Posted on 05/21/2002 2:50:34 AM PDT by Cinnamon Girl
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:33:32 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
This is no joke. Adolf Hitler, the lighter side, the early years, is coming to movie theaters.
It's "Springtime for Hitler" without the jokes or the songs. Or the irony.
Max, a movie written and directed by Menno Meyjes, is scheduled for release on Dec. 27 by Lions Gate Films. The film, which takes place in post-World War I Munich, stars John Cusack as Max Rothman, a German Jewish art dealer who takes a young artist named Adolf Hitler (played by Noah Taylor) under his wing.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Perhaps with Jon Lovitz in the title role.
This film seems to have little to do with reality. I think I'll just go dig out the recently declassified OSS psychoananysis of Hitler, which looks at his formative years in some detail.
You could have an exasperated Prussian Sergeant trying to teach the young Adolf the ways of military life while Hitler screws everything up.Hey and what if the sergeant were a young future Stalag 13 commandant named Klink? And Shultz could be Hitler's country cousin come to visit.
But that point needs to be made! The main point about the Nuremberg trials was 'the banality of evil'. The Nazis weren't simply bile-hurling demons. They were regular guys, with families and friends and pet dogs, people you might have liked if you'd met them in another context.
People have this vision of Hitler as a madman incapable of civil behavior or rational discourse. They think, "it can't happen here; I certainly don't know anybody like that." People forget that Hitler was swept to power because most people liked him; there must have been some reason they did. By pretending that that wasn't the case, we let our guard down for the next charming monster to come along (and he will).
Here you go. The directory marked "images" is the documents in photocopy form, if I remember.
You'll find that Hitler had quite an odd upbringing. But there's a lot to go through and it's really more than a psychoanalysis. The report originally existed in a few copies, one for the British, one for the Americans, among others - and the American one was "for the President's eyes only", because of the contents bizarreness.
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//h/hitler.adolf/oss-papers
Sounds too farfetched? Never say never. Remember "Hogan's Heroes" replete with lovable prison camp guards.
You are probably both right and wrong. Hitler does indeed seem to have had a very weird life. That doesn't preclude him being intrinsically evil. His evil may even have been inherited - certainly his father Alois seem to have been a nasty sort of critter.
Springtime For Hitler and Germany!
We started off with the cute little kid, brave and resourceful, who loves his mother.
Now we have the teenager, rebelling against the establishment, trying to overthrow the government.
Next we'll have Darth Vader, the epitome of evil.
We're shown step by step what shaped his life and changed him into a tyrannt.
Nope, Schultz would have to be some sort of business type. Before WWII, he owned the biggest toy factory in Germany. (Trivia note: Check the episode where they convinced the Gestapo agent that the war was over)
Somewhere recently I saw several poems he wrote in WWI, with a sympathetic portrait. Guess he was just a sensative guy gone astray.
Think it's too early for a sypmathetic portrait of the childhood of that poor, misunderstood, neglected rich kid, Osama?
He may have been, but that's not obvious to me. I am of the opinion that far more people than we would ever wish to believe would, if given the power Hitler acquired, match or exceed his crimes. And I don't just mean the intrinsically evil people; the congenital brutes are mostly behind bars. I mean the man on the street, the shopkeeper, the business executive, the housewife. There's no telling how someone is going to behave in that situation until he grasps the reins of power.
The only help for it is to put strict limits on the power any one man can wield, to remain eternally vigilant that those limits be preserved, and to keep and bear arms.
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