Has anyone else read Mein Kampf?

[Patito de Hule]

Wikipedia has this to say about Mein Kampf

The book is significant in our time because a retrospective review of the text reveals the crystallisation of Hitler's decision to completely exterminate the Jewish presence in Europe.

I agree. This is really an egg-head's way of stating why I read the book. Did I come away with a better understanding of Hitler's anti-Semitism? I'm not sure that I did. I may have lacked the proper predisposition or the intelligence to do so.

Further down, the Wikipedia quotes Mussolini on the subject and better reflects my thoughts on reading the book.

Italian Fascist dictator and Nazi ally, Benito Mussolini, was also critical of the book, saying that the book was "a boring tome that I have never been able to read" and remarked that Hitler's beliefs, as expressed in the book, were "little more than commonplace clichés."

Precisely my feelings after a long masochistic exercise in reading.

[stlukesguild]

Obviously no one is saying that *all* the German people were mad... just the ones that helped Hitler get into power (i.e., a majority, or a large minority...)

Isn't being anti-semitic a form of mental illness? Holding someone not to be human simply because of their race certainly sounds nuts to me!

What is often forgotten, in relation to the rise of the Third Reich, is just what life was like in Germany after WWI. It is easy to point at an enemy (or former enemy) nation and suggest that somehow they were different... mad... insane... and such a leader could never attain power here... and yet we have had our Dick Cheney (among others) who merely failed to convince quite as many. But when one considers the abject poverty rampant in Germany after WWI, the manner in which the German nation was humiliated by the French who occupied their industrial states and seized all the factories and machinery, the riots and violence on the streets and lack of ability of the government to control the situation... well then certainly anyone who was able to not only turn this situation around, but build Germany into an economic and military powerhouse would surely be recognized as something akin to a messiah by many.

[stlukesguild]

What saved Germany from the Reich's insanity, the allies or these persons, the Nuremberg trials or anything else?

Tell me really what the Nuremberg Trials achieved? Little more than some semblance of vengeance robbed as justice. We got rid of all those German generals who repeatedly humiliated us in battle in order to make sure we'd never have to face them again. We forcibly kidnapped as many scientists (especially experts in the fields of physics, jet engines, rockets, and nuclear physics) to employ within our own military and space programs. We wiped out the few high architects of the Holocaust that we could lay our hands on. At the same time, the major power-brokers behind the war such as Alfred Krupp were left untouched.

[Darcy88]

[QUOTE=Emil Miller;1118383]

You have misinterpreted what Prof. Kershaw has written, he didn't say that Hitler wasn't a tyrant but that he was not imposed on Germany. It's ridiculous to say that he could have done it without the support of the population at large regardless of those minorities that disagreed with his policies. In fact, after he'd eliminated the other parties, his popularity soared as his government started to put its programme into effect.
I suspect that you don't know very much about Germany from personal experience but I have spoken to people who were alive at the time and whose description of events is at variance with those who were not even born and who rely solely on what they choose to read about it.
As for democracy, Hitler introduced the plebiscite which meant that he went to the people for approval of policies that had a direct bearing on the running of the country.

The articles of the "Plebiscite Law" were brief and clear:

The Reich government may ask the people whether or not it approves of a measure planned by or taken by the government. This may also apply to a law.
A measure submitted to plebiscite will be considered as established when it receives a simple majority of the votes. This will apply as well to a law modifying the Constitution.
If the people approves the measure in question, it will be applied in conformity with article III of the Law for Overcoming the Distress of the People and the Reich.
The Reich Interior Ministry is authorized to take all legal and administrative measures necessary to carry out this law.

Berlin, July 14, 1933.

Hitler, Frick

The electoral pledge given by Hitler that day was not vain rhetoric. One national referendum followed another: in 1933, in 1934, in 1936, and in 1938, not to mention the Saar plebiscite of 1935, which was held under international supervision.

The ballot was secret, and the voter was not constrained. No one could have prevented a German from voting no if he wished. And, in fact, a certain number did vote no in every plebiscite. Millions of others could just as easily have done the same. However, the percentage of "No" votes remained remarkably low - usually under ten percent. In the Saar region, where the plebiscite of January 1935 was supervised from start to finish by the Allies, the result was the same as in the rest of the Reich: more than 90 percent voted "Yes" to unification with Hitler's Germany! Hitler had no fear of such secret ballot plebiscites because the German people invariably supported him.

Was a Hitler a tyrant? As it turned out, the answer is yes, but it's all to easy to say so now. Being wise after the event isn't exactly the pinnacle of intellectual attainment.

