“Would you travel back in time to kill baby Hitler?”
Since the introduction of the “Back to the Future” franchise, this question has provided a nuanced situation for historians and politicians alike to contemplate. It feels like a moral obligation to say yes to killing the man who led the genocide of half of Europe's Jewry, and many public figures, including Jeb Bush, have fallen into that moral trap. To the study of genocide, however, this is not merely a moral question, but a serious scientific question relating to the way in which genocides happen. It is debatable whether killing the infant Hitler would actually solve the problem and prove to be the lesser evil than the killing of millions, or would the Holocaust have happened nonetheless.
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With the goal of seizing the big picture, it provides an attempt to grasp the causal chains in the radicalization that eventually turned into the physical killing of millions of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners, homosexuals…, and using that to explain the extend of the role Hitler plays in the Holocaust. The basis of its argument relies strongly on the theories presented in Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy, which details the ways in which genocide is a modern phenomenon with strong links to democracy, and in Hannah Ardent's Origin of Totalitarianism, a pillar work in the studying of the formation and structure of the totalitarian …show more content…
As the Fuhrer, he allowed Germans to self-rationalize its problematic beliefs and remains there as the constant reassurance of the perceived righteousness of the Aryan race. Once his power was established, he became a figure similar to the figure of god for religious extremists, the living representation of Germany’s own dangerous nationalist ideology. The Holocaust was designed and carried out by all German people, and Hitler simply had to grant permission to every genocidal advance his people made. Still, this does not make him the sole creator of the Holocaust. The elements of the character of Hitler, nationalism, bitterness, and paranoia, were all present in German society at the time, and he was simply the perfect product of German society. Post-World War I Germany was completely capable of creating an infinite amount of Hitlers even if Adolf Hitler was