hitler or stalin
techstepgenr8tion
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30 Dec 2017, 3:34 pm
This.
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30 Dec 2017, 3:42 pm
i would choose the stalin-regime, i am 50 % gypsy, the nazis would have killed me asap.
I'd also choose Stalin over Hitler.
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techstepgenr8tion
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30 Dec 2017, 6:37 pm
If I'm to weigh in:
Stalin killed twice as many people and his gulags were in a lot of cases worse than the concentration camps.
Hitler we know for his odious ideas, racial preferences, etc..
I don't think there's a right answer here, nor even a particularly meaningful one.
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30 Dec 2017, 6:53 pm
Stalin even killed his own loyal supporters every so often as he trusted no one. Hitler rewarded his with promotions, women and gifts. Neither is good choice but if we can look normal and stay hidden (no aspies diagnosis back then) then we might do ok if being part of a Genocidial organization is ok.
Most his loyal supporters had some disorder. Hitler had a bunch, most of them wouldn’t been killed off by the organization if they weren’t in the organization. As a soldier or official I’d been safe for example as long as I followed orders. I wouldn’t follow Genocide ones though so I’d been killed . If I’m army then main risk would been dying in combat, though sooner or later the Genocide would have came out and I’d have to go awol and join a resistance. I’d prefer neither. But if it is one or other I’ll take my slight better chances under Hitler. Stalin hated gypsys too and Ukrainian people. He hated 20 million people and so killed them. Hitler and Stalin could been best friends if not for paranoia they both had.
30 Dec 2017, 7:16 pm
Most his loyal supporters had some disorder. Hitler had a bunch, most of them wouldn’t been killed off by the organization if they weren’t in the organization. As a soldier or official I’d been safe for example as long as I followed orders. I wouldn’t follow Genocide ones though so I’d been killed . If I’m army then main risk would been dying in combat, though sooner or later the Genocide would have came out and I’d have to go awol and join a resistance. I’d prefer neither. But if it is one or other I’ll take my slight better chances under Hitler. Stalin hated gypsys too and Ukrainian people. He hated 20 million people and so killed them. Hitler and Stalin could been best friends if not for paranoia they both had.
Might want to read up on Night of the Long Knives before speaking about Hitler's loyalty to his subordinates.
techstepgenr8tion
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30 Dec 2017, 7:51 pm
The only thing I could maybe say, if I was given a choice to have served abroad in the German or Soviet army I would have chosen the German army because in the Soviet army under Stalin the reward for having served abroad was a 10 to 20 year term in gulag upon your return home - or perhaps you'd get picked up from your service post directly by a black Maria. I in no way, shape, or form would have wanted to serve either of these guys but the treatment of the armed services was one place where there was both a distinction and meaningful difference.
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30 Dec 2017, 10:48 pm
Most his loyal supporters had some disorder. Hitler had a bunch, most of them wouldn’t been killed off by the organization if they weren’t in the organization. As a soldier or official I’d been safe for example as long as I followed orders. I wouldn’t follow Genocide ones though so I’d been killed . If I’m army then main risk would been dying in combat, though sooner or later the Genocide would have came out and I’d have to go awol and join a resistance. I’d prefer neither. But if it is one or other I’ll take my slight better chances under Hitler. Stalin hated gypsys too and Ukrainian people. He hated 20 million people and so killed them. Hitler and Stalin could been best friends if not for paranoia they both had.
Actually, the Asperger's diagnosis had been born in the heart of the Nazi Hell. Dr Hans Asperger kept his autistic subjects, who were little children who he called his "little professors," from being euthanized by the SS. His diagnosis of this group of kids became the basis of the Asperger's diagnosis. Unfortunately, as Asperger was writing about his findings in German which was not the most popular language of that time period, it took several decades later for Americans to even know what the hell Asperger's Syndrome was.
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31 Dec 2017, 2:34 am
The Doctor and the Nazis Pediatrician Hans Asperger is known worldwide for the syndrome he first diagnosed. The rest of his story—in Vienna during WWII—has only recently come to light.
Hans Asperger…a Nazi?
***
Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center felt uncomfortable even asking it that day in 1993. But he believed he should, because doubts about Asperger’s character had been raised. And a decision had to be made quickly about whether to posthumously honor Asperger by naming a condition after him in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the “bible” of psychiatry.
Volkmar, for example, did not hear about it until late in the DSM review process. But it was not Schopler who brought it to his attention. During the field trials Volkmar was running in order to test the pro¬posed criteria for Asperger’s, two Yale colleagues he held in high esteem raised the subject. One, Donald Cohen, the longtime director of the Yale Child Study Center, had published widely on autism. The other was a young star in the field, a clinician and investigator named Ami Klin. As a psychology PhD candidate in London, Klin had caused a stir with a brilliantly designed study showing that autism affected children’s responses to the sounds of their mothers’ voices. It had been Cohen who personally recruited Klin to Yale in 1989. The two men formed a close mentor-protege relationship based on both a fascination with autism and a powerful sense of Jewish identity. Cohen was an observant Jew and a dedicated student of the Holocaust. Klin had been born in Brazil, the son of Holocaust survivors, and had earned his undergraduate degree in history and political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The question the two men kept turning over was whether Asperger might be implicated, in any way, in the medical atrocities ascribed to the Nazis who ruled Vienna. Both knew that the medical profession had already embarrassed itself by its failure to ask this question about several doctors and researchers who had practiced under the Third Reich.
