blame hitler?

[The Stranger]

can hitler be blamed for wwII's 50 million or so deaths?also how did he spend his last days?i just saw the movie Downfall,i liked it but im not sure if its correct,although it seems to be.if anyone else has seen the movie,where the kids killed goerring's?

You should also see Napola...the beginning of der untergang...its about hitlers childhood...frigging brilliant movie

[Arcanum]

You should also see Napola...the beginning of der untergang...its about hitlers childhood...frigging brilliant movie

It's not about Hitler's childhood, it's about the Hitler Youths and the "Nationalpolitische Lager". What the nazis proclaimed the coming elite and it's not the beginning of "Der Untergang", "Napola" is independant made from "Der Untergang".

[The Stranger]

hmmm, then it isnt napola...thought it was...srry mixed up titles

[Kralizec]

You can draw a line between Hitler's promises of a better economy and the war. Once in power he pumped millions into the arms industry and raised a larger army then was allowed under the Versailles treaty. Since you can't hold up the facade of a working economy by building up forces indefinitely (there's a point where your warehouses are full of ammunition and tanks are simply parked and gathering dust, and people will start wondering what the justification for all that is), he had to go to war. That simple. If WWII hadn't happened at all and Germany remained peaceful, its economy would have collapsed like a cardhouse.
You could say it's somewhat similar to the decline of the Soviet Union, wich started to weaken under the pressure of keeping up with America in the arms race, while the people saw little improvement in wealth over all these years and began questioning the system.

WW2 was really part deux of the first, and cannot be totally blamed on Hitler, but Hitler is of course responsible for the Shoah.

Good words, I agree totally.

[Adrian II]

Once in power he pumped millions into the arms industry and raised a larger army then was allowed under the Versailles treaty.

He didn't. This is one of the myths spread by Hitler's opponents on the left. This myth is also addressed in Haffner's booklet I mentioned. Admittedly, a well-known nazi slogan was 'Kanonen statt Butter!' ('Guns, not butter!'), but in practice it worked the other way round. Hitler initially invested more in civilian industry than in the arms industry. He did produce butter instead of guns. Ironically (in view of what Gregoshi wrote) his favourite economic wizard Hjalmar Schacht applied many Keynesian precepts in the same way Roosevelt did in the United States. Only later could nazi Germany afford to 'militarise' its economy. It did so in close cooperation with the Soviet Union, as has been highlighted in another Haffner book by the way: Der Teufelspakt: Die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen vom Ersten zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (1989). I don't know whether it has been translated.

[Tribesman]

[/B]thats not true, people on their own are inteligent but the mass is stupid
That proves my point precicely , how can people react differently as a mass if they are not stupid individually ? the stupid mass is collective individual stupidity .
Hasn't stopped many nations since from focusing more on the short term than on the medium to long term,
yep , stupid creatures , they don't seem to learn from their mistakes .
Humans eh ?

[Kralizec]

He didn't. This is one of the myths spread by Hitler's opponents on the left. This myth is also addressed in Haffner's booklet I mentioned. Admittedly, a well-known nazi slogan was 'Kanonen statt Butter!' ('Guns, not butter!'), but in practice it worked the other way round. Hitler initially invested more in civilian industry than in the arms industry. He did produce butter instead of guns. Ironically (in view of what Gregoshi wrote) his favourite economic wizard Hjalmar Schacht applied many Keynesian precepts in the same way Roosevelt did in the United States. Only later could nazi Germany afford to 'militarise' its economy. It did so in close cooperation with the Soviet Union, as has been highlighted in another Haffner book by the way: Der Teufelspakt: Die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen vom Ersten zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (1989). I don't know whether it has been translated.

Thank you for correcting me, I didn't know that. I might pick up some of the literature you mentioned when I'm less busy with my current activities

Haffner maintains that the decision to destroy Jewry was a consequence of the lost battles in Russia, which made Hitler realise that he would lose the war. The murder of the Jews, on the other hand, was at least something he could accomplish... It became a substitute victory for Hitler, as it were, which seems to be in line with what most biographers state about his character. I suppose we will never really know what went on inside his head.

But...didn't the meeting in Wannsee where the nazis decided to systematicly eradicate the jewish population occur somewhere in 1942 and thus before the tide had turned against the Germans?

[Adrian II]

But...didn't the meeting in Wannsee where the nazis decided to systematicly eradicate the jewish population occur somewhere in 1942 and thus before the tide had turned against the Germans?

Opinions differ. There are facts, and then there are interpretations.

• Facts
  The Wannsee Conference took place in January of 1942. It was a gathering of representatives of fifteen institutions within the nazi hierarchy presided by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitsdienst ('Imperial Security Service'). It was the first occasion when the nazi leadership made a concrete plan to eradicate all Jews. There had been no such plans before. The minutes of this (secret) meeting were discovered by the American prosecution in the Neuremberg trial in March 1947, when they secured a file of the former German Foreign Ministry entitled Geheime Reichssache ('secret Imperial matter'). The minutes speak of a plan to 'evacuate' the Jews. No mention is made of extermination, yet the minutiae of the plan are obviously geared to that purpose. This form of bureaucratic hypocrisy was hardly unique in the history of nazi decision-making.
• Interpretations
  Historians disagree about the timing of, as well as the reasons for the 'decision' to start the extermination of the Jews. The two are internonnected.
  Christopher Browning (Fateful Months, 1985) believes that Hitler personally decided on the extermination at the height of his offensive in Russia, in July 1941, in a fit of extreme elation.
  Philippe Burrin (Hitler and the Jews, 1994) thinks he took the decision in August of 1941, when the Russian tide had turned and Hitler was outraged at the thought that his Russian offensive would stall.
  Structuralists such as Raoul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985) emphasize the gradual and improvised nature of the decision-making process, in which Hitler nearly always approved the 'moderate' options presented by his underlings and discarded the more radical ones. As a consequence, the 'decision' to start extermination was spread out over the year 1942; the extermination camps were gradually opened and the mass deportation of jews was gradually intensified as the Russian campaign turned sour. Finally, after Stalingrad and Kursk, the extermination of the Jews was declared a matter of the greatest urgency, almost as important as the Reich's military defense.
• My interpretation
  Ask yourself: Why was Wannsee a 'secret' meeting? Why were nearly all the policies with regard to a 'final solution' of the 'Jewish question' kept secret from the very start almost to the very end of the Reich? The main reason seems to be that the nazi leadership doubted that Germany had the 'stomach' to carry it out.
  During the first year of the Russian campaign, the German Einsatzgruppen that killed Jews and political opponents behind the frontlines in the East were gradually given more violent instructions as a test, in order to see if they would comply, if the ordinary German army would tolerate their activity, and if there would be enough 'volunteers' to staff the Einsatzgruppen. Only gradually, in the course of 1941-42, did the leadership become confident that they could pull off a policy of a Judenfrei ('Jew-free') Poland and Russia. And only after that did they feel confident that an overall extermination of Jews was politically feasible. The actual implementation of the policy (as opposed to the paper decision reached in Wannsee) did indeed coincide with the onset of military disaster for the Germans in the East. Based on what I know of Hitler's gangster mentality, my 'guestimate' would be that Haffner is right and that the extermination of the Jews was Hitler's Ersatzsieg ('substitute victory') for a military war that was in fact already lost in 1943.