Hitler's sanity

[Stolen Rutters]

Doh! Plotinus - well written. I had to look up the word "metaphysics" and it appears that the original poster's question was metaphysical, not historic. It just dealt with a historical figure.

That must be what Sobi was talking about there being no place in history for the word "evil".

I have an engineering degree, not a history degree. I absolutely love history, but when real historians start talking I admit my eyes glaze over. They throw around all sorts of QED style statements and expect me to buy it because they are the experts when, to me, it sounds like it came out of left field.

At least you explained your point. I actually WAS judging the past with modern views. Now I'm not sure we can do otherwise.

New official position: I now agree with Plotinus.

Thanks,
SR

 

[Emperor2]

Hitler was an evil man who was responsible for the deaths of MILLIONS of lives and deserved to be thrown into a crowd of Jews, gays and commies who should have killed him with their bare hands. There is no punishment man could give that would have punished him enough. But he was ALSO an INSANE maniac. There is no doubt that that mind was MESSED UP, beyond any other mans insanity in history. I hate nazis. And Commies.

FIGHT THE COMMUNISTS!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Joe Harker]

He was deeply affected by childhood expericences, his father used to beat him and he felt deep affection for his moter and was traumastised by her death when he was resonably young. I should point out at this point hitler was utliamutely not responsible for the way the Jews and other "inferior" races, he left it to the leader of the ss.

 

[Plotinus]

Yes, but many other people have been traumatised in similar ways without behaving in the same way (this is the idea behind The killing joke, where the Joker tries to reduce Commissioner Gordon to the same emotional state that he was in himself when he turned to crime, but fails to force him to behave in the same way).

The fact that Hitler delegated the task of murdering large numbers of people to others doesn't absolve him of responsibility for it.

 

[Adler17]

Indeed. And from a morale point of view, who is worse, the man who fires the bullet or the man appointing to do so? (From a juristical point of view there is no difference.)

Adler

 

[Plotinus]

Who knows? But that is a philosophical question, not a historical one.

 

[Ukas]

The question is philosophical, true. However the question if Hitler was a psychopath or a sociopath is historical, and in a way helpful in order to define Hitler's evilness or madness.

Although these definations are very popular these days it's clear Hitler couldn't be a sociopath. Furthermore it's still doubtful that he was a psychopath. I think Robert D. Hare mentioned this in his book Without Conscience, it's a while since I've read it but at least he wrote about difficulties of defining someone a psychopath without first hand experiences.

Hare's psychopathy checklist:

1. Glibness/superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self-worth
3. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
4. Pathological lying
5. Cunning/manipulative
6. Lack of remorse or guilt
7. Shallow affect
8. Callous/lack of empathy
9. Parasitic lifestyle
10. Poor behavioral controls
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior
12. Early behavioral problems
13. Lack of realistic, long-term goals
14. Impulsivity
15. Irresponsibility
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17. Many short-term marital relationships
18. Juvenile delinquency
19. Revocation of conditional release
20. Criminal versatility

At first sight Hitler would have scored high points, wouldn't he? But when you use this list to see if it fits a character you have to remember, that people are complete packages. These behavioral patterns should apply to Hitler in all phases of his life and then you have to think were there patterns in his behavior which could negate some items in the list. Like some of the following:

- Hitler wasn't very glib when compared to politicians of his time. The way he talked was straight and more to the point. In his book, Mein Kampft, there are many slick and smooth parts, but then again it was typed and edited by Rudolf Hess, who was totally another case.

- Hitler liked to spend time with kids (nothing sexual). He could spend hours playing with Ernst Hanfstaengl's son and his miniature railway. Hitler sometimes told stories about his childhood to amuse his friends, stories which had sense of self-irony and self-humiliation. For example the Toga Boy story.
A common psychopath would find it very boring and meaningless to spend time with a kid. Also he would see no use to tell stories, which could negate his value.

- Hitler had grandiose sense of self-worth, that's true, but also there were times when he really doubted his own value and saw himself as nothing. This is a trait which requires a skill to view yourself as someone else's eyes - a psychopath coudln't do this.

Yes, a can go on forever but I am bored of typing at the moment (see items 3, 10, 13, 14, 15 and 16 in the checklist).

