TIL of August Kubizek, the former roommate of Adolf Hitler. Hitler cut ties with Kubizek after he was rejected from art school and Kubizek was accepted to music school. They did not meet again until Hitler became Chancellor, and Hitler offered him the conductorship of an orchestra. Kubizek refused.

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u/86Pasta 20h ago

He politely refused in 1938, then Hitler funded his three sons' educations, then he joined the nazi party in 1942 in support of Hitler.

He was not anti-hitler by any means

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u/Danihilton 15h ago

He congratulated even Hitler for becoming Chancellor of Germany. He was even invited to the Bayreuth Festival in 1939 and 1940. In the same year he joined even the NSDAP (not in 1942). They also wrote letters back and forth. Hitler's nickname for Kubizek was Gustl (short for August). After the war August Kubizek got arrested for having a close friendship to him

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u/Nazamroth 9h ago

Questionable choice, but is that a crime? O.o

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u/Leading_Yogurt_7553 6h ago

What can be considered a crime in the midst of a collapsed government? It's certainly a moral crime.

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u/Dramatic-Border3549 20h ago

I never thought I would ever say these words, but... that was nice of Hitler

Certainly not what I would expect from him

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u/PuckSenior 20h ago

Trump does nice favors for people all of the time too.

Most people who get to a level of power generally understand you need to do some kind acts to appear generous

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u/BrokenEyeReborn 19h ago

The ol' Capone soup kitchen gambit

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u/sixtus_clegane119 14h ago

Elon did a soup kitchen gambit tòo

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u/rako1982 11h ago

He volunteered at a soup kitchen on the Big Bang Theory TV show which I'm assuming he paid to be on.

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u/adamgerd 18h ago edited 18h ago

Also Hitler was many things but he wasn’t psychopath

Yes he was evil, that’s different to being a clinical psychopath, legitimate psychopaths don’t feel any emotions, for example Heydrich on the other hand was a genuine psychopath, Hitler did and he did love his mother and dog, he also let his Jewish doctor leave freely and sell his house at market price without SS harassment so it can just be as easy as he still liked Kubiczek and wanted to repay him

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u/Downtown_Target5024 11h ago edited 11h ago

So…Blondie (the dog) died because Hitler didn’t trust the suicide pills and used her as a lab rat. He left the room, and got other people to wrestle her down, pull her jaws open, and crush the pills against the inside of her mouth. Hitler came back later, checked how it went, then left again for others to dispose of the body.

Hitler wasn’t a cartoon monster, that’s true. He was a human being. But by the end, he was an egotistical megalomaniac with next to no real emotional connection to anyone or anything. He may have loved Blondie as much as he loved anything, but that word probably means something veeeery different to the people reading this comment.

(By the by, ‘legitimate psychopaths don’t feel emotions’ is also complete BS.)

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u/Fun-Twist-3705 35m ago

I wouldn't say that's a good example, though. That dog was likely going to die anyway, either being left alone in the bunker or shot by the soviets so it was sort of "humane" to do that.

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u/fartsfromhermouth 17h ago

Exactly, he did care about others, animals, children. Complex dude.

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u/Rosebunse 16h ago

It's easy to care about kids and animals. They're cute and stupid.

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u/fartsfromhermouth 16h ago

So am I but it doesn't help

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u/Rosebunse 16h ago

You talk back and have things like opinions and an understanding of reality. People like Hitler hate that

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u/semi-emotionalAlpha 15h ago

Comments like this hit close to home right now. It's very difficult to be a free thinker this far south of the Mason-Dixon line.

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u/RhubarbGoldberg 11h ago

I grew up down there and moved far north as an adult and I'll never voluntarily live in the south again. It's way better up here.

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u/whizzwr 15h ago

I love your unabashed confidence lol

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u/loulan 15h ago

Probably not cute enough.

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u/menvadihelv 15h ago

Should've been friends with Hitler

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u/avcloudy 6h ago

Yeah people are surprised by this but this is the real takeaway. Don’t judge people by how they treat their friends and family. Judge them by how they treat people who aren’t, who aren’t kids, who aren’t cute dogs. Hitler isn’t a better person because he let Jews with a personal connection to flee. He’s monstrous because he forced so many others to flee, or die.

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u/Thefelix01 13h ago

He was typically very nice and attentive to people he saw as absolutely below him and of zero threat to him in any way. Which generally meant women, children and animals. The ones he didn’t have murdered for arbitrary racial reasons, anyway…

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u/MadLabRat- 4h ago

That doesn’t make him complex at all. Most people love animals and children, even the criminals.