The first warning sign came in 1996. That year, Ami Klin, along with Volkmar and psychologist Sarah Sparrow, began putting together a book they planned to title Asperger Syndrome. Yet Klin still could not shake his misgivings. And, because his name would be on the cover of the book, he decided that something more than a phone call to Lorna Wing was necessary in order to establish that Asperger’s hands were clean.
In late 1996, Klin began writing to archives and institutes in Germany and Austria, seeking any documentary or other information on the Austrian doctor. This yielded little. But then a professor in Cologne, Germany, referred him to Austrian historian Michael Hubenstorf, who taught at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Berlin’s Free University. “We would like to be able to write that he was a benevolent doctor whose primary concern was his patient’s [sic] well being,” Klin wrote Hubenstorf. “But we are not sure of that.”
Hubenstorf responded a few weeks later with a four-page letter and a five-page catalog of Asperger’s career postings, promotions, and publications he had assembled. Klin’s concerns, he wrote, were justified. While he had found no record of formal membership in the Nazi Party, Hubenstorf informed Klin that Asperger’s “medical career was clearly set in a surrounding of German Nationalists and Nazis,” and that he was regularly promoted within that setting. He believed the doctor might have downplayed his previous connections to known Nazis such as Professor Hamburger, his onetime mentor, whom Hubenstorf described as “the most outspoken Nazi pediatrician of them all.”
“It remains unclear how much of a fellow traveler he was,” Hubenstorf concluded. But his advice to Klin was to err on the side of caution. He recommended against publishing “anything before the utmost effort has been made to clear Prof. Asperger’s past.”
In the end, Klin chose not to take Hubenstorf’s advice. Weighing everything, he recognized that no “smoking gun” had been found—no evidence that Asperger had directly participated in any Nazi medical crimes. In the meantime, Klin had received a copy of an obituary of Asperger that portrayed him as a warm, gentle doctor devoted to the care of children. Asperger’s daughter, Maria Asperger Felder, also vouched for her father’s reputation when Klin reached out to her. Herself a psychiatrist, she wrote that her father had been at odds with the Nazis’ racial determinism, that he had been an enemy of children’s suffering, and that he had never lost “his lifelong interest in and his curiosity about all living creatures.”
This was the story of the benevolent doctor that Klin had hoped would turn out to be the truth. In 2000, Klin, Volkmar, and Sparrow published Asperger Syndrome, with a foreword by Asperger’s daughter.
The “benevolent doctor” version of Asperger had strong appeal, and would inform many assessments of his work. Indeed, an overwhelmingly positive narrative of Asperger as a man of moral rectitude came into focus in the new millennium, elevating him almost to the status of hero. Increasingly, he was seen as a cautious yet brave and canny saboteur of the Nazi project to exterminate intellectually disabled children. This image of him echoed the assessment made by psychologist Uta Frith, in 1991, that Asperger had been an ardent defender of the “misfits” the Nazi eugenics program was designed to destroy. “Far from despising the misfits,” Frith wrote in the introduction to her definitive translation of his 1944 paper, “he devoted himself to their cause—and this at a time when allegiance to misfits was nothing less than dangerous.”
The hero image was amplified by Berlin psychiatrist Brita Schirmer, who in 2002 called attention to Asperger’s “humanity and his courageous commitment to the children entrusted to him in times when this was by no means obvious, or without danger.”
In 2007, the Dublin-based psychologists Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald wrote a letter to the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that celebrated Asperger as a man who “tried to protect these children from being sent to concentration camps in World War II.”
And in 2010, the British autism historian Adam Feinstein published the results of his own reporting trip to Vienna to investigate the rumors that Asperger was sympathetic to Hitler. “The very opposite is more likely to be the case,” he concluded.
This view of Asperger rested on a number of compelling stories. It was said that he had twice narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo while working at the Vienna Hospital, and that he had risked his own safety by failing to report the names of disabled children to the authorities. An entry in his diary, written during a 1934 visit to Germany, seems to shudder at the gathering Nazi storm: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with constricted vision.” His Catholic faith, and his membership in the Catholic youth organization known as Bund Neuland, have also been cited as evidence of his association with a progressive morality that was at odds with the Nazi agenda.
Above all, this view rested upon Asperger’s clear statements, from early in the Nazi era, defending the right of mentally challenged children to society’s support. During the 1938 talk in which he described his autistic cases for the first time, he declared, “Not everything that falls out of line, and thus is ‘abnormal,’ has to be deemed ‘inferior.’ ”
Likewise, at the conclusion of his better-known 1944 paper, the one that later caught Lorna Wing’s attention, he saluted the medical profession’s “duty to stand up for these children with the whole force of our personality.”
Thus, the case seemed strong for Asperger as a humanitarian and liberal thinker. It was an optimistic and inspiring portrait that spoke to modern sensibilities. And it would prove to be seriously flawed.
To start with, the story of Asperger’s near arrest by the Gestapo had only one source, and that was Asperger himself. As far as is known, he brought it up twice in public: in a 1962 talk and during a 1974 radio appearance. To any astute Austrian familiar with the persilschein phenomenon, this raises the suspicion that Asperger embroidered on his experience of being politically vetted by the Nazi authorities, or perhaps even concocted the story in full. This vetting was a process most public servants had to endure under a law passed after the Anschluss to weed out Jews and anyone else deemed “unreliable.” No doubt Asperger’s being a non-party member was looked into, but in the end the Nazis cleared him.
Another flag should have been Asperger’s membership in Bund Neuland, which was, by Asperger’s own account, crucial to his development as a young man. While ardently pro-Catholic this group also espoused an anti-modern, pan-Germanic nationalist philosophy, and its tensions with the Nazis stemmed primarily from the Reich’s anti-Church position. Otherwise, there was a fair amount of common ground between Bund Neuland and the Nazis. For example, a 1935 issue of the Neuland monthly periodical highlighted the problem of “excessive Jewish influence” in the upper reaches of society, and discussed the need for “a clean separation” between the “Jews of Vienna” and the rest of the population.
