Quite wrong. A human being can and did do such things. Hitler wasn't some demon left over from a Sam Raimi film, he was a human just like you and me. The death camp guards the evil doctors and all those opther people were just that, people. Hitler didn't tender his resignation from the human race by being evil. You may wish that he wasn't a human being out of shame for what he did (I sure do) but wishing don't make it so. We may like to deny it and think "Oh, I would never do such a thing" but deep inside all of us, we all have the potential to be death camp guards or serial killers or just about any other sort of evil person you could name.

Quite right, Guv'ner! (Pardon the Cockney accent.)

This is just a special case of the debate on the nature of Man which seems to be one of Orrin's favorite themes. If Man is fallen, then it's no surprise that humans can run concentration camps or abortion clinics or fly airplanes into office buildings. If Man is perfectable with the right upbringing, then there is no explanation for these things.

Seems like Adolph is going to rejoing humanity.

When did humanity overcome its tendency toward evil? Funny how the dependency on materialism always seems to magnify our evil side by rationalizing it away. My favorite one is, "Communism isn't impractical, evil, if only Lenin had survived..."

Before the collapse of Germany into the morass WWII, Hitler was seen as a perfectly rational, formidable leader.

Heck, post-WW1 German national culture was sure to have generated a Hitler-type political figure at one point or another.

All the ingredients (rampant anti-Semitism, championing of authoritarianism, atavistic nationalism, a deep sense of anger at the result of WW1 and a distaste for liberal Angloshpere democracy) were right there.

After Versailles in 1919, some form of Fascism was inevitable for Germany -- payback for Versailles, if nothing else.

However, I wonder whether this hypothetical non-Nazi German Fascism would have been as intense or as vicious as the NSDAP. Germany in the early Thirties may have encountered a "perfect storm" of chaos, grievance culture, and a party of pulp-villain psychos in the right place at the right time.

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Has anyone noticed that by making AH "the world's greatest evil" we have basically given him what he always wanted in life? Immortality and Deification -- we have deified AH into a God of Evil. (And as the line from Babylon-5 put it, "Damnation is a small price to pay for -- Immortality!")

This is really great for those of us with neo-Nazi tendencies ourselves. As long as you don't use the trappings of the NSDAP -- hoist the Hakenkreuz and/or salute from the shoulder, you can nurture and cultivate the attitudes of the NSDAP while projecting everything on that cartoon god of evil, AH.

And for real Neo-Nazis like Black Sun types, black metal heads, and skinheads, we've provided the ideal trappings for a loser to make himself important and make everyone else afraid -- just go neo-Nazi with all the trappings.

There's a reason Mel Brooks makes AH a buffoon in a lot of his movies; in an interview, he said the ridicule was to cut down the God of Evil image into that of a vicious little pathetic buffoon that nobody would want to follow.

Hitler saw in Soviet style bolshevism a "Jewish" threat to his nationalistic version of socialism.
The inferior "race" threatening the superior German "race" through the threat of Soviet expansion. An accurate interpretation of Marx, combined with the nationaslism of a defeated yet revitalized Germany, overlaid with the standard "social darwinism" of the day. 19th Century scientism taken to a particularly ugly extreme. It was more than Versaille.

Hitler without Germans would have been just another pervert like you see riding the city bus.

It's certainly true that Germany after 1918 was going to be militaristic and aggressive.

But Tom is wrong to say that Hitler was regarded as normal. His nationalist backers themselves understood he was extreme; they thought they could control him.

Maybe in another country, they could have used him up and discarded him.

That's what happens when you resort to extremes, you give hostages to fortune.

Germany without Hitler would, presumably, have been antisemitic but more socialist (as Goebbels wanted), and Hitler without Germany would have been a bum.

In a "recreational thinking" session years ago, a guy I knew tried to figure out what would have happened if WW1 went the other way.

One aside was what became of the household names of the NSDAP:

Adolf Hitler ends up in the Army -- the one place he was able to fit in -- until retirement age, never being promoted far because he's too neurotic.

Josef Goebbels becomes a ranting crank -- sort of a German Francis E Dec Esq -- who might have tried to pull something but failed.

Heinrich Himmler becomes Germany's Aliester Crowley until he finally goes too far and ends up either in prison or a lunatic asylum.

Rudolf Hess & Ernst Roehm end up cruising low-end gay bars.

Albert Speer becomes a competent architect and may or may not achieve any fame.

Ex-fighter pilot and war hero Hermann Goering becomes a world-famous fashion designer; House of Goering in Berlin rivals the houses of Paris, but with emphasis on male fashions.

That's really funny

Hitler wasn't that evil, as despotic warmongering dictators go.

Pol Pot and Stalin were definitely more evil, and there are probably a hundred historical figures that were more evil, but were more limited in scope due to lack of technology.
Vlad the Impaler and the Roman General Crassus come to mind.

Harry-

I said Rational and Formidable.