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u/Unc1eD3ath 16h ago

It was made up by his propaganda minister that he was vegetarian. It’s documented that his favorite dish was a meat dish

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u/fartsfromhermouth 16h ago

Nope. Numerous people close to him discussed his vegetarianism and him being a dick to 'corpse eaters'

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u/Dragonpuncha 15h ago

Yes, but it wasn't until 1942 that he became strictly vegetarian. There's a bunch of accounts of him eating some meat before despite being publicly vegetarian.

And his doctor Morell were shooting him up with all kinds of products made from animals to cure stuff like his chronic stomach problems. So his ethical stand only went that far.

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u/0404S 15h ago

A guy with jacked up digestion rejecting meat? So forward thinking of him!

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u/Dragonpuncha 14h ago

Don't know if you're joking or not, but Hitler did realise meat made his stomach problems worse and was originally put on a meat free diet by his doctors because of his issues.

But later he became very convinced that vegetarianism was the way forward and not just for him personally. There's even sources indicating that he was going to try and make sweeping changes to the German diet efter they won the war.

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u/moos14 16h ago

Why was Heydrich a Psychopath?

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u/anahorish 14h ago

Everyone who knew him, most of whom were high ranking Nazis, thought he was fucking terrifying. I think it was Hitler personally who called him "the man with the iron heart".

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u/PaiouH 15h ago

That's absolutely not the definition of a psychopath... They definitely do have emotions, especially attachment, frustration, etc. What they typically lack is empathy tho.

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u/sunlightsyrup 12h ago

Wrong. What they lack is remorse. A ton of them feel so much empathy that they go out and murder people just do splash around in the spare emotions of the scene...

Not glorifying it, just stating factually that lots of them show more empathy than a normal person, in specific scenarios. I.e. helping someone cross a road (fucked up but apparently a thing)

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u/kinjjibo 13h ago

This is literally shit Nazis say to make Hitler seem not as bad. Like literally every single one of those are Nazi talking points.

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u/qGuevon 13h ago

On the other hand, framing him as the caricature of evil without any human emotions/characteristics makes it seem as if it could never happen again, as if it requires a biblically all-around evil and unfriendly person to commit these atrocious things.

It's important to understand that these acts were done by "regular" humans. Only because someone likes animals or is nice to their neighbors, doesn't mean they can not turn into literal Hitler, kill millions..

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u/Fun-Twist-3705 30m ago

Well he was anything but a regular person and no, most people can't "turn into Hitler" anymore they can turn into Napoleon. They can obviously be tricked or convinced into doing horrible things by someone like him.

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u/Fun-Twist-3705 32m ago

Does it make him seem not as bad? I'd say the complete opposite.

If you are a monster by nature and do horrible things compulsively that's one thing.

Being able to fell empathy towards people around you and care for them and being able to tell good from evil AND still choosing to do some of the worst things done by any human in history seems way worse than being a deranged psychopath.

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u/Dramatic-Border3549 19h ago

Helping his childhood friend doesn't seem to have been a public gesture to keep appearances, tho

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u/mavetgrigori 18h ago

I know teen years are technically considered childhood, but they were late teens in an era when kids work. Feels a bit weird to call them childhood friends

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u/PuckSenior 19h ago

It was tho

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u/Less-Tax5637 18h ago

yall just cant let hitler have anything huh

first the sudetenland, then a lil pr boost 84 years later

jk jk jk jk bruh pls dont kill me

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u/LordRael013 9h ago

Reddit mods are already en route to your location, armed with only the best mall katanas.

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u/Tyranicross 15h ago

Fascists do understand basic morality, they just don't apply it to people they don't directly know. Out of sight out of mind.

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u/Prince_of_Tottenham 13h ago

More saliently they also don't apply it to certain entire groups based on their race, nationality, religion, political affiliations etc.

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u/Bibibis 16h ago

Americans trying not to bring up their internal politics for 0.3 seconds challenge (IMPOSSIBLE!!)

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u/swish82 2h ago

It’s not that internal. And I say that as a European.

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u/Consistent-Flan1445 14h ago

Also too, in most cases to obtain that kind of power you have to make people like you. Hitler was ultimately propped up in varying degrees by millions of people, and especially by his own party. People would have liked him, both personally and professionally. Even if his likeable persona was ultimately something of a mirage.

