I never thought I would reach a point in my life where I would try to imagine myself as Hitler. But I am getting inside his head and thinking about what it means to have absolute power. I drove six hours on the road yesterday and listened to The Hitler Book. So I came to appreciate an interesting set of ideas.
The first was that if I knew that I would be supreme leader and likely to send thousands of men to their death that I would want to toughen myself up. And so I would have my enemies delivered to me after their arrest and I would learn to execute them myself. I would do this enough times so that the habit of killing men seemed ordinary. I would do so in private however, and I would not kill women and children.
The second idea was that I would be faced with the nature of my being as a supreme leader, and I was inspired to imagine myself addressing my top military leader with the following words.
Apparently, Hitler could not avoid the fact that he believed what he was doing was for the great benefit of Germany. The winner of an election cannot be dissuaded from that belief until he is deposed.
Hitler himself is not so interesting as is the ways in which he represents the ambitions of the 20th century. I wonder how different he is from any other such leader, and how different the German people are from us. Yeah, now I do actually wonder.
Like most other folks who have studied Hitler's Germany, I scratch my head wondering how London, Washington, Paris and Moscow could have been so blind.
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