In his living room, studded with signed photographs of the rich and famous, Henk Visser, the arms collector and businessman, once told me about his wartime experience. Barely eighteen years old, he had joined the Dutch resistance, was captured by the Germans and sentenced to death. While he was awaiting his execution, his mother wrote a letter to Hitler, begging him not to have her son executed. Hitler granted the request and Henk Visser survived.
This simple anecdote serves to illustrate that Hitler was not the crazed, bloodthirsty monster he is made out to be in the prevailing narrative on the 1930s and 1940s. Such anecdotes compel us to reconsider the concepts and facts that constitute our frame of reference and that consequently determine and shape the way we think, talk and act. The most important events and historical figures are multifaceted, but for clarity’s sake have been narrowed down to one-dimensional proportions.
Whereas history has many protagonists who, to say the least, are controversial, none of them has been vilified to the extent to which Hitler has virtually become the devil incarnate. This may be due in large party because as the leader of Germany, Hitler fought the British Empire and the US. In other words, he was the enemy of the Anglosphere, which would explain the negative image imposed on the world during and especially after the war. More than one century earlier, Napoleon was another sworn enemy of the Anglosphere and one could say that before Hitler appeared on the stage, he was the favorite bad guy. Not in France though. Nor did the English outlaw any references to Napoleon after they invaded Paris after the Battle of Waterloo.
Hitler shares with Napoleon the distinction of being a fascinating subject for biographers, but most are unable to resist the pressures to paint a fundamentally negative portrait. Among biographies of Napoleon on the other hand, there is an impressive number of positive and benevolent studies, outnumbering the negative ones, and this is certainly the case for France.
In the American Empire, Hitler is the embodiment of evil. One might even say he is the negative parallel to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Hitler would then be the son of the devil, while the satanic equivalent of the Holy Ghost would then be the ideology of National Socialism. The Holy Bible of that evil religion consists of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (the “Old Testament”) and Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (the “New Testament”). As a matter of fact, given the frequency with which since 1945 “New Hitlers” have been identified by American and other Western politicians, “experts” and journalists, proves that there is indeed a religious aspect to the way Hitler is being considered. The determination with which Russia is currently pursuing its goal to “denazify” the Ukraine is an indication that the American way of looking at the issue is shared in Moscow........
