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Adolf Hitler had quite a career. I’m not talking about his meteoric rise from a failed artist residing in a Vienna homeless shelter to Germany’s conquering and murdering Führer and chancellor. What is almost more astonishing is his transformation from a resentful ideologist and criminal politician to a supervillain of mythological proportions.
There is no better way to express that you seriously disagree with another person than declaring him “worse than Hitler.” There is also no better way to signal that the time for serious debate has ended, and that the time for spraying mental diarrhea has begun. “Godwin’s law,” named after the author and attorney who first proposed it, states that if a heated discussion only lasts long enough, someone will bring up a Hitler comparison.
The reason is obvious. No other historical figure has been as successful as Adolf Hitler in creating such a broad consensus regarding his own evilness. This consensus includes the descendants of those who worshiped Hitler and made his criminal reign possible in the first place. Growing up in Germany, I didn’t feel the slightest personal conflict rooting for any cinematic hero killing Nazis.
The war, and Germany’s defeat, had affected my family directly. One of my grandfathers had left the battlefield crippled, the other one hadn’t left it at all. Decades later, my grandmother would speak with horror of the retaliation rapes committed by Soviet troops. And my father, born sick and undernourished in destroyed post-war Berlin, didn’t walk until he was four. But none of these personal fates has confounded my conviction that Germany’s defeat in the Second World War is one of the most fortunate outcomes in modern history.
From motion pictures to video games, you never have to worry about ethical complexities if you make your hero slay Nazis. And it is immensely cathartic if, as in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, the Über-Nazi himself finds a gruesome (albeit counterfactual) end.
But this transformation of Hitler in popular culture, and of the movement he spearheaded, comes at a considerable cost. The reality of the Nazi terror is increasingly forgotten or neglected. The historical Hitler has been dead for more than 70 years, his charred remains dumped at some anonymous location.
Hitler lives on as a supervillain, joining the ranks Lex Luthor, the Joker, Darth Vader or, if you prefer more ancient mythology, Satan himself. And when the Hitler comparisons flourish—in internet comment sections, at political rallies, or during press conferences of public officials, it is usually this larger-than-life villain that the speakers refer to. And while the poor taste and the ignorance of such references should be self-evident, they also distract from the far more important truth that the historical Hitler is a subject worth talking about.
Historical narratives can entertain, but they also have the potential to educate. There is not much to learn from Hitler the Supervillain. But the unfortunate life of Hitler the Man has important lessons to teach. The Adolf Hitler of 1945 had solidified his place among modern history’s most prolific mass murderers. The Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, was primarily a politician.
Granted, he was not your usual candidate running for office. He was an unpleasant loudmouth: a tough-talking, amoral, hateful megalomaniac, intolerant of the slightest criticism, valuing loyalty above everything, and willing to tap into the population’s lowest resentments, and to utilize them for his unlimited personal ambition. But, at this early point in his career, he was not a murderer, not even an ordinary criminal.
Sure, Hitler had attacked Jews and other marginalized groups in his speeches. Since the early 1920s, he had threatened them directly, and facilitated a hateful climate against them. He had also favored the termination of the democratic German constitution, and stated his intention to force a revision of the territorial losses imposed on Germany after World War I. But nobody believed he was serious, not even when he was sworn in as chancellor in 1933. Most observers thought he was all talk, and would soon be tamed by the realities of his high office.
Conservatives, though appalled by his vulgar populism, welcomed him as a convenient ally against the despised liberal and socialist movements of the time. And they all could have been right, if only Hitler had faced a vigorous democratic-minded population, uncompromising institutions, and a widespread sense of decency. Had better circumstances been in place, Hitler would have remained little more than another obnoxious politician, soon to be forgotten.
But the historical constellation was different, and its study offers valuable insights. For example, criminal politicians tend to escalate their transgression. What precedes their worst atrocities is usually a series of lesser measures, many of which may be perfectly in accordance with contemporary legal constraints. For instance, it took Hitler almost a decade to complete the escalation from banning opposition parties to genocide, a period during which he learned what the world, and especially the German people, would let him get away with.
Another lesson is that acts of discrimination and violence don’t have to be carried out by official government forces. It is sufficient that the government utilizes resentments in the population and facilitates a climate of hatred. The actual violence may then be committed by fanatic followers expressing the “wrath of the people.” Before the Nazi elite launched its death industry, even before taking office, they could rely on their supporters to intimidate and brutalize.
Hitler’s rise demonstrates that a democracy can decide to terminate itself. Neither a written constitution nor formal institutions can prevent a country’s decline into tyranny, if its people seek or accept it. These are but a few insights that the study of Nazi Germany has to offer; there is more to learn for those who are prepared study the historical Hitler, in all his banality, and abandon the childish belief that it takes supervillains to commit super crimes.
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