Did Hitler have asperger's/autism or not?

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Did or didn't he?

If it isn't true I am fed up with Hitler being associated with aspergers.

I suspect he was just eccentric. He was a fantastic public speaker which isn't an aspie like trait.

He only personally killed at MOST 3 people in his entire life, himself included.

Did all those minions who did the dirty work have AS too?

What about all those nice citizens who turned in neighbors who were "strange"?

I remember an interview with an old German woman who, as a teenager, did single out a reclusive woman and report her. Yes, the woman got hauled off. The woman who was taken away struck me, per the description, as someone who might have had AS.

So they ask this old woman, the one who was a nice little citizen and reported the neighbor, why.

She had a look on her face I see in the USA now.

When America has piles of bodies, they'll say (when it's safe) that AS had something to do with it.

Last edited by SickInDaHead on 31 Oct 2012, 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

I recently was reading the Kershaw biography of Hitler and it kept going on about how he gave one-sided lectures to his captive audiences in the Wolf's Lair or at Berghof and talk about his "obsessions" at length and at one point it mentioned that at a certain dinner he told everyone his theory about how smoking causes cancer... it may be my peculiar sense of humour but I have to admit to laughing out loud at some of these descriptions.

Last edited by xenon13 on 31 Oct 2012, 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

This topic is getting so tired now.

No, he was not.

He had some traits of it but that doesn't mean he had it. I'd say it's more likely he was a psychopath. Even if he did have it, that certainly doesn't mean all aspies are like Hitler.

Too much Charisma, too much liking communicating with people, too good in terms of speaking., liked change, didn't take things literally, had good eye contact, aware of unwritten rules, good facial expressions, I don't believe he had any sensitivities , tics, stims or clumsiness. While definitely having "issues", I can't see it. Not one bit. He was very single-minded and obsessive, but that does not make Asperger's. He was rumored to be bipolar and on some sort of primitive medication for it.

I quite agree. It really doesn't matter what Hitler may have had, what matters is that society pushed in the direction that it did, was willing to go to war with non-conforming people and this is unfortunately a charateristic that is not unique to Depression-era Germany. Hitler had a gift for political oratory that tapped into people's prejudices and he became all things to all people who wanted to believe. His life amounted to very little until he became swept up in all of that. I think that the real problem can be seen when you go into police brutality threads and people cheer the police brutality and call for more of it... it's like the Agent 728 in Montreal who was caught denouncing artists and guitar playing people, you'd think she'd really love to have them hauled away to a concentration camp.

Well, he did seem to go on and on with his favourite subject: world domination
And didn't really seem to have much empathy with Jews, blacks, gays, gypsies, etc etc.
however, just like with any other dead person, it would be virtually impossible ever to be sure either way.
He was an injured ww1 soldier who seemed to enjoy parties and being the centre of attention... So I suspect NOT aspie, probably sociopath (perhaps exacerbated by social conditions in Germany post ww1 combined with personal trauma experience including being gassed)

I think people should understand that Hitler's atrocities had a certain logic to it, the most monstrous ones in particular. Take for example, the Holocaust. Germany is effectively land-locked, the martime powers can easily blockade it. Germany was not self-sufficient in food. During World War I, the blockade caused starvation in Germany and the blockade was maintained for many months after the Armistice during which thousands of people died. Hitler knew that this blockade would be brought back in the event of a world war. So, he decided that if people are going to starve, it won't be the Germans, it will be the conquered people, in particular the Slavs and the Jews. So from that came the Hunger Plan, and when it was decided that it was not useful to have Jewish slaves in the ghetto subsisting on rations that made it impossible to work effectively, that it would save food to simply kill most of them so that those still working could work effectively. After the Reinhard Operation was mostly done the German food ration was increased... also it served to fulfil Hitler's 1939
"prophesy"...

Let's take another case, the starvation in the USSR in 1932-33. The whole thing started with the scare of 1928 when the peasants, the kulaks in particular, nearly caused a famine in the cities by withholding food in a pressure tactic. This led Stalin to collectivise the countryside, with the kulaks in particular targeted, in 1929-30. The kulaks and other peasants responded, many of them did, by destroying crops, livestock, whatever they could, instead of letting the Soviets get their hands on it. The decision was made that the USSR industrialisation plan would not be sabotaged by these kulaks, that if production decreased because of kulak sabotage, that those who will pay the price will be the kulaks. If that means starvation, then well, they shouldn't have committed sabotage. It's a ruthless calculation but Stalin could argue to himself that the dead peasants killed themselves...