Then there were Asperger’s own words. His 1934 diary entry about all of Germany moving “in a single direction, fanatically” has been cited—originally by his daughter, and then by others, relying on her account—as evidence that he condemned the Nazification of Germany. Read in full, however, it seems more ambiguous, with hints of awe and admiration as well as consternation: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with a constricted vision, certainly, but also with enthusiasm and dedication, with tremendous discipline and control, with a terrible effectiveness. Now only soldiers—soldierly thinking—ethos—Germanic paganism…” Moreover, it is the sole known excerpt of Asperger’s writing that suggests concern about where things might be headed as of 1934.
Four years later, on October 3, 1938, there was no ambiguity in the language he used to open a historic address he gave to an assembly of his fellow physicians. The words he used sounded startlingly pro-Nazi, and came at the beginning of the talk in which he discussed his cases—whom he called “autistic psychopaths”—for the first time. This was a full seven months after the Nazi Anschluss, when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich, yet Asperger’s opening lines were nothing short of a valentine to the newly Nazified Austria.
“We stand in the midst of a massive renovation of our intellectual life, which encompasses all areas of this life—not least in medicine,” he began. This new thinking, he said, was “the sustaining idea of the new Reich—that the whole is greater than the parts, and that the Volk is more important than any single individual.”
In a handful of words, this was the defining vision of German fascism, which Asperger, in the next breath, applied to his fellow doctors. This “sustaining idea,” he urged, “should, where it involves the nation’s most precious asset—its health—bring profound changes to our entire attitude.” This applied, he said, to “the efforts being made to promote genetic health, and to prevent the passing on of diseased heredity.” It was hard not to miss the clear reference to the Nazi-driven “science” of race improvement through eugenics. “We physicians must carry out the tasks that fall to us in this area with full accountability,” Asperger declared.
This salute to the Anschluss, to the Nazis, to the suppression of individuality, and to the task of purifying the genetic lineage of the nation should by itself have dealt a fatal blow to the idea that Asperger secretly resisted the Nazi agenda. A review of other medical talks and papers printed that year in the same weekly journal where Asperger’s appeared shows that the opening of his talk was far from typical. Defenders of Asperger sometimes argue that he had a hidden anti-Nazi agenda—that he sought to throw the Gestapo off his scent by paying lip service to the regime. Brita Schirmer described the preamble as a “deft chess move” on Asperger’s part. His defenders usually assert, as a corollary, that the full text of Asperger’s speech, together with his 1944 paper, constitute an unambiguous argument to protect and nurture all vulnerable children, no matter the level of their disability.
But Asperger did not, in either the talk or the paper, make that argument. Despite recognizing in passing that autistic traits can be seen in children of both stronger and weaker mental capacity, he had little to say about helping the latter. Rather, he focused on the boys who possessed what he called “social worth”—a term he did not apply to all children. The boys in the group he favored would later be known as the “Asperger’s type,” and decades later as “Aspies.” They were those he described as being “more lightly affected,” as well as not at all rare in the population. Virtually every account of Asperger has him describing his boys, with affection, as “Little Professors”—this presumed a reference to their intelligence and their sometimes pedantic style. (That turns out to be a myth; Asperger himself never actually used the term Little Professors.)
Asperger made this preference explicit in his 1938 talk, where he admitted that he “thought it more rewarding to choose two [of his] not so severe and therefore more promising cases” to present. That would always be his pattern. In 1944, when discussing his “more lightly affected” children, Asperger was effusive in celebrating how far they could go, dwelling especially on those who had the potential to reach the uppermost echelons of society.
That said, Asperger’s vision of special education and what it could achieve was not quite as exceptional as his supporters suggest. Contrary to popular understanding, special education had its place in Nazi Germany. The Reich allowed that disabled children who could become productive citizens should be afforded support and education to achieve that end. Even the Hitler Youth had special units for the blind and the deaf. But the Nazis drew a line where the cost of supporting a child was expected to exceed that child’s ultimate material contribution to the state. For that child the Nazis had no use; his or her life was worthless.
Asperger did not go that far in anything he published, and the Catholic faith he professed opposed sterilization and euthanasia. But he never did advocate for the children he seems to have considered less “rewarding.” Indeed, he appeared to write off the possibility of improving outcomes for those whose autistic traits were accompanied by a “pronounced intellectual inferiority.” Rather than lay out a path to helping them, he simply noted the “tragic” fate of such individuals, or at least a sad minority of them. “In the less favorable cases,” Asperger wrote, “they roam the streets as comic originals, grotesquely unkempt, talking loudly to themselves, addressing people in the manner of the autistic.” When speaking of these “less favorable cases,” Asperger never celebrated their autistic differences. Rather, his tone was one of pity.
In May 2010, a soft-spoken Austrian academic walked into Vienna’s City Hall and its ceremonial gathering place, the Wappensaal, where a symposium honoring the memory of Hans Asperger was under way. Herwig Czech was a 35-year-old historian and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He had been invited to speak at the symposium by organizers from the Vienna children’s hospital where Asperger had done his most important work. A number of autism’s research luminaries were in attendance, and Lorna Wing herself was scheduled for an afternoon talk.
