Your thoughts on the rise of Hitler's power?

I’ll take the subject line of your question and answer that. He was charismatic, he came at the right time. He was also a great artist, I thought he followed Hinduism? I would never kill anyone never mind large groups of people for self serving purposes. Hind-site is a wonderful thing.

Would you be able kill anyone outside your ethnic group to obtain whatever has been promised to you? Probably not.
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Would you follow the Nazi Regime to protect your family while killing others? Probably not.

Would you be brave enough to give yourself up and die before being forced to turn into a killing machine? Probably not.

I know this is a tough topic but how do you think you would be if you were a German living at that time?

I would probably join the Partizans. That’s what my grandfather did.

OH and excuse my spelling, I was in a rush! And my mind was racing with thoughts!

Which are the facts and which are the theories?? Footnotes, please.

Did he really have mental illness or autism in his family tree? Also, there is a difference between being autistic and being a psychopath!!! Did he actually exterminate family members? I have never heard these things.

I have no idea how to answer the final question… If I were an ethnic German? If I were Jewish or mixed race? If I were a Slavic migrant or Roma? If I were a Communist, handicapped, homosexual or transsexual, or some other stripe of ‘asocial’?

Hitler had a huge amount of charisma as @Shippy said. He had something to offer for almost everyone (well, that is, people within his moral universe… the others were not ‘people’).

One of the most excellent and readable books on how and why Germans followed Hitler and became killing machines is Ordinary Men.

As others have said, Hitler came along at the right time and he had a natural talent for selecting those little details that were annoying a lot of people and just used those to get the fire going inside them. All it takes is to get a group irate and then they do the work for you by getting their friends and relatives irate and next thing you know you have a party that is capable of doing something.

Now my question to you is – if you believed your economy was crashing…and you became desperate for a political change and you have a man like Hitler who seems to have the answers…do you think you would be able to follow someone who is obviously screwed up?

I would never have thought that Hitler’s ideas were the answer. I would have been thrown in jail or sent to the camps for my opposition, if not for being Jewish. Of course, I wasn’t alive at the time, but my Grandmother was, and she was Jewish, and if she had still been in Germany (her family left in 1907 or so), she would have been in deep trouble.

Or was is it not that obvious because Hitler was full of secrets and hid them well?

Dunno about secrets, but it should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that Hitler was bad news.

Would you be able kill anyone outside your ethnic group to obtain whatever has been promised to you?

Nope. No way. In my book, we are all in the same family.

Would you follow the Nazi Regime to protect your family while killing others?

Absolutely not. My family has integrity. We would not survive at the expense of others.

Would you be brave enough to give yourself and die before being forced to turn into a killing machine?

Brave? No. But I would have fought it. There is no other choice. It is not a matter of bravery but a matter of necessity.

I know this is a tough topic but how do you think you would be if you were a German living at that time?

It should be obvious that if I had been living at that time, I would not have been one of those compliant Germans. Anyone who has read anything I’ve written here, too, knows that I’m not the compliant type.

But, coming from Jewish stock, I wouldn’t have had a choice. In any case, for whatever reason, the Jewish side of my family got out thirty years before Hitler took power.

@wundayatta, I am from a Jewish Family too and we have quite a tragic history. Although, sometimes I try to understand or envision what it would be like to grow as a non-german jew. Would I still be me without the religion and culture that I have that I was brought up. Would I help the Jews and die for others who were outside the German Box. And If I were a Jew at that time, would I convert to Catholicism, change my name and disappear. I would definitely fight if I found the strength and would even sacrifice myself for a family member if had too. Except Nazi’s scare the crap out of me. They are like the viruses from the matrix, programmed to kill.

My grandpa lost all his family in Auchwitz. He was traveling in Argentina when the Nazi’s invaded Poland and took his family away. Growing up; my father made us visit concentration camps and I couldn’t help but feel traumatized, and unable to understand this phenomenon.It really weighs over me.

As a Jew and a member of the human race, I wish he had never been born. That’s my thought.

@snapdragon24 I don’t identify much with my Jewishness because I wasn’t told about it until I was 20. I know little about it, and what I do know is because of Jewish friends who have shared their stories with us. My wife’s best friend is a daughter of holocaust survivors. There are many Jews in my children’s classes, and my daughter even served at the Bat Mitzvah of her best friend at the time. She had to learn to sing one of the prayers. She still remembers it nearly four years later. Hell, I can nearly sing it, too.

But for me, even though it seems like half my friends are Jewish (maybe they tend to be more interesting people—perhaps because they value education so highly), I don’t really feel like I am Jewish (although I’m told Hitler would have said I am). I understand it is part of my genetic heritage, so perhaps some of the culture has passed down to me through my blood. Maybe the value of education is part of that. Maybe creativity and entrepreneurialism is part of it. I don’t think anyone can say yes or no yet, and support that answer with data. It’s just a theory.

Shit happens in the world. Hitler was bad, but what is going on in the Congo is worse, I think, at least in terms of the number of deaths. More deaths happened in China. So Hitler was not at all unique. He just got a lot of publicity. He’s our evil guy. He obscures other evil guys.

I don’t think I’ll see these things because I’m not sure I can afford to let myself be traumatized by them. I don’t need to see that stuff to know what I need to do in life. I’ve had my own traumas. There is only so much I can take. And in this particular case, the individual is already dead. It is his ideological successors that we need to be vigilant about, and I feel I am vigilant about them. The battle against racism and ethnicism goes on every day. That’s one of the reasons I’m on fluther.

