Heil Hitler..!!!!

Not being a professional historian, I take on this write-up with utmost admiration and a heart that shouts "Heil Hitler". That's because, although defeated, although dead, this man is incomprehensible for me. There isn’t any other leader who has fascinated me so much from my school days. And when I started to write a blog many of my friends thought that Aphorisms would be exclusively for preaching Nazism. It’s really a wonder why Hitler wasn’t mentioned in Aphorisms for this long. Something unknown for me too. But now, here it is. A space for the mightiest totalitarian ever. Adolf Hitler.

His oratory skills and the kind of leadership quality he possessed were always something I was in awe of. What was the secret of his power over his listeners? They spoke of his intuitive powers and his "luck" as he escaped several attempts on his life.

Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuhrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers Mussolini and Franco were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss.

At the same time he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after.

How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission?

Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support.

Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.

We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his relationship with Eva Braun, who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his endless hatred of Jews, whose survival enraged him--each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers.

The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people--not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?

It was enough to read Mein Kampf, written in prison: to become, once again, a global superpower, capable of reconquering lost territory and others as well.

And the free world let it happen.

His kingdom collapsed after 12 years in a war that remains the most atrocious, the most brutal and the deadliest in history. But which, by the same token, allowed several large figures to emerge. Their names have become legendary: Eisenhower, De Gaulle, Montgomery, Zhukov, Patton...

But when later we evoke the 20th century, among the first names that will surge to mind will be that of a fanatic with a mustache who thought to reign by selling the soul of his people to the thousand demons of hate and of death.