At least it’s better than Hitler farting
Tangentially, I decided I’d be a helpful pedant and provide a link to Hitler’s Table Talk. You know, just in case your interest is so piqued by the Billmon reference that you think, Damn! Hours and hours of brain-liquifyingly tedious monologues from Hitler? Yes, I do want to inflict that on myself!
Anyway, I was over at Amazon grabbing that there linky-poo, when my eye was drawn to the reader reviews. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Anna from Stuttgart:
This is a rather large book, but I devoured it literally overnight. The intelligence Hitler displays in his conversations is almost overwhelming. Even his harshest critics cannot deny what a brilliant mind he had. A self-educated man, he possessed knowledge of a broad range of subjects, sometimes knowing even more about certain things than men who were educated at universities. Before I read this book, I knew he was smart. After having completed the book, I was convinced of his genius.
Anna is 21 and has been studying der Führer avidly since she was 13. Here’s her review of Mein Kampf:
I have read this work half a dozen times and each time I discover something new. The Hitler who wrote Mein Kampf was not the Hitler who later went on to rule the Third Reich and most of Europe. He was still developing.
Hitler was, naturally, a better public orator than he was an author, nevertheless this book can be compared with his “Table Talk” conversations (which were published after his death), as Mein Kampf is filled with Hitler’s thoughts, opinions, ideals, and plans. He also gives an interesting, albeit brief, account of his childhood and young adulthood as well as an especially fascinating first-hand account of his experiences as a soldier in WWI.
One is stunned at this man’s great intelligence, despite what popular opinion would have us believe.
It is certainly not light reading, but anyone in search of truth about Hitler and his way of thinking, not to mention his countless critics and would-be judges, must first have read this fine work.
Adolf Hitler: Misunderstood Genius.
In fact Hitler was not a stupid man, though he was by no means the genius starry-eyed Anna thinks he was. Evil and wrong, yes, but not stupid. I daresay he was streets ahead of George W. Bush in terms of brainpower, but then most of us are. Bush is more like Himmler: a failed chicken-farmer with repressed homosexual inclinations, vacuous but viciously canny nonetheless. Or maybe Goering — an aristocratic pill-popping drunk who’s unable to believe he’s done anything wrong. No, maybe Rumsfeld is Goering. The makeup and the nail polish, you know.
We could play this game all day. Karl Rove — is he Bormann or Goebbels?
33 Responses to “At least it’s better than Hitler farting”
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Steve says:
It’s hard to believe that Anna from Stuttgart isn’t really Mike from Skokie, preparing for the next neo-Nazi march.
Seriously, this post reminded me of an amazing book, now probably five years old, called The Third Reich, A New History by Michael Burleigh. (Hill and Wang, 2000) One of his main arguments, illustrated with sometimes hilarious examples, is that the mystification of the Nazi leadership and scholarship stressing their power and mayhem, has masked the fact that many of them were really quite stupid
Now this might not sound like such an extraordinary finding, but it is amazing how much of the literature imagines Hitler and Himmler and Ribbentrop and Goering as titanic figures. Burleigh doesn’t underestimate them, but is one of the first to call attention to the fact that so many of the Nazi muckety-mucks had second rate minds, were hopelessly confused and contradictory when they tried to express their ideology, and – most of all – were monumental bores.
Now I know that finding humor in Nazi history isn’t for everyone. But again and again, Burleigh will have you howling over the mind numbingly boring and idiotic schemes and ideas these guys came up with.
Which leads to Mein Kampf. When I saw your post, Vi, I remembered Burleigh’s dry and – yes funny – description of its writing. This is a book, he argues, that can’t be understood unless one truly appreciates its stupidity and the extent to which it was almost never read from cover to cover by any single human being in the whole damn Reich. The fact of its not being read was one of the longest standing (and never loudly stated) jokes in Germany.
Anyway, here is Burleigh describing Hitler’s writing of Mein Kampf:
“Conditions were hardly onerous within Landsberg prison, as Hitler effectively held court there. To abate his constant and voluble expression of opinions, his companions asked him to write a book. Unfortunately for them, he dictated the first part of Mein Kampf, his mythopoeia cum political philosophy, although that term affords this poisonous and turgid concoction coherence it lacks. …….It is unclear what Hitler read by way of sources. He had dabbled in the literature of anti-Semitism, eugenics and geo-politics, although it is unknown whether this was directly or in the form of degenerated copies. Despite considerable editorial input, the book was execrably written and punctuated with mad outbursts…..He combined the worst kid of reductionist scientific bore, forever citing cats and rats, with being a saloon-bar conspiracy theorist, forever banging on about Jews. Normally such people go quietly crazy amid genteel dilapidation, like hippies gone to seed in seaside towns. Unfortunately for humanity as a whole, this one did not……”
Anna says that even his harshest critics agree he had a brilliant mind. Quite the contrary. Underneath the veneer of allegiance and goosestepping, even his strongest supporters knew and often wrote or spoke quietly of how hopelessly idiotic he was.
