Do you understand how scary this picture is
god forbid a real person do real person things he wasnt just a robot who killed people jesus fucking christ
uh yeah its not like he killed and tortured six million jews or anything
Hold on just a tick. Listen, I’m Jewish, so I’m perfectly capable of understanding that what he did was just…..well, there are no words for it. But let’s not round it up to simply Jews that got killed. It was six million people that died in those camps, not just Jews. Did you know that homosexuals were sent there, too? Yeah, I’m sure you did. They had to wear special little symbols on their clothes. Do you know what it was? It was a pink triangle.
It was six million PEOPLE.
But you let that roll over in your mind for a while and you are going to forever see this man as a monster, but that’s not what he was. He was someone who thought he was truly doing something right for his nation, no matter how shitty he was doing it. Believe me when I say that I don’t like him. I really don’t. My grandfather’s brothers died in those camps, and my grandfather escaped to Spain, then to Mexico. He was lucky.
This is not a monster holding hands with a little girl.
This is Adolf Hitler, a man, holding hands with a little girl.
Yeah. It’s fucking scary. It really is. Do you know why?
It’s because you’re seeing that he wasn’t, in fact, a monster. You’re seeing in this picture that he was a man. He was a man, and that’s really the saddest part of it all.
As a History major who specializes in the history of early modern Europe, I’ve studied a lot of dictators in detail, not just Hitler. The number one mistake anyone could ever make in history is making the assumption that only inhuman monsters are capable of doing terrible things.
Stop dehumanizing Hitler just so you can reassure yourself that “normal” humans aren’t capable of doing bad things. Hitler liked children and dogs, he was a vegetarian and he cried like a little boy when his mother died. I’m not saying he was a good, innocent person, but when you stop attributing human characteristics to historical figures like Hitler, it’s how you overlook people just like him in real life, and it’s how people like him end up back in power.
That last statement.
I completely agree. It’s part and parcel of a lot of the other mistakes people make when they look at history – especially “why didn’t they see it coming” hindsight is 20-20 crap.
Though, point of fact, Hitler (or, more accurately, the Nazi’s as a whole) killed 6 million Jews. Everyone else who he killed (3 million POWs from the USSR, roughly 2 million Polish people, around a million Romani, about 200,000 disabled people, and around 200,000 other people including every homosexual and Jehovah’s Witness they could find) makes a total death toll for just the Holocaust (not the rest of World War 2) impossible to calculate precisely, but it’s thought to be somewhere between 10 and 20 million people. (It depends on if you count the 6 million USSR civilians who died).
The war that the Nazi party started killed around 60,000,000 people. Or, a number equal to a third of the populations of the United States. Or, a number equal to 2.5% of ALL OF THE PEOPLE who were alive in the WORLD when the war started. Nearly 3 out of a hundred people.
It’s terrifying that he thought he was doing what he thought was best. It’s terrifying to realize that he was a man, not a monster, and he liked things that regular people liked. But it’s important to remember, too. Because when you look at someone and only see a monster, you start to expect that all bad people look like monsters, you think that people aren’t nuanced.
They are nuanced. And no matter how terrible their actions, they will still look like people. Because they *are*.
(note: this is my point of view, anyway, speaking as a Jew whose grandfather fought in Europe and who has a photo album filled with my grandmother’s friends from the old country – Poland – none of whose names we know and none of whom survived)
Reblogging for hard truths. The worst monsters of all look exactly like me and thee, live in the same flesh as me and thee. But you can tell them by their actions – and how they justify those actions.
[like the above poster, we have not branches but entire TREES of family that disappeared from Eastern Europe. When we say “forgive but never forget” this is what we mean: never forget that hatred and fear can lead to ten million and more horribly, brutally murdered. Never forget that it starts with a few humans justifying evil-for-a-cause.]