Czech’s academic specialty was the role of medicine during the Third Reich. It was a hallmark of his work to unearth the discrepancies—often embarrassing—between the accounts medical professionals gave of themselves after the war and their actual conduct during it. Czech’s interest in this area was perhaps connected to his dawning awareness during his boyhood that his warm and loving grandfather had been “a convinced Nazi.” It was not something the old man ever talked about openly, but the knowledge lay heavily on Czech, given what he was learning at school about the darkness of those years.
Which brought Czech to City Hall, some 30 years after Asperger’s death. Before him, in their hands, all of the seated attendees held the day’s program, its cover featuring a black-and-white photograph of a young Dr. Asperger, wearing a white lab coat and engaged in deep conversation with a young boy—presumably one of his patients. The symposium’s title appeared above the photo: “On the Trail of Hans Asperger.” The event had been prompted by the growing international recognition of Asperger’s work. Over two days, presenters would explore the man’s career and offer assessments of the latest scientific findings regarding Asperger’s syndrome.
The organizers had received word beforehand that Czech had stumbled across compromising details regarding their honoree. This could not have been welcome news, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry, they encouraged him to keep digging and to report whatever he might find. But once Czech was standing in front of them, there was a slight awkwardness to the situation: Among the 150 or so audience members were his daughter and some of his grandchildren. The title of Czech’s talk, printed in the program brochure, was “Dr. Hans Asperger and the Nazi Child Euthanasia Program in Vienna: Possible Connections.” Awkwardness gave way to surprise, and then shock, as Czech drew a portrait of Asperger that left the hero narrative in tatters, based on a trove of original documents he had excavated. There was, for example, a 1941 letter Czech had found in the archives of the Spiegelgrund—the facility on Vienna’s outskirts which superficially resembled a hospital, but which functioned in reality as a killing center for severely disabled children. Those chosen for death at the Spiegelgrund were poisoned by phenobarbital, which was administered in suppositories, or mixed into the children’s meals. The drug, in sufficient doses, causes the lungs to malfunction. As a rule, “pneumonia” was listed as the official cause of death.
Asperger’s letter, addressed to the Spiegelgrund’s administration, reported on the recently conducted medical evaluation, at the University Hospital, of a little girl named Herta Schreiber. The handwriting was Asperger’s. Herta was then 2 years old, the youngest of nine children—of whom five still lived at home—and she had been sick all spring since contracting encephalitis. Her condition did not appear to be improving, and in June her mother had brought her to be seen by Asperger at his clinic.
The letter contained an assessment of Herta’s condition. It was apparent that she had suffered some sort of major insult to her brain: Her mental development had halted, her behavior was disintegrating, and she was having seizures. Asperger seemed unsure of his diagnosis. He noted several possibilities: severe personality disorder, seizure disorder, idiocy. Then, in plain prose, he offered a decidedly nonmedical opinion: “When at home, this child must present an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children.”
Having expressed his empathy for Herta’s mother, Asperger rendered his recommendation: “Permanent placement at the Spiegelgrund seems absolutely necessary.” The letter was signed “Hans Asperger.” Everyone in the audience grasped the meaning of Asperger’s letter. It was a death warrant. Indeed, Czech confirmed that Herta was admitted to the Spiegelgrund on July 1, 1941, and killed there on September 2, 1941, one day after her third birthday. Records state that she died of pneumonia. Notes from the hospital archives quoted her mother as agreeing, through tears, that her daughter would be better off this way, rather than living in a world where she would face constant ridicule and cruelty. It was Czech’s assessment that Herta’s parents supported the Nazi agenda.
n February 1942, he reported, Asperger was the senior pediatrician representing the city of Vienna on a commission asked to review the health status of 210 Austrian children residing in mental hospitals in lower Austria. Several months earlier, the government had begun taking steps to apply mandatory education laws even to children in these hospitals, as long as they were “educable.” A panel of seven experts was charged with compiling a list of the names of those children who should, despite their mental challenges, start attending classes in either traditional academic or special-education settings. In a single day, Asperger and his colleagues went through the records of all 210 children. While 17 were found to be too young for compulsory education, and 36 too old, the panel designated 122 of them as ready for schooling.
That left 26 boys and 9 girls. Their fate, Czech reported, was known, and he believed Asperger knew it as well. A written summary detailing the commission’s composition, purpose, and procedures clearly stated that those children judged to be not “educable” were to be “dispatched for Jekelius Action” as quickly as possible. When that was written, Erwin Jekelius, a former assistant to Asperger’s mentor Franz Hamburger, was the fiance of Hitler’s younger sister, as well as director of the Spiegelgrund. “Jekelius Action” was a euphemism the commission’s members would have understood quite well. Asperger once said he took a “great risk” by refusing to report children to the authorities. This, clearly, was not one of those times.
In the years following his talk, Czech would discover other evidence of how far Asperger went to conform. He found letters in Asperger’s handwriting that used “Heil Hitler” as their closing salutation. This was not mandatory. He also unearthed a job application filled out in Asperger’s hand in which Asperger described himself as a candidate for the Nazi Doctors Association, a group that functioned as a medical policy arm of the party and was instrumental in closing the medical practices of Jewish physicians. He also learned that Asperger had applied to be a medical consultant to the Vienna branch of the Hitler Youth, though there is no record of him having been accepted. All in all, in Czech’s view, Asperger took care during the war to safeguard his career and to burnish “his Nazi credibility.” Asperger, it would appear, did what was necessary.
There is debate as a result of these findings as to whether Asperger did what he had to do in Nazi territory to save as many children as possible and thus he still should be considered hero or while celebrating his science the hero worship of the guy is wrong. I am not sure myself. Czech has not shared his findings but nobody has contradicted his findings. At the time these findings were published in America I was uncomfortable enough with these findings I removed
Aspergersd photo from my avatar and yet see no reason to put it back.
