Why is adolf hitler considered evil

Such mythical figures had emerged in all cultures, in all centuries, and then in the 20th, one emerged for real. In the decades since his physical death, Hitler has lived on in a similar way: as moral touch point, a perverse gold standard for all that is wicked, all that is murderous. He is concept turned human, evil made flesh. He is, in the simplest and most straightforward way we can put it, the worst person who ever lived. Think about it. Who would be worse? Yes, we live inside our current and recent history, so that what is now or what is still near looms larger, closer than things in the more distant past.

That includes our monsters too. So was Caligula actually the worst person who ever lived? Later they would implement more radical eugenics measures in their "euthanasia" program, murdering about 70, mentally and physically handicapped people in And "euthanasia" was once again only a preliminary step toward the ultimate program of racist eugenics--the Holocaust.

This was the slippery slope with a vengeance. Because of his evil deeds, it's not surprising that in the s some viewed Hitler as the Antichrist. Daniel's prophecy seemed fulfilled: "A king shall arise, having fierce features, who understands sinister schemes.

His power shall be mighty, but not by his own power; he shall destroy fearfully, and shall prosper and thrive; he shall destroy the mighty and also the holy people [the Jews].

Through his cunning he shall cause deceit to prosper under his rule; and he shall exalt himself in his heart. He shall destroy many in their prosperity. Those wanting to know how Hitler became so evil should place at the top of their reading list Brigitte Hamann's Hitler's Vienna and Ian Kershaw's magisterial two-volume biography, Hitler.

These two excellent new works on Hitler poignantly provide insight into the background, ideas, and context that made Hitler possible. Both provide a detailed portrait of Hitler's political, social, and intellectual milieu. Since she focuses primarily on Hitler's formative years as an 18 to 24 year old in Vienna , Hamann's work examines how and to what extent the Viennese environment shaped Hitler's world view and political program.

She deftly weaves together Hitler's biography with a history of Vienna during his stay there, but always with an eye on the city as Hitler experienced it. The Vienna she portrays is quite different from the modernist Fin-de-Siecle Vienna described in Carl Schorske's path-breaking cultural history. Hamann is fully aware of the importance of modernism in Viennese culture, but she rightly argues from the outset that this was not Hitler's milieu.

Hitler wasn't moved--except maybe to disgust--at the work of Freud or modernist artists. But he did eagerly follow the political developments in the Viennese press, and Hamann's work provides considerable insight into the way Hitler perceived the political process and parties in Vienna.

One gains, for instance, considerable insight into Hitler's contempt for the parliamentary system from Hamann's engaging description of the Austrian parliament, which Hitler visited repeatedly during his first year or two in Vienna.

The Austrian parliament was often paralyzed by ethnic rivalries, which regularly produced filibusters in a variety of languages from the multi-ethnic empire, but with no translators , as well as raucous and outrageous use of noisemakers to kill debate on contentious bills.

All too often ethnic hostilities spilled over into fisticuffs on the floor of parliament. Hamann and Kershaw both argue that Hitler had a consistent--albeit pernicious--world view. At the center of that world view was the notion that history consists of a Darwinian struggle for existence between races, and the Aryan i. For Hitler human progress depended on two factors: 1 strengthening the Aryan race through eugenics measures; and 2 winning the struggle against the non-Aryan races necessitating a strong military.

Hamann astutely observes that for Hitler, "the individual has no value other than being part of a people and a race and to help secure their survival in the battle against other peoples and races. Hamann provides numerous examples to show how pervasive Aryan racism and eugenics were in the Viennese press.

Hamann's approach is commonsensical, admitting that Hitler likely read Lanz's periodical, Ostara, but asserting that Hitler's Aryan racism bears even more the stamp of Guido von List, the mystical writer who first introduced the swastika into Aryan racist circles. The leader of the intensely nationalistic Pan-German movement in Austria, Georg von Schonerer, also strongly influenced Hitler, who adopted the Heil greeting from him. Schonerer not only embraced racial anti-Semitism, but also promoted eugenics.

Hitler usually adopted his ideas from journalists and popularizers, some of them rather crass or even hare-brained. However, I question Hamann's assertion that the theories Hitler preferred were "not in agreement with academic science but were the products of the idiosyncratic thought processes of private scholars who were full of contempt for established scientists.

