Hello!
With all due respect, I have to disagree with the notion that Hitler was a genius.
Germany was at that time facing serious financial/social problems. The monarchy had been forcefully removed - not by the people but by verdict of outside powers. Thus, many people in Germany associated monarchy (= dictatorship) to prosperity and democracy to poverty and weakness. In addition, the military whose tactics had failed in Verdun and whose most glorious insight was realizing that WW I was impossible to win, after the peace claimed they could have won the war if the unions hadn't mobilized the German people against them (utter nonsense, the German army had maneuvered itself into a situation that was simply non-winnable, no matter how you view it). General resentments against Jews were common cultural heritage in Europe and blaming them for anything was an honored tradition among Christians (just think of the Plague a few centuries earlier - they claimed the Jews had poisoned the wells).
Now comes Hitler, a young idiot with many a slight knack for talking. He fails to get into a university (no surprise) and ends up among the destitute. He hears how the growing lower classes feel and which prejudices they have - simply because he belonged to them!
The rest of his rise to power is more or less the story of a small crook having some luck and finding people desperate to believe in any miraculous cure. Even a parrot could have claimed the power, probably, the way people felt. They longed for the old times of prosperity they had under the dictatorship of the monarch, and Hitler offered them just what they had asked for.
As for "his" ideas, most of them were actually created by other people. The concentration camps were actually a concept suggested by contempary British scientists to handle "race" issues, which were not only a concern in Germany. His highway project which helped both the economy and his war effort was actually based on plans of his predecessor, who simply had been incapable of getting the majorities, I think.
Other aspects of his war machinery were based on individuals eager to prove themselves and offering his vain egocentrism fuel, like for instance his pilot ace/boss for plane design who came up with the Stuka and its siren as a terror weapon.
If you want to see Hitler's "intelligence" at work, then look at WW II, especially the timing at which he broke the alliance with Russia, his premature aggrivation of the US, and finally, his greatest achievement - going to war against Russia during the winter. Too bad that Hitler obviously didn't know military history from just a century earlier when Napoleon got just about the same beating.
In the end, we should be thankful that Hitler was such an idiot. If he had as much intelligence as an average human, the results of WW II would probably have been more ghastly and the harm to the minorities like gays, Roma, Sinthi, Jews, and so on would have been even greater as no one in their right mind would have wasted their forces like that in the winter of the Eastern front.
The problem is that Hitler exemplifies a common pattern of people who are in trouble projecting that trouble on other people, claiming that the others somehow "conspired" to cause that awful state of affair. That accusation then turns into violence and - fortunately - into self-destruction as it is in itself a hollow shell of hate. Now, this is a very human behavior, and we are all prone to take the first step on that slope seeing fault in others. By holding up the name of Hitler and in a perverse glorifying him, people can then dehumanize this human behavior, saying that such actions are only things such an inhuman creature could cause, but the hate that the current people propagate is of a different nature. After all they are not nazis, they are not Hitler, so certainly, their hate and prejudices can not be as bad as those of him and his crew. That, I believe is one of the reasons why Hitler is still so present today: People use him to conquer the fear of what they really are.
Deathworks
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Topic: How can people still not believe in the Holocaust? (Read 15755 times)