As per Neurotribes the main reason Aspergers syndrome was not recognized in America was Leo Kanner. Kanner was an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis and subsequently helped 200 Jews escape. One of those Jews was a key clinician in Aspergers clinic who ended up working for Kanner. Yet Kannar would only mention Asperger once decades later in a dismissive manner. For a number of decades, Kanner was Mr. Autism so his failure to mention Aspergers precluded any non "Kanners Autism" from being recognized in America until Lorna Wing's PR campaign to get Aspergers Syndrome recognized. There has been speculation from wanting the spotlight for himself, from not wanting any bad PR that came with association with Nazi science after the war to Kannar's personal animous/suspicions but the answer went to the grave with Kanner. Regardless of the reason, Kanner's freezing out of Aspergers work caused the damage of non and misdiagnoses for so many of us. It is a hole we are still climbing out of.
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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 31 Dec 2017, 2:53 am, edited 4 times in total.
31 Dec 2017, 3:07 am
it is impossible to really assess their characters.
some minor things i have seen in mainstream history channel documentaries make me wonder how evil hitler really was.
i know hitler was brainwashed into believing the jews were responsible for germany's defeat in WW1.
the jews had been hated throughout history by many countries for some reason.
i am not sure why. maybe because some thought they were responsible for the execution of jesus.
some people noted that the jews set up a usurer system and grew fat on nothing but interest on loans they gave to investors.
the jews seemed to somehow wriggle into a strangle holding position in every society. they had the money. they did nothing but loan others money at exorbitant interest rates, and it was perceived that they loaned money to only those that served their agenda's
they owned everything by being the main shareholders.
so the image of the rat with the gold tooth was conjured.
i do not know why hitler considered them so inferior genetically, since they obviously were smarter businessmen.
i think he considered them to be an intimidating threat.
he wanted them all out of germany. at first they were deported to other countries, but eventually the other countries refused any more, and it must be remembered that the architects of this depravity of the final solution were the henchmen of hitler, themselves consumed with hatred of the jews.
i heard that hitler never wanted to hear any "gory details", but simply wanted to know if their plans were progressing as desired. a simple "yes" or "no" sufficed.
also, hitlers bombing of english residential areas was in retaliation to an english bomber raid in which only 3 planes got to their strategic target (the rest being shot down), and let their bombs go with sloppiness and they fell in a residential area.
england was the first to violate an agreed rule between england and germany that only targets of strategic importance would be bombed.
i guess hitler overreacted, but that's the story.
also, hitler observed that chemical weapons were out of the question when suggested by advisors.
he said something like "we will not descend to this level of barbarism" or something.
the way he loved his german shepherd dog was quite a surprise. he saw it was really alive and gave it his undivided attention when he petted it.
but he went nuts. taking poland was kicking the top off the ant's nest.
he would have been much better advised to take russia only, and global resistance would have been significantly reduced.
fighting on 2 fronts was lunacy, and his strategic ability was not very robust.
that incursion toward moscow was too much too bite off in one year.
he seemed not to have intelligence about the russian climate in the areas that had to be fought for.
prewar, hitler greatly improved peoples standards of living (1933-1938).
he built the autobahns, and designed the VW beetle (yes it's his artistic concept put into production).
everyone could afford a VW, and they could happily sit on 80 mph all day, so it gave people a sense of freedom they never had before.
prewar, stalinist russia was a miserable place. people starved to death and were being worked to death and had their whole years produce confiscated etc. they were not happy.
contrast that with the happy german families going on picnics in the countryside.
but hitler was a lunatic in the end. i think drugs buggereds his brain up.
musssolini said he was foaming at the mouth ranting like a rabid dog at a meeting. hitlers own people were clearly embarrassed. hitler was making no sense.
_________
so on to the concept of "a drink at home with hitler or stalin"
i think hitler would be more amenable to varied topics of conversation.
he was typically lazy. he got up mainly at about 2 or 3 pm, and apparently "exercise was out of the question".
he would have been easier to distract from war talk i guess than stalin.
i would not feel in danger if he knew that i was just a nobody with no influence or particular philosophy. he may even enjoy my company.
stalin on the other hand would always have a shrewd eye trained on my every movement and be much more prone to paranoid interpretations of innocent comments.
he would be distant and unfriendly i think. i would feel uneasy in his presence.
____
so, if you stuck with hitler, you would be a german citizen today, and if you stuck with stalin, then you would live in russia.
i would prefer to live in germany at the moment.
31 Dec 2017, 5:21 am
Ernst Röhm or Reichstagbrand or the usefull scapegoat(s)
https://books.google.fr/books?id=yzxqWp ... 3F&f=false
with a short story "Job" by Isaac Bashevis Singer (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/job)
“In short, I was about fifteen when I went astray. We had a political group in town where we read Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky and even got our hands on a brochure by Lenin—in Russian, not in Yiddish. In 1917, when the Revolution broke out, I was a Russian conscript. I managed to catch some lead near Przemysl and was laid up in a military hospital. What I went through in the barracks and on the front you probably know yourself. No, you know nothing, because my greatest sorrows came from my own mouth. I told everyone the truth. I spoke against the officers. To this day I don’t understand why they didn’t have me court-martialled and shot. They must have needed cannon fodder.
