From what I’ve seen a lot of what brought Hitler to power was luck and the economic and morale situation in Germany after WWI. Was he so smart that he knew how to take advantage of the situation, was he lucky, or did he have really smart advisers who saw how to take advantage of the situation?
Bottom line, was Hitler a really smart guy, or was he someone who came to power basically because of circumstance?
If you read his book Mein Kamph, he comes across as an extremely intelligent and well spoken man. But then, if you look into it, you will find that he had several people who took his original thoughts and notes and translated them into the book.
So, I think that he may have written the main ideas for the book, but it was someone else who embellished it with all the flowery intellectual text.
The bottom line is that whether he was intelligent or not, it’s pretty hard to debate the fact that he was extremely self-destructive and insane to boot. After all, his overall goal was the destruction of everyone and everything. The only thing that was up for discussion is who and what were to be destroyed in what order.
But Adolph was one crazy fuck.
You can find an English translation ot the book at the following link:
During his final days was not their evidence of him being a little mental like didn’t he have a mental disorder and was high on drugs?
Hitler had good political instincts. He knew what would work in getting power.
Unfortunately for Germany and the rest of the world, having obtained power he turned out to be nowhere near as competent in running a country.
If you mean smart like over average test intelligence or wit for political manouvers, yes he was. He was also one grazy fuck. I don’t think there’s any contradiction in those. Even people who are competely discopnnected from reality can be clever. Hitler was not disconncted, but he was otherwise really, really weird. And clever.
He knew when his political opponents had to back down. A very useful skill. So he made ultimatums until his opponents went to war. A very skilled and powerful armed forces used new methods developed in the inter war period to great success until his opponents adopted them (those that remained). After that he doesn’t appear to be all that smart.
A large part of the reason the Nazis lost was that their codes were compromised and their chief of intelligence, Admiral Canaris, did all that they could to delay the realization that this had happened. That and hundreds upon hundreds of Russian army divisions.
Hitler was very good at recognizing a political opportunity and whipping a crowd into hysterics.
Under his regime, schools quit emphasizing academics and started stressing physical education and patriotic indoctrination.
He wasn’t smart enough to get out of the way and let the Generals run the war.
He wasn’t smart enough to realize that the Russian winter would give the advantage to the Russians and stop his invasion, just like Napoleon.
He was crazy enough to double-cross Stalin.
We had a thread not too long ago about his pre-war economic policies being unsound and unsustainable.
The problem is that “smart” is a vague term that can mean many things.
Was Hitler cunning? Undoubtedly. He knew how to identify and exploit the weaknesses of his opponents, especially in the beginning of his career, and he was an expert at positioning himself in the best place for maximum personal advantage.
Was Hitler flexible and adaptable? As time passed it became clear that he was not, especially when it came to military decisions. As the war went on, in general the position of Hitler was that land conquered was to be kept at all costs. No retreat, no surrender, no getting out of the fight today so that we can fight another day. The cost to Germany in material, men and strategic position because of this “fight to the last men” obsession was enormous, in my opinion.
I think that Hitler was “smart” in certain respects and astonishingly thick in others. It seems to me that he was a first-class politician (very likely the best politician in the whole 20th century), a cunning man, a good tactician, a terrible strategist, a complete madman, and an amazingly evil individual (the last two are not mutually exclusive) who not only attracted some other very evil people around him, but also got the worst out of many others.
Imho, he was smart the way Bill Clinton was smart (I am NOT saying Clinton = Hitler.) Clinton, by most accounts, was a genius in terms of people skills, motivation, and charisma. I think Hitler had that same charisma (before he went insane,) which inspired a nation and drew people to him that were loyal to the death.
Just a little nitpicking: Hitler was his own insane and evil self well before getting to power. “Mein Kampf” was written in or around 1923, it is said that while Hitler was in jail for the failed Munich beer-hall putsch.
