@Holiday20310401,
Holiday20310401;43329 wrote:I suppose maybe we could speculate on Hitler, and his compassion towards human beings? It seems an awkward assertion to say he had no compassion for human beings otherwise it would be ideal to in the end(even though there is no way to prove this) get rid of the whole human race.
That actually WAS more or less his ambition, especially as the war went on.
Hitler had a very apocalyptic vision and outlook. This was initially directed eastwards towards the "judeobolsheviks" (Hitler always conflated Jews with Bolshevism). This is why he self-consciously waged a war of annihilation against Stalin and ordered a brutal scorched earth policy to be carried out by various agents of the armed forces, the SS, and the governors of the occupied territories. This policy was
never enacted against the West except in very isolated and limited forms, like the bombing campaign against London.
But as the tide turned, especially after the catastrophic losses at Stalingrad, then Kursk, then Normandy, then the Ardennes, not to mention the assassination attempt, he turned his apocalyptic ideas inwards to Germany. He knowingly and willingly brought about the complete and total destruction of Germany by fighting an utterly hopeless war down to the last window and basement and alley in Berlin. He threw kids on bikes and old men out into the street to take on the Red Army. This was against objections by all but the most blindly loyal officers, and it was one of his many many many crimes -- an utter wastage of lives for nothing.
And one quote of his towards the end of the war was something to the effect of it doesn't really matter if Germany is destroyed, all the good Germans are dead anyway. (By this he was almost exclusively referring to the members of the SS and the original members of the Wermacht before the war in Russia turned into a nightmare).
Hitler had ideas about honorable death, which in part meant dying for a cause even if the cause was completely hopeless.
And while I haven't read much of the psychological accounts about Hitler, I think he was somewhat influenced by Richard Wagner's
Ring cycle. Wagner, if you're unfamiliar, was a famous opera composer in the mid-late 19th century. He remains one of the greatest influences on modern film music (especially on music like Star Wars). And much of his operatic work was about Teutonic history. The
Ring cycle (
Der Ring das Nibelungen) was an enormous mythic epic opera (I own it, it's 16 CDs long) adapted from the medieval Nordic and German stories the
Nibelungenlied and the
Volsung Saga, as well as some Viking stories found in the
Eddas. Wagner was a galloping antisemite, he wrote treatises railing against Jews and he would certainly have been a flag-waving Nazi if he lived that long.
I bring this up, because the last opera in Wagner's
Ring cycle is called
Gotterdamerung (the Twilight of the Gods), and it's an apocalyptic account that includes the collapse of Valhalla. This is loosely extracted from Norse mythology as found in the
Poetic Edda.
And Hitler I think saw no other ending to his dominion other than complete destruction, apocalypse, ruin. There was no humanitarian or compassion in this vision. He'd just as soon take the entire world down with him -- and that's exactly what he did.
Quote:He just had no compassion for his past perhaps, for himself? I mean, he didn't have blonde hair, or blue eyes, yet that was his ideal right?
Not really his ideal. More that of people like Joeseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Frick, and the Nazi doctors. Not to say that Hitler didn't have his ideals, and he loved to go pinch the cheeks of blond girls in pigtails and pat the heads of his Hitler Youth, but to Hitler it was all more ideological than racial.
