Hot answers tagged hitler
17
There are two problems with the way the discussion is phrased, which I will try to summarize below.
Terminology problems. Some are unfortunate byproduct of social sciences being an imprecise (to put it politely) field of study, some are byproduct of cultural/historical drifts and differences, and some are a product of deliberate misinformation by "left ...
16
There is some controversy of what happened to Hitlers remains, owing to the general disarray of war, but there is no real controversy with regards to his death.
Adolf Hitlers did in his personal will and testament say that he had chosen death.
I myself and my wife — in order to escape the disgrace of deposition
or capitulation — choose death. It is ...
16
Here's the exact description of the photo, according to Hitlerpages.com:
Hitler and his fellow-soldiers in Fournes en Weppes, April 1915.
First row: Adolf Hitler, Balthasar Brandmayer, Anton Bachmann, Foxl,
Max Mund. Second row: Ernst Schmidt, Johann Sperl, Jakob Weiß, Karl
Tiefenböck.
This way, your man is called Balthasar Brandmayer. But it ...
14
No, residual paganism was not a factor in Hitler's rise to power.
As far as anyone can say, that is. This theory you reference posits that the German people claimed to be Christian, yet practiced secret worship "in the dark" to pagan gods. No one can prove that any German ever worshipped a pagan god in secret.
But we can say this much: Christianity was ...
14
Because the death of Hitler was reported by the Soviets, this is generally the root cause of conspiracy theories.
The general consensus among historians is that Hitler committed suicide in his Führerbunker in Berlin, by gunshot on 30 April 1945, however, controversy will remain.
His body was found by a soviet counter-intelligence operations group called ...
13
Was Hitler elected by the democratic process? I suppose, but really only in the Tammany Hall (JFK?) sense of the word.
In summation:
The German Communists were one of his chief competitors: he successfully framed them for the Reichstag fire and made them (basically) illegal.
The same act which allowed him to boot the communists gave him authority to ...
12
That's an interesting question. There is a book by Michael Hesemann, a German historian, in which he is interpreting Hitlers religion (that is actually the title of the book) like this:
Hitlers plans where going towards a "German pseudo-religion". Hitler got his first ideas from the "Ostara"-magazine, that was published between 1903 to 1931 and propagated ...
12
I have to recommend the recent book Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by a historian and social psychologist here, as there isn't are more objective source for understanding the mindset of those german soldiers during WWII as their own conversations:
A trove of previously unpublished, transcribed conversations among German POWs—secretly recorded ...
10
Hitler was awarded honorary citizenship in a few Austrian cities. Amstetten revoked Hitler's honorary citizenship in May 2011 and Braunau, which includes Ranshofen, Hitler's birthplace, followed in July 2011. Klagenfurt's mayor, Christian Scheider, removed Hitler from the city's roll of honour without waiting for verification that the city had ever honoured ...
10
According Wikipedia:
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination
Do you think that Hitler's racism was only about Jews? That's not quite right - it was about many other peoples, highly about Slavic nations, especially about Eastern Slavic - Russians, Ukranians, Belarusians and so on.
Did you know ...
9
Hitler was elected, yes, and exploited democratic procedures yes, but he did not come to power democratically.
Hitler as a person came to power because the violence, fueled mostly by the Nazi party and the communist party was increasing, and Germany looked at risk of falling into a civil war.
We already see the first undemocratic part here: The Nazi party ...
9
Yes, Bose was welcome in Germany. The Germans could have denied him entry if they wanted to, and so there are no doubts that they were happy to see him in their country. However, Hitler repeatedly refused to issue a declaration supporting India's independence, and this suggests that he personally did not support Bose's cause. It also has to be remembered ...
9
There were a number of attempts on made on Hitler's life , some notable ones were
One of the earliest attempts was made by Johann Georg Elser on November 8, 1939, when he placed a time bomb , at one one of the columns behind the podium , where Hitler gave a speech at the Burgerbrau Beer Cellar in Munich.The Bomb missed its deadline by 8 minutes , and ...
8
Simple answer, (and here I agree with @Evan Harper's comment), is deference to authority and careful planning by Nazis to hide the truth of what they were doing.
Deference To Authority
The most easily understood example of this it the Milgram exmperiment. This experiment was especially motivated by Holocaust trials. A summary from Milgram of the experiment ...
8
Hitler was right in this instance. It was Manstein that extended the battle too far.
The "official" reason for the offensive, was to recapture the city of Kursk. That was within the reach of the Germans.
The REAL purpose of the offensive was to cut off the Russian salient, of which Kursk was the tip. The reason this didn't work was that the Russians ...
