Adolf Hitler: Difference between revisions

* [[Enemy Civil War]]: In addition to the Night of The Long Knives, where he had the SA purged and made an impotent organization because he saw their ambition as a threat to his power, Hitler constantly pitted his top lieutenants and subordinates against each other so they could never overthrow him. This was both to ensure his own supreme power and because he believed it was a kind of positive Social Darwinism.

* [[Enemy Mine]]: With [[Josef Stalin]]. [[Chronic Backstabbing Disorder|It didn't last long.]]

* [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"|Everyone Calls Him Der Führer]]: Tried to enforce this, "Heil Hitler" aside.

* [[Eviler Than Thou]]: A telegram to Martin Bormann has him saying that all this racial supremacy stuff is rubbish; in reality, he's out to crush the Jews as an ethnic minority in the cultural sense, reasoning that notions like peace and love were introduced by and tied to them, and it was those notions that he was out to destroy. If that's true, then he was even more coldly rational and dangerous than previously thought. This was not [[For the Evulz]], but [[Utopia Justifies the Means|a form of social engineering]] -- he wanted to create a modern-day Sparta or Imperial Rome, and to that end he had to radically change Germany's cultural values. Getting rid of the Jews was his way. He actually admitted as much when he discussed the relation between Nazi racism and science with a common farmer: "I know perfectly well that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer and cattle breeder, cannot get your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as a politician need a conception that enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely and new anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis... and for this purpose, the conception of race serves me well. With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry the revolution abroad and re-cast the world."

* [[Evil Uncle]]: Hitler had a weird, controlling, excessively intimate relationship with his niece Angela "Geli" Raubal, who eventually committed suicide. With her uncle's own gun. After they'd been arguing for days. On a night when all the servants (except one who was deaf) were conveniently on vacation. Did we mention she'd been planning a trip to Vienna, where she was rumored to have a Jewish boyfriend? Even at the time, there was speculation that Hitler had been in love with her and murdered her in a jealous rage (although no clear evidence exists even today)<ref> witnesses could swear Hitler had been in the sleeping car train to Berlin the night of her death and arrived in Munich afterward, being tipped by a telegram</ref>.

** Hitler's father may also be an example -- his third wife, Adolf's mother, was his own niece.

* [[Evil Vegetarian]]: Many people think Hitler was this, though it is controversial whether or not he was actually a vegetarian.

** He still ate a small amount of meat and fish throughout [[World War Two|the 1940s]]. There is a story recollected by Gregor Strasser which tells how he refused to eat for days after Geli Raubal's death until his fellows dragged him to a restaurant and brought him a typical South German breakfast (with ham, bacon and so on). His face turned green, he said "[[Ironic Echo|take these corpses out of my sight]]" and from that day he avoided meat wherever possible.

* [[Fan Art]]: He drew quite a few reinterpretations of [[Disney]] characters, including [[Mickey Mouse]] and [[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|the Seven Dwarfs]].

* [[Fascist but Inefficient]]: Prior to the war years, Hitler was apparently quite fond of waking up late, taking long walks, watching movies, and otherwise being a pretty lazy totalitarian dictator. He took the view that things tended to sort themselves out if one didn't interfere too much. After failing to knock out the Soviet Union in a single blow in 1941 he went over to the opposite side because he believed the Wehrmacht was [[Never My Fault|wholly responsible]] for failing to meet the invasion's intended goals, and resolved to micro-manage every single military operation from then on.

* [[Fatal Flaw]]: [[Pride]]. The failed attack on Russia (and declaring war on the whole world at the same time) is just the tip of the iceberg.

* [[For Want of a Nail]]: Out of the six children of his parents, only he and his younger sister survived into adulthood. He narrowly survived several near-death experiences, and several failed and aborted assassination attempts after becoming ''Führer''. He also narrowly survived a shell explosion in [[World War I]]. His army buddies in the war used to think hanging around him was a decent way to live longer.

** There's a book called "Third Reich Victorious" which has ten self-contained alternate-history scenarios that end with Germany winning the war. The first has Hitler joining the navy instead of the army, and becomes a well-disciplined officer of the fleet, transforming his mild anti-Semitism of the time into hatred merely of the British, and building up a powerful fleet that manages to take on the Royal Navy when World War II comes around. It's actually a pretty good read.

** Also if, Germany had a reasonably unbiased judiciary, Hitler would likely have been executed for high treason for his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 instead of the ludicrously lenient five-year sentence in a cushy prison cell instead, from which he was released after only a year.