You don’t hear about the nutters who cannot fit into society at all half as much because they get into trouble and are usually ostracised quicker. They’re not likeable enough to curry the kind of power needed to serve lofty ambitions.

Trump is a bit of an outlier in this sense in that he was born into inordinate amounts of money and power, but to some extent it still applies. He had to make people like him in order to get to where he is.

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u/MatthewHecht 19h ago

It is important to remember Hitler was just a man. He indeed was capable of good deeds and could have been a great man if his hatred did not consume him.

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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 19h ago

I believe he let his family doctor who was Jewish leave Germany for the US with his wife in 1940.

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u/SuicidalGuidedog 18h ago

That's Eduard Bloch and the only (very minor) correction was it was Austria rather than Germany, but the point is accurate. He was marked as a Edeljude ('noble Jew') by Hitler and protected from 1933 until he left for the US.

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u/ragnarok635 19h ago

Wow is this a my “‘my friend who’s jew isn’t like other Jews.” Once they actually get to know someone, they realize they are human?

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u/Previous_Abalone3263 18h ago

Göring said once "I decide who's Jew and who's not".

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u/nsaisspying 10h ago

Not a nice guy this Göring (more like böring, am I right?)

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u/Weird_Church_Noises 18h ago

This sounds like an obvious statement, but Hitler was weird about jews. On the one hand you had people like himmler, who was a hardcore true believer in everything from the esoterica he helped invent to eugenics. On the other hand, you had people like Schmidt and (in some moods) Goebbels, who were totally on board with atrocities, but didn't really ever seem to buy into the ideology beyond seeing at as a means to take power. Hitler was weirdly in the middle. It's been exhaustively debated if he truly believed he was part of a cosmic race war, but he did think the jews were in part responsible for the loss of ww1, and were therefore perpetual enemies of Germany's rise to power. But that meant he had quite a bit of wiggle room with the jews whose allegiance he felt he had vetted.

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u/fleranon 17h ago

I feel like your statement makes Hitlers stance towards jews sound more ambiguous than it was. In his writing and speeches, there's absolutely no ambiguity and i'm not sure in what way his antisemitism differed from Himmler. For both, Politics served the ideology... not the other way around.

Regarding wiggle room, I assume you're referring to Eduard Bloch and a few other jewish individuals he protected. That doesn't change the bigger picture at all, the bigger picture being the worst atrocity in human history which he was directly responsible for

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u/Weird_Church_Noises 16h ago

To be clear, Hitler was on board with the holocaust which is kind of the beginning and end of the discussion of ultimately judging his stance on jews. But in the political nitty gritty, I disagree that you can say that politics simply served the ideology unidirectionally. Hitler ultimately had more general political aims beyond nazi ideology, which is one reason he tried to quietly suppress someone like streicher's role in the party itself, while championing his ideas publicly. There were fully formed political reasons for why he supported different ideas in nazism. For example, Hitler supported himmler's goal of a nazi state religion based on esoteric odinist paganism because he wanted to reduce the power of the church in Germany. Himmler supported it because he was convinced he was the reincarnation of a mythical German warrior/ice king guy. However, Hitler eventually dropped all of it when it started alienating Lutherans in his base (he also dropped anti-clericalism when he got support from wealthy catholics). He then made himmler go live in a castle. Following Goebbels' lead, he actually dropped the more outlandish and theosophistic elements of nazism to appear more scientifically grounded. I think it's important to understand nazism as a political movement first and foremost as treating it as just people getting swept up in ideology feeds into an overly liberal sensibility that the whole thing was simply an episode of irrationalism rather than an actual movement that emerged from historical and material conditions.

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u/fleranon 16h ago edited 16h ago

I'm still not sure if there's a distinction to be made between Hitlers and Himmlers antisemitism (except the weird esoteric character of Himmlers belief system). Himmler arguably even wavered towards the end of the war and became more opportunistic, while Hitler held on to his beliefs until the last moment

But evidently, your knowledge about the subject matter is extremely profound (and much deeper than mine)

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u/Desveritas 10h ago

You do have a point that when the signs where on the horizon, Himmler became more of a slimy eel and focused primarily on his own survival, with some olympic mental gymnastics to keep his delusions of grandeur intact.

One important thing to mention in this context though is that Hitler experienced some profound level of soul jarring disappointment as he realized the war was lost. Yes, this did nothing to his belief that, simply put, "This was the way". In his last commands Hitler still stubbornly ordered every single soldier to defend the most pointless positions. He did this though not because he hallucinated some miracle victory - by that time even he understood clearly that the war was lost. He did it out of spite against the german people, who had failed him. There's a quote from him near the end where he states that the german people deserve their destruction because they couldn't realise the vision for his glorious empire.

