Your thoughts on Adolf?

[AspiePie]

I believe Adolf Hitler shows the simple fact that even if you are smart and intelligent you can not always understand the world without having hindsight. A.H. Did everything the experts said society should do to better itself and while much of it worked... the fact is the holocaust is very sickening with modern knowledge. The problem is Adolf in his time would have been considered doing everything right according to experts but now in our experts would say those things are amoral..

This is the flaw with human knowledge...

Right and wrong from the human perspective are abstract concepts and don't actually exist. Hitler represents a question for any Aspie gaining power, "Will what I do now which I consider good be considered good down the line?" Aspies need to think when gain power about every abstract possibility..

In case you are wondering why I consider Adolf a aspie.. The fact is he was according to the biographies his friends wrote after the war a very aspergery person....

I believe Aspies should view him as warning when we start gaining power?

 

[AGXStarseed]

I'm not sure whether Adolf was really an Aspie or not, but you raise some good points.

 

[Ste11aeres]

I believe Adolf Hitler shows the simple fact that even if you are smart and intelligent you can not always understand the world without having hindsight. A.H. Did everything the experts said society should do to better itself and while much of it worked... the fact is the holocaust is very sickening with modern knowledge. The problem is Adolf in his time would have been considered doing everything right according to experts but now in our experts would say those things are amoral..

This is the flaw with human knowledge...

Right and wrong from the human perspective are abstract concepts and don't actually exist. Hitler represents a question for any Aspie gaining power, "Will what I do now which I consider good be considered good down the line?" Aspies need to think when gain power about every abstract possibility..

In case you are wondering why I consider Adolf a aspie.. The fact is he was according to the biographies his friends wrote after the war a very aspergery person....

I believe Aspies should view him as warning when we start gaining power?

I do not think that what he was doing was "right" in his time. People do things which they know to be immoral. And they do that nowadays, also.

 

[AspiePie]

I do not think that what he was doing was "right" in his time. People do things which they know to be immoral. And they do that nowadays, also.

It was considered a good idea by the experts?

 

[Ste11aeres]

It was considered a good idea by the experts?

Experts in what?

Experts in eugenism? Well, yes, of course they supported it.
That doesn't make it moral. It just means that they were immoral also.

 

[Peeta]

Honestly I have no clue what Hitler was thinking. I guess I could if I read his books but I haven´t. Personally I think the guy believed he was in the right. Not that he was doing the ´right thing´, but that his plan was the plan to follow. Whether his ideas of what had to be done changed over the course of his time as ruler I don´t now either. It has been suggested he was suffering from a selection of possible diseases. So he might not have had the same frame of might when he died as when he got arrested for that Beer Hall Putsch.

From what I´ve read Germany was in a really poor state after WW1 and this man not only promised a solution, but when he got elected he got the country somewhat back on track again. If he´d died before 1939, aka before starting WW2, at least the Germans would have had a good opinion of him. But he didn´t and now his name is synonymous for evil in large parts of the world.

 

[Ste11aeres]

Not that he was doing the ´right thing´, but that his plan was the plan to follow.

A good distinction to make.
I do think that people are always seeking something good when they act. Sometimes, though, it is at the cost of causing a great evil, or losing a great good.
For instance

Spoiler: Sensitive subject

Someone who rapes might do it for the sake of sexual pleasure. But it is at the cost of great harm to the person whom he/she rapes

 

[Judge]

The problem is Adolf in his time would have been considered doing everything right according to experts but now in our experts would say those things are amoral..

In his time, Adolf Hitler essentially did one thing exceedingly well. He told a demoralized and downtrodden nation what they most wanted to hear. A classic example of pandering to the masses' baser instincts for more than a decade.

A scenario which likely would have had little impact on the German people at large had the terms of the Treaty of Versailles not been so economically and politically punitive. A lesson well learned by the Allies after World War Two with such programs as the Marshall Plan.

Instead of continuing to make our vanquished enemies suffer after World War Two, we helped them to succeed in a new world order. In as much as some could construe Hitler as having done something right, one could also claim the Allies at Versailles did something later proven to be very wrong. Not to mention that two Allies at the same negotiating table were spurned in developing this treaty. Italy and Japan, which would go on to later join in an axis with Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Conquest can be as problematic as can utter defeat.

Dr. Morell wasn't aware of Dr. Asperger's research. Otherwise he would have likely had yet another magic remedy in a syringe for which his only patient- something Adolf Hitler became so dependent on.

 

[Marmot]

Prior to him enlisting in WWI in 1914, Hitler was an aspiring artist and failed twice to get accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna where he was living as a young man. We know that he was a painter, had a passion for architecture and both attended and gave a shot at composing opera.

Imagine if he had gotten into that art school, finished his opera or got a commission instead of enlisting in the first World War and having the experiences in the trenches of WWI that he did ? Imagine if all of the energy, passion & charisma that ultimately came out of him in the years to follow had been directed towards the arts instead of the direction that it did ?

