Sunday, February 27, 2011

Hitler's Response to the War

It is apparent from reading Mein Kampf that Hitler lacked a certain level of comprehension (whether it was intentional ignorance or simply idiocy we may never know) to understand the facts as they were placed in front of him. His staunch belief in German nationalism, combined with the radical change in attitude between pre-war and post-war Germany, led him to look for a radical idea of a scapegoat: the entire Jewish population of Berlin and Munich. Though he may have expressed anti-semitic feelings, similar to others of the German population, before he went to war, his post-war description was "the spider...slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people's pores" (193). By blaming the Jews for the radical changes in Germany's economic and political systems, Hitler neglected to discover the true, underlying cause of the unrest: that the German people felt as though the best solution for recovering would be to establish a new republic.

Hitler's lack of response to the outside ideas coming through to affect his mindset stemmed back to his days on the war front, when he refused to allow the pessimistic "propaganda" and news from home deter him from performing his duties. Though this attitude could be considered admirable for a soldier, and certainly led to some praise from his superior officers, his manner of characterizing his attitude can only be called negative and patronizing. Though he talks about the troops on the war front as a hard-working group as compared to those in the hospital, he also considered those listening from news from "the fatherland" as less than him, the ideal nationalist troop. His unwillingness to consider that news most likely added to the shock factor when he returned to Berlin and Munich his recovery in the hospital.

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