Was Hitler Dumb or Smart?

[ICametoLurk]

Hitler was more of In The Right Place, At The Right Moment.

He was in the Right Moment to be introduced to the Bavarian Worker's Party and everything that happened was because in the Right Moment. This was ALSO helped because the German Communists wanted to destory the Republic AT ALL COSTS so they ACTUALLY worked with the Nazis...Gobberals and the Communist leader talked in the same place. "After Hitler, Our Turn!".

As for WW2:

France suffered greatly because of WW1 which actually took place in France. They also had a Jewish Socialist leader who was hated so that probably weakened resistance.

Fun Fact: Germany would've suffered a famine that would've made Holodomor look like a Disney Movie if not for Stalin. I can't find it now but basically the amount of calories that Germans would've gotten was like 800...then Stalin shipped trains and trains of foodstuffs to Germany. See: German–Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement and German–Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement.

This kept his people feed (Speer wanted to introduce Rations like UK and USA did in WW2 but Hitler said that would turn the people against him) and France weakened.

Stalin fought in the previous war with Poland the Soviet Union had and wanted revenge so teamed up to invade Poland from both sides. Funny how only Germany was declared war on by the Allies and not USSR...

Stalin then ignored everything that given to him that Hitler was gonna attack, he was told the exact second it would happen but it tossed it off.

 

[Slightly Apathetic Mario]

>Had a general named "France Holder"
>Didn't have him hold France

also

 

[NevskyProspekt]

Everything He did was for a purpose. To talk about whether He was dumb or smart by mere human standards is to miss the bigger picture. He was possessed by the Aryan racial spirit, a visionary, a mystic, as Carl Gustav Jung correctly assessed. Whenever He made decisions He was not merely a man, but the racial spirit manifested. Some decisions may not be understandable by mortal minds because they were made from a point of view that reached far beyond physical reality.

This reads like something state-issued propaganda books would say about the Kim dynasty in the DPRK, Ceaușescu in Romania or Enver Hoxha in Socialist Albania.

 

[Table Country]

He's dead.

 

[Shitposting boogeyman]

He had to have something going for him to get has far has he did. But he lacked a degree of common sense and bit of more than he could chew.

 

[Wuornos]

Hitler is what happens when you combine high functioning autism with extraordinary public-speaking charisma, a trait he actively cultivated with an autismal hyperfocus. He was absolutely bizarre and strange in his casual interpersonal behavior. The fact he wasn't the most bizarre in the Nazi Germany leadership (that would go to Himmler) obscured it.

Bitch, please, Rudolf Hess was the real nutcase of the NSDAP. He thought he could use mind control to keep a chair balancing on two legs. Then there was his harebrained stunt of parachuting out of a plane over England, in the wee hours, in order to broker a peace deal with the King of England. I bet Hitler went spastic. Lol.

I 'm also fairly certain he's related to Roger Federer.

He wasn't. Hitlers personal chef made lots of money telling people via his book what he ate; his favourite thing being a kind of meat dumpling.

The reason this was spread is apparently the Germans thought it would make him look more like Ghandi, go figure.

No joke.

IIRC, Traudl Junge mentioned in her memoir of eating Spaghetti Bolognese with him while he chatted about the war effort. Yes, the vegetarianism was largely bullshit. He did go through a period, after his mother's death, where meat repulsed him though.

 

[MrJokerRager]

Well I subscribe to this view of Hitler.

 

[History Speaks]

Bitch, please, Rudolf Hess was the real nutcase of the NSDAP. He thought he could use mind control to keep a chair balancing on two legs. Then there was his harebrained stunt of parachuting out of a plane over England, in the wee hours, in order to broker a peace deal with the King of England. I bet Hitler went spastic. Lol.

I 'm also fairly certain he's related to Roger Federer.

Sure. but what kind of a regime puts a fruit cup like Hess in such a high position, and even makes him successor to Hitler and Goering?

Hitler also believed in crazy irrational things like Astrology and the Protocols. And do not get me started with Himmler, who was at least as bad as Hess.

 

[Piss Clam]

Doesn't matter does it? Hitler is just another shit show in Europeon history.

He was bound to come across.

 

[A-Stump]

He wasn't. Hitlers personal chef made lots of money telling people via his book what he ate; his favourite thing being a kind of meat dumpling.