So he consulted with the people but enacted his own policies regardless of whether they received majority support? That's like a rapist asking a woman for intercourse before forcing himself on her. You don't seem to have much of an idea of how totalitarian regimes operate. They silence oppposition by force and by threat of force. These Hitler did masterfully. If it wasn't a death sentence to write or publish or speak or act against the Nazi party I'm sure his "support" would have been far below what it was. There can be no form of democracy in a nation where opposition parties have been expelled and concentration camps built to hold until their grim deaths any who stand against the regime. You also seem to forget that Hitler had no scruples about lying. He lied and lied and lied throughout his speeches in a degree and manner so incerdible it puts other lying politicians to shame. He said whatever he needed to say to sway the people. He was like an even more morally abject version of Sarah Palin. Your revisionist history is at odds with Hitler's own actions and words. You seem to be arguing that Hitler's 90 percent support was the result of genuine popular love and approval more than it can be attributed to the success of his bold and relentless campaign of propoganda and intimidation.

[Patito de Hule]

This is a literature forum and a general literature subforum. The question was about reading Mein Kampf, presumably as literature. Your comments are ad hominem and add nothing whatever to any discussion on either Hitler or his book.

Have you read Mein Kampf? The OP asks whether anyone would be willing to discuss the book.

Well, I thought this was a moderated literature forum. Anyone interested in Mein Kampf here?

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=Darcy88;1118425]

So he consulted with the people but enacted his own policies regardless of whether they received majority support? That's like a rapist asking a woman for intercourse before forcing himself on her. You don't seem to have much of an idea of how totalitarian regimes operate. They silence opposition by force and by threat of force. These Hitler did masterfully. If it wasn't a death sentence to write or publish or speak or act against the Nazi party I'm sure his "support" would have been far below what it was. There can be no form of democracy in a nation where opposition parties have been expelled and concentration camps built to hold until their grim deaths any who stand against the regime. You also seem to forget that Hitler had no scruples about lying. He lied and lied and lied throughout his speeches in a degree and manner so incredible it puts other lying politicians to shame. He said whatever he needed to say to sway the people. He was like an even more morally abject version of Sarah Palin. Your revisionist history is at odds with Hitler's own actions and words. You seem to be arguing that Hitler's 90 percent support was the result of genuine popular love and approval more than it can be attributed to the success of his bold and relentless campaign of propoganda and intimidation.

One of the reasons I went to work in Germany was because I had read a good deal about Hitler in books such as Professor Alan Bullock's 'Hitler-A Study in Tyranny', William Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', and 'Berlin Diary', etc. etc. and I wanted to find out for myself how they corresponded to the view of people who had actually lived through the period.
The people I spoke to said that they didn't feel intimidated and that they would not have voted for Hitler if they had thought that they would be. They were ordinary people who worked with me and in a bar and a restaurant that I used regularly close to where was living in Nuremberg and also others whom I met in Munich, which I visited often. My employer and my landlady both said that life in Germany prior to Hitler was unbearable under the democratic parties that had governed Germany for 14 years before Hitler came to power. The men I spoke to had mostly served in the war and still said that life under Hitler was better than before. This is the difference between the selective reading of books and the real thing. It is obvious that Hitler had massive support in Germany and the numerous newsreels that illustrate it do not show people who are being intimidated into supporting the regime. I do not think that Hitler lied more than politicians do generally. I speak German and those speeches that I have heard, despite all the theatrical hand waving, are not as violent or deceitful as non German speakers might be led to imagine. Your ludicrous comparison of Hitler with Sarah Palin is simply another example of misunderstanding the political and social reality of the period.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Well, I thought this was a moderated literature forum. Anyone interested in Mein Kampf here?

It seems the opinion by many members here has been made apparent: it sucks. You can't force people to discuss what you want them to, especially if the majority finds the subject, in this case Mein Kumpf, a boring subject.

[JBI]

What saved Germany from the Reich's insanity, the allies or these persons, the Nuremberg trials or anything else?

Tell me really what the Nuremberg Trials achieved? Little more than some semblance of vengeance robbed as justice. We got rid of all those German generals who repeatedly humiliated us in battle in order to make sure we'd never have to face them again. We forcibly kidnapped as many scientists (especially experts in the fields of physics, jet engines, rockets, and nuclear physics) to employ within our own military and space programs. We wiped out the few high architects of the Holocaust that we could lay our hands on. At the same time, the major power-brokers behind the war such as Alfred Krupp were left untouched.

