Was Hitler good for the World in any way?

Hitler did plenty of good, people just don't assiociate it with him.
Note; i am not condoning his actions by any means
He skyrocketed technology and helped bring Germany out of its depression years, (granted, Streseman could've done that if he'd lived long enough) essentially.
To quote Newton: each action has an equal and opposite reaction. All his evil made some good.

0 Replies

The problem with your claim is that you have no basis upon which to assert that these things would not have happened if Hitler had not seized the government.

1 Reply

If the Second World War had not occurred,
that woud have inhibited prosecution of the Third World War by the communists.

If neither of those wars had occurred, we 'd be richer in resources
that were expended in those wars and in human lives,
however, I can 't help but wonder how far back and more primitive
we 'd be for lact of the emergency research n development
that was generated to support those wars.

The chances that we 'd be on the Moon by now are 50% at best.

0 Replies

@Setanta,

blueprince wrote:

Hitler did plenty of good, people just don't assiociate it with him.
Note; i am not condoning his actions by any means
He skyrocketed technology and helped bring Germany out of its depression years, (granted, Streseman could've done that if he'd lived long enough) essentially.

Setanta wrote:

The problem with your claim is that you have no basis upon which to assert that these things would not have happened if Hitler had not seized the government.

1. What Set says

2. Stresemann was Germany's foreign minister and only Reichschancellor for two short periods in 1923.

0 Replies

@Lightwizard,

Animal Rights, the whole European social security system (first for Germans-only, today abused by every non-European in some way), the reliving of German economy in 5 years, the US did it in 10 and Germany had a major debt by the treaty of Versailles. Etc. Etc. If he didn't kill anyone he would've been the greatest leader the world has ever known. By his racially inspired murdering spree he is now the worst.

1 Reply

Hitler did not pay off the German debt. Less than 25% of the reparations demanded in the Versailles Treaty were paid, and most of that came from "in kind" payments, i.e., the seizure of German assets by the Allies. The German war debt was forgiven by the League of Nations before Hitler ever came to power.

Additionally, the run-away inflation in Germany after the war has been shown by German economists to have begun in 1914, before the Great War started, and therefore not a product of the Versailles Treaty. The Weimar government brought that inflation under control before Hitler ever came to power. All of the social legislation for which Hitler apologists (with whom i include you) give him credit were passed by the Weimar government before Hitler came to power.

0 Replies

@Jokalari,

"Animal rights" were already known in Germany since 1871 (in the criminal code) - they became part of some state constitutions as well as in the federal sonctitution, 'Basic Law', since 2002).
The nazis made some populistic changes.

The German social security system was 'invented' by Bismarck, from 1992 onwards.
The Nazis just "modernised" it - as did Weimar governments before.

0 Replies

Walter wrote:

The German social security system was 'invented' by Bismarck, from 1992 onwards.

A quite young system, I'd say, the old Bismarck invented..

1 Reply

Questions such as that posed for this thread are impossible to answer, because we don't and can't possibly know the alternatives to Hitler's existence or role in Germany.

To pose a perhaps less volatile example, one could argue that the Communist rule in China was good in an historical sense in that it involved the ultimate recovery of China's national life and culture after the debacle of the Manchu dynasty's collapse and the European domination and exploitation of the late 18th and 19th centuries. However that would necessarily involve the rejection of speculation about alternative trajectories through the 20th century. It would also leave unanswered the questions associated with the human cost and suffering involved in successive waves of revolution and repression, and, as well, involve the necessary assumption that China will complete the political transformation implied by its advancing economic one without further revolution.

Interesting stuff for speculation, but questions that have no answers.

3 Replies

George wrote:

but questions that have no answers.

Better than answers that have no questions..

0 Replies

@Francis,

The 9's are to close to the 8's on my keyboard. Very Happy

0 Replies

@georgeob1,

Excellent points, George. The problem with any speculation of this sort is that we have no way of actually knowing what the alternative might have been. We can posit several different possible alternatives but we cannot know which, if any, would have worked better than the one that is actually an historic fact.