So bearing all this in mind, we should understand that such things could happen here... under the right conditions. I can see the Personal Responsibility Brigade condemn millions to death with similar logic...

(Thread moved from Autism discussion to Random)

Not this topic again! Every few months someone starts a new thread on this!

Why is it that two historic figures, neither of whom displayed a single aspie trait in their lives, are constantly being cited as being possible aspies?

These two are Lincoln and Hitler.

Hitler was a likely sociopath, with alot of narcicism in the mix.
But aside from a few obsessions, did not have any aspie traits.

Lincoln had no aspie traits either.

To think either was an aspie is idiotic.

But atleast claiming Lincoln is understandable.
Wishful thinking-everyone wants to claim Lincoln. That is the obvious motivation for wanting lincoln to be an aspie.
Gays want to claim him as well.

But whats the emotional payoff of claiming Hitler?

Since he didnt manifest any aspie traits what is the emotional payoff of this practice of defying all evidence and casting him as a possible aspie anyway?

Is it self-hating aspie who do that? Or is the hitler theory the product of nt's out to slander us, or what?

And im aware that we aspies have to take the bitter with the sweet.

Someone on wp posted the suggestion that Henrich Himler (head of the SS) was an aspie. And made a good case for that.

So..If we aspies want to claim the Einsteins of the world as our own- then we have to be prepared to also accept the Himmlers of the world as well. I get that, and am down with that.

But Himmler was a very different personality from his boss, and he actually quacked a little like a duck. His boss niether quacked nor looked like much a duck.

Hitler was a hypochondriac on increasingly large, regular doses of speed, who apparently eventually suffered the onset of Parkinson's, which the Nazis tried to hide from the world by controlling what news footage got out, so that people wouldn't see his hand tremor (though one little clip did escape). His family had a history of mental illness. He's also suspected to have had untreated (or poorly treated, perhaps) syphilis. And, yes, he experienced both war and jail time. He was an artist manque who became a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur and was much more likely affected by narcissism and the symptoms and side-effects of his drug use (such as paranoia) and illness than by anything resembling being on the autism spectrum. His rise to power came from those who thought they could use him, not some sort of greatness on his part (except for charisma and public speaking ability, which, btw, an Aspie can actually have, though it's unusual), and then they discovered they couldn't control him. He was a nut job to begin with, and he only got nuttier. Asperger's isn't known to be a disease of rapid degeneration.

This whole notion reminds me of things such as anti-semites trying to find some kind of "hidden Jewishness" in anyone they don't like. I don't think we should let this get us down.

How about we give it a rest? I know new people often ask questions that have been asked before, and I usually don't mind approaching some of that stuff anew. If I get tired of it, I simply skip the thread. But this sort of thing with Hitler and others is different. Even if we like someone, such as Einstein, the guy is dead. We can only go so far to rate our community (or encourage others to rate it) based on dead people. It was hard enough for me to get diagnosed as a living but middle-aged person. It's not like we can ask people who knew Hitler as a child whether or not he exhibited autistic traits by age three-an-a-half. There's just not enough info to go on.

Besides, the point outofplace makes is well taken. If you've met one Aspie, you've met one, as we keep saying. As individuals, we each become as we are as a result of many things. Ultimately, whether or not Hitler had Asperger's is irrelevant.

Edit: Also well argued, naturalplastic. You posted at the same time I did.

Here ya go - knock yerself out...
"Understanding Madmen: A DSM-IV Assessment of Adolf Hitler"
(a 16-page pdf file: clicking the link should automatically open the file with your local pdf reader if one is installed, or right-click|save link as to save a copy of the file)

http://www.uccs.edu/~faculty/fcoolidg/H ... nproof.pdf

I think the name of Hitler's political party says it all. National-"Socialist" sound very similar to "sociopath".

Nazi="National Socialist-path party"

He suffered of PTSD. I saw a documentary with him and they talked about this.

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