Meh, just look at the rhetoric too. We are still thinking of Jews within Nazi understandings. The major difficulty of such a discourse of nazism is the creation of the Jew. As historians would note, Jew and race are two different things; you could, for instance, be a German Jew who was proudly a German, and loathed by your French neighbor for such a reason. Likewise you could be a Moroccan and still consider yourself a Jew without issues of identity.

What world war 2 really hammered home was this idea of the Jew somehow as something completely outside local society. Sure, it started before then, and its echoes are still heard in various discourses, but any historian would be sure to note Jews fought on both sides of World War 1, proudly and in fair numbers. The idea of a Jewish race seems cemented by the idea of a desire to destroy such a "race". The same concept eventually lead to a Jewish exodus from many traditional centres of the world - the idea of a separate, particular race is very much a product of the hate that people felt slightly before, and especially during and after Hitler.

Take our world for instance, how much of our critical understanding of the world is rooted within that same understanding of "race." We don't, for instance hear the same talks about Arab Jews as we do Arab Christians and the general category of "Arab" itself within a discourse - how do we rationalize that within our own terms of legacy.

If anything, the Racial crap that Hitler built his career of hatred upon has the same stickiness in our world, and created the reality of the terms it imagined. We talk of Jewish race, of United Jewish whatever, but we fail to realize how that is playing in the same rhetoric as Hitler, except as a form of appropriation.

If you want to talk Jewish race, I am forced to remind posters to at least question the idea of Race itself. Granted certain cultures make a bigger deal than others about it (making one select one of a few options on a census, for instance) yet in terms of Jews - you have Ethiopian Jews, Chinese Jews, Uzbek Jews (who are a subbranch of Buchari Jews), you have Moroccan Jews, Egyptian Jews, Turkish Jews, German Jews, Russian Jews, etc. etc. etc. If one thinks they look the same, practice the same customs, speak the same languages, or enjoy the same things then they are surely mistaken.

Yet somehow, there is a weird sort of affinity in perception because of the perpetual otherness created by the rhetoric of anti-semitism, and of Racialism.

[Darcy88]

[QUOTE=Emil Miller;1118498]

One of the reasons I went to work in Germany was because I had read a good deal about Hitler in books such as Professor Alan Bullock's 'Hitler-A Study in Tyranny', William Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', and 'Berlin Diary', etc. etc. and I wanted to find out for myself how they corresponded to the view of people who had actually lived through the period.
The people I spoke to said that they didn't feel intimidated and that they would not have voted for Hitler if they had thought that they would be. They were ordinary people who worked with me and in a bar and a restaurant that I used regularly close to where was living in Nuremberg and also others whom I met in Munich, which I visited often. My employer and my landlady both said that life in Germany prior to Hitler was unbearable under the democratic parties that had governed Germany for 14 years before Hitler came to power. The men I spoke to had mostly served in the war and still said that life under Hitler was better than before. This is the difference between the selective reading of books and the real thing. It is obvious that Hitler had massive support in Germany and the numerous newsreels that illustrate it do not show people who are being intimidated into supporting the regime. I do not think that Hitler lied more than politicians do generally. I speak German and those speeches that I have heard, despite all the theatrical hand waving, are not as violent or deceitful as non German speakers might be led to imagine. Your ludicrous comparison of Hitler with Sarah Palin is simply another example of misunderstanding the political and social reality of the period.

It is a ludicrous comparison because I doubt Palin would set out to eliminate entire races of people. Life under Hitler was good? Was it good for the German people when their towns were being shelled and bombed to smithereens as a result of Hitler's insanely ridiculous aggressive waging of war? Was it good for the millions confined to concentration camps, for the millions put to the gas? Do I really have to go dig up his speeches talking about Jewish conspiracies to wipe out the "Aryan" race? Maybe you simply get off on going against political correctness and have decided to take on the greatest challenge possible, that of whitewashing National Socialism. You say he was a smart man, that he was good for Germany, that the people loved him. Even if that is in some small way possibly true his military aggression and racial genocide mark him down as one of the most degraded and repulsive human specimens to ever befoul all of history. Anyone who can look at the man's words and deeds and not come to the conclusion that he suffered from a plethora of psychological disturbances, from narcissistic personality disorder to bipolar disorder to sociopathy, is regarding the man with coloured lenses, plain and simple.

Your anecdotes of people saying they did not feel intimidated do not remove from the towering stacks of evidence the plain fact that Hitler had a massive armed police force, concentration camps across Europe, total control over the presses, a downright Spartan like totalitarian system of psychological training beginning in childhood, in addition to a host of other means of manipulation at his disposal.

I'm half German. I have relatives there and here who lived under Naziism. I haven't talked to them at length about it, but from their own mouths they were not big fans of Adolf Hitler.

