DBWI: CH: Hitler's a bad guy

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TheKinkster

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Yep it was Manstein, the memory fades in my old age :).

Personally, I think you're right about the pragmatism--I think Manstein knew what Hitler's reaction would be to the suggestion of using nuclear weapons against defenseless civilians, and saw it as an opportunity to get rid of some members of the General Staff he'd rather have out of the way.
 
Perhaps Hitler goes the other way, and turns Communist in the aftermath of the Great War? A Communist Germany under someone as competent as Hitler is...frightening. He'd be rivals with Stalin, to be sure, but he'd also be much less concerned about an attack from Stalin due to a shared ideology, effectively freeing up the entire strength of Germany to throw against Western Europe. The lack of an opponent along their western border will allow the Soviets to concentrate more on East Asia, potentially invading all China and overthrowing the Nationalists there, instead of limiting himself to just Manchuria like in the OTL Soviet-Japanese War.

Now, there's a scary thought; totalitarian Communism victorious across all Eurasia..:eek:
 

WeisSaul

Banned
He definitely is very charismatic and often used his Nazi Party speeches to whip up passion for his cause. I'd say most likely an "evil Hitler" would have started by picking a fight with old enemy France, which conceivably would have led to another land war. In this case he would be savvy enough to convince other powers such as the UK, US, and the Soviet Union (OOC: does it exist here?) to stay out of the fray.

There are some historians who claim he had a master plan to exterminate Jews, Roma, and Slavs to colonize eastern Europe with the "master race", but he's not deranged. Besides, in OTL he relied heavily on Jews to advance Germany's technology and military capabilities that ASB doesn't begin to describe these suggestions.

Hitler ending up as anti-semite wouldn't have hurt him that badly would it? I mean it's not like he was the only one in Europe. It also isn't like he would have killed all the Jews. Anti-Semitism is one thing, but Genocide on an industrial scale!? That's just preposterous.
 
We know Hitler shared many of the prejudices of his youth growing up around Linz. His experiences in Vienna led him to encounter many Jews. Remember the quote from Our Struggle when he first encountered a Hassid:

I looked at him and thought, "Is this a Jew?" Then another thought came to me: "Is this a German?" However, a third, cleansing thought came, "It matters not what his race is; he is a man."

Many historians such as J.F.C. Fuller have traced this thought to the evening after Hitler, having sold a few landscapes, treated himself to the Vienna Opera. He thought he was going to see Sigfried, but due to the sudden illness of the conductor and tenor to the influenza, a performance of Die Zaubenflotte was substituted. This became Hitler's favorite opera in later life; he is recorded as seeing it over fifty times and Beethoven's Fidelio thirty times.
 

CalBear

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Next person who tries something like this will be banned so damned fast that they will catch pneumonia from the draft.
 
Interesting suggestion. Hitler does note in Our Struggle that he in retrospect admits that his art was rather dull before he begun to allow his landscape paintings to be influenced by Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner. Let's assume that Hitler never delves into experimentation before his final make-it-or-break-it application and thus is rejected, what next?

Remember, just that he doesn't get into the Vienna art school he hoped for does not in and of itself mean that he will go down the road of becoming a political villain... What happens next, for Herr Hitler?
OOC: I've probably said this before but for some reason, I see hitler being more receptive to Pittura Metafisica-it's easier for me to see him as working along the lines of De Chirico. Also, hopefully nobody minds a bit of butterfly killing:
IC: I think that his phase of artistic experimentation is really more important than getting into art school because with it he's going to be drawn to the major artistic circles of pre-war Germany and I think having a group of like-minded people he had some kind of common goal with and some of whom inoculated him against some of the worst excesses of war-glorification. In fact, didn't he convince the Soldier's mutiny to fund the publication of his friend Otto Dix's print cycle Der Krieg(linky here, probably not for weak stomachs
 
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