7
Here is a Wiki page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views
Below is a paragraph from the article above:
Persecution of the Christian Churches
In 1999 attorney Julie Seltzer
Mandel, while researching documents for the "Nuremberg Project",
discovered 150 bound volumes collected by Gen. William Donovan as part
of his ...
7
The most important cause of WW2 (as of WW1) was imperialism.
By that, I mean a specific development of capitalism that features concentration of capital which has enough influence in state affairs to dictate expansionist policies in its favour.
As a result, nations struggle to expand their spheres of interest, i.e. access to markets and resources, which ...
7
"Intentionalism"—the view that Hitler was responsible for German racial policy (as supposed by this question's very title, "did Hitler had a final solution plan")—is not favoured amongst scholars. Therefore, the idea of a coherent plan of racial extermination needs to be done away with. German racial extermination policy evolved situationally and in ...
6
The case of Eduard Bloch is relevant if untypical in humanity considering Hitler's character:
Eduard Bloch (30 January 1872 – 1 June 1945) was a Jewish-Austrian
doctor practicing in Linz (Austria). Until 1907 Bloch was the doctor
of Adolf Hitler's family. Hitler later gave Bloch special protection
after the Nazi annexing of Austria ...
The ...
6
Hitler says early in Mein Kampf
I studied Bismarck's exceptional legislation in its original concept,
its operation and its results.
He praises various policies and the diplomacy of Bismarck's government, and towards the end declaims
What miserable pigmies our sham statesmen in Germany appear by comparison with him. And how nauseating it is to ...
5
I think the cause was the same as of the WW I: German militarism and expansionism. Since Kaiser Wilhelm gained power in Germany, it has been pursuing an aggressive foreign policy (e.g. the Morocco crisis) and launched an arms race with Great Britain. It resulted in one world war, which did not prove conclusively to Germans that militarism doesn't work, so ...
5
It wasn't Parkinson's, it was a nervous tic. Why? Because he was losing the war and slowly breaking down. It all culminated in the famous meltdown scene that has been parodied so many times. Notice he loses the tic during that scene.
PS Downfall is just a movie. It is neither historical fact, nor a documentary.
5
DISCLAIMER - the answer is written from the point of view of Reich's rulers
Invading the USSR was not a strategic blunder, the timing however was unfortunate.
The alliance with Japan was intended to provide the Soviets with a second front in the east, drawing their troops away from the west, thus making things easier for the Germans. And for a while it ...
5
The German and Austrian Jewish population was about 750,000, of which three quarters were exterminated. Whereas the total German population was about 70 million. But 1941, when the extermination program began the number of Jewish forced labourers in German was 60,000, compared to the 2,000,000 foreign labourers (Fremdarbeiter) [source]. The Nazis decided ...
4
This is a very hard question to answer, and it's a hard question to even define!
You would have to decide what is a religious belief and what isn't (where do religion and politics overlap?). Hitler was big on racial supremecy (obviosly). Is that a religion? etc. Can one person have 2 (or more) religions?
You also have to decide what religions are called ...
4
Continental Germany in fact converted to Christianity about the same time as the Anglo-Saxon peoples in England. It was only the Nordic countries, and some Eastern European ones, that came to Christianity significanly later.
So any residual paganisim is just as likely to exist in the (English-speaking) author's own culture, if not moreso.
Generally, I ...
4
The gas chambers were intentionally choosen to make it easy to kill lots of people. The germans tried shooting gypsies and disabled people (the first victims) but their soliders wouldn't be able to do it for long. It upset them. The Nazi party needed an easier way to kill lots of people.
The gas chamber was easy for their soliders because one group of ...
3
Jews were (and in many placed in East Europe still are) very much hated by the population mostly because it is believed that they are guilty in killing Jesus Christ.
In Russian Empire for instance there were multiple bloody anti-Jewish pogroms. The only reason why the Jews were not killed by the non-Jewish population at the time was that the state mostly ...
3
Joachim Fest, who wrote a major Hitler biography in German, cites four sources and concludes thus (in footnote 63 on p. 807 of the English paperback edition):
Probably the exact nature of Hitler's illness can no longer be determined, since no examination with a specific investigatory aim was ever undertaken. Because of the extremely inadequate ...
3
The whole operation was doomed from the start because the Allies at Bletchley Park had deciphered the German plans for the attack.
The British gave the Russians ample warning time of this, although the Russians already knew about it as they had spies of their own within British intelligence.
http://www.colossus-computer.com/colossus1.html
Given that the ...
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