Ask me about Adolf Hitler.

[2/325Falcon]

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Got anything on how he reacted when Jesse Owens won 3 Gold Medals in the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin at which I believe he was in attendance?

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He probably said "LOL teh Nazis got pwned. [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]"

[ThaSaltCracka]

I don't really have any more questions, currently, however I hope this thread keeps going. Fascinating stuff here.

[sightless]

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His Grandfather on his father's side was Jewish. So that means Hitler was a 1/4 Jewish.

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Are you really sure thats true, as far as I know It is not known if he had jewish blood or not

[A_C_Slater]

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I have had an interest in Hitler for a long time and know tons about him as well.

With that said I think the OP's use if respect is misguided. I generally tell people that I acknowledge his abilities to do what he did and his rise to power. But I hardly respect or admire the man.

Hitler's greatest skill was understanding the use of propaganda or what we would call today spin. As a matter of fact I would say Hitler is responsible for the propaganda now having a negative meaning. You people should asks questions about that aspect of Hitler.

One of the reasons I think Hitler is such a interesting person is because of his ability to constantly use propaganda to mold people's perceptions. Because of this it's hard to get a real handle and what he really believed.

Also, Hitler was a military idiot. He caused Germany to lose the war almost single handily.

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Hitler's greatest skill was his oratory. Goebbel's handled the propoganda. Hitler was quite literally the greatest orator of all time. As David Bowie once said 'Adolf Hitler was the world's first rock star.'

He was indeed the first mass media superstar. I believe he was the first person to have screeching teenie bopppers try to mob him. It is strange, but true.

I do know that Lenin had a similar ability to work the crowd into a frenzy, but there simply isn't any video evidence to prove it that one can with Hitler.

From the Life and Death of a recount of a speech from the early days before he assumed power:

'Dressed in a frayed suit, he stood on a table or on a platform with his back close to the wall, his bodyguards nearby. He began slowly, almost haltingly, waiting for the moment when the audience seemed about to catch fire, and at that moment he would launch into a sharp, fierce denunciation of Germany's enemies in a voice that seemed to shoot across the hall like the cracking of a thousand whips. Thereafter he played on the audiences emotions of envy, rage, and hate, like a conductor waving music out of an orchestra. The hardest part, he confessed, was the know the exact moment when to strike, when to send his voice shooting fiercely across the hall. By the end of his speech his blue suit was soaked with sweat, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and his face was chalk white.'

So as you can see from this passage he wasn't a raving lunatic at the prey of helpless rages. The rage was calculated for effect. He delivered all his speeches with cold and calculating sobriety even if he might have appeared to be out of his mind with rage at the atrocities that Germany was forced to endure.

[esad]

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Himmler and other underlings are not important. Hitler, of course, is responsible, and I'm sure the OP would agree that Hitler had shown a trend toward and eventual mania about anti-semitism and the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. My question is perhaps related to the query about him not having fired a weapon at an enemy himself or having killed anyone himself. How much of the Wannsee conference and the results of that meeting were conveyed back to him? He says to Goering, "I want a final solution". Ok, then what? Was he getting updates? Or did Himmler/Heydrich et al. just carry out their own madness based on a loose framework?

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I'm going to give you my take on the Jews and Hitler.

Hitler was exposed to much anti-semitism in his youth and I'm sure he believed many of the Jewish conspiracy theories that were popular at the time. As he got older I'm sure that he realized that most of these theories were bs, but he saw the mass hatred of Jews and realized he could use this to his advantage.

There is a quote from Hitler (I think in Table Talk) where he says (I'm paraphrasing)

"I needed someone to blame and I chose the Jews, because I knew they couldn't defend themselves and nobody in Europe would rise up in their defense."

Hitler really understood how to control public opinion and he knew that if he could play on the anti-semetism of Europe that he could blame them for all the ills of the country. You don't have a job...it's the Jews. The economy is bad...it's the Jews, etc.. It makes people turn away from looking at the government and instead focuses them on an enemy that is a minority and easy to act against. It makes people feel good to see the Jews hauled off, because they are the cause of all their problems. Read some of the stuff about how the French gleefully turned over Jews to the Nazis if you don't believe me.

For Hitler and Europe the Jews were the perfect scapegoat for everything wrong. Of course Hitler wasn't going to stop there. He had other scapegoats lined up like the Slavs that he planned to blame and eventually kill as well.