And I forgot to include his out-of-this-Earth charisma in my previous post. He must have been one of the most charismatic individuals in the whole of recorded history. Which makes one shudder at the realization of how easy it is to whip up a whole nation into doing whatever the hell you want, if you are charismatic enough and ruthless enough.
Clinton is also way booksmart. He got into Harvard with no family legacy backing and was a Rhodes scholar. I am told by Ellen Tauscher (now a dep sec of state for nukes, but at the time a Congresswoman) that Clinton is the smartest man she ever met. And Tauscher is herself scary smart and as quick a study as I’ve ever met.
His ability to inspire thugs to follow him like lapdogs was beyond doubt, but how smart can you be to start a world war, really? Especially when your Plan B was “suicide in a bunker”.
Minor correction: Yale, not Harvard. But since Yale has higher admission standards, your point stands. 
Not many people know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.
I probably should have used “intelligent” as in having a high IQ. We can agree he was crazy and really narcissistic, but I’ve never seen anything that said he was book smart (like Clinton was mentioned here).
I think Hitler was above average in intellegence, but so are a lot of people.
Hitler got lucky. He had a Great Depression, a lost war and the ability to manipulate people.
Take away any of those three and there would’ve been no Hitler in Germany. If you look at the elections before the Nazis completely took power, you’d see as soon as the economy picked up, the Nazis lost seats. If it dipped again, they got seats.
Hitler genius came from his ability to learn from his errors. This is important as many thugs just keep hitting their heads on the wall. Hitler learned from his time in jail and used that to sieze power through the system not through violence. Many others would’ve tried violence again.
I don’t consider con men to be smart. How many con men exist today. According to USA Today the US State Department reports at least 21 BILLION dollars has been lost to the Nigerian Internet scams and estimates run as hgh as 50 billion. (Many people who lost are ashamed to report it)
So you see a scammer isn’t necessarily smart as in intelligence but in how to take advantage.
I keep seeing people call him crazy, but he wasn’t truly mentally ill until the last part of his life. Isn’t that right?
Evil and foolish, sure. But mentally ill? Was he diagnosed with anything or can he be diagnosed today with anything?
I think he did eventually lose a lot of function, and sort of hunched over and stared when he wasn’t ranting and railing at people. But for a long time he wasn’t that crazy, just evil. I think people need to define him as crazy because they fear what his behavior shows humans are capable of.
I know people who have spent time with Bill Clinton and they all report how much he stood out from everyone else they’d met and how intense the experience was when Clinton focused his full attention on them. If Hitler was like that, it would explain a lot.
By the end of his life he definitely had neurological symptoms (Parkinsonism, possibly aggravated by the insane cocktail of drugs given to him by his personal doctor, Morell).
He went on to be more “loud crazy” towards the end, indeed. However --although, mark it, this is my opinion-- it can be argued that he always had a not negligible touch of paranoia within him.
I think that the fact that he was able to get out the worst literally out of thousands of people shows very well what humans are capable of. He was crazy (to a higher or lower degree), evil, and with a charisma that was off the charts. A very, very dangerous combination.
When it comes to “what humans are capable of”, there are plenty of individuals who were way scarier than Hitler. Ever seen footage of Eichmann? Insignificant little bureaucrat. Absolutely banal. And one of the main architects of the extermination of millions of people.
Or, take Heydrich. This guy had an indisputable genius-level intellect, was perfectly sane (although it could be argued that he had sociopathic tendencies) and used his gifts, without flinching, for evil.
Would these two guys have ended up doing what they did if Hitler had not existed? Maybe Eichmann would have ended up spending his life as a mildly annoying second-rate bureaucrat in a small German town. Maybe Heydrich would have ended up becoming some spectacular jerk with a brilliant mind who might have reached tremendous heights or sunk into the gutter. There is a possibility that neither would have become a mass murderer.
But I digress. This thread is not about “what ifs”, but about how smart Hitler was, or wasn’t.