** Hitler is often painted as a coward and a [[General Failure]], when in fact he was decorated for bravery in [[World War I]] and came up with some of the tactics that overcame the Belgians in 1940. His real [[General Failure]] moment was more for political propaganda reasons later in the war when he insisted that troops on the Eastern Front shouldn't retreat -- which [[Josef Stalin|Stalin]] had also done earlier on.

*** Whether or not that was a fair description being a runner in general was no cushy job. Runners had to work their way through labyrinths of trenches to and from critical places, especially messages at places where the landlines were which meant of course the places that were either too far forward to lay lines or had all their lines blown up. Or in other words the most unpleasant. Whether Hitler earned it honestly there is no reason a runner could not earn an Iron Cross the hard way and there are plenty why he could.

** Historians now have access to Hitler's war record, whereas they previously had to rely heavily on ''Mein Kampf'' and the dubious testimony of Nazi sympathizers who were with him (and, sometimes, not). It turns out that yes, he really ''was'' a coward or at least nowhere near as brave as he made himself out to be, spending almost the entirety of the first war relatively safe behind the front lines in Regimental HQ, and turning down promotions probably to avoid more dangerous work (or work, period -- he spent days at a time not doing much). His Iron Crosses came more from sycophantic ass-kissing ([[Irony|of a Jewish officer]]) than bravery.

** Also, one good set of tactics does not Alexander make - Hitler was a shockingly bad strategist, and made several blunders, over the advice of more competent generals, that ultimately cost him the war. There are too many to list here - see [[General Failure]] below.

* [[For Science!]]: The excuse used for the Zyklon B experiment at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The Nazis wanted to find out whether a substance previously used for killing rodents would work on people. In 1941 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were put in the gas chambers and used as guinea pigs. It worked, unfortunately -- and it worked incredibly efficiently. The victims died within 20 minutes. The Zyklon B gas was commonly used from then on in the concentration camps for exterminating what were mostly Jews.

* [[Fountain of Expies]]: Just look at the [[A Nazi by Any Other Name]] page.

** Note that some scholars claim Hitler was not ''particularly'' hateful of homosexual men, and that the chief architect of the Nazi campaign against gays was in fact Heinrich Himmler. Also note that [[Double Standard|lesbians did not suffer such discrimination.]]

** [[Pragmatic Villainy]]: the number of gay males who ended up imprisoned<ref> under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code - Nazis insisted on full legal coverage</ref> was small, but [[Sarcasm Mode|incidentally]] those discovered, tried and sentenced were nearly always political opponents of the regime. Even Ernst Rohm was only killed for political reasons, not because of his sexual activities.

** There was actually a homemade film found of a cookout at Hitler's home, with [[Even Evil Has Loved Ones|him happily spending time with friends, playing with his dog, etc.]] Many people wanted the film destroyed so nobody would see it, because they thought Hitler being shown to be a regular person would horrify people too much.

** Actually it is known that movies of him away from work were made as propaganda specifically to dispel any notion that he was not human.

* [[May-December Romance]]: Eva Braun, who was 23 years his junior. Allegedly, as a 28-year-old German soldier in World War I, with a 16-year-old French girl, Charlotte Lobjoie, which produced a son, Jean-Marie Loret. Had a short relationship with Maria Reiter in 1931, whom he had met when he was 37 and she was 16.

* [[Million Mook March]]

* [[Modern Major-General]]: Hitler was many things, but a military genius was not one of them. His army's early victories came about due to the brilliant leadership of generals like Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian. Once Hitler started trying to personally direct the war effort out of fear that his stellar generals might overshadow him, he began replacing them with Nazi yes-men who had more loyalty than talent. That's about the time everything started to go downhill.

** However, this is often Flanderised. Hitler was described as a "gifted amateur" tactically (not strategically), certainly more than you'd expect for someone who never rose above corporal in the army. His reputation was in part made by an idea he had to deal with the Belgian border fortresses during the invasion of the Low Countries -- the Belgians had made the turrets so huge and impenetrable, ''the Nazis could just land gliders full of commandoes on top of them''.

** But on the other hand, Hitler specifically ordered said doctor ''not'' to be killed. While the above sounds like a good [[Freudian Excuse]], he didn't actually seem to blame the doctor, although he was truly desperate when his mother died -- the doctor claimed he had never seen a young man so desperate in the same situation.

** After the Anschluss, the doctor, Eduard Bloch, actually wrote to Hitler and asked for help after his practice had been closed. He came under Gestapo protection and was allowed to live undisturbed until the paperwork for his and his wife's immigration to the US had been finished.

* [[Mook Promotion]]: Hitler was a [[Mook]] in [[World War I]]

* [[Beard of Evil|Moustache Of Evil]]: Unless you're doing a [[Charlie Chaplin]] cosplay [[Good Hair, Evil Hair|you'll get in trouble for using that.]]