This is an interesting website:

Some interactive maps...

http://www.neue-reichskanzlei.de/addressesD.html

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1983 300D

Very good and interesting movie. Bruno Ganz gives an astonishing enactment of Hitler.....I've seen it at least 3 times (and own it). Scary stuff that went on in those final days.

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it's a great movie for those of you who have not seen it. i've read it's accurate, a lot of the dialog taken from goebbels' diary as well as from the writings of hitler's personal secretary. her non-fictionized tale is told in the movie "Blindspot: Hitler's Secretary," which i believe was used quite a bit for this movie.

it is the movie used for all of those "hitler freaking out" internet clips with different things being "discussed" via altered sub-titles. they're pretty funny: http://prozak-nation.com/?p=237

as far as hitler being crazy, i've read some historians and their books saying that labeling hitler crazy takes something away from the atrocities he helped plan and create. to say that he must be crazy is to say that humankind is not capable of such things and only a monster can do it. the reality, and history, shows that almost anyone is capable given the right situation or circumstances. it doesn't necessarily take a mad man to orchestrate slaughter, why do you think you always hear "he was such a nice man, a quiet man" after something horrible is committed by a fellow human. anyone can be a monster, so the theory goes.

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1985 300D - 1984 Euro 280E AMG Clone (SOLD) - 1978 280CE (SOLD) - 1983 300D (SOLD) - 1981 300D (SOLD)

It got me to read Mein Kampf. I wouldn't call Hitler mad.

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mein kampf is simply a "play book" for hitler and his followers for 1934 to the end of the 1000 year reich. of course it's poorly written, repetitious, boring, and a little "ranty" but he wrote like he painted.

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1985 300D - 1984 Euro 280E AMG Clone (SOLD) - 1978 280CE (SOLD) - 1983 300D (SOLD) - 1981 300D (SOLD)

Being insane doesn't mean one is necessarily bereft of intelligence or logic, though it might be so.

I may have to watch it again in order to back up my complete recollection of it. It was a good movie, ecellent acting and cinematography, yet it left me still inconclusive.

In all the years of searching through this subject, I have found that most of the material is not really reliable in its interpretation.

Personally, I think he ended up in a state of madness throughout the progression of developments, yet there are indications that every aspect of the endevour was initially driven by madness or insanity.

I recently watched "Triumph of the Will". I literally had to force myself to do so. The DVD was laying there for an entire week unwatched until the day before I had to return it.

It is an unspeakable lesson, but stunning enough, is the descrapency of the original German soundtrack vs. the subtitled English naration.

Another example is the English title translation of "Mein Kampf". "My Struggle" is not an authentic interpretation of the words 'Mein Kampf'. It is misleading. It should be "My Fight".

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Unless you read a German authentic version, I would have my reservations on it. The question is, did you read "My Struggle" or did you read "Mein Kampf"?

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From a history point of view, this is correct.
What makes a difference here is the elevation of Hitler to mark the ultimate bench of human evilness and derailed governmental insanity. That's the point where it leaves the vicinity of neutral historical observation. It takes on a different intensity that is undetected when talking about other historically mismanaged governments.

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Hitler was a pretty routine case of amphetamine psychosis, he had abused meth for years.

IIRC, the original book the movie was based itself based on eyewitness accounts of not only the secretary, but of the servents staff and Hitler's personal valet as well, a man who survived the war. I've seen him on the tube in other documentaries, he is a pretty credible, rather nice old man who spent his young life pressing the pants of one of history's greatest mass murders, fitting his cufflinks while Hilter and Goebbels discussed fine wine, opera, and massacreing ever Jew in Europe.

I'm certainly not a Nazi or Fascist but I think it is dangerous to simply label Hitler as the ultimate bench of human evilness. I think it's misleading to think that without further elaboration. He conceived of his own system as a moral system responding to the evils of modern hedonism and marxism. He say the transcendence of the individual by commitment to the state as a moral ideal.
To label him as 'the ultimate bench of human evilness' leaves the impression that his form of nationalism could never be conceived as a good. This is dangerous in my opinion because it hides the road to fascism.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

I think this is an excellent statement. It is extremely difficult, ever since, to get any kind of clear picture on the essentials of developments.
Also, as I believe that levels of governmental recklessness have continued to evolve during the past 70 years, it is almost safe to say that in this current time and age, nuclear or not, risks are being taken that maybe well exceed the scale of insanity, as we continue to picture Hitler as the unsurpassed benchmark.

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Proximity in time or space magnifies the importance of people and events. As it should.

You should read Ian Kershaw's biographies of Hitler:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitler-1889-1936-Hubris-Ian-Kershaw/dp/0140133631

In essence, the guy was a bit of a loser, but was in fact, a man who found himself and turned his life around and was, in the beginning of his actual political career, a genius. His talent for organization and honing his message to the times, and his use of hatred as a political force, all focused into his talent as probably the greatest orator since Cicero, motivated millions of people to support a political movement that was in essence, a criminal enterprise, all the while as they believed they were supporting something else. (Hmmmm.... reminds me of a certain US president...). He also had an incredible appreciation for the art of symbology and the use of iconic images and symbols as powerful tools. He designed the swastika himself, for instance, one of the most potent symbols in the history of art, evil tho it may be, it is indeed probably the most evocative symbol ever created.

But as mentioned earlier, he was fond of mysticism and easily susceptable to quackery, and unfortunately one of the quacks was shooting him up with "vitamins" which were in fact concoctions of cocaine, meth and various eye-of-newt kind of stuff cooked up by his personal physician. His genius deterioated along a pretty predictable bell curve of amphetamine psychosis, starting from heightened alertness and feeling of well being and high energy, then on to grandiosity and feelings of indestructabilty and self-righteousness, and then a descent into paranoid madness.

He began to believe his own myth, and as a result, he began to assume actual command of the German military's day to day battle operations, culminating in the disaster of Stalingrad, a military defeat that he owned lock stock and barrel, having split the Germany Army into three groups against the advice of his top generals, splitting them into three different attacks across the vastness of Russia when a single massive hammer blow to Moscow might have won the war for him, and then compounding the mistake by refusing to allow his troops a strategic retreat when doing so would have been wise, with every strategy and every blunder due to his sick malignant egotism. But yes, you are correct, at the time of Mein Kampf Hitler was a propaganda genius and a man whose organizational skills were so exceptional, he was about to organize a country the size of Texas into a war machine that came pretty damn close to taking over a third of the world.