The reason this was spread is apparently the Germans thought it would make him look more like Ghandi, go figure.

No joke.

That's not true though. Or is at least, half true. He was a vegetarian but the myth that it was all a show was propagated by an asshurt vegetarian who didn't want him associated with their cause. They have a way of dancing around it but he likely had IBS and was prescribed the diet because so. You obviously don't want to tell the German people that the leader isn't partaking in the national love of all things meat because he's a hair trigger away from filling his britches.

 

[ICametoLurk]

Hitler was more of In The Right Place, At The Right Moment.

He was in the Right Moment to be introduced to the Bavarian Worker's Party and everything that happened was because in the Right Moment. This was ALSO helped because the German Communists wanted to destory the Republic AT ALL COSTS so they ACTUALLY worked with the Nazis...Gobberals and the Communist leader talked in the same place. "After Hitler, Our Turn!".

As for WW2:

France suffered greatly because of WW1 which actually took place in France. They also had a Jewish Socialist leader who was hated so that probably weakened resistance.

Fun Fact: Germany would've suffered a famine that would've made Holodomor look like a Disney Movie if not for Stalin. I can't find it now but basically the amount of calories that Germans would've gotten was like 800...then Stalin shipped trains and trains of foodstuffs to Germany. See: German–Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement and German–Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement.

This kept his people feed (Speer wanted to introduce Rations like UK and USA did in WW2 but Hitler said that would turn the people against him) and France weakened.

Stalin fought in the previous war with Poland the Soviet Union had and wanted revenge so teamed up to invade Poland from both sides. Funny how only Germany was declared war on by the Allies and not USSR...

Stalin then ignored everything that given to him that Hitler was gonna attack, he was told the exact second it would happen but it tossed it off.

Wanna add to this.

 

[byuu]

Wanna add to this.
View attachment 3510290

To add insult to injury, the social democrats managed to rebuild their party after Hitler while the KPD is banned even in post-war Germany for being unconstitutional.

 

[Lemmingwise]

What I'm trying to say is that if Hitler was born in Miami in 1985 he'd be a real estate magnate right now, with a GED, a Dodge Charger and an orange trophy wife.

"JEWS could be here" he thought. "I've never been in this USSR before. There could be JEWS anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE JEWS" he thought. Wagner's ride of the valkyries reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the 3 reichsmark schnapps circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of merchants after dark. "With a gasvan you can gas anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

Overall probably smart, but a victim of his own ego. He was smart enough to get into power and that probably amped up his delusions of grandeur hence the retarded military decisions. It'd say smart but delusional/crazy.

This is probably the best answer all things considered. However you feel about the man I think we can all say that though he had many flaws it’s undeniable that he left a lasting mark on history that will persist throughout the ages not unlike the names of Alexander The Great and Caesar, although obviously for very different reasons. I very strongly doubt that someone could achieve what he did without something of a brilliant and crazy mind.

 

[Stan]

He started out very smart and then gradually became grandiose, then delusional.

Hitler is said to have been skilled at getting people to follow him and listen to him since elementary school. When he was in middle school he was involved with the church, sang in the choir and considered becoming a priest. He is said to have developed his German nationalist ideas at a young age. His poor performance in high school was a result of boredom and disengagement as he began to pursue being an artist. Hitler was 19 when he lost both parents and was living in Vienna, basically homeless. He applied twice to get into art school but we all know how that worked out. It's around this point that Hitler started to conceive of his anti-Semitic and German nationalist rhetoric. At that time there was a sense of cultural optimism that science would allow everyone to make the world a better place. Hitler (and Henry Ford, and most people at this time tbh) understood that optimism a a reason to put eugenic theory into practice, especially against the Jews. Hitler and the atomic bomb ruined modernism.

Hitler was perceptive in war and charismatic in public, but to say the Nazi regime was a sandcastle is unfair to sand in terms of stability. Germany's gains in the Blitzkrieg, and then the upset win against France gave Hitler a feeling of his own gravitas and inevitability. He was still pretty rational at that point, though; here's a recording of Hitler giving a perceptive summary of the situation at the eastern front in private comments made to the Finnish prime minister in 1942. Surviving Operation Valkyrie probably helped convince Adolf that he really was the chosen leader of the Third Reich. Basically everyone else at that table left the Wolf's Den bunker wounded or killed; Hitler somehow was seated right next to the bomb and survived without serious injuries.