“Kerensky called for further fighting and I became a Bolshevik. I ended up in Poltava, and there we went through the October Revolution. Mobs set upon us and we were chased away. Who wasn’t there? Denikin, Petliura, others. I was eventually wounded and discharged from the Red Army. I got stuck in a little town where there was a pogrom against the Jews. With my own eyes I saw how they slaughtered children. I lay in the hospital and got gangrene in one foot. I’ll never understand why, out of everyone, I came out alive. Around me people died from typhoid fever and all kinds of other diseases. For me, death was an everyday thing. But despite all this my faith in man’s progress became stronger, not weaker. Who started wars? Capitalists. Who incited pogroms? Also they. I’d seen plenty of wickedness, stupidity, and pettiness among my own comrades, but I answered myself ten times a day with the same refrain: we are products of the capitalist system. Socialism will produce a new man—and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, my parents died in Poland, my father from hunger and my mother from typhoid fever. Though possibly also from hunger.
“After the mobs were driven out and things subsided into some kind of order, so to speak, I decided to become a laborer, despite the fact that I could have taken a government post or even become a commissar. By that time I was already in Moscow. I’d studied carpentry in our little town, so I entered a furniture factory. Lenin was still alive. For the masses, the big holiday still held sway. Even the New Economic Policy didn’t disappoint us. How do the Hassidim put it? ‘Descent for the sake of ascent.’ To stand and hear Lenin speak was a compensation for all the suffering and humiliation. Yes, suffering and humiliation. Because in the factory where I worked they cursed me and called me a ‘dirty Yid’ and mocked me no less than they had in the barracks.
“I was constantly hounded—and by whom? Party members, fellow-workers, Communists. They took every chance to tell me to go to Palestine. Of course, I could have complained. You heard of cases in which workers were put behind bars for anti-Semitic acts. But I soon realized that these were not isolated incidents. The entire factory was saturated with hatred for Jews—and not only Jews. A Tartar was no less inferior than a Jew, and when the Russians felt like it they made mincemeat of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles. Try sweeping away a trash can. I saw with sorrow that the Revolution had not changed all the drunkenness, debauchery, intrigues, theft, sabotage. A doubt stole into my heart, but I kept it silent with all my powers. After all, this was still just the beginning.
“I promised you to be short and this is what I’ll do. Lenin died. Stalin took over. Then came the plot against Trotsky—who for me was a god. Suddenly I heard he was nothing but a spy, a lackey of Pilsudski’s, Leon Blum’s, McDonald’s, Rockefeller’s. There are hearts that burst from the least worries, and there are also hearts as solid as a rock. It seems I have a stone there on my left side. What I’ve put up with, I only wish upon Hitler, if it’s true that he’s still alive somewhere, and that someone is hiding him in Spain or Argentina. I shared a room—actually a cell—with two other workers: drunks and scoundrels. The language they used—the smut! They stole from my pockets. At the factory, they called me Trotsky more than once and pronounced the ‘r’ with a Yiddish accent. Then came the arrests and the purges. People I knew—idealists—were taken away to prison and either got sent off to Siberia or rotted in jail. I began to realize, to my horror, that Trotsky was right: the Revolution had been betrayed.
“But what is a person to do concretely? Could Russia endure a new revolution, or even a permanent revolution? Can a sick body stand one operation after another? As my mother, peace be upon her, used to say: If a dog licked my blood, it would poison itself….
“So the years passed. Permanent revolution is impossible, but there is such a thing as permanent despair. I went to sleep in despair and awoke in despair. I was drained of all hope. Yet Trotskyist circles sprang up regardless of the persecution. The old conspiracies from the Tsarist times repeated themselves. The Revolution had fallen with a thud, but humankind doesn’t resign itself. This is its misfortune.”
II
“In 1928, I came back to Poland. So to speak. I smuggled myself across the border, helped by my fellow-Trotskyists. Each step involved the worst of dangers. I forgot to tell you that while still in Russia I’d been held at Lubyanka for seven months precisely under the suspicion that I was a Trotskyist. There wasn’t a single night in which I wasn’t beaten. Do you see this crippled fingernail? This is where a Chekist stuck a glowing rod into me. I had my teeth knocked out and those who did it were my fellow-proletarians, a curse upon humankind. What was done in prison can’t be put into words. People were physically and spiritually degraded. The stench of piss pots made you crazy. In a prison you can find all sorts of people. There was homosexuality as well as outright rape. Yes, be that all as it may, I smuggled myself into Poland and came to Nieswiez—perhaps you’ve heard of this little town? As soon as I crossed the border, the Poles arrested me. They later let me out, but then I was put behind bars again.
“This was in 1930. I’d been given a contact among the Trotskyists in Warsaw, but they ended up being just a few poor youths, workers. The Stalinists considered it a good deed to denounce Trotskyists to the authorities, and most of them were imprisoned in Pawiak or Wronki—a terrible prison. In Warsaw, I tried to tell them about what was going on in Russia, and don’t ask what I had to put up with! Our young little Stalinists, the onetime yeshiva boys and simple idlers, hounded me to the point that I started longing to go back to Russia. I was beaten, spat on, and called nothing but a renegade, fascist, traitor. A few times I tried to speak to an audience, but thugs from Krochmalna Street and Smocza Street came to shut me up. Once, I was stabbed with a knife. There is no worse lowlife than a Jewish Chekist, Yevsektsia member, or plain Communist. They spit on the truth. They’re ready to kill and torture over the least suspicion. I already understood that there was no difference between Communists and Nazis, but I still believed that Trotskyism was better. Something had to be good! Not everyone could be evil.
