I don’t blog much, but occasionally I get really pissed off with nowhere else to go, and this is such an occasion.
I am almost beside myself over something, and I don’t know what to do about it. For years now (and especially for the past few months) I keep hearing people say that Hitler was elected!
He was NOT! I have known this since I was a kid, and it is not open to argument.
Yet, earlier tonight I heard the claim again, solemnly intoned in a professional documentary:
“Hitler won the election.”
Which wouldn’t have been so bad but for the fact that last week I got into a big argument with friends who had insisted Hitler had been “elected democratically.” I insisted that he had not, they insisted that he had, and it felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
It is one thing to argue over opinions, but this is a historical fact. Sometimes I get really depressed and wonder What is wrong with people?
The “Hitler won” argument has gotten really loud because of Trump’s election (as if that should change past history somehow).
God how I hate how the human mind “works.”
Comments
8 responses to “What happened is less important than what people want to have happened!”
No one in the group had a smart phone, I Pad, laptop, desktop for an internet search?
I had mine, but it didn’t occur to me at the time to use it. I assumed this well known historical fact was common knowledge. I learned about it when I was around ten, watching the usual “Rise and Fall” TV shows. Which is why I was really spooked seeing the “Hitler won the election” claim in a purported historical documentary.
https://www.amazon.com/Eva-Braun-Hitlers-Andr%C3%A9-Annosse/dp/B01KYBVEOK
Little known fact about WW2 – Tojo was involved in the heroin trade.
It’s pretty surprising that the ‘he won’ thing keeps popping up. I learned way way long ago in a world history class (70’s) that he didn’t.
I wonder if they still teach history.
I’m not sure as to what changes if he had ‘won’. Would his actions be any less evil had he an outright majority of Nazis in the Reichstag prior to his appointment as Chancellor?
Why did your fellow conversationalists think him ‘winning’ was significant?
Or was it simply an attempt to link a past evil to a current politico that the left happens to detest?
Maybe if you define “won” as over 50% of the vote, then no Hitler did not win. He did win the most of any candidate. Hindenburg then appointed him Chancellor. He was then able to the Reichstag make laws that he and the Nazis favored, eventually gaining complete control. He got control of the military when Hindenburg died, having them take an oath of allegiance to him, personally.
1932 German election results:
49.5% Paul von Hindenburg
30.1% Adolf Hitler
13.2% Ernst Thälmann
6.8% Other
0.3 % Other
Hitler did not win the most of any candidate. Hindenburg did.
Elected or not, Nazis were very popular from 1933 to about 1937. Many Germans barely knew what a Jew was, they did know the Nazis came to their town and built schools, hospitals and roads.
And while we’re parsing terms, “fascism” was an Italian phenomenon, Germans were Nazis, not Fascists. Similar, but not the same thing. Similar because Hitler admired Mussolini and tried to copy Fascism. Meanwhile, Musso thought Hitler was a clown.