Have Fun,

Ukas

 

[Stolen Rutters]

I don't know that we can truly diagnose this stuff at such a distance, ESPECIALLY for a person in a leadership position. Hitler was surrounded by people who vetted and edited his speaches, by people who forwarded his messages. You would effectively be diagnosing the group, the inner circle so to speak.

@Joe Harker
Being the leader, he was most certainly responsible for the actions of the people around him. It is not possible to absolve the man of the responsibility of the regime he put in place, as much as he would have liked to have a firewall, he definitely gave his blessing to the whole endeavor long before he came to power, and nurtured the holocaust along from a distance once it got buy-in from the people carrying it out.

 

[Adler17]

If the Holocaust was related to one or two camps, then you could have been able to deny Hitler's responsability. It might have been only a radical fellowman. Indeed many "normal" Germans seeing some Nazis making cruel things did not believe it was Hitler's order but his charges were the bad guys.
Hitler was fully resposible.
Hitler's psyche is (and most likely was already) the topic of whole libaries. Indeed he could be very charming and used sometimes the soft Vienna dialect. But in the next moment he could be very hard. Or vice versa. Once he ordered to shoot his enemies and then gave a pension to a long enemy from another party!
So I see also schizophrenic (sp???) tendencies here.
Also he had a massive mistrust in noble men, especially soldiers. He had here a massive lack of self worthiness. That lead to mistrust and, especially after the 20th July, to open hatred, as many members of the resistance were nobles. Adam Trott zu Stolz, Helmuth James von Moltke, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Hyazinth Graf von Strachwitz, Friedrich Wilhelm Prinz von Preußen (some of them were executed, some were not detected), to name only a few (I could go on and the list is like a who's who of the German nobility, finding names also like Schwerin or Dönhoff or Dohnanyi.
However for a full large scale psychological investigation I am not well suited, not knowing so much about that Austrian nor having studied psychology.

Adler

 

[Zarn]

Hitler was hit with poisoned gas (even blinded for a bit), during WWI. Poison gas could make a lot of people funny in the head.

 

[PTM]

Just a few things to consider:

a. The Holocaust was largely conceptualized and masterminded by SS leader Himmler and his underling RSHA (SD+Gestapo+Kripo) leader Heydrich. The actual deportation procedure was handled by a man named Eichmann. It is unclear if Hitler had any direct involvement with the murder aspect of the final solution, though I would argue he must have known what was going on and sanctioned it through inaction (at the very least). I suspect it is something he would have wanted to occur if asked (which is at least part of the reason why Himmler conceived of it).

b. Initially, industrial mass death was not the aim of the Nazis (debatable). At the very least, in the preliminary stages of Nazi power, Jews were mostly deported to Poland (later the Central Government). Eichmann explored Pakistan and Egypt (later Madagascar) as possible zones for deportation.

c. Antisemitism was not unique to Germany. Poland was radically antisemitic at the time, and the French, Dutch, and other nations also shared beliefs (though more subdued). In Jadenwar (sp), 1600 Jews were killed by Polish civilians (in a town of 2500) without any prompting whatsoever by Nazis. These were neighbors they had known their entire lives.

d. Antisemitism served many practical aims of the Nazi regimes. In their effort to earn support, they militarized their populace. But the non-soldier elements did not have someone direct to fight (especially before the outbreak of WWII). The race war provided that enemy. Thus, the Nazis were able to "order" support from the populace, as they became not a government but military superiors to each and every civilian.

Edit: These are just points to consider, and do not form the basis for a veiled argument of any kind. If it must be known, I think Hitler and the Third Reich are a stain on the history of mankind, a horrible event that can never (and should never) be forgotten. While it is true technology, especially military hardware, flourished during their time and that Nazi scientists were often the best the world has ever seen, nothing can excuse the inhuman acts of unspeakable brutality and violence they inflicted upon innocents. It is unfortunate that the history of humanity must be tarnished by the foul acts of beasts such as these.

 

[Atropos]

If Hitler wasn't evil, then we need to seriously reconsider the definition of "evil."

Insane? Well, I think there's no doubt that he was immoral, not amoral. He was fully aware that the code of values of his society prohibited the killing of large numbers of people purely because of their ethnic identity, and did it anyway. However, he had devised his own twisted code of values under which such killing was fine. Those pills he took were no excuse either; they were sleeping pills, not meth, and he didn't start taking them until the war (due to sleeping problems).

