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May 22, 2003
A production on CBS television has dramatized Hitler's rise to power. A big part of Hitler's rise was the frustration he and a lot of Germans felt concerning what they believed was the stab in the back of Germany toward the end of World War I. That is what all the sieg heils were about. Sieg heil translated into English is "hail victory." The stab-in-the-back was a myth, but Hitler wanted power in part at least to undo it and the treaty of Versailles. So how did the movie handle it? The drama had everybody speaking in English except for some songs and when sieg heils were shouted. The use of "hail victory" instead of "sieg heil" would have added a little clarity to what was going on.
And Hitler came across in the drama more of a nervous twit than he was in real life. In real life Hitler was sometimes relaxed. Sometimes he looked genuinely kind and happy. Often evil men do not look evil - Ted Bundy for example, or perhaps Timothy McVeigh.
Was it wrong to try to portray Hitler as human. No! He was human. What was wrong with Hitler was the way he viewed the world - ideas held or accepted by Joseph Goebbels and countless others who supported Hitler, voted for Hitler, agreed with Hitler and did what he wanted them to do. Seeing Hitler fret and fuss, lose his temper, almost commit suicide, parade, wave his pistol around, communicated little about his ideas. And the little snippets of speechmaking in the CBS movie captured little of it. The movie ended with a few words on the screen about Kristlenacht and people being sent to concentration camps, but how it had come to that was largely missing. The movie failed to communicate what Hitler was about and therefore had little more than soap opera value.
Imagine something happening to the United States similar to what happened to Germany in the early decades of the 20th century, that instead of being on the winning side in World War I the U.S. had been on the losing side, that Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California had been returned to Mexico. Imagine Americans seething with revenge, angry about the betrayal of those who had been fighting for victory and believing that they had not been defeated militarily but stabbed in the back by a bunch of sellout leftist Democrats in Washington. (Hitler believed that the Social Democrats and Jews were responsible for the stab-in-the-back.)
Hitler became evil because he believed in myths about World War I and myths about Jews, because he wrecked international agreements and waged wars of aggression for Germany's aggrandizement and because he had no inhibitions about killing millions of civilians he had labeled as Germany's enemy.
Copyright © 2003 Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/m-adolf.htm