Re: Hitler: The Unknown Soldier 1914-1918

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Re: Hitler: The Unknown Soldier 1914-1918

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HITLER - THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER 1914 - 1918 (A DOCUMENTARY) - THE FASCIFIST



I will comment first on two major weaknesses of this documentary.
It completely fails to acknowledge the earlier and more generic case of Mussolini, his March on Rome (1921), the common experience of veterans of the awful trenches of the battle front.
Mussolini was the first to emerge as a prototype of seasoned, hardened vets, applying the skills learned at the front, in the service of national (and cultural) revolutions, when they got back home.
Encountering the economic catastrophe that accompanied the war.
Indeed, Hitler only saw himself as "the drummer" (corporal) of a national revolution.
It was the stunning success of "Il Duce", and the modernist Roman empire he created, that inspired Hitler and the other German national socialists.

Second, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, no doubt had a powerful emotional influence on Hitler, as with all his soldier comrades.
His subsequent political development merely amplified the morphic resonance of his speeches to those millions of bitter Germans.
He spoke to their hearts.
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Re: Hitler: The Unknown Soldier 1914-1918

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And here is theguardian's hatchet job:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/a ... olf-hitler
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Re: Hitler: The Unknown Soldier 1914-1918

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We know that figures like Hitler or Mussolini are lifetime actors, working from a script, financed and controlled by others.

But that alone will never adequately describe the special part that their common "war" experience plays in the evolution (and sponsorship) of that designated historical role as national saviors and messiahs.

(I can't help but wonder what David Irving would have to say about this?)



QUOTING
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In Hitler's First War, award-winning author Thomas Weber delivers a master work of history--a major revision of our understanding of Hitler's life. Weber paints a group portrait of the List Regiment, Hitler's unit during World War I, to rewrite the story of his military service. Drawing on deep and imaginative research, Weber refutes the story crafted by Hitler himself, and so challenges the historical argument that the war led naturally to Nazism. Contrary to myth, the regiment consisted largely of conscripts, not enthusiastic volunteers. Hitler served with scores of Jews, including noted artist Albert Weisberger, who proved more heroic, and popular, than the future Fuhrer. Indeed, Weber finds that the men shunned Private Hitler as a "rear area pig," and that Hitler himself was still unsure of his political views when the war ended in 1918. Through the stories of such comrades as a soldier-turned-concentration camp commandant, veterans who fell victim to the Holocaust, an officer who became Hitler's personal adjutant in the 1930s but then cooperated with British intelligence, and the veterans who simply went back to their Bavarian farms and never joined the Nazi ranks, Weber demonstrates how and why Hitler aggressively policed the myth of his wartime experience.

Underlying all Hitler studies is a seemingly unanswerable question: Was he simply a product of his times, or an anomaly beyond all calculation? Weber's groundbreaking work sheds light on this puzzle and offers a profound challenge to the idea that World War I served as the perfect crucible for Hitler's consequent rise.

=============================
UNQUOTE

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-First-War ... 0199226385
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Hitler: (How to falsify and fabricate "history".)

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Customer Review
Tim Smith
1.0 out of 5 stars bad history
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2011
This is a bad book on the important topic of hitler and the nazis. There have been people in recent years who have cashed in on the nazis by making far-out claims about them. Claims that don't even make any sense. The more crazy it is, the more media attention the book gets and the higher the books sales are. Contrary to what people say about this book, Weber adds almost nothing to what was known before. I heard the claims about Hitler's war record ten years ago in a BBC documentary called "the making of Adolf Hitler". Five years ago, there was another (better) book by John Frank Williams covering Hitler's war record. Weber can fool some people. But for people who don't treat footnotes as facts, the scam here is quickly exposed.

Here is one example as a starter: page 221. In the middle of discussing Hitler's hospital stay at the end of the war, Weber starts talking crazy. He tells the reader that Hitler was diagnosed in the hospital as a psychopath and given experimental hypno-treatment. The magic hypno-treatment gave Hitler a confident personality. The doctors forgot to undo the treatment when they released Hitler. Weber considers this nonsense to be a reasonable explanation of Hitler's change after the war. This kind of thing usually shows up in books on UFOs rather than books written by Oxford Professors. The sources weber gives in the notes are junk books on Hitler. To even buy into this nonsense it's clear that Weber doesn't understand anything about hypnosis.

