One thing
Hitler never drew people. He's draw streets and scenes but no people.
And he may have been 12.5 % Jewish.
Who knew.
Bump for later. Thanks for your post, neverdem.
As for how Hitler's life would play out in the absence of capture, Dr. Murray predicted suicide. Good call.
"How fortunate for govenments that people do not think". Adolph Hitler
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I periodically remind my teenage vegetarian niece that Hitler, too, was a vegetarian. This does not amuse her mother (my liberal sister-in-law).
Third, some understanding of Hitler had to include his love of Wagner, Hegel and other aspects of Germanic culture. While Hitler was not a truly speaking a German, he was Germanic enough to crave an identity as such including Wagner's antisemitism and so forth. As I understand it, Wagner was a cross dresser and Hitler's sexual predilections suggested dysfunction but his biographers have all been unclear to what extant.
There is such a thing as evil. Hitler surely was one of the great communicators of the 30s who understood the fears, wishes and needs of the Germans. He was clever to the extreme and must have been a great retail as well as a wholesale politician. He took all his abilities, all of his intelligence and directed it towards evil; hence, he was an evil man.
Finally, I wish people who write of Hitler's psychology would review Elias Canett's Crowds and Power. This book has a lengthy review of wanting to be a survivor and enjoying being a survivor of the dead as a prime motive factor in many mass murderers of history--that is Genghis Khan, Saddam, Caesar and so forth. This is why these people were dangerous and why now (with the A bomb) we dare not permit another to rise. A good reason for disposing of Saddam.
Beating the nurture over nature drum to death. Some people are just plain evil.
I spent some time reading through the cited OSS report on Hitler's personality. A few things bear mentioning.
First, the report does not claim that Hitler was an overt homosexual, but rather that he had repressed homosexual tendencies. It also claimed he had heterosexual incliniations, but was impotent. The main finding about his sexuality was that he was a masochist.
Second, the report diagnoses Hitler with practically every mental illness under the sun, including paranoid schizophrenia. Some of the diagnoses seem very far-fetched and ridiculous. Some of the diagnoses rely on discredited psychoanalytic thinking; for example, the report explains that Hitler must have witnessed his parents having sex as a child, which inspired Oedipal rage and jealousy against the father, etc. A significant amount of Hitler's behavior is explained by silly mechanisms like Oedipal rage, desire to sleep with the mother, and so on.
Third, the report did not accurately predict Hitler's demise. The report claimed Hitler would die by having a Jew shoot him, thereby preserving his status as an anti-Jewish hero; or, that he would die by leading soldiers directly into a glorious battle; or, that he would die by committing suicide in some incredibly dramatic way like blowing up his palace with him in it. Instead, he just shot himself. Although the report accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide, that prediction was easy since Hitler constantly repeated that if Germany lost the war he'd commit suicide.
The report seems to suffer from a few problems. First, the Freudian/psychosexual stuff lacks credibility. Second, the predictions of Hitler's future behavior were inaccurate. Third, the report disagrees with various other psychoanalyses of Hitler, except in regard to Hitler's rage over childhood abuse and humiliation. Fourth, the report subscribes to a discredited view of schizophrenia as resulting from subconscious conflicts. It's now known that schizophrenia is the result of a degenerative brain disease, and I doubt very much that Hitler had it, since he displayed none of the typical symptoms. But the report repeatedly diagnoses Hitler as having paranoid schizophrenia, or being "on the verge of it" because of subconscious conflicts.
Doubtless Hitler was a deeply disturbed man with all kinds of mental problems. But the accuracy of the specific psychoanalyses in this report remain to be demonstrated. Some parts seemed highly plausible, and other parts seemed doubtful.
I just rented and watched something on Hitler, called, IIRC, "The Rise of Evil."
I'm sure historians could find things to quibble with, but I thought it was pretty good.
They made Geli look about 16 instead of 21 (or maybe I'm just getting old) and they alleged that he liked golden showers, but they didn't present him as having SSAD.
One thing I thought was good was that they went into detail on how Hitler got Bismarck to apppoint him Chancellor.
There was a documentary on the History Channel last night comparing Stalin and Hitler's psychological makeup. It described both as paranoid and abusive of women. My husband had to laugh - that also describes his boss to a T.
There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in his Vienna phase. Nazi goons did all they could to remove the evidence of that but failed.