He had “great dreams for Germany” if “great” is understood as “very big”. There’s nothing inherently good about military victory, and desiring one is not an indicator of virtue. I don’t think it makes any difference whether you desire military victory for yourself, or for a group of which you are a member.
Hitler may have started off with arguably some sound propositions - bringing his nation back from the brink, nullifying some quite unfair WWI reparations imposed on his nation, building solidarity among his people - but due a number of factors (syphilis and the onset of Parkinson’s being no small contributor, methinks), he went ‘full potato’ not long into his tenure. Then to blame a single denomination (the Jews) on all the ills of the world - it’s been said he blamed the herpes slmplex disease on those of Jewish faith after contracting it from a Jewish prostitute in Austria - is kind of beyond the pale.
Hitler’s machinations also gave rise to the Middle-east malaise we have today, effectively turning the very Jews he vilified into the tyrants of said region! O, the irony… :rolleyes:
One.
Wrong.
Yes, under certain circumstances.
To some degree.
[QUOTE=blindboyard]
So if someone had the intention to benefit his fellow man, how can we be qualified to condemn him, morally?
[/QUOTE]
By considering the means by which this was done, and not focusing entirely on the ends. Modern other-regarding ethics demands this.
Len Deighton’s book on WWII (“Blood, Tears and Folly”) recounts an occasion during the war when a woman in Britain was sentenced to a lengthy prison term for saying that Hitler was a good man, better than Churchill.
Tila is fortunate to be living in different (not necessarily better) times.
I wouldn’t even go this far; towards the end he had nothing but aloof contempt for the people who had failed him. When Speer protested that destroying German infrastructure would send Germans who survived the war into the stone age he replied;
He also forbade civilian evacuations from threatened areas, guaranteeing more suffering for the population. His Volksturm idea, throwing the Hitler Youth and old men against Russian guns as cannon fodder to buy his regime more time was another expression of contempt for his people.
Not to mention, when it became obvious that the war was lost he didn’t give two shits and dragged it on. This can’t be blamed exclusively on him, of course, but the buck stopped with him.
On his love of the white race, he ordered his men to fight as hard against the advancing Anglo-Americans from the west as the Red Army from the east, and was furious that loyal Heinrich was attempting a separate peace.
The best you could probably say about him was that he was a delusional fantastic with an ill mind. Especially after the July plot, when he though fate had spared him for great things. There may be an argument to be had that he wasn’t the worst Nazi - in terms of sheer brutality, others may have outclassed him if they were Fuhrer instead. Heydrich and Himmler spring to mind in terms of capacity for casual genocide, and Streicher was probably more hate-filled and vulgar.
Hitler did not have syphilis. Hitler did not have Parkinson’s disease. Hitler did not have herpes simplex (and herpes simplex is not syphilis). Hitler did not have one ball. Hitler did not become an anti-Semite after contracting an STD from a Jewish prostitute. These are all urban myths. The stab in the back theory started the moment WW1 ended blaming Germany’s defeat on betrayal by the civilians, notably socialist, Jews, and communists (much the same thing to those believing it as the Jews were blamed for being behind communism as well, see Judeo-Bolshivism). I must say the “Hitler had early onset Parkinson’s” has to be my favorite; the evidence usually given of this is that he developed a tremor in his left arm. What’s left out is that he developed this tremor after being injured in the July 20th bomb plot.
Oh, I see where this is going. Rolleyes indeed.
I think you mean Ozymandias (The guy in gold), not Dr Manhattan (“that blue guy”) and yes, he absolutely was.
Personally, I consider one to be too much.
Personally, it’d be wrong.
Personally, nope.
I seriously doubt it, but dude was insane, so who knows what he thought.
Because it’s intentions and results *combined *that count. Personally, quite weighted towards the latter but not exclusively so. So a guy who, say, saves a busload of schoolkids from a collapsing bridge, but he really stopped the bus because he wanted to abduct and rape the kids (but didn’t get to that part before the emergency folks showed up)? Bad guy, regardless of outcome.
Even if by majorly contorting my entire belief system I believed that the Jews are the downfall of humanity and therefor their extermination is justified, it still wouldn’t make Hitler a good person. Hitler wasn’t exterminating the Jews for the good of humanity, he was doing it to rally the country in his favor and expand his personal power in Germany, and then further expand that power to encompass the world.
Harris didn’t bomb Germany purely to advance his career, he did it because he thought that that would be the best way to win the war against a power hungry madman.
While Nazi race science was a jumble of nonsense, one of its general beliefs was that it was the Aryans who were the master race and not specifically the Germans. Germans were believed to have the highest percentage of Aryans among them but not all Germans were Aryans and not all Aryans were Germans. So doing things to make Germany stronger was not the end goal for the Nazis - they saw winning the war as just another step along the way. The Nazis wanted Germany to win the war and conquer Europe so they could move on to their ultimate goal - purging all of the non-Aryan elements out of Europe and establishing a pure Aryan homeland. If Germany had won the war, the Nazis would have begun killing off the millions of Germans who didn’t meet their crazy standards.
I’m going to leave aside the the Holocaust for the moment.
Basically, Hitler was a nationalist, and a racist. He believed in what was good for Germany, and Germans, and didn’t care too much about other people. Actually, that’s too simple. He believed that German “cousins,” for lack of a better term, were worthy at least of the normal considerations given to enemies in wartime. That would include, for example, the Brits, white Americans (a ton of us have German ancestry), the French, and other Western Europeans.