October 30th, 2006 at 9:56 am EST -
Paul Tergeist says:
Hitler subverted an entire country, made himself dictator and destroyed the world. It doesn’t say much for Americans that George Bush, who is dumber than dirt, is doing the same thing.
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Infidel says:
George W. is of the people, he was almost elected by the people, but I’m dead sure he is not “for the people”. If his government should perish from the earth- not a problem, just another dead end on this wonderfully great experiment. I for one think George is acceptable. That the true definition of unacceptable is unacceptable and cannot be accepted- just as a promise doth no surity owe. One can be quite sure when a promise(a true promise) is made that all in ones power is being done. I think George is trying everything in his power(and power that is not rightfully his) to keep a promise he made to the American people and his God and himself. For this he has merit. I don’t like it, I disagree with it, and I am against it. I defend his right to try and I can’t understand where the congress went. The Republicans are a terrible party when they vote as one, just awful.. they need to be disbanded. The Dems are on the brink of being like the Republicans in order to win. Representatives represent one or the other, not the republic for which they stand, is that the greater evil? Because if we get a Democratic Bush type- What’s the difference?
Hitler- how could Germany get rid of him?
You think for one minute Americans will stand by and allow George W. Bush to eliminate voting?
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Paul Tergeist says:
We stood by and allowed him to gut the Constitution. Or YOU did. I’m an activist! I went to a party at the home of a person I don’t like and used their phone to call in assassination threats. Then I went and voted straight Dem even though our Repugnican governor is doing a fine job. But she supports the President’s policy of ’stay the course’, although it was never ’stay the course’.
VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN!
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Paul Tergeist says:
DIXIE CHICKS! DISAPPEARING FROM A THEATER NEAR YOU!
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gordo says:
Steve–
You make a great point about the stupidity of the Nazis. I’ve always thought that in most oligarchies, it’s more useful to be stupid than smart.
That might sound contradictory, but consider this: if you and Anna from Stuttgart were both government functionaries, it would quickly become obvious that Anna was the more sycophantic Hitler-worshiper. Since one’s intelligence was measured by one’s buy-in to Nazi ideology, she would be thought of as extremely wise (for a woman).
You can see the same effect when you look at the Bush administration. Anyone who points out things like the law of diminishing returns as it applies to tax cuts, or opportunity costs as applied to Iraq, will be judged an idiot who doesn’t really understand economics.
When I was a kid, I bought into the conventional “misguided geniuses” view of the Nazis. When I was about 15, I heard that the original title of “Mein Kampf” was “Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice.” It was then that I realized that Hitler had been no more intelligent than the crackpots who fill up bunkers with canned goods and ammunition.
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Violet says:
I think it’s a question perhaps of how you define stupidity. Was William Shockley stupid? Not really. Actually he was quite brilliant in his field. But he held stupid ideas; his knowledge of humanity was desperately limited and he was warped with racism.
Hitler wasn’t brilliant at all — except perhaps in his gift for demogoguery — but I wouldn’t call him stupid if stupid means a slow mind.
There’s also the problem of historians reading what they want to in Hitler. The Burleigh book
issounds like a good example of the “Poo on the Nazis not only were they evil but they couldn’t even tie their own shoes” school. It makes people feel better, for sure. It’s gratifying, pissing on these creeps, and comforting as well. The more we can believe that the Nazis were totally implausible figures, the less we have to worry about their brand of evil being the kind of thing almost any human society can come up with.(Steve: Do you really think the Burleigh book is one of the first to call the Nazis out as second-raters? I remember reading that kind of stuff 35 years ago, and in fact I’d say off-hand it seems like it’s been the majority view, at least in American-British scholarship.)
The best testimony perhaps comes from people who were there, observers like the American William Shirer. Here’s what he said about Goebbels:
Saying that Goebbels seemed ‘”as insufferable as Ribbentrop” and that the two shared “a tremendous arrogance,” Shirer emphasized that unlike the foreign minister, the propaganda chief “was not unintelligent.” …
Shirer found Goebbels’ declarations “invariably banal, the product of a mind that though nimble was fundamentally mediocre.” Also, Goebbels seemed “unbelievably ignorant of the world outside Germany. He appeared to know absolutely nothing of the history, literature and the people of any foreign land. He understood no modern foreign language. His ideas of America” Shirer lamented, “were childish.” He explained: “Goebbels believed…that the United States was run by Jews and that it was being ‘racially’ poisoned not only by a mixture of Jews and Gentiles, but of whites and blacks. He believed” Shirer noted, “our level of culture was set by the gangsters.”