[JuniperWoolf]

Well, you do not give him enough credit. What would you make of Napoleon then? Also crap? What of Caesar, also crap?

They accomplished much, much more while simultaneously improving their nation and it's reputation. The Naopleonic Code changed the entire world for the better. I'm not sure if you're talking about Julius or Augustus Caesar but both made significant contributions in several fields, philosophy being an obvious one. Also, they lasted much longer and after they died there were still people who loved them as opposed to 99.99bar% of all people worldwide hating them with all of their hearts. There are certain things which make a great leader, and Hitler failed on all fronts except expansion, and even that was just a serious strategic blunder, as he later learned. I think the problem is that he was so impressively, invasively bad that people confuse it with greatness.

Well, I thought this was a moderated literature forum. Anyone interested in Mein Kampf here?

No.

[mal4mac]

This is a literature forum and a general literature subforum. The question was about reading Mein Kampf, presumably as literature.

It's not literature, it's garbage.

Anyone want to read their garbage?

Actually, there's probably more enlightenment there... is there really so much fat in Soya Milk?!

[kiki1982]

[QUOTE=Darcy88;1118565]

It is a ludicrous comparison because I doubt Palin would set out to eliminate entire races of people. Life under Hitler was good? Was it good for the German people when their towns were being shelled and bombed to smithereens as a result of Hitler's insanely ridiculous aggressive waging of war? Was it good for the millions confined to concentration camps, for the millions put to the gas? Do I really have to go dig up his speeches talking about Jewish conspiracies to wipe out the "Aryan" race? Maybe you simply get off on going against political correctness and have decided to take on the greatest challenge possible, that of whitewashing National Socialism. You say he was a smart man, that he was good for Germany, that the people loved him. Even if that is in some small way possibly true his military aggression and racial genocide mark him down as one of the most degraded and repulsive human specimens to ever befoul all of history. Anyone who can look at the man's words and deeds and not come to the conclusion that he suffered from a plethora of psychological disturbances, from narcissistic personality disorder to bipolar disorder to sociopathy, is regarding the man with coloured lenses, plain and simple.

Your anecdotes of people saying they did not feel intimidated do not remove from the towering stacks of evidence the plain fact that Hitler had a massive armed police force, concentration camps across Europe, total control over the presses, a downright Spartan like totalitarian system of psychological training beginning in childhood, in addition to a host of other means of manipulation at his disposal.

I'm half German. I have relatives there and here who lived under Naziism. I haven't talked to them at length about it, but from their own mouths they were not big fans of Adolf Hitler.

I felt the need to put a different perspective on the matter.

I do not condone National Socialism and do not approve of it, but it is necessary to see it from another viewpoint. And I need to agree with Emil Miller on this point. Astounding as it may seem, it is true.

It is not because you particular relatives did not like Hitler that the greatest part of German civilians could not be completely taken in by him and the great big shows he put on. In fact I would contend the opposite, that there were very few who were smart enough to see through it (like there are very few who see through the war on terror these days) and that there were even fewer who tried to do anything against it.

I suppose it was the naïvety of the vast majority of people (as that is still the case today) and the overall economic situation which caused the whole thing.
The Treaty of Versailles, now widely considered amongst historians to be one of the causes of WWII and National Socialism, made sure that Germany was unable to benefit from the gay twenties and thus sank into deeper recession than even America. There were places in Germany where unemployment got to 30%! To put this in perspective, we are now getting edgy when things come to 15%... There was no wellfare system unlike now and people would just die of hunger because there were no jobs available. Think Greece right now times two probably. After WWI buying a loaf of bread in Berlin could cost you a piano. And the allied, instead of helping the poor people who had not asked for this war, left them to die in the streets of Berlin. Mainly down to the French (Pétin if I am not mistaken) who held a rather conservative view of warfare...
So Germany spent the booming twenties paying compensation to other countries and not investing in its own economy so that the already vast levels of unemployment before the recession did not go down, an effect of WWI which solved itself in places like the UK through government investment partly, but which could of course not be solved in Germany because the German government had to spend all its money on compensation to countries like the UK while the latter was living it up on champagne so to say. You can see why the first thing Hitler did when he got to power was to stop those payments and behold, the Wirtschaftswunder. Not a miracle in itself, rather a New Deal à la Roosevelt, but one that certainly caught on.
And then there were vast amounts of Jewish shop owners, bankers etc. They were rich, they were still rich in the thirties, and they kept themselves to themselves so they were an ideal target.