0 Replies

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

Questions such as that posed for this thread are impossible to answer, because we don't and can't possibly know the alternatives to Hitler's existence or role in Germany.

Certainly we do - at least 'we', who know German history.

If - and that's the real crux of the matter democracy had been developed 'workably' in the Weimar Republic .... i.e. Brüning was a weak chancellor, but with plans good enough to be finished under the Nazis/Hitler.

However, I agree that such "answers" are mere speculations. History was/is different.

2 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

No, nein, nyet and NON!!! The Weimar Republic went bankrupt because it printed TOO MUCH MONEY, not for any alleged political views. Keep that in mind if you can, please, and recall that hyperinflation trumps politics. Counterfactual hypotheses are useless as a basis for action, as you note (though btw I would hope you'll drop the imperial "we" in favor of "I"), but they are NOT useless when clearly stated as hypotheses.

0 Replies

@georgeob1,

I believe that's true in most things we experience in life; it's practically impossible to know any future from one leader to the next.

The word "speculation" explains it best.

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:

Questions such as that posed for this thread are impossible to answer, because we don't and can't possibly know the alternatives to Hitler's existence or role in Germany.

Certainly we do - at least 'we', who know German history.

If - and that's the real crux of the matter democracy had been developed 'workably' in the Weimar Republic .... i.e. Brüning was a weak chancellor, but with plans good enough to be finished under the Nazis/Hitler.

However, I agree that such "answers" are mere speculations. History was/is different.

Hard to follow this, Walter. Do you, who evidently "knows" German history in a way that others don't, mean to imply that you - unlike others here - know the alternatives to Hitler's existence and role in German history?

In the last sentence you concede it is all speculation. Ok there.

I belive the limitation is even more fundamental than you finally imply. We know that chaotic dynamic systems - those with many internal mutual influences among the dynamic variables and non-linear feedback - are susceptibile to "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and therefore impossible to predict accurately - even though they are in principle deterministic.

What could be more chaotic than the trajectories of human affaira in tribes, parties, nations or the world? I suggest that even if you knew the attitudes of every living German and all those who influenced German life outside Germany in 1935, you could not accurately predict the outcome years later if (say) Hitler had been eliminated then.

1 Reply

The oft quoted Hitler creations of the Autobahn and the Voltswagen (which obviously were not singularly his own concepts) certainly don't come even near to any kind of retribution of his place in history. Then there were Albert Speer's monumental but throw-back, sterile concrete buildings when modernity was being advanced by the Bauhaus, which was closed down and the majority of the architects, designers, artists and craftsmen fled to other countries -- many to the US like Richard Neutra. I met Neutra at his LA home when I was in college on a field project and he volunteered some really horrible images of the Nazis, especially the SS. As if they needed any more bad publicity.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Well, I really don't know what would happened "when" and "if" - and actually I don't like those 'plays'.

I've said (here) since years that I can't really understand what happened in Germany - but that's only because of my very own personal attitudes towards .... well, all that what happened then and there. [I've read (more scanned, since I can't read all due to 'bad writing') some hundreds of personal letters from my family: it's more than amazing how they changed there attitudes.]

0 Replies

In light of the current world financial situation which is very similar to the 1929 Wall Street Stock Market Crash, Hitler made 'war' the primary motive in people's minds instead of misery from hyperinflation in Germany and unemployment elsewhere. The arms manufacturing helped Germany pull out of the severse economic conditions. The death of 50 million people also decrease the demand for goods thus prices of things were lowered. The mass destruction of property also created a build phase in the world economy that lifted the world out of the depression. There is definitely a dark phase but it helped the world out of a bad economic situation.

1 Reply

@talk72000,

There's so much wrong with that last post that any reply would seem superfluous!

However, I would simply remark that it could equally be argued that "the world" gives rise to evil megalomaniacs. To argue that such an event was "beneficial"to the world" in any way is an ethically facile description a self-correcting systems mechanism.

2 Replies

Was Hitler good for the World in any way?

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know