That Wonderful Hitler

~ Clarissa

“Hitler had the capacity to be a wonderful, amazing leader for his country but he made some mistakes and ended up being not that good.”

I have no idea what I’m supposed to respond to this statement made by a student.

The good news is that other students started responding to this comment before I saw it.

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Published by Clarissa

21 thoughts on “That Wonderful Hitler”

  1. I think he lost the capacity to be a wonderful and amazing leader when he wrote his governmental plan in prison.

    Was your student referring to Hitler’s influence as a leader? People say he was very charismatic, and good at getting people to follow him.

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  3. I think it’s the reference to his initial success in fighting unemployment, improving Germans’ economical situation and giving Germany back her sense of honor, lost after WW1 on political stage. Most Germans supported him, no?

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    2. Looked at wiki:
      The Sudetenland was relegated to Germany between October 1 and October 10, 1938.
      Had he stopped here, he would’ve been still considered “wonderful, amazing” by most Germans, no?

      Now remembered “Hitler’s First Photograph” by Wislawa Szymborska.
      http://www.ralphmag.org/hitlerL.html

      Btw, from what I read about Holocaust, I started getting impression as if without his obsessive hatred of Jews, which got country’s bureaucratic apparatus at his disposal, Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. However, I don’t hold great men view of history, so feel it’s not so. What do you think?

      And last point – today read in Israeli newspapers RE the link between neo nazis and terrorists in 1972 Summer Olympics:

      Forty years ago, the massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches overshadowed the Munich Summer Olympics. Though it was never proved, left-wing extremists were suspected of working with the Palestinian terrorists behind the operation. But previously unreleased files seen by SPIEGEL prove that neo-Nazis were involved instead — and officials knew about it.
      http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/files-show-neo-nazis-helped-palestinian-terrorists-in-munich-1972-massacre-a-839467.html

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      1. “Btw, from what I read about Holocaust, I started getting impression as if without his obsessive hatred of Jews, which got country’s bureaucratic apparatus at his disposal, Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. However, I don’t hold great men view of history, so feel it’s not so. What do you think?”

        – I think many people find it convenient to blame the Holocaust on just one bad guy who’s, besides, dead. But many people participated. If you choose to herd human beings into a gas chamber, you can’t blame Hitler. Whenever I saw an old person in Germany this May, I couldn’t help but wonder what they were doing in 1945.

        What I’m trying to say that you need a deeply diseased society to respond to the ideas of a maniac like Hitler. I believe in individual responsibility.

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      2. I wasn’t talking about individual responsibility. At all. I meant that lots of feelings were already there, while Hitler served as a catalyst to enhance the feelings in general population & kick off propaganda machine, which influenced people a lot, as it usually does. So, without him, would somebody else do exactly the same? I mean, he wasn’t chosen because of his antisemitism.

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      3. Forgot to add that I mistakenly got this feeling from reading Ian Kershaw’s “Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World”.

        Now I saw he wrote many interesting books, f.e. (from wiki):