“Nimble but mediocre.” That’s kind of the key, there; Goebbels wasn’t stupid, but he was ignorant and unoriginal. I think something similar could be said of Hitler.
By the way, here are the IQs of the Nazi leaders tested at Nuremburg:
1 Hjalmar Schacht 143
2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141
3 Hermann Goering 138
4 Karl Doenitz 138
5 Franz von Papen 134
6 Eric Raeder 134
7 Dr. Hans Frank 130
8 Hans Fritsche 130
9 Baldur von Schirach 130
10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129
11 Wilhelm Keitel 129
12 Albert Speer 128
13 Alfred Jodl 127
14 Alfred Rosenberg 127
15 Constantin von Neurath 125
16 Walther Funk 124
17 Wilhelm Frick 124
18 Rudolf Hess 120
19 Fritz Sauckel 118
20 Ernst Kaltenbrunner 113
21 Julius Streicher 106 -
Violet says:
When I was a kid, I bought into the conventional “misguided geniuses” view of the Nazis.
And this was during your childhood at the neo-Nazi camp? Seriously, where is “misguided geniuses” the conventional view? I started reading about the Nazis in the early 1970s, and the first books I read made it clear that these guys were just a bunch of mediocre thugs.
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Mandos says:
The Misguided Geniuses view comes from the popular conception of the origin of Autobahn and Volkswagon. It’s quite widespread.
The question is, how much can you credit them for lifting, as I understand it, Germany out of depression?
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Unimportant says:
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
– Frederick Nietzsche
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Unimportant says:
WAKE UP PEOPLE!
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Violet says:
The Misguided Geniuses view comes from the popular conception of the origin of Autobahn and Volkswagon. It’s quite widespread.
Well, I’ve missed it. I’ve never read a single work about the Nazis that treats them as “misguided geniuses” and I’ve never met anyone in real life who expressed such a view. I’ve only seen that kind of talk from white supremacists like on Stormfront. I thought all non-Nazi sympathizers were well aware that the Nazis were mostly thugs and crackpots.
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Violet says:
I’m really curious about this, because while I can’t remember which book was the first I read about Nazi Germany (sometime in the early 70s), I remember with perfect clarity the portraits of the Nazi leadership: Himmler the subnormal chicken farmer. Goering the ridiculous pill-popping transvestite. Goebbels the slavering rat. Hitler the racist crackpot and failed artist with a scatological obsession. These guys weren’t giants or titans or geniuses. Most of them were of average or above-average intelligence but below-average wisdom, and all of them had grotesquely warped characters.
In the intervening 35 years I’ve yet to encounter a single book that fundamentally alters that portrait. Where are the books depicting Hitler as a misunderstood genius? Or any of them as misunderstood geniuses? What I see mostly are just more books detailing how weird and fucked up they were.
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gordo says:
Violent–
Seriously, in pop culture, the “misguided genius” view is the more common one. Fascists are seen as having a special genius for efficiency. They make the trains run on time. There was even a Star Trek episode in which Nazi Germany is called the “most efficient state of all time” — more efficient than even the United Federation of Planets!
It’s easy to dismiss people like Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, and Pat Buchanan as crackpots, but they’re regularly featured in the media, and their viewpoints are more widely disseminated than those of most knowledgable historians.
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Violet says:
How do you get from Nazi efficiency to Misguided Geniuses? The Nazis didn’t invent efficiency. The Germans have been famed for being efficient, tidy people who make the trains run on time since long before there were even trains. The Nazis harnessed that to their ends.
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Mandos says:
The fact that they revived German industriousness is what gives them this positive veneer. Not everyone has read extensive biographies of the actual character. So most people think that there’s a causative relation between the rise of Nazism and the recovery of Germany from Versailles.
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Violet says:
So most people think that there’s a causative relation between the rise of Nazism and the recovery of Germany from Versailles.
There is. That was how Germany recovered from the post-war depression. It wasn’t the only way they might have recovered, but it’s what happened.
But the brief success of Nazism in terms of re-arming Germany, expanding employment, and setting up efficient death assembly lines does not mean that the Nazi leaders were geniuses. And I still don’t buy that most people really think Hitler and Co. were misguided geniuses. Geniuses? Effective politicains, yes; effective killers, yes. But geniuses?