List, Lanz, and Schonerer, to be sure, were outsiders to academe. However, bizarre as it may seem, many of Hitler's racial ideas weren't at all foreign to academic scientific discourse, even if they weren't accepted universally. Biology, anthropology, and medicine in German-speaking lands were saturated with eugenics and racism, sometimes even anti-Semitic Aryan racism very similar to Hitler's.

Hitler's world view was diametrically opposed to Christianity, for which Hitler had nothing but contempt. Hitler never attended church in Vienna, and some sources note that his greatest enemy--besides Marxists--was the Jesuits.

One anonymous eyewitness reported that "Hitler said [c. Hitler recognized that Schonerer's position had been a public relations fiasco, and thus a political blunder, so later he always shied away from publicly criticizing the Christian churches, despite his personal antipathy toward them.

Neither Hamann nor Kershaw pay any attention to occult influence on Hitler, and with good cause. Despite the mystical inclinations of some of the Viennese anti-Semites who influenced him List and Liebenfels and the neo-pagan tendencies of some of his entourage Himmler, for instance , Hitler had little or no interest in mystical and supernatural teachings or experiences.

Privately he was contemptuous of Himmler's attempts to revive ancient German pagan rites. Alan Bullock, in one of the best scholarly Hitler biographies to precede Kershaw's, is probably close to the truth in labeling Hitler a materialist who spurned belief in anything supernatural, despite his occasional vague rhetoric about Providence.

Hamann helps clear up a number of myths about Hitler's early development, but the only really significant revelation concerns Hitler's anti-Semitism during his time in Vienna.

Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that he became devoted to anti-Semitism while in Vienna, and although historians are incredulous about Hitler's "reminiscences," most have accepted this, since it seems so plausible. Vienna was a cesspool of anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century. The incredibly popular mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, used anti-Semitic propaganda to further his political career, the Pan-German press which Hitler read was spewing forth anti-Semitism, and Vienna had a much larger and more visible Jewish population than any major German city.

Interestingly, however, only one source from his Vienna days reports that Hitler was anti-Semitic at all and several vociferously deny it. Hamann takes the side of the deniers, especially in light of the amicable relationship Hitler had with several Jews during his stay in Vienna. She admits that Hitler studied anti-Semitism in Vienna, but she argues that anti-Semitism did not become an integral part of his world view until later by at latest, when we have his first recorded anti-Semitic utterance.

Whether Hitler converted to anti-Semitism during or after his Vienna years, there can be little doubt that Viennese anti-Semitism was a crucial factor influencing him in that direction. Reconstructing Hitler's years in Vienna is a daunting task, as the sources are few and some are questionable or worse.

Hamann shows considerable skill in analyzing the main eyewitness sources we have, for she doesn't take any of them at face value, but assiduously tests them against each other and against a wealth of knowledge she has gleaned from other sources.

She points out mistakes even in the ones she considers basically reliable like Hitler's roommate August Kubizek , while dismissing some as totally worthless such as Josef Greiner. Her analysis of the sources is itself a major contribution to historiography on Hitler, and her work will be indispensable to future biographers and historians.

I only hope that if a new edition comes out it will be edited better than this one. There are numerous troublesome errors, some in translation usually minor, like Double Alliance instead of Dual Alliance , some in footnote numbering esp.

Kershaw's biography is likewise a major contribution to historiography, and it will probably become the standard biography of Hitler for many years to come. Others looked to Greek mythology and compared Hitler to the figures of Icarus and Sisyphus. Thus Hitler became a hegemonic historical analogy.

He did not so much join the ranks of earlier historical symbols of evil as render them unusable. And when the worst has not materialized, those who invoked Hitler have been accused of crying wolf. Hitler comparisons have therefore lost credibility in certain circles and have given rise to Hitler fatigue. Our present moment is a tricky one: Some commentators feel more justified than ever in invoking Hitler, yet many feel a bit numb to the comparison. The solution, it seems to me, is not to ban comparisons to the Nazis—as if such a thing were possible—but to grant that analogies have always been a tendentious business, and that only the future can tell which ones were valid.

Commentators should proceed with a little more humility, a little more circumspection, and, perhaps, a little more creativity. Before , the analogical reservoir was more abundantly stocked. Is an Austrian dictator really the best reference for Trump, or should commentators look closer to home—to American demagogues including Huey Long and George Wallace?