Another reason for the death camps and the killing of course is a way for Hitler to maintain a hold over the people under him. If you can get your subordinates to commit murder for you then they have a vested interest in making sure you stay in power. They know if you are ever overthrown then they are sunk too. Dictators like Hitler have always done this. It creates a fanatical group of people who will do anything to make sure you stay in power. Ala the SS. Most people don't know that before the gas chambers the SS would go across the country-side of conquered territories and round up the Jews and machine gun them down. They killed at least a couple million this way before they came up with the Final Solution. (And one of the reason's they did was because word was getting back to the general population about these death squads and they wanted to keep it more hush hush.)

So, did Hitler want to kill the Jews because he hated them? I don't think he really cared who he killed per se, he wanted them killed because it helped him to maintain power, not because of some firm belief that that they were the cause of the world's problems. And that viewpoint seems much more sinister and evil then what most people believe. Having the will to commit genocide so you can maintain power is unimaginatively reprehensible.

Did Hitler know about the final solution and the details? Of course he did. Another quote from Hitler (paraphrasing)

"Don't put down on paper what you can communicate in person."

Hitler would get personal reports all the time, but he was smart enough to know that if he was ever overthrown he could claim that Himmler, et al did it on their own, since there is no record of it. But of course he knew exactly what was going on and encouraged it.

[A_C_Slater]

Although Hitler had anit-semitic tendencies during his early 20's (as was a kind of underground trend in Germany at the time) he really started to develop a hatred in his dealings with the Jewish art dealers whom he sold his painted postcards too. He felt that they were ripping him off and he hated them for the condescending way in which he felt that he was dealt with.

He may have hated them because he had relied on them so much during his powerless years. Hitler always ended up killing the people whom he had relied on in his weaker moments. For example he had the head of the SA killed. The SA was like his private miltia, but they were commanded by Rohm. He killed him and many others whom helped him to power during "The Kinght of of the Long Knives."

It was Intolerable to Hitler that he had ever needed anyone's help to achieve anything.

[Hamish McBagpipe]

Definitely not to trivialize anything you've mentioned but I don't think you've seen Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003) with Robert Carlyle which touches on tonnes of what you've been talking about. Very well done, a bit speculative but very well grounded, great performances, and touches on all the major events of his early life. Doesn't beat any biography I've read but gives an eerie insight, in some parts, to what it may have been like around him before becoming dictator.

[BigPoppa]

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It was Intolerable to Hitler that he had ever needed anyone's help to achieve anything.

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One of the more brutal African dictators (I think of Liberia) tortured and executed the middle class family that had rescued him from the streets and paid his way through school. It was explained in similar terms.

But I'd always heard The Night of the Long Knives explained as Hitler both destroying the only person whose power could rival his own and proving to the military and aristocratic establishment that he could be trusted to keep his people under control.

[A_C_Slater]

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Definitely not to trivialize anything you've mentioned but I don't think you've seen Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003) with Robert Carlyle which touches on tonnes of what you've been talking about. Very well done, a bit speculative but very well grounded, great performances, and touches on all the major events of his early life. Doesn't beat any biography I've read but gives an eerie insight, in some parts, to what it may have been like around him before becoming dictator.

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I have seen parts of this movie, but I think the portrayal of Hitler is more caricaturey (I know prob not a word) than it is in Max. It seems more like the producers made him how they wanted him to be. But I missed most of it, I remember that they didn't do justice to the power of his oratory which is essential if you want to understand how he acquired power.His oratory power is shown realistically in Max. I completely disagree with the tag line though.


"The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke


Hitler was the guy that decided to "do something" about the flourishing of evil. He had to combat the evil Bolsheviks and the evil Jews. He would make sure that "good" would prevail.

Now someone is probably thinking 'wait are you saying we should just let people die and not defend ourselves vs aggressors, blah, blah, blah!'

No, I'm saying the people that went out in the world looking for someone to lead them or to teach them how the world "really was" should have just done nothing. If people would just do that then it never gets to the mass genocide point.



Here's a tag line that I prefer 'The world is won by those who let it go, by letting it go, it all gets done. But if you try and try then the world is beyond the winning' -- Lao Tzu


Hitler tried harder than anyone to "win" the world in the conventional sense. The conventional sense being to exert your ego on everyone and everything around you.

[J.Brown]

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I read the title and thought this thread was going to be awful but I am really surprised. This is one of the most interesting threads I have read in a long time.

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i agree, but i am not really sure why.
this is sort of like totally unknown knowledge to me.
i asked my wife about what she thought of this thread and her response was "why would anyone care to know anything about him?" that was my first thought as well, but OP you have done a nice job of explaining why.

however i still, and will always, struggle with humanizing hitler in anyway. he became the face of evil that stalin could have been if he was more well known to the general public. very informative for sure. J.