By the way, the first book I read back in the 70s (when I was a little kid) was not an in-depth biography but probably a Time-Life book. You can’t get more mass-market than a Time-Life book.
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Mandos says:
So…people consider massive economic turnarounds to be Great Accomplishments. If not geniuses, then accomplishers. One way or another, the popular conception of the Nazis is that they were a laudable form of government that went awry with an infection of cultural anti-Semitism that somehow went really really sour—as opposed to thugs and criminals. Noble villains whose cachet is only increased by the scale of their villainy.
Not many people read Time|Life books. I consumed many.
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Paul Tergeist says:
I must concur with Violet. I was born in Nuremburg. My father was a military officer in WWI. By WWII he held a reasonably high rank..high enough for my mother to get a stateroom on the Normandy at government expense to go to Germany… and he was connected with the trials. He was, in fact, was the de-facto mayor of Nuremburg for a period of time during the occupation.
I read his papers after he died in the late 60s; I sent the historical objects back to Nuremburg and destroyed the stuff he probably shouldn’t have kept. As a consequence I am a history buff in the very area of interest you are discussing.
Anyone who relates the economic recovery of Germany after WWI to misguided Nazi geniuses is just wrong. But then, they probably don’t buy into global warming either, or an Iranian nuclear capability.
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Violet says:
the popular conception of the Nazis is that they were a laudable form of government that went awry with an infection of cultural anti-Semitism that somehow went really really sour—as opposed to thugs and criminals. Noble villains whose cachet is only increased by the scale of their villainy.
I think I must inhabit a parallel universe then. I’ve never met anyone who thinks the Nazis were a “laudable form of government” that just “went awry” with an infection of anti-Semitism. Come on, even my extended family, people who are very much just average small-town folks of basic education, know perfectly well that the Nazis were sick racists from the beginning, ruthless police-state thugs.
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Mandos says:
So I actually suspect, following Papa Noam, that there’s a medium-educatedness that leads to these sorts of ideas. A space between “basic education” and “thorough grounding” that allows people to surmise all kinds of convenient things.
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Violet says:
Paul, if all that about your father is true, I’m fascinated.
Or are you just pulling our legs?
Would you tell us if you were?
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Violet says:
I’m going to start asking around about this. “Do you think the Nazis were misguided geniuses? Noble villains?”
I will eat my shoe if most people say yes.
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Mandos says:
They won’t say “yes”, because it’s not polite to say “yes” if you ask it directly.
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richard cherry says:
I can’t believe we will ever get to a ‘truth’ about the Nazis because, as the greatest cultural hobgoblins of our age, they are always villified, not just for their vast and very real evils, but for anything else anyone could make up. I say this entirely without evidence - never read about the Nazis because they never interested me - but it’s how history usually happens so I’m prepared to assume it happened this time too. And no you won’t find many people who are likely to to talk to you who would say anything other than ‘very bad’ etc.
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Paul Tergeist says:
Paul, if all that about your father is true, I’m fascinated. Or are you just pulling our legs?
Would you tell us if you were?
-VI was born at the 224th station hospital, 24 Saarburgerstrasse, Nuremburg, Bavaria in June of 1948. Obviously my mother was there. She was nee’ O’Daniel from Kentucky and a socialite in San Antonio during the war. The Normandie was a relatively famous ocean liner, converted to a troop transport during the war but there were officer accommodations and my mother sailed to England as soon as the occupation had established itself. I suspect I was conceived during a holiday in Ireland because of various things in my mother’s scrap book. When my father was transferred back to the US in 1950 the family again traveled on the Normandie after which he was stationed at Aberdeen, MD. for a couple of years. I found no record of what he did during that time, but he was then transferred to Fort Sam Chaffee in Arkansas and finally back to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio where he retired. He was buried there with full military honors in 1969. It was the month I returned from my extended combat tour in Vietnam. My mother’s grave is next to his.
He had the occasional problem from embedded shrapnel for some years afterward from a wound he got during the D-day landings.
Why would I make something like that up?
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Violet says:
Why would I make something like that up?
It’s just such a common pick-up line. “My Dad was at the Nuremberg Trials!”
Seriously, it’s fascinating. Did he meet any of the Nazi defendants? Did he record his impressions of the German people? It sounds like he died before there was much chance for the two of you to talk as adults. That’s sad, and I’m sorry.
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Violet says:
And no you won’t find many people who are likely to to talk to you who would say anything other than ‘very bad’ etc.
So I’ll just have to start hanging out with people who occupy that middle space between “basic education” and “thorough grounding,” and perhaps after they’ve come to trust me they’ll loosen up and share their secret admiration for the Nazis. Okay then.