By the time Hitler got to power in 1933, people were sick of no pleasure and so he gave it to them, with good effect... The old Roman tactics of bread and games distracted most naive people from the real stuff that was going on.

Videos in the museum of the Nürnberg rally grounds show two women, friends, now in their 80s, but back then teenagers telling of a story they heard about a Jewish man who was lifted from his bed and at least severely beaten (if not shipped off or battered to death). They said, at the time, they wondered whether, I quote, 'the Führer did not know about this. Surely he cannot have approved this.' They said they were now ashamed of their own naïvety, but at the time, they were indoctrinated by the system, their school the Hitler Mädel (Hitler youth, but for girls) and did not think about Hitler in a bad way (Führer cult). They also said they knew nothing about democracy when they got out of school at 18 and they said about the deportation of the Jews, I quote again, that 'they thought they were going to a place all together, and that surely can't [have] be[en] a bad thing.' After the war and indeed during it, when they learned about things like Auschwitz they found it hard to believe they said and felt quite disheartened by having been so naïve. Hardly surprising though, as even the Americans refused to believe that Jews were being killed in a industrial manner from the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto at the time of the uprising there. They only really believed it when they saw piles of real, human and dead bodies in the camps they liberated. What chance did normal citizens have in believing that something like this was at all possible? Sure, we would believe it now and if in Hungary the same were close to happening, everyone would put a stop to it, but we know it is possible, abck then in the 1940s it was unprecedented and so intensely evil that it is almost inconceivable.

A man, displaying army positions they had to practice for a parade, ironically with an umbrella said that it was hard not to be pulled along by the enthusiasm of other boys. He said that they were permanently prepared for war and the idea of dying for the honour of Germany.

I think it would have been very hard to disagree with that regime if you had been living in a place where everyone was hungry before, without a job. As Emil Miller said, times were sh*t before uncle Adolph...
Forced Arianisation of shops will have added a lot of money to the system as well. Think about it. A shop like that one that burned down in London, bed shop. How much money is it worth? Let's say 500,000 pounds. If that had been a Jewish family's, they would have had to sell it to an Arian for maybe a quarter (at best, in the beginning), so for 125,000. If they refused after a while it was confiscated and literally given to an Arian. That is just pure profit. No loans from the bank, instant business and the money flows straight into the system because the owner can employ people with it or buy things with it which benefits other people in turn.

The people in Coventry were an unfortunate first case of carpet bombing, but why, pray, were the people and not least the wonderful city of Dresden to be subjected to a perfected version of it? Yes, a lot of people died in Coventry, but was it necessary to make even more people die in Dresden? Those people who died over there did not ask for this war to happen and asked even less to die in a pretty unstrategic bombing just for revenge.

I would not say that life was a breeze under Nazism, but it wasn't all that hard if you leave bombings to one side. Bombings were not on little villages and were not duting the 30s, but Nazism penetrated the whole thing, also little villages. I lived in a small village called Wiltingen in Rheinland-Pfalz which has now a population of 2,000. Back then less, no doubt and it contained a Jewish population of one family. They had a shop (as Jews do) with collonial goods. A few of them evidently escaped to South-Africa, but the eldest generation stayed and had to sell the shop and eventually died in Auschwitz. In my small market town (essentially that is what it is) now, the population steadily decreased. I am quite confident that the people were not malicious, only people do not care about the system, because people are only interested in their own lives (only look at the Daily Mail headlines about Polish people sometimes). If their lives are good or adequate (and that was evidently the case, at least in the beginning), then sod the rest.

The Third Reich was much more intricate and clever than you presume. By the time anyone knew what was going on, Hitler had secured power through emergency status after the Reichstag burned down and he blamed the commis for it.

[Darcy88]

[QUOTE=kiki1982;1118687]

I felt the need to put a different perspective on the matter.

I do not condone National Socialism and do not approve of it, but it is necessary to see it from another viewpoint. And I need to agree with Emil Miller on this point. Astounding as it may seem, it is true.

It is not because you particular relatives did not like Hitler that the greatest part of German civilians could not be completely taken in by him and the great big shows he put on. In fact I would contend the opposite, that there were very few who were smart enough to see through it (like there are very few who see through the war on terror these days) and that there were even fewer who tried to do anything against it.

