Ultimate Apotheosis of Intolerance

Fifty years ago today, in a sprawling bunker beneath Berlin’s smoking streets, Adolf Hitler put a pistol into his mouth and ended a life unmatched for the horror and destruction it had let loose upon the world.

Like all megalomaniacs Hitler had believed that the polity he created would endure for centuries. In fact, it lasted only a dozen years. But in that brief span Germany and its helpmates spread carnage and ruin across most of Europe, from the English Channel to the Urals. Scores of millions of soldiers and civilians died in the war Hitler planned and provoked. Many fell in battle. Millions more--Jews especially, but also Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and any seen as political enemies--died in bureaucratically directed acts of mass murder.

There was a uniqueness to Hitler, in his will to power, in his career and in the reasons for his mass appeal in Germany, that continues to inspire a seemingly endless flood of scholarly studies and speculative monographs. And of course it is precisely because Hitler embodied the forces of fantasy-driven vengefulness that here and there, drawn from among society’s dysfunctional dregs, handfuls who envy his malignant power continue to honor his memory.

To a large degree, of course, Hitlerism existed long before Hitler, in the warped hatreds and demented schemes of the intolerant and pathologically self-absorbed. To a much lesser but still troubling degree, aspects of Hitlerism continue to flourish. Sadly, we don’t have to look very far in our own country to discern them.