@wundayatta : How can culture pass through genetic heritage? That’s kind of like the theory that enabled the persecution of assimilated Jews who had not been practicing the culture or religion for generations.

He was a victim of circum stance cision, they cut one of his balls off instead.
A life of bitter hatred inevitably followed, being a sick fuck helped of course.

@ucme : I thought he lost one during the First World War…

@bookish1 Probably did, I just make half this shit up as I go along :¬)

By all accounts I’ve seen, Hitler lived a reasonably middle class life and outwardly displayed at least average intelligence. He obviously had mental issues, at least later on, and these may have been genetic.

Me? I think if I lived in 1933 Germany, I’d have hightailed it out. But it’s hard to say where to. Maybe the USA, if possible.

do you think you would be able to follow someone who is obviously screwed up? Or was is it not that obvious because Hitler was full of secrets and hid them well? He didn’t hide them that well, but his agenda and charisma convinced others of his sanity and they followed.

Would you be able kill anyone outside your ethnic group to obtain whatever has been promised to you? Perhaps, I am opposed to killing but desperate times, who knows.

Would you follow the Nazi Regime to protect your family while killing others? No. My family would most likely die helping others.

Would you be brave enough to give yourself and die before being forced to turn into a killing machine? Yes.

I know this is a tough topic but how do you think you would be if you were a German living at that time? I think I’d be part of the resistance and take my chances, while trying to get the heck out of there.

Neo-cons pretty well purged the less publicly palatable elements of fascism (e.g., violent nationalism) to create the Republikan Party.

@bookish1 How can culture pass through genetic heritage? I don’t know. If it can happen, then much smarter people than I will figure it out.

Can intelligence pass through the genes? Can an ability to run pass through the genes? Can musical ability pass through the genes? Can a capacity for spirituality pass through the genes?

If they can, then these things will surely affect the culture of the family and it could affect an entire clan if they are all fairly closely related. So, for example, a group of people that all have very strong musical capabilities are more likely to incorporate music in various aspects of life than people who don’t like music or can’t do music.

The effect would be broad and it would be difficult to tie it to specific actions, but on average, it could have an impact. Again, I don’t know how this would work, but it seems to me that the theory would be a useful one to try to test out.

I think about how I would have behaved and I am honest enough with myself to know I can’t predict how I would have reacted under those extraordinary circumstances. I am a Jew.

For more information about Hitler….http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/adolf_hitler.htm
Pretty much basic information on that one. But it does shed a bit of light on what was going on in…let me word this properly….Hitler’s youth.

Autism is not connected to Mental Retardation. And I agree with @bookish1 , “Ordinary Men” is an excellent book to read if you want to have some idea of how people came to the point of doing such totally horrific things to their fellow Germans. Hitler had very good relationships with several Jewish men, but I think he was turned off when he was denied admission to the Art School in Vienna. I think that he found warfare to be a niche into which he fit very well & I think that he also thought he had Jewish family members in his back ground. I think that his actions against the Jews was partly trying to remove these thoughts from his mind.

I don’t make excuses for Hitler but if it hadn’t been for the First World War and the economic and political chaos that it caused he would never have risen to power and we would never have heard of him.

My grandfather was an ethnic German protestant but did not like the direction his homeland was headed, so he left in the late ‘20s or very early ‘30s and settled in Switzerland. My mother was a young child during WW II, but she remembers the planes flying overhead and when Swiss cities and towns were bombed.

As for what I would do if I were placed in the position to kill or be killed? No one can say. I’d like to think that I would choose to die; but the instinct to survive is very strong, especially when decisions are being made on adrenaline, not reason or conscience.

You have to remember Hitler did not have to deal with the media forms we have today. He was an excellent, charismatic speaker who could control when and where he spoke. He was also very good at getting rid of any potential threats to his control on his way up, especially the ones that supported with him.

@wundayatta Nature nurture. A child basking in rays of music during the formulative years is almost guaranteed an apt for it. That’s culture. The family has a tradition of playing music/singing. In our family the piano was more important than the bed. You could always sleep on the piano buy you can’t…

A key event understanding Hitler’s rise to power is the so-called

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s worth reading this article. Except for the social democratic party members in the parliament no one voted against it.

I can also recommend Ken Follett’s century trilogy. It’s a great entertaining way to understand what led to WWI and WWII.

If Germany had had something like the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Street_riots

in Britain the Third Reich might have been avoided. The British people were more courageous to say no to their Nazis.

Unfortunately even though we’d fought off the Nazis, we still have dictators in our very own front yard. I think they’re called Members of Parliament.

@lightsourcetrickster – Why are you not a member of parliament?

Tis true, autism is not associated with retardedness, but what I meant to say is that people diagnosed with autism also,sometimes, have the inability to feel certain emotions as well. Also most of this info is found in documentaries online…it is a theory that Hitler was diagnosed with some disfunction simply because he is a psychopath…it is a fact that he had people in his family that had a handicap and exterminated them. It is also a fact that he was obsessed with his niece and kept her under constant surveillance before she went completely mad and it is a fact that he was a fucked up kid who got rejected when motivated to become an artist. Along many many other things. I cant name mu sources because they were all mixed up facts nd theories that I saw in movies, documentaries, stores from my jewish friends and more…but in conclusion I like how honest everyone is here and I appreciate all your truthful answers…I hate hitler and im upset his mother didn’t go through the abortion…another fact ;)