I suppose it was the naïvety of the vast majority of people (as that is still the case today) and the overall economic situation which caused the whole thing.
The Treaty of Versailles, now widely considered amongst historians to be one of the causes of WWII and National Socialism, made sure that Germany was unable to benefit from the gay twenties and thus sank into deeper recession than even America. There were places in Germany where unemployment got to 30%! To put this in perspective, we are now getting edgy when things come to 15%... There was no wellfare system unlike now and people would just die of hunger because there were no jobs available. Think Greece right now times two probably. After WWI buying a loaf of bread in Berlin could cost you a piano. And the allied, instead of helping the poor people who had not asked for this war, left them to die in the streets of Berlin. Mainly down to the French (Pétin if I am not mistaken) who held a rather conservative view of warfare...
So Germany spent the booming twenties paying compensation to other countries and not investing in its own economy so that the already vast levels of unemployment before the recession did not go down, an effect of WWI which solved itself in places like the UK through government investment partly, but which could of course not be solved in Germany because the German government had to spend all its money on compensation to countries like the UK while the latter was living it up on champagne so to say. You can see why the first thing Hitler did when he got to power was to stop those payments and behold, the Wirtschaftswunder. Not a miracle in itself, rather a New Deal à la Roosevelt, but one that certainly caught on.
And then there were vast amounts of Jewish shop owners, bankers etc. They were rich, they were still rich in the thirties, and they kept themselves to themselves so they were an ideal target.

By the time Hitler got to power in 1933, people were sick of no pleasure and so he gave it to them, with good effect... The old Roman tactics of bread and games distracted most naive people from the real stuff that was going on.

Videos in the museum of the Nürnberg rally grounds show two women, friends, now in their 80s, but back then teenagers telling of a story they heard about a Jewish man who was lifted from his bed and at least severely beaten (if not shipped off or battered to death). They said, at the time, they wondered whether, I quote, 'the Führer did not know about this. Surely he cannot have approved this.' They said they were now ashamed of their own naïvety, but at the time, they were indoctrinated by the system, their school the Hitler Mädel (Hitler youth, but for girls) and did not think about Hitler in a bad way (Führer cult). They also said they knew nothing about democracy when they got out of school at 18 and they said about the deportation of the Jews, I quote again, that 'they thought they were going to a place all together, and that surely can't [have] be[en] a bad thing.' After the war and indeed during it, when they learned about things like Auschwitz they found it hard to believe they said and felt quite disheartened by having been so naïve. Hardly surprising though, as even the Americans refused to believe that Jews were being killed in a industrial manner from the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto at the time of the uprising there. They only really believed it when they saw piles of real, human and dead bodies in the camps they liberated. What chance did normal citizens have in believing that something like this was at all possible? Sure, we would believe it now and if in Hungary the same were close to happening, everyone would put a stop to it, but we know it is possible, abck then in the 1940s it was unprecedented and so intensely evil that it is almost inconceivable.

A man, displaying army positions they had to practice for a parade, ironically with an umbrella said that it was hard not to be pulled along by the enthusiasm of other boys. He said that they were permanently prepared for war and the idea of dying for the honour of Germany.

I think it would have been very hard to disagree with that regime if you had been living in a place where everyone was hungry before, without a job. As Emil Miller said, times were sh*t before uncle Adolph...
Forced Arianisation of shops will have added a lot of money to the system as well. Think about it. A shop like that one that burned down in London, bed shop. How much money is it worth? Let's say 500,000 pounds. If that had been a Jewish family's, they would have had to sell it to an Arian for maybe a quarter (at best, in the beginning), so for 125,000. If they refused after a while it was confiscated and literally given to an Arian. That is just pure profit. No loans from the bank, instant business and the money flows straight into the system because the owner can employ people with it or buy things with it which benefits other people in turn.

The people in Coventry were an unfortunate first case of carpet bombing, but why, pray, were the people and not least the wonderful city of Dresden to be subjected to a perfected version of it? Yes, a lot of people died in Coventry, but was it necessary to make even more people die in Dresden? Those people who died over there did not ask for this war to happen and asked even less to die in a pretty unstrategic bombing just for revenge.

I would not say that life was a breeze under Nazism, but it wasn't all that hard if you leave bombings to one side. Bombings were not on little villages and were not duting the 30s, but Nazism penetrated the whole thing, also little villages. I lived in a small village called Wiltingen in Rheinland-Pfalz which has now a population of 2,000. Back then less, no doubt and it contained a Jewish population of one family. They had a shop (as Jews do) with collonial goods. A few of them evidently escaped to South-Africa, but the eldest generation stayed and had to sell the shop and eventually died in Auschwitz. In my small market town (essentially that is what it is) now, the population steadily decreased. I am quite confident that the people were not malicious, only people do not care about the system, because people are only interested in their own lives (only look at the Daily Mail headlines about Polish people sometimes). If their lives are good or adequate (and that was evidently the case, at least in the beginning), then sod the rest.

