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| A visibly agitated Hitler giving one of his infamous speeches. Image courtesy germanartgallery.eu |
He left the darkest
marks of any human being on the recent history of the modern world. Besides
that, he left the ugliest scars that run much deeper than acceptable in
millions of lives today. Now dead and gone, Adolf Hitler remains the solid
testament to the reality that given chance, man can be worse than the devil.
It is common opinion
that you cannot separate Adolf Hitler from the second world war—a war that
literally brought the world to its knees. An aggressive and over-zealous
militant ruler, Hitler wanted to restore German dominance in Europe, lost in
Germany’s humiliating defeat in WW1.
This could only be attained by violating the treaty of Versailles that
had among other things, reduced Germany’s size by one eighth and its population
by 6.5 million people. Since Hitler wanted to bring all German speaking people
under one umbrella of a greater Germany, he saw the need to assert German
hegemony over smaller and weaker states. And so, it was against this background
that Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
Buoyed by the ease with
which he took over Poland, in the same month of September, Hitler made a move
on Belgium, an invasion that led to the outbreak of the WW11 as Britain and
France joined in to defend Belgium and Italy joined Germany’s side. By far the
most costly war in terms of human life, according to the Guinness Book of World
Records, the material cost of WW11 far transcends that of the rest of history’s
wars put together!
But it is certainly the
holocaust that secured Hitler a legacy of contempt and bore out his disturbing
capacity for evil. Initially a failed artist from the Austro-Hungarian Empire before
joining the army and eventually rising through the ranks to rule Germany,
Hitler was a gifted orator who easily talked his way into the hearts and minds
of the German people barely out of the greatest depression crisis.
An acclaimed raptor of
emotions, Hitler brainwashed his audience into believing that the Jews were the
sole cause of the German’s economic woes. This is how Hitler successfully
turned a personal vendetta against Jews into a national issue and made it
regrettable to be a Jew in Germany, back then. A majority of the citizenry won
over and even praising him as their ‘saviour’, Hitler was soon in all his pride
and glory opening up concentration camps where 6 million Jews were rounded up
and gassed to death. But not every German agreed with Hitler’s vision of a pure
German race. It’s on record that there were several unsuccessful attempts made
on Hitler’s life in a bid to stop him, when it occurred to the military elite
that a selfish lunatic had usurped all powers that be and was steering Germany
to complete ruin.
But then again, just
like every cloud has a silver lining, so did Hitler have a side of him that
wasn’t all that gloom after all. Apparently, Hitler had a deep passion for the
automobile that ultimately led to the birth of the ubiquitous classic
Volkswagen Beetle car. Although the British are much credited with making this
funny little car known to the world during their West Germany occupation after
WW11, Hitler arguably long envisioned motorizing the masses before he went all
berserk. And in Ferdinand Porsche, he found the stroke of engineering genius
that gave the world the beetle—a car so simple yet solid that would soon outperform
Ford’s Model T and become the first car ever to sell twenty million units.
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| Hitler inspecting a convertable Volkswagen Beetle car. Volkswagen would later experience marketing headaches once real mass production began after WW11 and under British watch due to the car's undeniable ties to the late Nazi Germany dictator. Image courtesy germanartgallery.eu |
Whether some people are
born evil or the world makes them evil is open to conjecture. But whatever made
Hitler so evil—a man who found great relish in human pain and suffering is for
anyone’s guess. Some people suggest that the answers are in the pages of Mein Kampf (My Struggle)—a book Hitler
wrote in the 1920s advocating for the rearmament and reunion of all
German-speaking people into a greater Germany.
His was politics of
deception and extermination; a totalitarian ruler who rode on a dubious wave of
ethnicity, tyranny and a cult of personality that should never be emulated
anywhere again in the world. To most people, he remains a despicable figure of
history—a man who absolutely wasted his talents.
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