gaijin
Banned
Then we're not talking about Hitler but someone completely different. Within the realm of Hitler's cosmology of racial struggle, his strategic decisions actually follow a pretty solid logic. People suggesting that Hitler "act more rational" struggle to understand what Hitler readily accepted as a fact of reality: that Germany had to wage a genocidal war to totally remake the European (and, by extension, world) order in it's favor and that this was literally a matter of life-and-death to the German people. Once one accepts that basic leap of logic, everything else about his decision making becomes entirely comprehensible. His decision to wage such a genocidal war came at the point where Germany had the greatest chance of winning it.
This. The man was working from a completely demented and perverse premise, but once you accept that premise his actions are pretty rational. Only in the latter part of the war when Parkinson's, drugs, and stress caused him to become increasingly more inflexible.
Maybe strange to use the word empathy when talking about somebody like Hitler, but if one tries to understand his thinking it is pretty obvious he was being rational. Acting rational in efforts to achieve a perverted goal does not equal crazy.
It is very easy, but also very stupid to dismiss other people as crazy. This goes far beyond people like Hitler. Even in the present day we have people who work from a different premise than we do (IS, Putin, the Chinese government). Very easy to dismiss them as "evil" or "crazy" or simply ridicule them, but that would be a mistake. The wise course is to try to understand their thinking so as to better predict their actions. Important to keep in mind is that empathy does not equal approval. In the Chat section I have been repeatedly been accused of being a "Putin apologist" simply for pointing out that the Russians look at the current situation from a different perspective then say the average European or American.
Know thy enemy.