Adolph Hitler – was he – mad, bad or sad or a combination of all three of the above.

It has been said that he forced the German peoples to follow him to disaster and ultimately destruction of their homeland.

This idea or image of children (the German population) being mesmerised by the Pied Piper and led to distruction is tempting to be sure, not least as an explanation by the Germans themselves for what took place in Germany during this time period.

One historian curiously has written in his book (A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester ) and described the Pied Piper as a psychopathic paedophile – a bit to close to the analogy for comfort maybe.

A psychological profile was produced in 1943 at the instigation of the OSS regarding Hitler and what he might do next and especially if things turned against him in Europe. This was as far as we can tell was one of the earliest attempts at a Political profile of a living Politician and later spawned the BAE (Behavioural Analisys Unit) of the FBI (formerly the OSS). Earlier examples of profiling a criminal included the Jack the Ripper case and the middle-ages during the time of the inquisition in particular.

 You might want to take a look at my other Hub on the subject of Hitler:

http://hubpages.com/hub/howhitlersoldhimselftothegermans

Hitlers Early Upbringing

The authors of the OSS report made much of Hitler’s violent father and his seemingly unatural closeness to his mother (Oedipus complex) and attempted to link these early experiences to his later life.  While never doubting for one moment that we are all to a certain extent products of our own childhood, whether good or bad, the author goes further and talks of projection of Hitlers hate being transferred from his father to other neighboring countries and Jews in particular as a reason for his blood-lust.

Like-wise his mother endulging the young Adolph and being closer to him because she had had other children die in infancy or being still-born created in the mind of  the young Adolph the feeling of entitlement and almost childlike behaviour when around women when he was an adult.  Not wishing to appear sceptical, but the early descriptions of the young Adolph could be made to fit quite a number of my own aquaintences who subsequently did not feel the need to invade Czechoslovakia or Poland.

Mesianic

Hitler also appears to have had a Mesianic view of himself (he see’s all, knows all and can do no wrong - you know what I mean, that old chestnut) which has been formed from his early experiences where younger siblings have died young leaving him to survive and comrades during the First World War were killed while he Adolph remarkably had lived on.  Where you or I might say he was just lucky, Adolph apparently thought he was under divine protection and intervention so that his holy crusade as he saw it could be acted out with impunity.

In the later stages of WW2 it must have come as a bit of a shock to discover that he was in error and would have to face-up to reality.