(Taking my cue from the other two Hitler threads…) It seems fairly obvious that if Hitler hadn’t instituted the Final Solution, he would not be viewed as the incarnation of evil he is now. But would he still be viewed unfavorably today? If not, is it even possible that he could be viewed as a national hero for having brought Germany out of the Depression?
Without the hateful stance angainst a minority population it is doubtful that he would have been able to obtain power. But if he had he might have just been another power hungry dictator like Napoleon.
Eeeville? Probably not. I am assuming that you include all of the various anti-jew/anti-slav stuff. (Crystal Night, Final solution, punishing entire villages for the acts of insurgents/partisans, etc.) He would have been seen as only a little worse then the Kaiser, IMO.
No, I dont think so. He eventually brought ruin to his country, and indeed, it was split apart into two seperate countries by the post war tensions (East and West Germany). His failures would ultimately outweigh the politically acceptable successes.
During the nineteenth century, Napoleon was considered something of an embodiment of eeevil – he was seen as spreading the French Revolutionary cancer and upend all of European civilization.
Well, you are assuming first that Hitler brought Germany out of the Great Depression. Further, the policies towards the economy implemented by Hitler and the Nazis, while they had some short term successes, would have been long term disasters. They required war - they could not be sustained by Germany alone. Once war started, the German economy became cannibalistic, surviving only through the destruction of other economies.
And if you take the Final Solution away, are you also taking the other policies of persecution of Jews away? Many Jews died and many more were brutally treated and driven out of their businesses and homes/countries before the final solution started. Ghettoization wasn’t part of the Final Solution as such. There is also the barbaric treatment of other groups, such as communists, socialists, labor unionists, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons etc. And also the extermination of Slavs, both civilians and Russian POWs. None of these are as such part of the Final Solution.
Without the Final Solution, Hitler should certainly still be viewed as evil. Whether he would or not - well, I think it likely that a Hitler without the Shoah would have been easier for some groups to rehabilitate as a bulwark against communism. Not that it would have been correct to do so.
I think it is genocide that seperates the bad from the evil. Killing millions of people for no rational reason is what distinguishes dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin from more ordinary figures like Tojo, Mussolini, Lenin, Castro, and Napoleon.
I’d say he’d still be pretty evil. He had the person that was the arguably the closest thing he had to a friend murdered for purely political reasons in the Night of the Long Knives purge, as well as most of the leadership of his organization. Not quite as evil as genocide, but it rates in there somewhere.
Have you read Fatherland by Robert Harris ?
In it he postulates that Germany won WWII and cleaned up all evidence of the Holocaust.
The victor writes the history books.
Given what he did to the Poles, and the Russians, yes he certainly would be considered evil.
If the only condition is that there be no Final Solution, Hitler would indeed still be viewed as one of the most evil humans ever to live. There is zero chance he would be viewed favourably (except by neo-nazi losers.)
Bear in mind that Hitler was already considered the incarnation of evil before the Final Solution began to be implemented. The final solution wasn’t begun until 1942, at which point Hitler was well established as an enemy of the human race. He’d still be responsible for thirty million or more deaths as a direct result of the war he started.
There’d be literally nothing positive about him. How did he lift Germany out of the Depression? When he took over in 1933, things were bad; when he died in 1945, things were worse.
Going from what 19th century literature I’ve read (which admittedly might not be very representative of the masses), I don’t think Napoleon was considered evil so much, as just something that was going to be great and revolutionary, and instead was just a failure. And even recognizing that he failed and never was able to become more than a dictator, there still always seems to be the question in the writers minds whether something could have been done to make it go right.
In a sense I guess that you could say that Napoleon was sort of the Elvis of the 19th century, where people fear that their own expectations of greatness drove a great man to a petty life.
Mussolini was pretty bad to the Abyssinians, but he doesn’t usually rate that high on the old Evilmeter - just another dictator.
-Joe
Tojo was convicted of war crimes, in fact pretty damn nasty war crimes.
*"The crimes
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.[5]
[edit] Mass killings
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military “murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture.”[6]
In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians as a direct result of the Japanese invasion.[7] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 260,000 civilians and prisoners of war.[8] Herbert Bix, citing the works of Mitsuyoshi Himeta and Akira Fujiwara, claims that the “Three Alls Policy” (Sankō Sakusen) a scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, and sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was in itself responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians. The mystery behind Hirohito’s role is explained in the authoritative book by David Bergamini, who translated war diaries and depositions from the tribunals from the original Japanese, and interviewed sources directly.
[edit] Experiments on humans and biological warfare
Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia, amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments. Anesthesia was not used because it was considered to affect results. In some victims, animal blood was injected into their bodies.
To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.[9]
According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths.[10] Furthermore, “tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases…”, resulting from the use of biological warfare."
*
Hitler waged blitzkrieg type war on most of Europe and Russia. This qualifies as evil by any definition. Like saying he made the trains run on time. would endear him to the Germans. No way.
Check out this photo (caption below).
“Two bewildered old ladies stand amid the leveled ruins of the almshouse which was Home; until Jerry dropped his bombs. Total war knows no bounds. Almshouse bombed Feb. 10, Newbury, Berks., England.” Naccarata, February 11, 1943. 111-SC-178801.
This is Rotterdam after the German bombing.
And [here’s](http://www.uoregon.edu/~kimball/images/1945ap28 BRL-Friedrichshain Wgn53.jpg) what Hitler brought on his own people (Berlin, 1945).
Judge for yourself what Hitler’s reputation would have been, even without the Holocaust.
The sheer scale of what Hitler did to the Polse and Russians completely eclipses what Mussolini did to the Abbyssinians.
Its estimated that 25% of Poles perished, and although the Russians bear a good deal of that responsibility, this is still most closely associated with Hitler.
It is sobering to consider that between them, the Japanese, Russians and Germans were responsible for well in excess of 100 million deaths directly, and yet the holocaust does make Hitler stand out from such a dreadful company.
Take away the holocaust and you maybe downgrade Hitler to level of utterly evil despot along the same level of Stalin, and that is not much of a step down.
Umm… didn’t Stalin kill more than Hitler, and Mao more still?
You must be thinking of something else. “Blitzkrieg” refers to the tactic of punching holes in enemy lines with armor and creating so much confusion that they become ineffective, forcing them to retreat, surrender, or be killed easily. I wouldn’t call that evil, at least not more than war normally is. We actually used similar tactics in the Gulf War, although with modern weapons.
Yes, it just means Lightning War - Lightning as in forked or sheet
Really it just means fast advance
Stalin and Mao are both reckoned to have killed more than Hitler, but this is not just a numbers game.
It’s the systematic and institutionalised way in which Hitler classified his victims and the industrial processes used to do away with them, which entailed more than mass murder, it also incuding extracting every possible iota of value from them, from their labour, to their physical components which were then exploited to manufacture products, not only that, Hitler was saw it as something of an accomplishment and the events are recorded in excrutiating detail, right down to the payment for the trains used to transport the victims.
I guess to the victims, it doesn’t much matter who was worst, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Tojo.