“Up until now I haven’t mentioned my personal life, because in Russia I hadn’t had any personal life. Even if I could have sinned, there was nowhere it could be done. With several men living in a single room, you’d have to be an exhibitionist. I witnessed both sexes in their utmost shame and misery, and I, as they say, lost my appetite. Hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children were brought forth—the homeless—who in turn became Russia’s curse and peril. When a woman went to buy bread, they fell upon her and stole it from her. Very often they raped her too. There was no lack of downright thieves, murderers, drunks. The Revolution should’ve brought an end to prostitution, but whores loitered all around the very Kremlin. In Warsaw, I met a Trotskyist woman. She was hunchbacked, but for me a physical defect was no defect at all. She was clever, intelligent, idealistic. She had a pair of black eyes and from them all the sadness and wisdom of the world peered out—though where in the world is there wisdom? We became close. Neither of us thought much of the idea of going to a rabbi. We rented an attic room on Smocza Street, where we started living together. That’s also where we had our daughter, Rosa—naturally, after Rosa Luxemburg.
“My wife, Sonia, was a nurse by trade—a medic and a compassionate caregiver. She spent her nights with the ill. We seldom had a night together. I couldn’t find any work in the Polish factories and earned a little by repairing poor people’s furniture—a closet, a table, a bed. I earned peanuts. As long as there wasn’t any child, it was still bearable. But when Sonia was in her later months it became difficult. In the middle of all this I was arrested. I’d been denounced by my Jewish and proletarian brothers, who’d invented a false accusation against me and actually planted illicit literature. What do you know about what people are capable of doing? Some of them later fell in Spain—they were killed by their own comrades. Others perished in the purges or simply in Comrade Stalin’s labor camps.
“The entire trial against me was a wild invention. Everyone knew this: the investigator, the prosecutor, the judge. They put me together with people whose faces I’d never seen and said that we’d planned a conspiracy against the Polish Republic. The policemen—guardians of the law —gave false testimony and swore to lies. In prison, the Stalinists hounded me so much that each day was hell. They didn’t take me into their circle. Among the civilians there were rich people, especially women, who brought political prisoners food, cigarettes, other such things. They even provided lawyers free of charge. But since I didn’t believe in Comrade Stalin, I was as good as excommunicated. They played dirty tricks on me. They tore my books, threw dirt into my food, they literally spat on me a hundred times a day.
“I stopped talking altogether and went silent. It got to the point that I became like a mute. In order not to hear their abuse and curses, I used to stuff my ears with soft bread or cotton from my coat. They even persecuted me at night, all in the name of Socialism: a bright future, a better tomorrow, and all their other slogans. The tortured themselves became torturers. Don’t think that I have any illusions about the Trotskyists. I’ve realized one thing: the worst people are those who want to save the world. Among simple folk—merchants, skilled workers, the so-called little man—one can still find decent people. But among those who want to bring about the coming of the Red Messiah there is no truth, no compassion. What’s easier than torturing in the name of an ideal?
“It got to the point that the Polish prison guards began to stand up for me and demanded that I be left alone. I started asking them to put me among the criminal offenders, and when they at last obliged me the comrades exploited it and organized a protest demonstration opposing a political prisoner being put among criminals. In other words, they wanted me nearby to torture. This is how they behaved—those who ostensibly sat in jail for the sake of justice.
“Sitting among the thieves, pimps, and murderers was hardly a delight. They eyed me with suspicion. There prevailed an old hatred between the underworld and the politicals—ever since the times of 1905. But, compared with what I endured from the Stalinists, this was paradise. They stole my cigarettes and made off with portions of the packages that Sonia sent me, but they let me read my books in peace. Instead of ‘fascist,’ they called me ‘idiot’ and ‘good-for-nothing,’ which did less damage. It even happened sometimes that a thief or a pimp would pass me a piece of sausage or a cigarette from his own stash. What was there to do in the cell? Either you play cards—a marked and greasy pack—or you talk. From the stories I heard there, one could write ten books. And their Yiddish! The politicals babbled in the Yiddish of their pamphlets. It was not a language but some kind of jargon. The thieves spoke the real mother tongue. I heard them use words that astounded me. It’s a shame I didn’t write them down. And their thoughts about the world! They have a whole philosophy. At the time I went to prison, I still believed in revolution, in Karl Marx. I had all kinds of political illusions. Back outside I was completely cured.
“While I sat in jail, there developed in Poland a growing disappointment in Stalin. It swelled to the point that the Polish Communist Party was thrown out of the Comintern. Many of my persecutors had taken off for the ‘land of socialism’—where they were liquidated. I was told about one sucker who, having crossed the border, threw himself down and started kissing the ground of the Soviet Union, as Jews of yore used to do when arriving in the Land of Israel. Just as he lay down and kissed the red mud, two border guards approached and arrested him. They sent him to dig for gold in the north, where the strongest of men didn’t last more than a year. This was how the Communist Party treated those who had sacrificed themselves on its behalf.
“Then a new curse wriggled its way in: Nazism. It was Communism’s rightful heir. Hitler had learned everything from the Reds: the concentration camps, the liquidations, the mass murders. When I got out of jail, in 1934, and told Sonia what I thought about our little world and those who wanted to save it, she attacked me like the worst of them. The fact is that while I sat behind bars I’d become a kind of martyr or hero for the Trotskyists. I could have played the role of a great leader. But I told them: dear children, there is no cure for the human race. It was not the ‘system’ that was guilty but Homo sapiens itself, in the flesh. When they heard such heresy, they shivered with rage. Sonia informed me that she couldn’t live with a renegade. I’d had the luck of becoming a renegade twice over. It was a separate issue that, while I sat behind bars, she had lived with someone else. Hunchbacks are hot-blooded. There’s always a volunteer handy. He was a simple youth from the provinces, I think he was a barber. Little Rosa called him Daddy…”
III
“Don’t look so afraid! I won’t keep you here until tomorrow. You went away to America in 1935, if I’m not mistaken, and you know nothing about what happened later in Poland. What took place was an absolute breakdown. Stalinists became Trotskyists, while Trotskyists went into the Polish Socialist Party or the Bund. Others became Zionists. I myself tried to turn to religion. I went to a study house and sat myself down to learn the gemara, but for this one must have faith. Otherwise it’s just nostalgia.
