R2OK!

gfloyd · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 7:49 am Post subject: Was Hitler Funny?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article4227983.ece

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His telephonist in his bunker claims he liked to joke around. It seems that this memoir is a desperate attempt to find some good in the old monster.

I bet Robert Mugabe likes practical jokes as well Rolling Eyes

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His name was ernie ........ and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.....

Rachel · Guest

Well he did wear those funny trousers but not a funny or nice man at all.

gfloyd · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 9:40 am Post subject:

Rachel · Guest

Well that's the thing Ernie, it's so easy to imagine that Hitler may have been funny because all of us youngsters who were not around at the time he was have mainly comedic exeperiences of people impersonating him/Nazis... John Cleese - don't mention the war and the funny walk... Freddie Star... and what he did.... Allo Allo etc....all the serious programmes about Hitler/Nazis are so watered down for TV because the enormity, the evil reality of what he and his Nazis did is not broadcastable.... why would anyone want to write/read a book about him, surely that's like inviting the Devil into your life.

frank · Joined: 26 Jun 2008 Posts: 20 Location: calais france

just because a person commits horrible things doesnt mean that they are not interesting to read about, I would be quiet interested to read about hitler despite the things he did. Like, I' am quite intrested that he was a vegetarian for instance. It just doesnt fit the sterotype does it.

John W · Joined: 07 Dec 2006 Posts: 3367 Location: Warwickshire, UK

Many years ago I read Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny think it was written in 1952 and yet is still considered today as a thoroughly important book. Bullock was a true historian and made it clear to the reader that Hitler, as well as a murderer, was a clever politician, who though appallingly cruel believed right to the end that what he had done could have been good for Europe.

Of course written in 1952 Bullock's book could not benefit from all the research since that has gone into the Holocaust and about the appalling treatment of captured eastern Europeans and Russians, so Bullock doesn't deal in detail with much of the Nazi atrocities I expect because he didn't know the detail that has become evident since.

John

gfloyd · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 3:22 pm Post subject:

I've been to Wannsee in the suburbs of Berlin where the Nazi's planned their extermination of the Jews at a conference in 1942. The house has been preserved as a museum. What strikes you is how ordinary everything is. You could be forgiven for thinking it was just another meeting of civil servants and goverment officials. I think it is the ordinariness & banality of the way the Nazi's went about their work is what is most chilling.
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His name was ernie ........ and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.....