What do you think of Hitler as a person. Some would say he is awesome some like me would say he wasnt a very good person. And maybe what your saying is true.
Hitler's main claim to fame was that he was charismatic, ambitious, and a great orator, capable of manipulating others. However, he was quite inept in military tactics, and the economic recovery he pulled off, anyone could do, because it was wartime production. America did the same thing and it solved the Great Depression; why is Roosevelt remembered more for his New Deal (which didn't solve the Depression) than for Lend-Lease Policy?
He wasn't hated by his countrymen though, it's just that he had carried them very far, helped them recover so much that he gained their loyalty. That's politics. But to consider Hitler a genius is quite an exaggeration. Insane, yes. Ruthless, yes. Smart, yes. Definitely not genius material.
Face it people you cant tell if the man is a genius or not by your support side. I dont support the guy but he was one of the biggest geniuss of this world
it takes a real genius to save a country from breaking down
Genius for no retreat whatsoever, for having tantrums whenever his military commanders said otherwise, for diverting so many valuable resources to kill Jews and losing him the war?
Hitler was a decent tactician and at times a good leader. Despite this, he made erratic and stupid military decisions and lost WWII because of it. I would compare Hitler to Falkenhayn during WWI.
He thought the Jews were evil. From his point of view, he was doing the world a favor. Literally. He may have been a good person... He went crazy and committed suicide.
He was not a great person. He ordered the deaths of millions of Jews, and the ways he did it in, were utterly terrible. So terrible, I wouldn't dare say it here. As a politician, he might have been good with all the debates he had, and swaying the people to his side, but he did not use it for justice, that was a major mistake. At the end of the war (WWII), some of his military commanders though he made a grave mistake in not defending Antwerp, instead he fought in the Ardennes mountains in Belgium, later to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. He could have easily have made his last stand in Antwerp, like the Russians did in Stalingrad (ie. street, to street fighting). Hitler was not a great person, and was never a great commander.
How you answer this question really depends on how you define "great". He certianly managed to amass great fame otherwise no one would know who he was. He was arguably a great public speaker otherwise he would not have been able to convince so many people to follow him. But as a perrson I think the things he did prove that he was a horrible person. By some definitions he was great but by others he was most definately not.
This question depends entirely on the definition of "great." Under most original connotations of the word, yes, Hitler would have been considered "great" in the sense of many other leaders from history who had the suffix attached to their name (many of them despot in their time). I only think this way because I'm a history and literature buff, so when I see words like "majestic" or "terrible," I think of them in their original meanings and not what we've come to mean in our culture right now. "Majestic," for instance, generally meant something that was oppressive, while "terrible" was often a positive term for someone who could obliterate his enemies or was terrifying in power, though not necessarily "bad" or "good" in any sense.
If we use the actual definition of the word "great," which is independent of the contemporary use which essentially just means "really good," then Hitler was great (though he was evil).
Gagaman is absolutely correct that Hitler saved his country at first, though it's also true that his actions would later decimate it and much of the world. He was the Time Magazine man of the year in 1938 for his contributions to ending the Great Depression, and he was hailed as an economic savior by the entire first-world. How do you think he came to be in such a position of influence? It wasn't only by hate-mongering (though that was part of it); it was by looking like somebody you would be willing to follow. Germany after WW1 was abused to the point of desperation by the League of Nations for a war they hadn't started, and when someone came along to end the imposed Weimar Republic and the financial ruin that it brought on Germany, he looked incredibly appealing.
