Jeez, a year of Hitler. Did you lose a bet or something?

did u read "the castle in the forest" by norman mailer?

If you're interested in diving into another year-long task without the year-long commitment, then I would suggest the memoir, "The Year of Reading Proust" by Phyllis Rose.

"At least you didn't read 'Ordinary Men' by Christopher Browning. There was a downer. " -- I read that book,very disturbing.

I am reading "On Killing" - by Dave Grossman right now.Next on the list is "Masters of Death" by Richard Rhodes.

I also recommend reading "The Cruel Hunters" by French MacLean.

Very interesting essay, ECB. I hope you devote another year to another (if sunnier) topic.

You've inspired me to take on the daunting task of watching a year of "Hogan's Heroes". If that works out well, I think I'll start studying the Pacific Theater with "McHale's Navy".

What seems left out of the discussion of what caused Hitler, Hitler the monster v. underlying conditions, is the variable of what the West did and did not do.

In terms of allowing him to get power and build a war machine, the whole appeasement debate, Chamberlain v. Churchill, USA sitting it out in the 30s, etc.

England did let them build a bigger air force. And England almost lost. And we the USA really didn't help all that much for 1.5 years. It was a close call.

"Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich (1970)" is actually comparatively light reading. One of my majors was history and I have been fascinated with Nazi Germany since I was a child though, so my immersion into the subject is a bit different than yours. I encourage you to go back to it at some point.

First, I must acknowledge that you are an excellent writer. Whenever I pick up the Stranger I immediately see if you have a piece and generally read it. You appear to do your best when you are doing, for lack of a better word, investigative reporting. Having said that much I must confess that I did not expect writers for the Stranger to be interested in such serious matter as Hitler and his philosophy, his take on what life ought to mean to folk. I had assumed that the writers of the Stranger are perpetual children involved in protracted rebellious behavior (oppositional defiant disorder, ODD) against their parents and God.
I tended to see the whole homosexual enterprise as nothing more than children, who, like the proverbial mice, are shaking their feeble hands at the sun trying to change it. Nature made human beings man and woman and made their sexual organs to fit each other. Homosexuals, as it were, want to defy that reality. Homosexuals want to change reality and recreate themselves in their own defiant self images hence men stick their penises into other men’s anuses (and infect themselves with all sorts of bacteria and virus and die from them, not to talk of the fact that they so destroy their anuses that they practically have to wear diapers to hold the feces that gush out from their over widened anuses) and call such obnoxious behavior sexual and women stick their mouths into other women’s vaginas and call such filthy and germs ridden behavior sexual…their mouths are almost always infected by the fungi and the other micro-organisms that live in the female vagina. (These people do not appreciate how annoying their behavior of making boys sexual objects is to some persons, persons who would like to put them out of their miseries for making their perverse way of life so conspicuous!)
Well, one had dismissed the Stranger and its writers as rebels who are out to remake reality and who would eventually grow up and accept reality as it is and quit their infantile life styles (their powerless efforts at being powerful). But lo and behold you claimed to have read up on Adolf Hitler and judging from the summary of the few books on him you provided apparently have done so. (You did not indicate whether you read Hitler’s own writings, such as Mein Kampf, Table Talks/Secret Talks, edited by Trevor Roper, or not; and said that you have not read Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich…you should read them…may I also add Robert Waite, The Psychopathic God and Alan Bullock’s Study of Tyranny).
My question is this: what motivated you to read Hitler? I understand that no one entirely understands why he does what he does yet it is nice to speculate on the subject. So, why did you read up on Hitler?
I have read just about everything that I could lay my hands on Hitler and have reached some tentative conclusions as to why he had a nihilistic approach to human beings.
I tend to see Hitler as a fore runner of what is going to happen in the future. For example, I expect that when society fully grasps what homosexuals do and its potential threat to civilization to react with disgust. I expect some demagogues to persuade a significant portion of society to round up homosexuals and gas them to death.
Of course, one does not support such a drastic approach to the absurdity that is homosexual defiance of nature; one merely states the fact that some persons find some behaviors so offensive that they are tempted to play God and try to do away with those who exhibit them.
Extreme idealists who appreciate the world’s imperfections, reject them and seek a perfect, ideal version of them are often tempted to do away with those human beings that they find particularly obnoxious.
I believe that Adolf Hitler was an extreme idealist (idealists can be on the right as well as on the left, fascists are idealists on the right and socialists are idealists on the left) who appreciated the imperfections of human beings and wanted to change people to fit his mentally constructed ideals of them, and in pursuit of his version of ideal human beings believed that if only he did away with those he associated with gross imperfection, such as Jews, homosexuals, the mentally and physically challenged, Slavic persons and non-white persons in general that he would be doing biological evolution a great service, that he would be improving the human stock.
It will take too much space and time to recapitulate what I have elsewhere written on why Hitler did what he did. I am just curious to know why you undertook to read him, a serious subject, rather than continue the prolonged teenage rebellion that is the nature of homosexuals and their local mouth piece, the Stranger.