Hitler also started abusing drugs in 1941 after his personal physician gave him an opiate and a hormone injection to speed his recovery from illness. He had previously received high-dose vitamin injections, but after being impressed by Dolantine, Hitler started asking his doctor for stronger remedies. In this middle period Hitler was getting opiates and meth occasionally, and his doctor made a bunch of weird steroid and hormone concoctions from animal cells to inject into the Fuhrer thinking they would make him strong like the animals they came from, perhaps. After the July 20 1944 (date of Operation Valkyrie) Hitler's drug intake increases rapidly. His physican Dr. Morell records injecting Hitler with 20 mg Eukodal (oxycodone basically) right after the bomb went off, and then another doctor recorded giving Hitler a cocaine injection before trying to remove shrapnel from his body. (Cocaine was used as a numbing anesthetic at that time.) It would be likely that Hitler was addicted to opiates by August 1944.

The main reason Hitler started abusing drugs was because he mistrusted his own generals too much to take a day off or delegate decisions; so when he got sick, decisions couldn't be made. Hitler basically used them in order to prop up his workaholic hours. He also needed stimulants like cocaine and meth to help him radiate the charisma he used to be able to summon naturally, but which had started to escape him because of the stress of the war and its unpopularity to the German People. Hitler felt he required the stimulants so he could go to a meeting and keep his generals on track, believing in the Endsieg, and not questioning his fitness to continue as Fuhrer. Hitler's generals bought the act, believing that he must have known something they didn't, or that he had a secret weapon up his sleeve that would change the game. Hitler himself was somewhat in denial about what the shots contained, as he fired Morell in April 1945 for making him addicted to opiates. Ironically, Morell had lost access to those drugs by that point in the war, so it's possible Hitler's real displeasure with Morell was that his treatment was now causing withdrawal symptoms.

Between the drug abuse, the intense success of the early phase of the war, and his miraculous ability to avoid assassination attempts time and again, Hitler started to get the feeling he was a god. Then again, by that point Hitler's only route for survival would have been in winning, since he wasn't willing to surrender to the Allies on any terms. So his later decisions may also be interpreted as the actions of someone who had painted himself into a corner, and was high as fuck on cocaine and oxy.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Probably cult leader smart, as in he knew what buttons to push in order to get ahead. But in the end his actions turned to be short sighted and even without the Americans his empire would have quickly collapsed under its own weight.

Turning a war-ravaged Germany into an economic and military superpower in less than 20 years, capable of instilling fear into the minds of the Banking Tribe over 7 decades after his death?... Yeah, he must've sat on his thumbs for most of his life doing nothing and eating paint chips.

From what I understand Germany still had a huge military post ww1 (it was simply disbanded) and a lot of his economic actions were either to loot/steal from his own citizenry or carried by the war economy.

 

[ApatheticViewer]

I always just wrote the jew stuff off as him creating an enemy to galvanize the people against. Fucking cringe if he actually believed it tho.

Idk given 50 more years of power who knows what Germany could have been. He seemed to have things well structured as he was just starting out.


I will say that Mein Kampf is complete drivel. Structure of book is basically

1. We used to be great
2. This loss of greatness is the jews
3. To be great again is the German right. Because if you look into our past

1. We used to be great
2. This loss of..

That's basically it for 600 pages

 

[George Floyd Sneed]

Smart enough to take over a country ravaged by war and depression, smart enough to significantly expand that country’s influence to take over land several times the size of Germany, not smart enough to hold onto it for an appreciable amount of time.

Some of the comments here are hilarious. He was able to get the drop on almost the entirety of Europe in a matter of a few years but yeah he was just some dude who randomly bumbled into the role. Some of the arguments here could apply to literally every other leader as well.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

He was smart at first then he was dumb. The end.

 

[thegooddoctor]

He had a certain workmanlike spirit about him, he was definitely eloquent and was able to command an entire country to monolithically worship him even though he was prone to fits of black rage due to being a huge cocaine addict as his brain disintegrated near the end of his war. I wouldn’t say he was conventionally intelligent as he ultimately lost the war and his empire crumbled but he amazing sense of character and he radiated strength and had an ability to make people gravitate towards him through his negotiations and charm.