The Slavs, mainly Russians and other Eastern Europeans, were inferior. His idea, ultimately, was to extinguish Russia as a nation, and make it into sort of a German colony. Sort of like what the US did in what is now the US to the people who used to live here.
Which explains why the war was so much more brutal in the East than in the West. Russia was in the end fighting a war for its survival, which was reflected in how desperately they fought the Germans.
In the beginning, you could make the argument Hitler was doing what any nationalist German would be doing: trying to regain territory lost in previous wars, unite ethnic Germans in a German state, and throw off the yoke of sanctions imposed on Germany after they lost the last war.
It is to be remembered that England and France declared war on Germany, after it invaded Poland. And that Poland was carved out of territory that used to be part of Germany, before it lost WWI. The German treatment of defeated France was not particularly harsh, as far as wars go, and there’s no evidence he contemplated a permanent occupation of France. He never seriously considered invading the UK, and in fact wanted peace with England, but Churchill wasn’t having it.
He believed - probably correctly - that war with Russia was inevitable.
But his early successes went to his head. The idea of extinguishing Russia, in addition to being evil, was fantastical. In other words, it never had a chance of succeeding.
Hitler was evil because he was fundamentally a racist. And I don’t think he was “ignorant”. It was racism born out of hatred and megalomania. I think even saying he was willfully ignorant is going to far.
To hell with Hitler. I am compelled to point out that you should all forget that the movie version of The Watchman even exists and go read the book.
It’s much more important to be remembered that England and France had guaranteed Poland’s territorial integrity and pledged to go to war to defend Poland if it was attacked before Hitler invaded Poland and Hitler invaded anyway. If you’re going to point out that Poland was carved out of territory that used to be German (and Russian) before WWI, one may as well point out that Poland was carved up between Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1795. German treatment of defeated France was quite harsh as wars go, and in violation conventions and accepted standards of war. 1.5 million French people were deported to Germany and used as slave labor during the war. 25% of the German work force consisted of foreign slave laborers, and the Nazis also had plans for the deportation and enslavement of Britain’s adult male population in the event of a successful invasion. While any possibility of an invasion of England was entirely unrealistic due to the Royal Navy, Hitler quite seriously planned to invade Britain. The claim that Hitler wanted peace but Churchill wasn’t having it is entirely without merit, regardless of how much Pat Buchanan plays at being an apologist for Hitler.
War with the Soviet Union was only inevitable because Hitler intended war with the Soviet Union. He spelled out in no uncertain terms that he considered it Germany’s destiny to take lebensraum in the east by war with the USSR and Poland as far back as Mein Kampf. Saying he was correct in his belief that war with Russia was inevitable makes little sense, as the only reason he was correct in this belief was because he intended to make it true.
By coincidence, I just returned from a business trip to Poland where I had the chance to tour the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau during some down time. As a professional project manager, it’s difficult to imagine someone like me drawing up efficient schedules, plans and timetables for building facilities like this, not to mention the connecting networks and infrastructure, knowing it’s purpose, and thinking that it’s a “good idea”.
Not just being able to consolidate and exterminate people from thousands of miles around by the thousands, but to also recycle all their stuff. Not to mention to have the foresight to keep some of them around for experimentation because you know that in the future you will need to force the sterilization of another 80 million Slavs.
But then I read OPs like this one, and it is easy to imagine how you can pretty much do anything, so long as you can convince enough emotionally detached morally disconnected weirdos that it’s in the interest of the “greater good” (which, coincidently, is also in their best interest).
There’s a reason the Nazis had all the teachers, businessmen, librarians, professors, lawyers, politicians, intellectuals and other educated people categorized as “enemies of the state”.
Yeah…that doesn’t sweeten the deal.
You know why Goebbels kept Hitler away from bars, right?
He got mean when he drank.
Prussia was carved out of territory that used to be Poland, if you want to play that silly game.
Even against foreign oppression, as with the case of Washington and Alfred the Great?
If a military victory is good because it acheives national liberation, then it’s not inherently good; it’s only good because of some external circumstance. Hence saying of someone simply that he desires military victory does nothing in itself to show that he is a good person; the circumstances might show that, but they might equally show that he was a very bad person.
Hitler wasn’t trying to make the world a better place.
Although he was Austrian he only wanted to increase the power of Germany and the blonde people.
Well, wars can be pretty brutal. During the American civil war tens of thousands died in POW camps. At Andersonville, for example, men picked through latrines in an effort to find bits of edible food in order to stay alive. In Elmira, 25% of the men confined there died in captivity.
Tens of thousands of civilians - women, children, entire families - we’re burned to death in the fire-bombing of Dresden and other German cities. (Ironically, at least according to Albert Speer, the allied shift to bombing German cities probably helped the German war effort, since the previous strategy had nearly crippled German war production.) And then there’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
So I wouldn’t say that Hitler’s treatment of France was “quite harsh” as far as wars go.
As far as Churchill is concerned, he was always quite openly and publicly determined to continue the war with Germany, “whatever the cost”. Link.
Hitler, on the other hand, wanted to put an end to fighting in the West, so he could put resources into Barbarossa.
He had nothing to gain by continuing to fight England.
I think both sides were contemplating war; not just Hitler, but Stalin too. Hitler wanted it sooner, Stalin later.