Hitler and Aspergers Syndrome (Poll and Discussion).

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^ I took the liberty of listening to both pieces you mentioned (crumb's angels and Berg's Wozzeck.) Sometimes I feel like modern artists do things just for the sake of being different, without much impact behind their work behind shock value or novelty. Those pieces aren't the kind of thing I could just listen to and actually enjoy. Anyway, I don't quite 'get it,' but I guess I just have more conventional tastes in music. If it music does it for you and you find value in it, than more power to you. You may see things in those pieces that I don't, I'm sure.

My preference when it comest to classical music seems to generally be for the more understated pieces that don't try and do to much besides get to the meat of the composition. As Jeffrey Jones would say, some pieces have 'too many notes.' (chuckle)

Chopin, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff are my preferred composers. I also like a few modern score composers like Randy Edelman(Gettysburg Soundtrack.)

Heil Schikelguper!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I don't know why anyone wants to focus on this because it could very well be true, but not because of his actions during the holocaust so much as his general idiosyncrasies and from what I've read about his personal life.

If he did have it I don't even think it was mild but it's important to remember that he could have been a sociopath at the same time. I don't think AS is what made him do what he did. Perhaps someone with AS has a brain that could develop into something like Hitler's more easily, but I don't think most people with AS are born misanthropic.

If he did have AS that certainly wasn't the the worst of his problems.

Hitler must have believed that the earlier successes must have mean't that nothing could beat Germany. He acted this way while in his Berlin bunker, telling his generals that the two massive tank and infantry units could beat the Russians and send them back towards Russia and the units could come and keep Berlin safe. There were so such units, what there were were two small units, undermanned and tired of fighting. Hitler, believed what he wanted to believe. For this and more, Bruno Ganz plays it brilliantly in Downfall.

I think Hitler was in over his head after 1942 as capable foreign leaders and generals took over from their cautious predecessors to step up the leadership level of allied resistance. The Allies too also had tremendous economic advantages and population advantages which helped them greatly in a war of attrition.

Hitler made statements in 1938 about how soft the democratic leaders of England and France were, and that Germany and Italy held their biggest advantage over the democracies as the allied leaders like Chamberlain were no match for the "vigorous personalities" of the fascist leaders. He stated that no such capable opponents existed to him in the Allied camp. Hitler was half-right in that he definitely had the will to fight and take risks, and that Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich would make many concessions to avoid war. Germany in 1938 was the nation that wanted war, and the German army had that burning desire to fight and revenge itself against France. Fascism was the vigorous expansionst ideology, and the British and French were directionless and unaggressive.

The French had suffered terribly in WWI and had lost around 1.6 million men in combat, with millions more maimed and wounded. 3 of 10 Frenchmen between the ages of 17 - 45 died in WWI. This kind of loss had a terrible effect on the French population, workforce, and national psyche. Even though right-wing nationalism was a strong force in France at this time, almost no-one in France, even the French Generals, had the slightest desire for another war with Germany. The French Generals actually wanted to fight the Soviet Union at this time, as they considered Communism the main enemy of France, not Nazism.................. The French CnC, Gamelin, spent a large amount of time during the phony-war drawing up serious plans for an Allied expeditionary force to attack Baku and seize the oil wells there(as if France would really fight Germany and Russia at the same time.) Gamelin really was planning this though, but the French expeditionary force objective was changed to Finland at first to help the Finns, but finally was deployed to Norway to fight the German attack there.

France did not want to fight Germany at all because the French Generals and nation considered honor satisfied by the 1918 settlement and the return of Alsace-Lorraine. For the French Right-wing, it was Communism that was the dangerous idealogy perverting France in the 1930's. The French right-wing actually held sympathies with Hitler and some desired a similar Fascist coup in France. "Better Hitler to Blum," they said. Blum was the leader of the pan-leftist Popular Front government.

Hitler was able to read the 7 or 8 various French premiers of the 30's like a book, and correctly guess that they would not risk a war with him. Chautemps, Sarraut, and other forgettable names felt they had no mandate or the proper backing from their compromise governments to prepare for another war with Germany. Thanks to the WWI losses and sterile birthrate, the French manpower levels were terribly low in the 1930's, and the French Army itself had ossified since WWI. The French Army changed nothing about its tactics or equipment since 1918 and had only added a few hundred new tanks and planes in the 22 years it had to prepare for WWII.

The French Army had basically returned to its thinking of the 1870 war, where it failed to go on to the offense in Germany and had thus been totally defeated by an aggressive federal army. Gamelin had no desire or plans to penetrate the German frontier. Instead, France's major military effort in the 1930's had been to construct the Maginot line defenses, which merely tied down the French Army in the comforts of underground forts in which they were surrounded. Gamelin had planned for WWII feeling that the tactics would pick right up from WWI static warfare.

France was a shell of what it was in 1940 when Hitler attacked it. France had a tremendous army in 1914 that was completely willing to fight and very well prepared(except for the lack of Heavy Artillery or machine guns.) In 1940, France waited to be attacked and handed the all-important initiative over to Hitler............ Gamelin did exactly what Manstein wanted him to do, and rushed half of the French Army into Belgium as the Germans attacked there with light forces(and the French were conveniently opposed by few air-attacks as they rushed northwards to be eventually cut off by the Panzer-thrust at Sedan. Gamelin made the fatal error of leaving no French strategic reserve to 'plug the hole' at Sedan. He lined all of his armies up side by side on the frontier with absolutely no backup to cut off a German breakthrough.

Anyway, as leaders like Gamelin were replaced by DeGaulle, Chamberlain by Churchill, Hitler found that he had stronger competition from his foreign adversaries. Hitler had not planned strategically for his next move after the Battle of France. Hitler was in uncharted strategic territory for Germany. It was easy enough to overrun France but crossing into England was another consideration entirely for which no real plans had been made. The German Navy was entirely insufficient.

Like Napoleon, it seemed the best option for Hitler was to begin to try and pick off British colonies.

Still though, once Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin ran into some luck and stalled the German Armies, the superior resources of the Allies could come into play, to win a war of attrition. After 1942, the Allies really began to just use the enormous economic advantages that they already possessed. Hitler had even said in 1938 or so that he "had to win the war by 1943 because by that time(as the Soviet Union was rearming after the purges,) that the economic power of the combined Allies would be so against him that any of his efforts to expand would be impossible.

By the time of the Battle of Kursk, even 17 German Panzer divisions had no hope of defeating the Red Army or subduing the Soviet Union. The Red Army was just too strong by 1943 numerically and was even able to create a mass strategic reserve at Kursk that did nothing but just feed fresh units in piecemeal where they were needed, in addition to the rest of the Soviet Army. For all of their skill, the Germans could not match these numbers.