Weber in the book does a real good job in tracking down nearly every story about Hitler from fellow soldiers in the war. But he doesn't do anything useful with the stories. The problem with the stories is that they tend to tell one of two stories depending on the politics of the teller. Its not all that different from what happened when John Kerry ran for president with people attacking and defending his military record. The only way to really find the truth is to compare the stories and find things said in common regardless of politics. Weber doesn't do that. He uses what appears to be his intuition to decide that the anti-hitler stories must be true. Future historians will be happy that Weber gathered all that stuff up in one place. But I doubt they will pay much attention to what he wrote.

Weber tries really hard to make the case that Hitler's job as a messenger wasn't dangerous. But he isn't convincing. The front line trenches (or really bunkers in the case of the Germans) were far from the only dangerous place on the battlefield. Even the book shows that without saying it. And the other thing he doesn't quite is that messenger had to go where the message had to go. Weber seems to think a regimental messenger just went back and forth in safety to battalion headquarters. He also doesn't understand that anyone moving around outside was in danger. The Germans didn't stand around in the front trenches getting hit by shells. They usually hid out in concrete bunkers. Being a messenger wasn't as dangerous as going over the top. But it was still dangerous.

Weber also goes after Hitler's medals. He tries to minimize the first iron cross by saying that hitler wasn't acting alone in the situation. But so what? He tries to brush off the second one by saying that it was the result of politics up way high in germany. On that one he is right but he is wrong. He is right in saying that the german government wanted more iron crosses given out to ordinary soldiers. But he is wrong because the officers over hitler still had the choice of who they were going to give the medals to. I find the idea of hitler as the artful backslapper and manipulator of officers impossible to accept. He was a cog in a machine. Weber is right in that he was more likely to get a medal because of his contact with officers. But thats true in all wars. And if he were no good as a messenger, they would have sent him back to the trenches.

This is where I don't get why Weber is so hysterical about this stuff. What does it matter to the history of this monster how a good or bad he was at delivering messages in a war? Whats next? Are we going to study how he brushed his teeth for understanding?

Weber tries to minimize all of Hitler's war wounds too. But again, its not convincing. He says that Hitler getting exposed to gas was no big deal. Weber somehow knows exactly how much gas was used on Hitler and he knows that Hitler didn't even need medical treatment. Rather than being wounded, he wants us to think that Hitler was either crazy or a coward who used the gas attack as cover to flee the fighting. But that makes no sense. If Hitler were the manipulating coward Weber capable of tricking officers into giving him an Iron Cross first class, he would have been more than clever enough to get himself posted away from the frontline entirely and much earlier in the war. And if he is not a manipulating coward, why would he flee a "safe" job as messenger? The book contradicts itself and in the end if we readers accept everything he says, we end up with hitler whose actions can't be explained at all.

Weber's understandings of the first world war and its battles are also poor. He doesn't really know what he is talking about most of the time. He makes the mistake of calling people liars because their memories of dates don't line up with the written history of the regiment. If he had more experience, he would know that this very typical and that the art is not in calling soldiers liars but in trying to line up how the stories they tell might have happened. He doesn't understand what the phrase fog of war means.

The truth about hitler's career as a soldier is that its very boring. He was an ordinary soldier who was good at one minor thing (running back and forth). He was rewarded as a solider for being a good cog in a bigger machine. He did what he was told and in most armies full of drafted men of any nation, many men couldn't even do that little. Was Hitler a war hero? No. Did hitler and the nazis brag up what he did the war? Yes. Thats makes hitler what the traditional history always made of him as a soldier: a nothing. The old insult of calling him the little corporal is more powerful against Hitler's war record than 400 pages written by Weber.

Weber fails in the book to make hitler in the war less than nothing. But that was a crazy thing to try in the first place. Some parts of Weber's books will serve a useful purpose in leading future scholars to hitler's military records. But the bulk of it will go on the shelf with all the other crazy books about the nazis written in the past decade.
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Hollywood take on German WWI experience

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I vividly recall the first time I watched this on the big screen, back around 66-67.
Presents an interesting take on the social class divisions manifest in Germany's war effort, and the necessity of "hero-izing" as many common soldiers as possible, to keep the commoners motivated on the home front.
Even as Germany was starting to lose the "war".

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheBlueMax
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Re: Hitler: The Unknown Soldier 1914-1918

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... world.html

Not exactly the body profile of the classic "Teutonic warrior".

The particular Aryan "physical type" that Hitler and the NSDAP idolized and promoted, was the tall, blond, dashing "man of action" Reinhard Heydrich.

But Heydrich was known to be part Jewish on his father's side of the family.
He was (according to official German version) assassinated by Czech partisans, leading to the total destruction of the village of Lidece.
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