Hi John -
Hitler was motivated by racial theories that became all the rage in the late 19th -- early 20th century. You probably remember the old illustrations that have a lower form of primate on the left, some cross between ape and man in the middle, and a noble browed, jut jawed Northern European on the far right as the apotheosis of man.
Being a second rate thinker (who seems to have thought he was first rate -- typical guy who should be doomed to work as a rent-a-cop or gas station attendant) Hitler took that stuff seriously.
Well, a lot of people did back then. As I said, it was all the rage. People who thought that they were advanced and modern were persuaded that the races of man had inherent characteristics that they could not escape by any education. The Irish were sots, the English were enlightened, the Slavs were inferior, the Jews could not help themselves, they were an evil canker and Christ killers, too. And the Aryan was the apotheosis of human evolution.
You probably remember when the eugenicists were sterilizing people in the US. Remember that great champion of human freedom, Oliver Wendell Holmes? He really was a first class thinker (History of the Common Law, truly great), but he wrote the majority opinion in Buck vs. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), upholding a Virginia statute that forced sterilization of a woman who wasn't actually retarded but not all that bright and very low class, on the grounds that "three generations of imbeciles is enough."
If the great justice Holmes can sign off on eugenics, can you really blame a poor failed semi-educated artist who was wounded in the Great War from being persuaded by the reasoning?
Just kill off all the bad 'uns, and the good 'uns will flourish. It's for the good of the majority.
Made sense to him.
Plus, his mother, whom he loved, died of breast cancer, very painfully, and she had a Jewish doctor. And then he was left all alone. And he moved to Vienna and lived in poor quarters, tried to make a living as an artist and failed dismally, and lived shoved up cheek by jowl with Eastern European Jews, with sidelocks and long beards and funny clothes and funny smelling food, and it made him nauseated.
The Weimar Republic hired him to infiltrate the Nazi party, and it was an epiphany. He had found his metier.
And the rest was history. |