 

[AspiePie]

You shouldn't look at Hitler as a bad man you should look at Hitler as man who did bad things?

 

[Judge]

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - Lord Acton

"If you seek his monument, look around you." - Christopher Wren

 

[Southern Discomfort]

Whoa, I'd like to distance myself from the idea of being like Hitler. He was a psychopath, no doubt about it.

 

[Beverly]

it's one thing to believe you and yours are the best then, set out to prove it, quite another to slaughter innocents because you think they will never be as good as you and yours. Hitler was not wrong to see the potential of Germany and the German people but, he was wrong to be so racist that he could not see that level of potential in every nation and every race and, he was very wrong when he set about eliminating those he thought had the least potential to be great.

There is a fine line between justified, earned pride and cruel arrogance and, I have no respect for anyone that crosses that line. Hitler crossed that line by miles.

 

[Tom]

Tbh I believe you (OP) have managed to be wrong on every point you make. I doubt you have seriously studied any of the subject matter involved. And you top it off with a ridiculous and potentially harmful retro-diagnosis. Gee Thanks.

 

[Judge]

Animosity permeated the life of Adolf Hitler virtually his entire life. The ultimate human tragedy exported to millions of innocent people.

 

[tree]

A couple thoughts about Hitler....

He owed a lot to his style. I saw a photo of
him when he wore the same style mustache
as all the other guys. Nothing special about
him. Kaiser Bill mustache did not make him
stand out. Once he changed the mustache,
he started getting more notice.

I was surprised he had a sister and that she
lived so long a life.

 

[AspiePie]

Tbh I believe you (OP) have managed to be wrong on every point you make. I doubt you have seriously studied any of the subject matter involved. And you top it off with a ridiculous and potentially harmful retro-diagnosis. Gee Thanks.

I read several books by friends of his like Albert Spear? I think knowing the original source is the best info?

 

[SameStars]

What makes you think the Holocaust wasn't sickening then?
Immediate post-war steps were taken to collect evidence, verbal testimony and visual documentation, of the horrors of these camps. So that all that had passed there could not be denied or cynically dismissed as mere propaganda by America or England. Even during the war itself violent orders againts Jew were couched in euphemisms, such as Aktion and Sonderbehandlung, in German statements. When the war was as good as lost, the concentration camps were hastily evacuated and the prisoners were forced on the so coined Death marches (Todesmärsche).

Adolf Hitler wasn't the first to cast Jews as scapegoats, only the first to inspire massacre on such a scale. History is littered with examples of anti semitic attacks and insinuations. You can observe it even in classic literature, where Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a reflection of its time and the European attitude towards Jews. In earlier centuries, pogroms swept through Imperial Russia and expulsion of Jews occured in England and Spain.

Adolf Hitler showed an understanding of his public. A country that knew poverty after their defeat in the First World War and the following restrictions of the Versailles treaty. A Germany that was thrown in a state of super inflation by its inability to afford the reparations to France and Great Britain, where unemployment ran rampant and the country morale was low.
Adolf Hitler understood the need for nationalism by electing a common enemy, advocating a superior German nation. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei saw Jews at the core of materialism and the economical explotation of Germany.

Adolf Hitler played in on these factors, by having someone to blame and promising a swift economic recovery.

 

[Southern Discomfort]

I read several books by friends of his like Albert Spear? I think knowing the original source is the best info?

I think once you're quite educated on a condition like Asperger's you start to pick up on behaviours that everyone does and contribute them to the same condition. I've done it a few times myself, I've looked at my best friend and thought maybe there's a bit of autism there.

Hitler was psychopath, nothing more.

 

[Judge]

An "insider's" perspective is always interesting, however it never guarantees objectivity in recalling or reporting historical events. That said there are some great formal military sources along such lines when it comes to the Third Reich. However...

I own a copy of Albert Speer's "Inside The Third Reich" among many other such books on the subject. While Speer was once thought to be the one "repentant Nazi", history has since determined Speer to have been far more complicit in being quite aware of crimes against humanity than was originally known at his trial in Nuremberg in 1946. As much as he was documenting history from his own unique perspective, it also appears he was covering his own tracks. Enough to keep him in the limelight but off the scaffold.

Reminds me of a book I read some years back authored by Gitta Sereny, titled "Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth". That had prosecutors understood the actual facts and had access to evidence at the time regarding what Speer actually knew, he would have likely been hanged at Nuremberg rather than receive a 20 year sentence for crimes against peace and humanity.

Speer cleverly made his own autobiography a "cottage industry" of sorts right up to his death in London. When it comes to a historical and political analysis of Hitler, frankly I'd prefer to emphasize other classic works from authors like William L. Shirer, Joachim Fest, John Toland and Alan Bullock.