Are we rehabilitating Hitler like we were Stalin now?

Oh my goodness no.  I merely posted a thesis about Hitler.  It seems to be born out by my reading of the published evidence.  That he was a creature of evil incarnate is without question.  That the Holocaust did in fact happen is an historical fact.  But, his mindset at the beginning is not so easily plumbed and I set forth a thesis that I invite you to attack and destroy with historical evidence.  For example:  If he had said in his book:"While fighting against the British in France, I came to the realization that this war, like many others, is aresult of a Jewish plot.  If I survive I swear to devote my life to eradicating these parasites from the face of the earth by shooting, hanging, burning, gassing, crucifixtion and any other means I can think of--so help me God."Now that would make my little thesis seem silly.I think my initial comments about Stalin were nicely supported by subsequent posts.

The problem with any historical figure is we cannot get inside their heads.  Any thesis that is presented trying to do so is doomed to failure.  Your thesis, on the other hand, is safe because we cannot dig Hitler up from hell or wherever his evil soul went to, and plug a probe to his head to record his thoughts.  On a matter such as this, he would not have telegraphed his intentions before his rise to power, and even in power, he would not have wanted a paper trail of evidence in case he was ever held accountable for it.  So how can we dispute your thesis without the inclusion of circumstantial evidence based on hearsay, second hand accounts, and implied logic?  I mean that's all that is available to us, and Mein Kampf certainly gives us the implied intention to rid the world of Jewry before it can fulfill its hideous goal of taking over the world.  Other than this, I don't know what to say.

Willy,I have to say that my knowledge of events prior to and during the Third Reich tend to make me agree with you.Hitler did not initially intend the extermination of the Jews, but he did not shed a tear over the prospect either.  One of the things that any serious research into the holocaust will show is that the SS went out of their way to provide Hitler with what we would call "plausible deniability".  To my knowledge there is absolutely no paper trail linking Hitler to the order to exterminate the Jews.  There is much documentation about the Fuhrer's principles but nothing that says he ever explicitly wrote out an order calling for the extermination of the Jews along the lines of the famous "commissar order" he promulgated before the invasion of Russia.  Hitler essentially wanted the Jews gone and did not care if gone meant shipped elsewhere or killed.

Okay, so what are we trying to say about Hitler?  That he might not have actually initiated the holocaust, but just signed off on it after the fact?

Not quite.  How about this.  Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite, perhaps the worst of the crowd.  Hisviews were well known and his lickspittles, always eager to curry favor, did everything they could thinkof to forward his program of ridding greater Germany of Jews.  Perhaps' like Caligula, Hitler wishedthat the Jews (read the people of Rome) had but one neck so he could wring it.  Anti-semitism was rampant in Germany and many other places in Europe so his rantings fell on fertile ground.The Holocaust was a latent horror.Thy tyranny of numbers, the problems of emigration and the coming of the war led to a situation whereonly something as drastic as the Holocaust could resolve the problem and fulfill the "leader's desire.So the Holocaust  policy was the logical outcome of solving a problem by the application of industrialtechniques  and Teutonic efficiency to a perceived social problem as envisioned by a soi disant "savior" of Germany--a madman.  As fear as I can tell there was no master plan to kill the Jews in Germany or in theworld at large.  Like Topsy, the policy just grew and grew until the unthinkable became commonplace.All this from a race that gave us Bach, Wagner, Beethoven, Luther, Einstein, Alexander von Humboldt,Mozart, Bismarck, Fritz Haber, Leopold von Ranke. Goethe, Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich--astonishing and horrible to contemplate.

+1Well put.

Well put!?Huzzah--a compliment--open the bottle of French wine!

A Pinot Noir would be warmly welcome ! (seems that you have some great "c?page" in the US too)http://www.tastings.com/wine/best_producers/us_pinot_noir.html Btw, I fully agree with your last post ...

Kind of chiming in late on this conversation, but I think that an examination of history will show that the “Final Solution” evolved over time and the course of the war.  As stated by others above, elimination of the Jewish race was not an initial goal of Hitler and the Social Democrats.  As late as 1939-1940 he was still toying (unrealistically) with shipping all the Jews in Europe off to Madagascar.When the Nazi's conquered Poland they began relocating Jews from Germany to "the General Government" with the goal of relocating them out of Germany to Poland (or some other land) but the Gauleiters (local German officials in the occuppied territories) had no viable means of handling them.  As this situation grew worse, they were herded into ghettos and camps - some camps where they were used as labor.  As time passed, and it became obvious that there was no viable way to "relocate" the Jews, they started on the idea of working them to death.  Sometime between when they first started transferring Jews to the General Government in the newly conquered territories and the launch of Barbarossa views changed and it became much more expedient for the Nazis to simply eliminate new populations of Jews that they came across rather than further relocating them.  Of course relocation continued -as did wholesale slaughter of "Soviet" Jews.  Remember - Hitler sold the invasion of the Soviet Union as a stike against "Jewish-Bolshevism" and against "Asiatics" and it was, from the very start, a war of anihilation instead of simply a war of conquest.Never a stable individual, I think that from a distance we can see how Hitler's mental state and faculties declined (decayed?) over the last 10 to 15 years of his life (was it the syphalis?).  Never a paragon of rationality or morality, he became increasingly irrational and amoral (and obsessed) as the war progressed.