        In a 1993 essay entitled “‘Working Towards the Führer'”, Kershaw argued that the German and Soviet dictatorships had more differences than similarities.[18] Kershaw argued that Hitler was a very unbureaucratic leader who was highly averse to paper work in marked contrast to Stalin.[18] Likewise, Kershaw argued that Stalin was highly involved in the running of the Soviet Union in contrast to Hitler whose involvement in the day to day decision making was limited, infrequent and capricious.[53] Kershaw argued that the Soviet regime, despite all of its extreme brutality and utter ruthlessness was basically rational in its goal of seeking to modernize a backward country and had no equivalent of the “cumulative radicalization” towards increasingly irrational goals that Kershaw sees as marking Nazi Germany.[54] In Kershaw’s opinion, Stalin’s power corresponded to Weber’s category of bureaucratic authority whereas Hitler’s power corresponded to Weber’s category of charismatic authority.[55] In Kershaw’s view, what happened in Germany after 1933 was the imposition of Hitler’s charismatic authority on top of the “legal-rational” authority system that had existed prior to 1933, leading to a gradual breakdown of any system of ordered authority in Germany.[56] Kershaw argues that by 1938, the German state had been reduced to a hopeless, polycratic shambles of rival agencies all competing with each other to win Hitler’s favor, which by that time had become the only source of political legitimacy.[57] Kershaw sees this rivalry as causing the “cumulative radicalization” of Germany, and argues that though Hitler always favored the most radical solution to any problem, it was German officials themselves in attempting to win the Führer’s approval who for the most part carried out on their own initiative increasingly “radical” solutions to perceived problems like the “Jewish Question” as opposed to being ordered to do so by Hitler.[58] In this, Kershaw largely agrees with Mommsen’s portrait of Hitler as a distant and remote leader standing in many ways above his own system, whose charisma and ideas served to set the general tone of politics.[58] As an example of how Hitler’s power functioned in practice, Kershaw used Hitler’s directive to the Gauleiters Albert Forster and Arthur Greiser to “Germanize” the part of north-western Poland annexed to Germany in 1939 within the next 10 years with his promise that “no questions would be asked” about how this would be done.[59][60] As Kershaw notes, the completely different ways Forster and Greiser sought to “Germanize” their Gaue with Forster simply having the local Polish population in his Gau signing forms saying they had “German blood” and Greiser carrying out a program of brutal ethnic cleansing of Poles in his Gau showed both how Hitler set events in motion, and how his Gauleiters could carry out totally different policies in pursuit of what they believed to be Hitler’s wishes.[59][60] In Kershaw’s opinion, Hitler’s vision of a racially cleansed Volksgemeinschaft provided the impetus for German officials to carry out increasing extreme measures to win his approval, and which ended with the Shoah.[61]

        The Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka has praised the concept of “working towards the Führer” as the best way of understanding how the Holocaust occurred, combining the best features, and avoiding the weaknesses of both the “functionalist” and “intentionalist” methods.[62] Kulka argued that Kershaw demonstrated both Hitler’s central role in the “Final Solution” and why there was no need for any order from Hitler for the Holocaust, as the progress that led to the Shoah were “worked out” toward the Führer by almost everyone in Germany.[62]

        Thus, for Kershaw Nazi Germany was both a monocracy (rule of one) and polycracy (rule of many). Hitler held absolute power but did not choose to exercise it very much; the rival fiefdoms of the Nazi state fought each other and attempted to carry out Hitler’s vaguely worded wishes and dimly defined orders by “Working Towards the Führer”.

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        1. “Kershaw argued that Hitler was a very unbureaucratic leader who was highly averse to paper work in marked contrast to Stalin.[18] Likewise, Kershaw argued that Stalin was highly involved in the running of the Soviet Union in contrast to Hitler whose involvement in the day to day decision making was limited, infrequent and capricious.[53] Kershaw argued that the Soviet regime, despite all of its extreme brutality and utter ruthlessness was basically rational in its goal of seeking to modernize a backward country and had no equivalent of the “cumulative radicalization” towards increasingly irrational goals that Kershaw sees as marking Nazi Germany.”

          – Very true!

          “Stalin’s power corresponded to Weber’s category of bureaucratic authority whereas Hitler’s power corresponded to Weber’s category of charismatic authority”

          – Not true. 🙂 Stalin was a charismatic leader, too. It’s just that his charisma was different in origin form Hitler’s. Churchill’s memories of Stalin show how even Churchill was completely under his spell against his own will. That’s charisma. But it’s not the Western charisma which is why Kershaw doesn’t recognize it.

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      4. //I believe that Germany would have exploded one way or another. The explosion could have looked differently or not but it would have happened.

        Agree Re some kind of explosion. But this way on Jews? Don’t know.

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  4. Sometimes people choose strange wording for things. I once worked for a jewish woman from Poland who survived Auschwitz, she remarked to me that she stood beside Joseph Mengele and thought he was a “beautiful” man. Knowing what kind of despicable person he was I fond that a very odd word to use. Obviously she was talking about his physical appearance. Truth be told, Hitler was definately inspirational and charismatic and certifiably nuts.

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  6. Is it just me, or does “not that good” get a prize for “greatest understatement” by your students? It even beat the bit about slaves and low self esteem.

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  7. Don’t let student writng rub off on you. I have some howlers like that in my collection, too.
    My favorite is “Freud had only the partial truth.”

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