Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Yukaphile]

Actually, that's hyperbole. From all accounts, Hitler had a few tiny redeeming qualities. He loved his mother and cried when she died. He mourned the death of... that girl who killed herself? Forgot her name. And had a hard time looking at meat again. And it's true. No one is a Saturday morning cartoon comic book supervillain in the real world even for people whose crimes fit that definition. I'd argue Hitler was bureaucracy gone bad, to the most extreme degree. He wasn't a murderer or a rapist, I believe, though - not directly. He's like Trump. Trump can't directly fire someone, look them in the eye, and say, "Pack up your shit and get out." Likewise, it sounds as if Hitler couldn't kill a person personally, but had no problems ordering deaths as an abstract. People who actually carry out those crimes themselves and personally, however, are much worse, even if it's on an individual level versus the collective mentality of government.

[Jonathan101]

There were a couple of occasions he might have killed people, or at least attempted to; in the early years of the Nazi Party he took part in the street fights he helped to engineer and definitely assaulted some people at the very least, although this stopped after he got smashed in the head with a glass mug, and of course while he never killed anyone in WW1 that was more for lack of opportunity.

The person you are thinking of who killed herself, who he mourned, was his niece, and despite the mourning there are plenty of historians who think he might well have done it himself based on circumstantial evidence, and he may well have sexually abused her and a couple of other women, although these allegations were never proven.

Hitler definitely had moments of cartoonish villainy- for instance, he would sometimes have meetings with diplomats and generals that consisted of him shouting and yelling at them, accusing them of all kinds of stupidity and treachery, making vicious (and very real) threats to them and their country...and then make an excuse to leave, go off, and laugh his head off about it; one guy even fainted when Hitler did this while about to invade, and they had to revive him to continue it again. He was a lifelong bully and pathological liar, deliberately engineered riots and street fights and sometimes participated in them, definitely had people tortured and killed over personal grudges as much as ideology, could fly into rages... He has some sympathetic qualities sure, but in many ways he could be hideously nasty interpersonally, and I don't think he didn't kill anyone in person for lack of ability.

(also, I'm not sure why you think Trump can't directly fire someone- he does it all the time; it's literally been his catchphrase).

[Jonathan101]

Regarding Holmes, just because he claimed he was born evil doesn't make it true or even mean that he actually believed it; he said that after he was captured and was milking attention for his notoriety, and he was known to spin more than a few yarns.

Even genuinely bad guys who revel in notoriety can rarely exist exaggerating how bad they are, or making stuff up about why they did things.

Whether Hitler wanted power is a matter of ongoing academic debate- some say he did (usually journalistic ones in my experience), while others (often academic) contend that he was genuinely ideological and wasn't simply someone who would kill for pure megalomania.

[CmdrKing]

Regardless of Hitler's sincerity of belief, fundamentally fascist state are unstable and can only exist by pitting themselves against an Other. So on a sufficiently long timeline, the 3rd Reich would eventually have either subjugated the world or died trying.
Heck, that's pretty much why they persecuted the war against Russia despite it being tactically brain dead to start with: they surmised, correctly, that Stalin would break their accord pretty soon anyway so striking first while they had something resembling the manpower was the best option.

I am amused that more than one person in the topic has concluded that Trump is a worse person (in terms of one on one human interaction) than Hitler, doubly so because I don't think I can find any fault in the logic.

[Yukaphile]

@Jonathan101 I'm saying that because - at least from secondhand accounts from my mom, I don't watch MSNBC - he can't directly tell it to someone's face. He needs someone else to do it for him. That could be false, though?

@CmdrKing You are aware Stalin wanted the same thing too, yes? To expand and conquer, only with stealth rather than force of arms, because Hitler had that old-time glorious and romantic view of war, and Stalin considered himself practical. It's what imperialism is all about. You expand until you either take everything or die.

[Jonathan101]

I mean, he literally made a show out of firing people, so I'm not sure how true that is. I imagine that in practice when he has someone fired in real life he has it passed along, but that's could be more a matter of business practice. It sounds exaggerated at best to me.

[CmdrKing]

Yuka- sorry, yes. That's what I mean. Stalin was a rival fascist to Hitler and their clash was inevitable.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

I still say Hitler was only pretending to care about his mother or niece or whoever to make others think he had a good side.

and again, H.H. Homes only ever did things involving his murder castle, it was his only purpose for being and by his own words, his obsession with death was born of fascination, not trauma.

and again there was the other serial killer, Jane Topan, she was another who was actually born evil, she was even the inspiration for The Bad Seed. and she said she wanted to murder more innocent people then anyone else in history. and once more, the only way to achieve that goal would be to kill off the entire human race.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

My impression is that Hitler wanted to claim territory of residing Germans to reestablish Prussia. The fallout with USSR was circumstantial and understandably ominous.

USSR I thought was just general state expansionist because when you seek to become a closed-circuit autarky union to suit your authoritarian intents, the more sustainable your economy is with more nations added to it. So them being next-door neighbors to HItler's Prussia wasn't a sightly condition.

[Yukaphile]

@Dragon Ball Fan Then you're being an overly simplistic child. The demonization of the Nazis as the ultimate evil has, for the past 70 years, been frankly pathetic as it's painted them as almost a kind of supernatural force of evil - like spirits come to tempt us off the right path. That's only because of how our media and entertainment has lionized the war, however, and the fact that our elders have socially conditioned us to think that way. And it's done huge damage to our perceptions of the innocent victims of the war, to treat them as if they were monsters.

@BridgeConsoleMasher He wanted to turn the Slavs into a slave race to serve the Aryans, and wipe out 100,000,000 people in Russia. Absolutely not cool. Of course, given Stalin's plans, and how his was a slow-motion genocide that could rival the Nazis, then that would mean he'd be wiping out huge populations of the world too in order to feed their homeland. I've met people who think the Nazis were worse than the Soviets because "they planned worse," but that applies to Stalin and the USSR as well. As I've said elsewhere, I consider them a nation-state that was as evil and in their own way worse than Nazi Germany. You can't support a Socialist or Communist agenda without denouncing the USSR and Stalin. If you do, then you're just a tankie. And I DESPISE tankies.