Was Hitler a Christian?

[abaris]

Everyone was in favor of saving Hitler's brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark. Ooo, suddenly you go too far!

Honestly, I always keep wondering what it is with Hitler. He was just your average psycho, who happened to come to power in a major industrialised nation. Take away the coming to power part and all that's left is a sad unerachieving loser with supriority complexes. Classic Behavioral science material, but nothing more.

As a person he really wasn't that remarkable.

[Alex K]

No, you're absolutely right, Hitler is overrated. But I guess the fertile ground in which his ideas grew is less palpable, and a guy like that lends himself to easy identification. And isn't it also more comfortable and reassuring to blame one evil poster child in lieu of accepting that it was just ordinary people like you and me who fell for this ideology...

[robvalue]

Right. He had about as much chance of winning wars on his own as I have of getting a double page spread in Playboy.

I find it really sad to think of the average German soldier being forced into battle. It hit home when we visited the German grave site near Ypres. I highly doubt most of them would want to fight if they had a choice.

[abaris]

No, you're absolutely right, Hitler is overrated. But I guess the fertile ground in which his ideas grew is less palpable, and a guy like that lends himself to easy identification. And isn't it also more comfortable and reassuring to blame one evil poster child in lieu of accepting that it was just ordinary people like you and me who fell for this ideology...

Even my father fell for it. He was the last one to have reason to do so, since he was among the ones being persecuted and had to emmigrate. But he always told me, how impressed he was by Hitler's entrance to Vienna, which he watched from the top of an advertising column. He always kept telling me how easy it is to fall for appearances alone. He was 15 back then.

Truth is, the soil was fertile. And it's fertile again. Otherwise, primitive ideologists like Trump in the USA or the rightwing figures in Europe wouldn't be such a success. And there's another part of history repeating itself. When the economy goes down the shitter and people fear for their mere existence, it's easy to present scapegoats instead of policy. The only thing being different is America starting to fall for it too. That wasn't the case back then.

[Gawdzilla]

Pity Ernst Röhm didn't go ahead with his plan to replace the "weak little corporal". Ernst would have never gotten the call from von Papen.

[Crossless2.0]

No, you're absolutely right, Hitler is overrated. But I guess the fertile ground in which his ideas grew is less palpable, and a guy like that lends himself to easy identification. And isn't it also more comfortable and reassuring to blame one evil poster child in lieu of accepting that it was just ordinary people like you and me who fell for this ideology...

Even my father fell for it. He was the last one to have reason to do so, since he was among the ones being persecuted and had to emmigrate. But he always told me, how impressed he was by Hitler's entrance to Vienna, which he watched from the top of an advertising column. He always kept telling me how easy it is to fall for appearances alone. He was 15 back then.

Truth is, the soil was fertile. And it's fertile again. Otherwise, primitive ideologists like Trump in the USA or the rightwing figures in Europe wouldn't be such a success. And there's another part of history repeating itself. When the economy goes down the shitter and people fear for their mere existence, it's easy to present scapegoats instead of policy. The only thing being different is America starting to fall for it too. That wasn't the case back then.

There's really nothing new about ideologues in the U.S. What's different this time is the traction Trump enjoys among such a large number of people. His rhetoric isn't all that different than Pat Buchanan's was, but he has poll numbers that Buchanan could only dream about.

For all that, I think a comparison between what is happening in conservative circles in the U.S. and what Germans were going through in the '30s completely misses the mark. The U.S. is not experiencing a devastating economic depression as Germans experienced so much more acutely than was true even of their contemporaries, who also suffered. The U.S. is not rebounding from a humiliating defeat in a world war. There is no hard-Left group vying for power in the U.S. as was true in Germany when the Weimer Republic was seen as ineffective and discredited and the choices most people felt they were left with were between the Nazis and the Communists.

What we're seeing here is something more like the old Know-Nothings rearing their heads -- U.S. nativists who, in typical hysterical American fashion, are quick to whine and panic about the country's imminent collapse because most of them lack the historical perspective to understand that the sky is not falling, regardless of the challenges we face.

In short, there are a lot of chest-thumping Americans who use bluster and inflammatory rhetoric to try to disguise the fact that, deep down, they are pussies who long for a Strong Man, a Great Leader, to save them.

[abaris]

There's really nothing new about ideologues in the U.S. What's different this time is the traction Trump enjoys among such a large number of people. His rhetoric isn't all that different than Pat Buchanan's was, but he has poll numbers that Buchanan could only dream about.

It is new, in the sense that Americans, even during the Great Depression, didn't flock to the extreme right or left. There never has been a socialist movement in the USA to speak of and the Nazis, although existing, were extremely fringe. So this scapegoating bigmouth, and a significant number of people rooting for him, is indeed a new development.

[Anomalocaris]

Hitler pretended to be either a Christian, but he was not. He may have had some deist tendencies. But he most certainly was a product of Christianity.

[Gawdzilla]

Ku Klux Klan was very strong in the '20s. People didn't "flock" to them, but they were a presence. Same with Father Coughlin's Catholic-Fascist crap.

[abaris]

But he most certainly was a product of Christianity.

That's not even remotely true. He was the product of all the obscure figures roaming the land at the turn of the last century. Guido von List, Georg Ritter von Schönerer and to a lesser degree Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, to name only a few.

He was also the product of his upbringing, which bore all the hallmarks of the sociopath recipe. Abusive father, overprotective mother. Never found his place in life, never could or wanted to hold on to a job. That's Hitler.

By all accounts, he wasn't an atheist. He often spoke about providence. Even in his private circle. It's not as easy as saying, he was christian or atheist. He probably wasn't either.