“The anarchists raised their heads again—some of them still stood by Kropotkin, others became Stirnerists. We had guests in Poland. Ridz-Szmigli had invited the Nazis to hunt in the Białowieza Forest. Then came the Stalin-Hitler pact and the war. When they started to bomb Warsaw, those who were strong enough ran over the Praga Bridge and set out for Russia. Some had illusions, but I knew where I was going. Yet staying among the Nazis was not an option for me. I came to say goodbye to Sonia and found her in bed with the barber. Little Rosa started crying, ‘Papa, take me with you!’ These same cries follow me still. They torment me at night. They all perished. No one remained.
“I was in Bialystok when a number of Yiddish writers from Poland all at once became ardent Stalinists. Some lost no time and began denouncing their colleagues. People knew me as a Trotskyist and I was heading for certain death, but by then I’d arrived at a certain philosophy: We can’t live openly in this world. We have to smuggle ourselves through. People, like animals, must constantly hide themselves. If the enemy’s on the right, you go left. It goes left, you crawl right. This very philosophy—you can call it cowardice, it doesn’t bother me—has helped me. I knew where the informers were and I avoided them. A lot of leftists—half-leftists and converted leftists, so to speak—went to Vilna or Kovno, but I went on to Russia, not to the big cities but to little towns, villages, collective farms. There I found a different kind of Russian: generous, ready to help. There they laughed at communism.
“Until 1941, people got by somehow. When the war arrived, a famine broke out. Refugees on foot arrived by the millions. Others were brought in freight trains. Millions of Russians went to the front. I starved, slept in train stations, passed through all seven circles of Hell, but I avoided one thing: prison. I kept my mouth shut and played the role of a simple person, someone half-illiterate. I worked wherever possible. On collective farms and in factories I witnessed the thing called the communist economy. They simply destroyed the machinery. They ruined raw materials. It couldn’t even be called sabotage. It was a simple beastly indifference to anything that didn’t directly relate to them. The whole system was such that either you stole or you were dead. I entered a factory and the accountant, a fellow from Warsaw, conducted his accounting on books by Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy. He scribbled his numbers—obviously false—on the margins and above the printed type. You couldn’t get any blank paper there. People lived on stolen goods sold on the black market. You can’t grasp it unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes. If not for America—and had the Nazis not been such ferocious murderers—Hitler would have got as far as Vladivostok.
“I didn’t live—I smuggled myself through life. I became a worm that crawled from here to there. As long as it wasn’t trampled, it crept on. I was astonished to realize that the whole country was like this. We became like the lice that infested us. Until I arrived in Russia for the second time, I’d still had something in me that could be called romanticism or sexual morality. But with time I lost this, too. Millions of men lay scattered on the fronts and millions of wives lived with anyone who would take them. I slept with women whose names I didn’t even know. In the night I had females whose faces I hadn’t seen. I once lay with a woman on a bale of hay. She gave herself over to me and cried. I asked her, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she wailed, ‘If Grishenka only knew! Where is he, my little eagle? What have I made of him!’ Then she nestled up to me, crying. She professed, ‘To me you’re not a man but a candle for masturbation.’ She suddenly took to kissing me and wetting me with her tears. ‘What do I have against you? You’ve probably also left someone behind. A curse on fascism!…’
“In Tashkent, I got typhoid fever, which was later complicated by pneumonia. I lay in the hospital and around me people were constantly dying. Some Pole spoke to me and started telling me about all his plans. All at once he went silent. I answered him and he didn’t respond. The nurse came in and it turned out that he’d died. Just like that, in the middle of speaking. He suffered from scurvy or beriberi, and with these diseases people died, so to speak, without a preface. I became indifferent to death. I never believed this would be possible.
“You shouldn’t think that I came here just to get into your hair and tell you my life story. The fact is that I’m here and this means that I smuggled myself through everything—hunger, epidemics, murder, destruction, borders. Now I’m in your United States. I already have my papers. I’ve already been mugged in your America, and have already had a revolver held to my heart, too. A survivor with whom I crossed here on the ship has already worked his way up and owns hotels in New York. He took straight to business, forgot all the dead, all the killing. I recently found him in a cafeteria and he complained to me about his falling stocks.”
31 Dec 2017, 5:57 am
Most his loyal supporters had some disorder. Hitler had a bunch, most of them wouldn’t been killed off by the organization if they weren’t in the organization. As a soldier or official I’d been safe for example as long as I followed orders. I wouldn’t follow Genocide ones though so I’d been killed . If I’m army then main risk would been dying in combat, though sooner or later the Genocide would have came out and I’d have to go awol and join a resistance. I’d prefer neither. But if it is one or other I’ll take my slight better chances under Hitler. Stalin hated gypsys too and Ukrainian people. He hated 20 million people and so killed them. Hitler and Stalin could been best friends if not for paranoia they both had.
Might want to read up on Night of the Long Knives before speaking about Hitler's loyalty to his subordinates.
But did he purge any of his true loyal people, that was a move to gain the military loyalty. How many government purges did Stalin do? His people were so afraid to make the slight mistake. If they clapped too long or clapped too short stalin would see that as a sign of treason and have them killed. Stalin believed everyone was out to get him.
