, they were massacring Jews even to the extent of draining resources away from fighting the Russians.
It may be ironic, but Hitler’s rise, predicated on hating the Jews, may have led to his fall, as the Jewish population within Germany might well have made the difference in defeating the USSR. Jewish scientists and industrialists in WW1, for example, were largely responsible for the nation being capable of staying in the war. Without Walter Rathenau, The Kaiser’s armies couldn’t have stayed in the war for the years they did. Germany had no strategic stockpiles or reserves. For their service, the German government tried to blame them for the loss and hid the fact that Jews served heavily in the armed forces and war bureaucracy.
No.
Churchhill, for all his faults, had something that perhaps no other British leader had, or perhaps has had since that time. He was half American. That’s only partly a joke: he was half-American and in particular studied the Civil War. Consciously or unconsciously, he modelled his public self on Lincoln.
He was not a great soldier, and he was not a perfect man. But he was capable of leading and inspiring others and . To a very great degree, I think Churchhill may have been the last honest and straightforward statesman in British history. he was the last man to have a goal, to define the goal for everyone, to explain in clear and concise language why that goal was worth it, and to fight against what he saw and knew to be a great evil.
Churchill was honest & straightforward and Atlee wasn’t? Where on earth do you get that from. It wasn’t just that Churchill wasn’t a great soldier, he was an incompetant one, and interfered with military decisions he did not understand . He spent his life in an assault on the working classes, and his speech at the tail end of the war, suggesting that a Labour government would need a form of the Gestapo to implement its policies, combined with his previous actions in the General Strike and at Tonypandy make it pretty clear he viewed the left as an enemy as serious as the Nazis. His opposition to Hitler wasn’t based on an opposition to Hitler’s policies, but instead on a perceived threat to the Empire.
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.
= = =
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.
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.)
Why do you think this?
Just because he made GWB sympathetic doesn’t mean he’ll do the same for Hitler.
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.
No, but he ordered the 3-week old puppies from his dog to be shot, just before he committed suicide.
And 10 years earlier, his Nuremberg Laws forbid Jews from owning puppies (and any other pets), forbid them from giving their pets away to friends or neighbors, and required them to turn in their pets to be destroyed.
The world might have been a better place if Hitler had spent his time kicking puppies.