The Third Reich was much more intricate and clever than you presume. By the time anyone knew what was going on, Hitler had secured power through emergency status after the Reichstag burned down and he blamed the commis for it.

In making a final assessment of Hitler as a man and leader its all well and good to take these things you say into consideration. He brought Germany back from the economic and spiritual brink. But up to 9 million Germans died in the war he played a very, very large part in bringing about. 6 million Jews were murdered on his watch and under his orders. By the time he ignominiously took his own life Soviet tanks were entering Berlin. Half his country wound up being occupied for the next 40 odd years. He only achieved his short success because he had absolutely no scruples about doing anything it took to accomplish his sickly grandiose and inhumane ends. The people loved him because he lied to them and he manipulated them in ways wholly unconcerned with truth or honour or goodness, by any definition of those words.There was no international Jewish conspiracy to eliminate the "Aryan" race. Hitler was the aggressor. He wanted war from the very beginning. He had plans of genocide stinking in his venomous heart from the beginning. He was a maniac, a subhuman sociopath. Germany needed a strong man, not a strong man with maniacally homicidal and suicidal intentions.

Two main points to disprove the notion that he was a genius. One, he let the British Expeditionary Force escape from the beaches of Dunkirk, ordering his commanders on the ground to halt. He leaves a free Britain in his rear and then sets off to take out Russia, believing in his grandiosity that he can outdo Napoleon. Two, his interpretation of Nietzsche is a boy's interpretation, one lacking any understanding of the nuances of the philosopher's thought. Nietzsche was one of the greatest thinkers Germany has ever produced and Adolf Hitler was the clear apotheosis of all that Nietzsche despised in Germany.

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=Darcy88;1118565]

It is a ludicrous comparison because I doubt Palin would set out to eliminate entire races of people. Life under Hitler was good? Was it good for the German people when their towns were being shelled and bombed to smithereens as a result of Hitler's insanely ridiculous aggressive waging of war? Was it good for the millions confined to concentration camps, for the millions put to the gas? Do I really have to go dig up his speeches talking about Jewish conspiracies to wipe out the "Aryan" race? Maybe you simply get off on going against political correctness and have decided to take on the greatest challenge possible, that of whitewashing National Socialism. You say he was a smart man, that he was good for Germany, that the people loved him. Even if that is in some small way possibly true his military aggression and racial genocide mark him down as one of the most degraded and repulsive human specimens to ever befoul all of history. Anyone who can look at the man's words and deeds and not come to the conclusion that he suffered from a plethora of psychological disturbances, from narcissistic personality disorder to bipolar disorder to sociopathy, is regarding the man with coloured lenses, plain and simple.

Your anecdotes of people saying they did not feel intimidated do not remove from the towering stacks of evidence the plain fact that Hitler had a massive armed police force, concentration camps across Europe, total control over the presses, a downright Spartan like totalitarian system of psychological training beginning in childhood, in addition to a host of other means of manipulation at his disposal.

I'm half German. I have relatives there and here who lived under Naziism. I haven't talked to them at length about it, but from their own mouths they were not big fans of Adolf Hitler.

Once again you are misrepresenting the situation and just because I don't take your black and white view of the events under discussion doesn't in any way represent whitewashing National Socialism. If quoting acknowledged experts on the subject and testimony from those who were alive at the time constitutes whitewashing in your view, it shows an ignorance unworthy of reply.
However, to put the record straight here's an extract from Professor Ian Kershaw writing for the German Magazine Spiegel International.

Much suggests, in fact, that between the death of Hindenburg in August 1934 and the expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland four years later Hitler was indeed successful in gaining the backing of the vast majority of the German people, something of immeasurable importance for the disastrous course of German policy ahead. Apart perhaps from the immediate aftermath of the astonishing victory in France in summer 1940, Hitler's popularity was never higher than at the height of his foreign-policy successes in 1938

So yes, Hitler did have the backing of the vast majority of the German people.

That Hitler had rid Germany of mass unemployment and rescued the country from the depths of the depression was seen by many Germans long after the war as a major achievement, whatever disasters had later followed. Good living conditions and full employment were among the positive attributes of Hitler recorded in opinion surveys in the American occupied zone in the late 1940s, while a sample of young Germans in north Germany around a decade later thought Hitler had done much good in abolishing unemployment. As late as the 1970s, Ruhr workers still had positive memories of the peacetime years of the Third Reich, which they associated with full employment and the pleasures of excursions with the Nazi leisure organization, "Kraft durch Freude," or Strength Through Joy.

This bears out my own enquiries into what many Germans felt about life under Hitler before WW11.


