Adolf Hitler the racist, murderer of innocent men, women & children and, perhaps the most despised criminal

Dr. Nalin Jayasuriya

I think the time is opportune to remind our communities of who Adolf Hitler was. This re-introduction becomes important at a time when merits and demerits of emulating Hitler are being discussed among a few minds in Sri Lanka. A very few even  speak of the benefits of emulating Hitler in order to develop an ancient Buddhist civilisation once known as the ‘pearl of the Indian ocean. I doubt this being the thinking of educated, refined and educationally qualified majority of our beautiful Island. Let us peruse a very few of the many facts of Adolf Hitler’s rulership of Germany in those dark, evil days.

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. As a child he was resentful and discontented. He was a vegetarian and did not smoke or drink. He was not known as a womanise although he once had a short affair with his niece.

During World War I Hitler served as a Gefreiter (lance corporal) in the Bavarian army and in the world-war II he served as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) through his position as Fuhrer (leader) of Nazi Germany.

Hitler promoted the idea of Ubermensch, a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race. This is where his racism started followed by a growing hatred of Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Communists. Hitler’s first written utterance on political questions dating from this period emphasized that what he called “The anti-semitism of reason” must lead ‘to the systematic combating and elimination of Jewish privileges. Its ultimate goal must implacably be the total removal of the Jews’.

In February 1932, Hitler officially acquired German citizenship and decided to run for the Presidency. Once in the saddle, Hitler moved with great speed to outmaneuver his rivals, virtually ousting the conservatives from any real participation in government by July 1933, abolishing the free trade unions, eliminating the communists, social democrats and Jews from any role in political life. If any person spoke against Hitler’s rule, irrespective of whether it was against Hitler himself or any of his stooges, he swept them into concentration camps without court hearing or trial. He stuffed Law Courts with his Nazi party members who blindly gave verdicts that pleased Hitler.

With support from the nationalists, Hitler gained a majority at the last “Democratic” elections held in Germany on 5th March 1933 and, with cynical skill he used the whole gamut of persuasion, propaganda, terror and intimidation to secure his hold on power. The seductive notions of “National Awakening” and a “Legal Revolution” helped paralyse potential opposition and disguise the reality of autocratic power behind a façade of traditional institutions.

“Hitler told Himmler that it was not good enough for the Jews to simply die; they must die in agony. What was the best way to prolong the agony? Himmler turned to his advisors, who concluded that a slow, agonizing death could be brought about by placing Jewish prisoners in Description: /var/folders/j9/b6drvl4d0pxc1b2p6x2bch0w0000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/hitler1.jpgfreight cars in which the floors were coated with quicklime which, produced excruciating burns. The advisers estimated that it would take four days for the prisoners to die and, for that whole time, the freight cars could be left standing on some forgotten siding. Finally, it was decided that the freight cars should be used in addition to the extermination camps.”   – The life and death of Adolf Hitler by Robert Payne.

By genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labour, starvation, exposure, medical experiments, terror bombing and in concentration death camps, the Nazis under the leadership of Hitler, murdered 15,000,000 to 32,000,000 people who included the handicapped, women, children, the aged, the sick, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians and many others. Among them 1,000,000 were children under 18 years of age. Besides, none of these figures include civilian and military combat or war deaths.

When we thing of killing directed by Hitler, genocide immediately comes to mind, particularly that of 6,000,000 Jews. The Nazis also murdered for reasons other than race or religion. For one, the Nazis slew those who opposed or hindered them, whether actually or potentially. This was why Hitler assassinated hundreds of top Nazi SA’s (Sturmabteilung) in June and July 1934, who under Ernst Rohm were becoming a strong competitor to the SS (Schutzstaffel); or executed perhaps 5,000 Germans after the 1944 plot on his life and attempted coup d’etat. Indeed, it is why critics, pacifists, conscientious objectors, campus rebels, dissidents and others throughout the 12-year history of the regime in Germany were executed, disappeared or, slowly died in concentration camps.

Joseph Goebbels the Head of Nazi media and propaganda who was an expert in publishing false propaganda, provided tinkered information that Hitler wanted the Germans to believe. He and his wife Magda poisoned their children and then committed suicide for fearing that the very German people who he had been deceiving would kill him and his family in the most ignominious way. Hitler believed that if he controls the Media he can bring the nation under his whim and fancy be feeding false propaganda. What he did not know is that he cannot fool all the people all the time.

On April 28, Mussolini had been shot by a firing squad by the people of his country and then hung by his feet in a public square in Milan, Italy. Fearing the same fate, Hitler tested cyanide pills on his Alsatian dog Blondi.

On 30 April, 1945 Hitler committed suicide. His body was carried into the garden of the Reich Chancellery by aides, covered with petrol and burned along with that of Eva Braun. This final Macabre act of self-destruction appropriately symbolized the career of a political leader whose main legacy to Europe was the ruin of its civilisation and the senseless sacrifice of human life for the sake of power and his own commitment to the bestial nonsense of National Socialist race mythology. With his death, nothing was left of the “Greater Germanic Reich,” of the tyrannical power structure and ideological system which had devastated Europe during the twelve years of his totalitarian rule.

(The writer, Dr. Nalin Jayasuriya is a Business & Management Consultant.)