Really, it’s the “laudable form of government that went awry with an infection of cultural anti-Semitism that somehow went really really sour” that I can’t believe. I would believe that many people think of the Nazis as Evil Geniuses, the terrifying Gestapo and all that, the most efficient killing machines ever to roam the earth. And actually they were the latter, so it’s easy to mythologize them as Evil Geniuses. In fact that sort of cartoon-evil view of things is what I would expect to be the most common among people who, say, haven’t read Arendt.
But the notion that the Nazis started out as good guys and the anti-Semitism just somehow crept in and ruined the party — that’s bizarre. I’ve never heard that in my life. You don’t have to ever have cracked a book to know that Hitler Hated The Jews and the Nazis Hated The Jews and that was their fucking raison d’etre.
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Infidel says:
Germans hated Germany. That is why they embraced Hitler. Then all of Germany was employed, all Germans had a job and all Jews weren’t German. Every industry was state controlled and all citizens worked. Citizens that couldn’t work were eliminated. Efficiency. Happy were the Germans that came out of the worst of circumstances to be better then an entire race, to have a job, a roof over their heads, 3square meals, and the comraderie that the vision of their fearless leader had of an Anschluss. If genius is recognizing and exploiting right place at right time- or they were just lucky.
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richard cherry says:
No I can’t believe the ’started out good and just got a bit anti-semitic’ thing either, but again I have no grounds for that except that I’ve never heard anyone push it.
And after all, loads of people have hated the Jews for no reason since there were Jews (or perhaps before).
Actually I can think of one reason to hate them - they are another bloody religion! And even then I can’t win because some of my friends define themselves as ‘culturally Jewish’ where they don’t even do the religion bit so i can’t get them for that. Damn their fiendish cunning.Hanging out with the crypto-nazis - I was in mischievous mood at a diner party with some sloanes (Trans for US: UK upper class twits)some years ago and tried to goad them by defending apartheid. The only result was one bloke who clapped me warmly on the shoulder and said ‘Quite right! I know a lot of people who think that but wouldn’t be as brave and honest as you about it’. My dinner almost decorated the carpet - that’s what you get for trying to be a smartarse I suppose.
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richard cherry says:
Paul - not a lot of Tergeists in Ireland, though Galway is awash with O’Tergeists.
What a fantatsic lineage. -
Paul Tergeist says:
“Paul - not a lot of Tergeists in Ireland, though Galway is awash with O’Tergeists.”
-RCOK, that’s funny!
“It’s just such a common pick-up line. “My Dad was at the Nuremberg Trials!”
-VI have never been able to pick anyone up with that line. Maybe it’s my delivery. “My dad was at the Nuremburg trials….wanna f**k”?
My father was tasked with running the local government and was not a functionary at the trials. Even so, he was effectively the chief official of the local government and had the clout to go where he wanted. He did spend some time at the trials and with the people involved but whether that was something official or hobnobbing, or a bit of both, I don’t know. A lot of his stuff was marked “Secret” and the follow-on pages were missing. To the best of my knowledge he did not actually meet any of the big-name defendants. At least there were no pictures of them.
I think my parents got along just fine with the German citizenry. I had a German nanny and I never heard anything bad about Germany from either of them. But again, my father was The Man In Charge and the Germans had a vested interest in making sure he was happy.
Sixty years later the US government has legalized many of the things we hanged people for doing in WWII. History will not be kind to us.
Everyone needs someone to hate. Being a superior race is part of national pride and a national identity. We do it with Mexico and the Canadians do it with us and will continue to do so until we send a troop of Girl Scouts to take over their country. Everyone hates Jews although you can’t tell a Jew from a Gentile in most cases and white, blacks and ornamental people all feel superior to each other for no particular reason. Repugnicans and Demoncrats do it too. Even males and females.
Everyone finds something to hate about everyone else. Except me.Well, enough philosophy. I have to go to the mall and find some unwrapped meat. But no Jews, darkies, dinks or whatnots. In my neighborhood only White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican girls are good enough to be raped, at least until we get our own lacrosse team.
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flavius says:
In fact, PaulT, there have been several invasions of Canada by the U.S. Serious military attempts in 1775 and 1812; more minor incidents in 1846 (”54-40 or fight”), a couple of Fenian invasions, and, I believe, a really half-hearted incursion during the civil war. There were also plans for invasion made during the ’20s as a military exercise (actually chosen as a target because it was unlikely, and thus would not be politically embarrassing if revealed.)
Happily all attempts failed.
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