By this time, August 1939, all sections of the regime, and the masses who had been so jubilant at Hitler's every "success," had ensured that their fate was tied to the decisions of the Führer. So it would remain down to 1945. In the wartime years, as seemingly glorious victory gave way to mounting, inexorable calamity, as defeat on defeat inevitably eroded the charismatic basis of his leadership, and as it became plain that he was leading Germany into the abyss, the fateful bonds with Hitler that had been sealed in the "good years" of the 1930s ensured that there was now no way back. The German people, having supported Hitler's triumphs, were now condemned to suffer the catastrophe into which he had led them.

So you see, Professor Kershaw doesn't in any way exonerate Hitler from the terrible consequence of the Nazi regime. In fact he goes into considerable detail regarding the repression of those who disagreed with the regime as do others that I have quoted. It's just that they maintain an objective stance in presenting their findings rather than resort to hysterical ranting. If as you say, you have German relatives who grew up under National Socialism, they must be pretty ancient because the Third Reich lasted from 1933 until 1945. So anyone born in 1933 would have been 12 years old by the time the regime ended. I doubt that they would have much to say, particularly at this late stage, but in the event of them having survived to a very old age, they wouldn't have any personal experience of how terrible life was in Germany before Hitler came to power.
My own enquiries were carried out over thirty years ago and those I spoke to are almost certainly dead.

[Darcy88]

[QUOTE=Emil Miller;1118728]

Once again you are misrepresenting the situation and just because I don't take your black and white view of the events under discussion doesn't in any way represent whitewashing National Socialism. If quoting acknowledged experts on the subject and testimony from those who were alive at the time constitutes whitewashing in your view, it shows an ignorance unworthy of reply.
However, to put the record straight here's an extract from Professor Ian Kershaw writing for the German Magazine Spiegel International.

Much suggests, in fact, that between the death of Hindenburg in August 1934 and the expansion into Austria and the Sudetenland four years later Hitler was indeed successful in gaining the backing of the vast majority of the German people, something of immeasurable importance for the disastrous course of German policy ahead. Apart perhaps from the immediate aftermath of the astonishing victory in France in summer 1940, Hitler's popularity was never higher than at the height of his foreign-policy successes in 1938

So yes, Hitler did have the backing of the vast majority of the German people.

That Hitler had rid Germany of mass unemployment and rescued the country from the depths of the depression was seen by many Germans long after the war as a major achievement, whatever disasters had later followed. Good living conditions and full employment were among the positive attributes of Hitler recorded in opinion surveys in the American occupied zone in the late 1940s, while a sample of young Germans in north Germany around a decade later thought Hitler had done much good in abolishing unemployment. As late as the 1970s, Ruhr workers still had positive memories of the peacetime years of the Third Reich, which they associated with full employment and the pleasures of excursions with the Nazi leisure organization, "Kraft durch Freude," or Strength Through Joy.

This bears out my own enquiries into what many Germans felt about life under Hitler before WW11.


By this time, August 1939, all sections of the regime, and the masses who had been so jubilant at Hitler's every "success," had ensured that their fate was tied to the decisions of the Führer. So it would remain down to 1945. In the wartime years, as seemingly glorious victory gave way to mounting, inexorable calamity, as defeat on defeat inevitably eroded the charismatic basis of his leadership, and as it became plain that he was leading Germany into the abyss, the fateful bonds with Hitler that had been sealed in the "good years" of the 1930s ensured that there was now no way back. The German people, having supported Hitler's triumphs, were now condemned to suffer the catastrophe into which he had led them.

So you see, Professor Kershaw doesn't in any way exonerate Hitler from the terrible consequence of the Nazi regime. In fact he goes into considerable detail regarding the repression of those who disagreed with the regime as do others that I have quoted. It's just that they maintain an objective stance in presenting their findings rather than resort to hysterical ranting. If as you say, you have German relatives who grew up under National Socialism, they must be pretty ancient because the Third Reich lasted from 1933 until 1945. So anyone born in 1933 would have been 12 years old by the time the regime ended. I doubt that they would have much to say, particularly at this late stage, but in the event of them having survived to a very old age, they wouldn't have any personal experience of how terrible life was in Germany before Hitler came to power.
My own enquiries were carried out over thirty years ago and those I spoke to are almost certainly dead.

I'm not hysterically ranting. The man carried out the wholesale liquidation of 6 million innocent souls. He sent nearly 9 million of his own country men to their graves. The people supported him because he lied to them and manipulated them. He took propaganda to never before seen extremes. Some of his speeches are downright psychotic. If any man ever warranted categorical condemnation that man is he.