There a storm a-brewing about a coming mini-series on Hitler’s early life, up to his taking the reins in Germany in 1936.
The problem? Some folks think that by portraying the human roots of Hitler and his Nazi machine, we somehow humanize and even engender sympathy for him.
“Why the need or the desire to make this monster human?” asked Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “The judgment of history is that he was evil, that he was responsible for millions of deaths. Why trivialize that judgment of history by focusing on his childhood and adolescence? Have we run out of subjects to focus on?”
The problem is, no matter how hard we try to run from it, Hitler was human. As far as I know, he possessed no horns nor cloven hooves. He was not an alien sent by invaders to destroy mankind. He was an “evil monster,” certainly, but he was still born of man and woman, he still had a youth, he still pulled on his uniform one leg at a time.
To simply chalk up Hitler as just a monster, to look only at the results of what he said and did during the late 30s and early 40s, is to actually make him a greater danger.
After all, if he’s so aberrant, so much of a wild sport, a “monster,” then there’s nothing to learn from him. There’s no precedent he sets that we can be wary of. There’s no lesson from history to learn, since, after all, primal forces of evil aren’t something that can be predicted or dealt with. They simply are.
By ignoring the question of who Hitler was, and how that influenced what he became, we make it all the more easy for other Hitlers to come along. We make it easier to ignore the seeds of evil within our own souls.
And that would be the real trivialization of the judgment of history.
Hear, hear…