Inside Hitler’s Mind
Probing the mind of Adolf Hitler is not an exercise in the macabre that would better be forgotten. For decades, Jews, who were insisting that we remember the Holocaust, were advised to stop their morbid handwringing and get on with life. For, after all, remembering piles of emaciated bodies and specterlike skeletons shuffling from barbed-wire enclosures was not a compelling occupation for people pursuing the good life.
But while forgetting may seem well and good, as Jewry feared, the Fuehrer has returned. And, as improbable as it may seem to rational individuals, some are buying into his obsessive mania. No, Hitler has not been physically resurrected, nor will he be raised until the resurrection of the ungodly, when he will receive in full measure what is due him. While the Fuehrer’s physical remains decay in an appropriately unmarked spot, the venom Hitler created is being injected into a new generation of degenerates. Fearful images are projected in visages of brawling neo-Nazi hoodlums scrawling their swastika graffiti and violently venting their racial hatred. They and their growing host of fellow travelers prove that yet another generation contains elements susceptible to the mania that a half century ago sanctioned a national savagery that submerged a significant portion of the world in blood. Consequently, like it or not, we must remember and remind ourselves and our contemporaries of the bad seeds that produce such ignominious evil.
Adolf Hitler, the prototype man-turned-monster, offers a concise study in how cunning demented minds can be in crafting strategies that will achieve their nefarious objectives. His conclusions, which were drawn from early observations of strengths and weaknesses of contemporary political parties, led to his concepts for forging the Third Reich. Factors central to his thinking form the principles that have risen again and constitute the dangerous malignancy confronting us in the 90s.
Two elements—a sense of racial superiority and anti-Semitism—that were already ingrained in Hitler’s character shaded his concepts.
Racial Superiority
Hitler’s idea of a pure Aryan race appealed to those afflicted by inferior impressions of themselves and their nation, which had been defeated in World War I and humiliated in its aftermath. His “master race” would have its heel in the face of inferior people, especially Jews, Slavs, and Czechs. Jews would be wiped out. The others would become hewers of wood and carriers of water for their pure Aryan masters.
Anti-Semitism
Although he publicly denied having adverse opinions of Jewish people in his youth, “We,” Hitler said, “didn’t give the matter any thought … I even took them [the Jews] for Germans.” A boyhood friend, August Kubizck, contradicts him. “When I first met Adolf Hitler, his anti-Semitism was already pronounced.” In Vienna, under the influence of entrenched anti-Semites like Mayor Karl Lueger, hatred for the Jew deepened and would ultimately erupt into a holocaust. Ironically, during his vagabond years of living jobless in the flower houses of Vienna, it was an old Hungarian-Jewish clothes dealer who took pity on Hitler and gave him an overcoat to protect himself against the cold.
Religion Tolerated as a Means to an End
The future Fuehrer did not, as did the Communists, make the fatal error of discounting the influence of religion over the people. His aim was to separate the church from political influence while maintaining a facade of respect. The final phase of his plan would have the state as the God figure, and he, of course, would be the state. (While Hitler retained membership in the Catholic Church, he confided to a friend that he was convinced that the historical Jesus had been no Jew, but the son of one Pantherus, a Greek soldier in the Roman army.)
Seize the Political System
To accomplish this, he studiously curried the favor of elements in the military, politicians (notably the President of the Republic), and important business figures. Trading on their respectability, he then built his state-within-a-state in preparation for the final takeover.
Lies and Terror
Hitler’s rationale for the use of lies and terror is expressed in his Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the Nazi manifesto: “At a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down.” Of developing his approach to the use of “spiritual and physical terror,” he said, “I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses … the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of success of any further resistance.”
Pageantry and Oratory
Taking a cue from Karl Lueger, a brilliant orator, Hitler wrote, “The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.”
No one can doubt the narcotic-like power that held sway over the flag-bearing, goose-stepping legions who led Aryan super-race masses into mammoth stadiums to be mesmerized by the thunderous oratory of their deified Fuehrer. Nor can we question the devastation reaped as the Hitler-induced hypnosis caused a nation to become immune to the grisly sights, sounds, and smells of the Holocaust.
Such are the threads spun from a consummately degenerate mind. Those who—in the name of religion or racial superiority, Aryan or otherwise—use the lie as a fundamental tactic and attempt to intimidate the objects of their hatred by brutalizing them are no less Hitlerian than the master anti-Semite himself. And, given a negative social climate, should a man with compelling oratorical and political skills come to the fore, be fully assured that compliant masses once again will be ready to march.
What we should appreciate from all of this is that the satanic forces that form personified evil can be identified. And when those people attempt to legitimatize their evil designs, in whatever guise, those of us who recognize the process must move to put an end to it.