 

[Evie]

Atropos, nonetheless, the question of whether or not Hitler was evil is purely and exclusively a PHILOSOPHICAL question. They are the ones who debate morale codes, and what actions fall where in any given morale spectrum.

History (and the historian) has absolutely no business judging how well or how poorly a given person conformed to the moral codes prevalent in his own time, or to those prevalent today.

 

[ParkCungHee]

It depends on what definition of "Insane" we're using. If your going to use the legal definition of the term, Hitler was perfectly sane. He showed signs of guilt when confronted with the suffering he had caused, and certainly was aware of what he was doing.
The inclination to depict the Nazi Hierarchy as being the result of natural defect, in my belief, reduces the magnitude of their crimes, as well as is a grave misunderstanding of the nature of the Nazi as well as similar regimes.

 

[Ukas]

If Hitler wasn't evil, then we need to seriously reconsider the definition of "evil."

Insane? Well, I think there's no doubt that he was immoral, not amoral. He was fully aware that the code of values of his society prohibited the killing of large numbers of people purely because of their ethnic identity, and did it anyway. However, he had devised his own twisted code of values under which such killing was fine. Those pills he took were no excuse either; they were sleeping pills, not meth, and he didn't start taking them until the war (due to sleeping problems).

That's exactly what I think. Most likely Hitler wasn't a psychopath but unbalanced enough to commit a mass-murder.

Hitler had sort of brainwashed himself throughly, or let himself be brainwashed by anti-Semitic forces of late 19th-early 20th century, long before he did the same to his audience in whole new level. What makes genocide possible is the method to dehumanize the victims before the act itself is committed. If you see nazi propaganda films such as Ewige Jüden (which got its name from Henry Ford's book 'The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem') and Juden Süss, you will see that the Jews are often compared to rats and cockroaches. In speeches the Jews were labeled dangerous and against all values of the new Reich. The Jews were not humans to most nazis, who actually went great lengths trying to prove this "scientifically".

The Jews and other ethnic and social minorities were persecuted and killed by the Nazis even before 1933. Hitler and his helpers had already planned their different methods of very violent ethnic cleansings long before he got to know Dr. Morell.

 

[Ukas]

Hitler was hit with poisoned gas (even blinded for a bit), during WWI. Poison gas could make a lot of people funny in the head.

Well yes it can. I read just yesterday, when Hitler was in hospital after being wounded in a poison gas attack, he presumably lost his eye vision temporarily. It was a common symptom among gas victims, but his doctor's diagnosis was that Hitler lost his eye vision more likely due to his strongly hysteric state. Moreover the doctor's opinion was that he was probably a psychopath! He was probably the first one to say so.

 

[Captain2]

well i have to admit, Hitler was somewhat human, first off Anti-Semitism was around before him, but I do personally feel that hatred of Jewish people is stupid, even if you are partially jewish

now when it came to the end of the war, imagine this, you almost control Europe, you have a following large enough to collapse nations

then for two years straight try to imagine that you've lost all of that, the walls of your empire are collapsing and soon your enemies will have you all to themselves

I'm imagine he'd lose some sleep over that, try not to go nuts after two years of decline

 

[Adler17]

In the very end he was mad. But he still had some (relative) clear moments. But one thing we have not to forget: He was a human. Despite his madness, his drugs and his crimes he was not a demon. His crimes let to this conclusion that he was a demon, but when we see them we must see these deeds as one of a human. And as such we have to be aware that we all carry that bad things with us. But we are luckily not as crazy or criminal or stupid enough nor do the situation makes us so. I mean we all have to see also into usselves to try to understand how someone could do these bad things- and to prevent it in future.

Adler

 

[thetrooper]

What I always like about Adler's posts is the no-nonsense approach and soberness. Well done.

Speaking of Hitler's sanity - I recall a documentary about Goebbels diaries. Now that was a disturbed personality.

 

[Felix Luce]

I bet I know something you don't know:

Hitler started Volkswagen ("People's Car").

Scary, huh? And he started many other reforms. He even hired scientists to word on the atomic bomb.

But I believe that he was insane/evil in that he became so wrapped up in his own beliefs that he would do anything to carry them out.