Talking About History: No, Hitler Was Not "Good" in Any Way

Could Hitler have been considered "good" in any way? Some argue he wasn't really evil as he really believed and followed his beliefs and thought he was right in his actions.

No. Not in the slightest. There is no redeeming factor in Adolf Hitler’s life as a dictator and Commander in Chief of the Greater German Reich’s armed forces that can be even considered to be “good.”

It’s amazing (and, frankly, appalling) that three-quarters of a century after the final campaigns to liberate Europe from Nazi domination, there still exist many people all around the world - including citizens of the Allied nations that waged war against the Third Reich - that think Hitler was a well-intentioned man who loved Germany and merely wanted to save Western Civilization from the scourge of Communism.

It’s a matter of historical record that Adolf Hitler adored his mother Klara, was good to dogs, was kind to German children (except those who were Jewish or were related to his political opponents), was polite to women, especially those who were part of his massive entourage, and was ahead of his time in promoting environmental protection and the anti-smoking movement. (Many people in the United States probably don’t know this, but German medical researchers in Nazi Germany were the first to publish studies that linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. These findings were known by American medical doctors, but powerful interests in the U.S. tobacco industry, aided and abetted by Senators and representatives from North Carolina and other tobacco-growing states, managed to keep data from German cancer studies suppressed for a quarter-century.)

However, no matter how personable and “nice” Hitler may have been to his intimate circle, he was still an adherent of several toxic and evil philosophies, which included:

• A belief that a Master Race - the Aryans - was superior to every other ethnic or religious group on Earth, particularly in Europe
• A belief that Nordic or Germanic peoples - or volk - were the true Aryans and that Germany, the Heimat and heart of the Reich, was destined to rule a united Europe
• A belief that Jews, Slavs, Romani (or Gypsies), and other “lesser” races, including blacks, were subhuman and were only fit to be slaves to the Aryan race or, in the case of the Jews, exterminated
• A belief that Germany was entitled to invade and conquer the lands of Eastern Europe, including Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, to create what he called Lebensraum for the German people
• A belief that Jews, Socialists, and Bolsheviks had betrayed Imperial (Wilhelmine) Germany in 1918 and undermined her efforts against the Allies in 1918, the so-called “stab-in-the-back” theory
• Like his fellow Fascist dictator in Italy, Benito Mussolini, Hitler thought that war was not something to be feared or avoided; instead, it was necessary for the continued existence of the Reich and something to be glorified, even desired

None of these beliefs are “good” or “admirable,” and it doesn’t matter if they coincided with similar beliefs held by other imperialists in Europe or Theodore Roosevelt’s martial views, which the former Rough Rider and President of the U.S. adhered to pretty much until the loss of his son Quentin during World War I.

You have to be unbelievably racist and fascistic in your world view to even try to find a redeeming quality into one of the architects and prime movers of World War II. For although other nations, primarily Japan, Italy, and Stalin’s Soviet Union, also share a lion’s share of responsibility for starting the series of conflicts that we know as the Second World War, it was Hitler who fed into German resentment over the overly harsh Versailles Treaty of 1919, deep antisemitism, fear of Bolshevism, and a fierce desire for revenge against the Allies and deliberately set Germany into a global war that caused between 50 and 60 million deaths - mostly civilian - and forever changed world history.

So, no, sweet summer child. The man who oversaw the conquest of Europe and the Holocaust (an inhuman exercise in mass murder that gave us the word genocide) was not a “good” person.