How Hitler Won

There are so many morbidly fascinating things about Adolf Hitler that the ultimate reality of his designs has been overlooked by the West. Specifically, if we assess what Hitler intended to "accomplish", we will realize that, to a considerable extent, he succeeded. What's more, he succeeded only after his own death and only with the help of the Allied powers.

There is a challenge I've always had in studying Hitler, aside from reconciling with the fact that he was real, and that he was popular, and that he presided over, but did not wholly invent, a situation in which the most "civilized" of nations took it upon itself to pry children from their mothers in the middle of the night.

The hardest thing to understand about Hitler, for me, is what he wanted. What Hitler wanted, above all else, was a Europe that conformed to his own vision, obssessive compulsive, entirely amoral, pseudo-scientific, and under girded by a scale of violence that no one had previously imagined as even being imaginable.

We know Hitler hated the Jews, the gays, the gypsies, the communists, the liberals. Hitler hated everybody, including himself, pathetic example of Aryan stock as he was. Hitler was like Mama Cass killing 50 million people for the sake of creating a race of people who look like Gisele Bunchen. No small amount of self-loathing at work there.

What Hitler hated more than anything, however, was ambiguity, cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, and truth for truth's sake. Which explains why he hated the United States. Which explains why he just may be the stupidest person in the history of the Earth, as one would have to be to declare war on the United States.

Most of us, even those of us who are relatively well-informed, either do not know or do not appreciate that the United States, even as Western Europe was overrun and Britain was on its knees, weeks from capitulation, would never have declared war on Nazi Germany. Without America to fight, Hitler would have won. But his hatred of what the United States was in his eyes dictated that he would declare war on it.

These are the questions I return to: how could someone so great (in a way that makes no moral judgement, but simply reflects one's impact on history) could be so incredibly stupid? No leader had been able to conquer all of Europe as had Hitler. And there has never been born a man so stupid as to simultaneously invade Russia and declare war on the United States, as did Hitler.

The biggest nightmare for any would-be European conqueror, especially a German, is a two front war. The most nightmarish manifestation of a two front war would be one involving the literally endless waves of tanks, ships, and guns produced by a sufficiently aroused United States, totally impervious to conventional attack, and the endless waves of bitter cold and bitter humanity that is Russia. Hitler took on both at once when he could have easily co-existed with both, at least for a time.

So what did he want? What he wanted was homogeneity. Hitler looked at waves of humanity in the same detached sense as an obsessive compulsive sort might look at a dirty dish or a dust bunny. They will not sleep while the disorder lingers. Hitler wanted a German Germany, and his obsession ran so deep that it literally meant that not a single human being in the Reich, as populous as America at its height, could be allowed to live there if he or she was insufficiently German.

In other words, he wanted the impossible. But, in 1941, he had already done the impossible, conquering the whole of Europe without stirring to action the giants of East or West. The holocaust was the clearest manifestation of Hitler's design. The fact that it continued apace until laterally the last day of the war speaks all the volume necessary as to its importance to the Nazis.

The Nazis wanted a homogenized and categorized Europe. Subservient Gauls to the west. Germans in the center. Slavs (slaves) in the east. Jews dead. This is a nightmare vision, of course, but we should take pause if we believe that it is a project that we would never support. Because, in the end, we did.

To Hitler, and to many other thinkers who would not agree with Hitler on anything else, the cause of European wars from time immemorial was the mixing of antagonistic populations. Experiments with multi-ethnic empires had led to a cosmopolitan and frontier-less Europe that genuinely disgusted many people, not least of all the Nazis.

What happened after World War II? Did populations return to their pre-war homes so that Europe could start over? No. The killing slowed to a trickle, but the ethnic cleansing actually gathered steam.

Millions of Germans who had lived to the East and South of Germany for centuries were forced from their homes. Knock on the door. Get all your shit and leave. Go to Germany. Lived here 200 years? Own this house? Don't know anyone in Germany? Don't have transportation? Child sick? Tough shit. Leave. That happened millions of times in newly-liberated countries.

Put simply, the way Europe dealt with World War II was to finish Hitler's project for him. The European states in 1950 were more ethnically homogeneous that ever before in history. Hitler was right about one thing; Europeans don't want to live with Europeans. Germans want to live with Germans.

And the Jews? Let's just say that the creation of Israel had less to do with remorse for the crime of the millennium that it had to do with total contempt for the Arabs and the attraction of a way to get rid of the Jews once and for all without having to kill them all.

This is the sad truth about Hitler's aim in World War II and the degree to which people agreed with him, even if they were on his list of undesirables.

A similar dynamic took place after the Gulf War in 1991. There was another bout of ethnic cleansing carried out in Kuwait, with the support of the United States, that we are just as well-practiced at ignoring. After restoring "freedom" to Kuwait or, more accurately, to the venal and medieval al-Sabah family, every Palestinian living in Kuwait was expelled. All of them.

Their crime? Being Palestinian. Yasser Arafat, who represented Palestinians with about the same amount of legitimacy as George W. Bush represents San Francisco, had sided with Saddam Hussein when he annexed Kuwait. So, when the al-Sabahs regained power they ethnically cleansed their country. And we let them.

Such details are far easier to ignore than to acknowledge as parts of the American story. They bear out a simple truth, though. People, more often that not, do not want to live with people who are different from them, even if those difference are wholly imperceptible to outsiders. We should be grateful to live in one of the few countries that, despite all our problems, dares to try to be open to all.