It was something the speaker at that vegan festival said, and I think I've read about it before: While there wasn't anything official, a few of the higher ups in the Nazi hierarchy had ideas about spiritual and physical purity for the Aryan race which necessitated abstaining from consuming flesh and the killing of animals. Hitler himself was an anti-vivisectionist, and self-identified as a vegetarian from around '42 according to the
Wikipedia-article.
And the point is?
He is also said to have been a dog lover. That didn't stop him from directing that the poison he intended to take first be given to his German Shepherd *****, because he wanted to make sure that it wouldn't result in a painful death for himself.
While we can sometimes, but not always, judge individual actions as either good or bad, a human being is far too complex to fit into only one of these categories. There are no entirely good or entirely bad humans, and Hitler was no exception. He was not an all-evil person. He was only human, with both some good and some bad qualities.
I guess I'm weird, but when someone has tried to exterminate entire ethnic groups, gays, disabled people, not to mention invading multiple countries and in the process killing millions in addition to the many millions gassed, hung, shot, starved to death, tortured to death, etc., I don't feel the need to spend time and energy looking for positive qualities in that person before writing him off as a **** human being who would actually deserve to burn in hell for all eternity if only there were a hell.
I think this common oversimplification of Hitler as Satan makes it harder for us to understand the very complex forces that pushed the world into war and genocide, and the lack of understanding hinders us from taking the necessary steps to prevent it from happening again.
Hitler and the others of his ilk were/are mediocre little people who aren't deserving of all the attention that some heap upon them. Studying them isn't going to provide any solutions, because they aren't really the issue. What is worth studying and trying to understand is what it is about a given society at a given time and in given circumstances that causes a society/nation to give power to such monsters of mediocrity. There are people like Hitler born every day of every year. The question is why and how we allow one of them to gain power.
Frankly, murderous dictators, serial and mass killers, and the like shouldn't even be remembered by name, because that's part of what they're striving for with their rampages. We should just assign them numbers, and expunge their names from history: "Murderous Dictator #643 came to power in Germany in the year...." "Serial Killer #2,347 killed twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Their names were:..."
It's the victims who should be remembered, not the murderers. Spend your time learning all about them. They are infinitely more important than the killers.
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