wow, I should have stopped reading #14 when he mentioned the invented mental illness "oppositional defiant disorder", but no... I sloughed through it. that was just surreal.

@16: I stopped reading as soon as I realized what it was, which was sometime around mice shaking their hands at the sun. Maybe I'll finish it sometime, probably not.

Ms. Barnes for all her reading about Hitler misses the two most important studies:

Dr. Fritz Redlich's
Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (Paperback)
http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Diagnosis-D…

And Dr. Ted Dorpat's

HITLER: WOUNDED MONSTER
http://www.amazon.com/Wounded-Monster-Hi…

whereas Redlich approaches Hitler very much more from a medical perspective
than the psychoanalytic one that one would expect from him, Dr. Dorpat, a famous
Seattle psychoanalyst, put the last nail into the coffin of Hitler analysis by demonstrating
the effects of post traumatic stress on the monster. The ultra nationalist Hitler served for five years
straight at the front lines as a runner, until he was gassed, and was back at the front, until
shell shocked by a major close explosion. Hitler sought out war and fighting forever after and found
and kept bloodthirsty vengeful company. Hitler would have been little more than a
ranter on a soap box if when he found his "voice" he had not found sufficient wounded
followers who were quite willing to do what it takes to seize power.

Recently on Poe News there was a link to a story
about Francisco Franco's monorchidism or "one testicle"
and apparently Hitler had only one testicle as well.
The article went on to say they suffered injuries in
battle that led to their conditions but in Norman
Mailer's last novel, The Castle in the Forest, he
portrays Hitler's condition as a birth defect. Could
Erica Barnett please clear this up? I need to know if
these two fascist dictators inherited monorchidism from
birth or if it was a result of war injuries.

Both Francisco Franco and Hitler were monorchid or they had only one
testicle. Franco's condition was apparently due to a battle injury but Norman
Mailer in The Castle in the Forest portrays Hitler monorchidism as a congenitally
inherited condition that made his personality abnormal. Could the stranger clear
this up oh wait maybe this question is best put to Dan Savage.

It is ridiculous that you have done a year on Hitler without doing Arendt. Her Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem are possibly the most significant pieces of political theory produced about Nazism. Though they aren't really about Hitler. They're about the ideas and implications of the era.

Have you read Raul Hilberg? Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust? What sort of research are you doing?

Want more misery? Read "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell.

All this history-buff dick-measuring is a delight.

Where else in America can someone who's spent a year of their life exhaustively comparing serious studies on one subject be so dismissively called on the carpet as a philistine.

Seattle, you intimidate me.

#14, you terrify me. Sorry my behavior is "obnoxious" and "annoying" to you. I'll try and keep it on the d/l, 'less someone starts to "appreciate" it.

#14 sounds like they have some skeletons in their closet...and some butt plugs.
#20 is only slightly less annoying.