Hitler as Symbol and Reality

Many people today think of Adolf Hitler as the most evil man who ever lived. Until the recent collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Defense Department planned a mobilization for war in Europe, it was planning how to stop a Hitler-style Blitzkrieg (lightning war). Visitors to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) are always taken to see the monument to those who died in the Siege of Leningrad--caused, the guides remind visitors, by Hitler's armies. People in Israel today still recall Hitler's death camps. Even the name of Hitler--or his ministers like Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering--has come to mean pure evil.

This is an exaggeration, but not by much. Hitler was a ruthless man with dangerous ideas. He was the driving force behind a war which killed over 50 million people. Millions of people died in German concentration camps--six million Jews, 200,000 Gypsies, millions of gay men and lesbians, and at least a million political prisoners. Hitler is not only a symbol of evil, but, in many ways, was the reality of it as well.

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