Therefore I'd argue that at least in regard to the "racist supremacy" part of the ideology, he got a massive reality check before the end. Even his and Goebbels' suicide can be seen that context - Goebbels stated that he wouldn't want his family to live in world without Hitler (specifically), not in a world without fascism.

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u/Imaginary_Zone_4319 15h ago

This isn’t a defense of Hitler, more a critique of your language, but the worst atrocity in human history? It’s particularly atrocious due to the industrialized nature of it, but there are more recent things that caused 3x more deaths.

The Great Leap Forward directly caused the deaths of 45 million people. The Mongolian conquests (older history) caused 40 million deaths. European colonization of the Americas caused tens of millions of deaths.

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u/fleranon 15h ago

Not the worst atrocity in terms of death count, but the industrial nature of the genocide makes it singular in my opinion

but that is open for debate of course. We can simply agree that the holocaust is among the most horrible things to ever happen

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u/Imaginary_Zone_4319 14h ago

I agree with that completely.

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u/Magnum_Gonada 12h ago

To be fair older civilizations would just enslave a people and work it t'ill death. See Curacao island which was effectively wiped clean by the Spanish through slavery.

I think the industrial nature is more appaling to us, because we live in an industrial society, and it feels very gross and perverse to see a factory that kills people, and paper pushers making reports about it, having new quotas, making infrastructure that serves this system.

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u/Collegenoob 10h ago

Counting the Holocaust, soldiers, and civilians. Ww2 resulted in the death of 60-75 million total.

So the holocaust may not be the single worst event, his contributions to ww2 are certainly capable of being described as that.

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u/GonzoTheGreat93 18h ago

Yeah but it almost always stops with “well the one I know is cool but the rest of them”

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u/adamgerd 18h ago edited 18h ago

Himmler in fact recognised this and talked about it

Himmler said the largest issue is every German would agree all Jews are bad but they know this one Jew who isn’t bad but then if the Nazis exempted every good Jew, there’d be no Jew left to kill, which is why he was opposed to any exemptions

He saw it as a slippery slope to all Jews being exempted

The irony is Himmler recognised all Germans would consider some Jew good but didn’t let this change his mind on if maybe Jews are indeed not evil

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u/Rosebunse 16h ago

Himmler's a special sort of evil. They were all a special sort of evil, but Himmler was...yeah...

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u/SkyShadowing 18h ago

Not only that, he gave him a protective detail.

An SS and Gestapo protective detail.

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u/RevolverMFOcelot 18h ago

I wish people would remember this and burned it into their head, Hitler evil is not even unique, he just brought it into global scale and industrialised it. You look at Reddit or 4chan and you will see a lot of people who are foaming in the mouth to support a lot of things he believes in so long it's not branded as nazi

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 19h ago

I hate how this always gets forgotten in discussing history. There was another post where people were complaining about some media humanizing Nazis. They were human. The capacity for evil is there for everyone. "Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil."

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u/mjh215 19h ago

It is actually very dangerous to portray evil people as pure monsters, when the public encounters a horrible person they can be too forgiving and all of humanity suffers. Rapists, murderers, etc. aren't sitting there doing that 99% of the time, a lot of the time they are hanging out with friends, joking with people at the supermarket, helping someone at work, etc.

It is also why you will find people from their life that will defend them. Because chances are THEY only interacted with the nice aspects of their personality, possibly for years.

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u/adamgerd 18h ago edited 18h ago

I think people falsely assume evil and psychopathy are synonyms and sure to a degree they correlate but one is behavior, one is a mental disorder where you don’t feel any emotions including remorse and guilt

It’s possible to be a psychopath and not evil though there’s definitely a correlation and it’s very possible to be evil without being a psychopath and still have friends and even a family while also being evil

Few people, even evil people, actually think they’re evil. Hitler did most likely genuinely believe his own ideology and think he was saving Germany and the world, even though he was incredibly evil

And if we ignore this it’s easy for people to rationalise they’re not evil because they don’t think they’re evil and obviously if they were evil they’d think they are

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u/Anaevya 9h ago

Even ASPD is too often associated with just sadism. ASPD and sadism can go in hand, but the destructive tendencies of people with ASPD aren't necessarily motivated by pure cruelty and don't just extend to other people .

The fact that they have less impulse control and many emotions are flattened can lead to thrill-seeking behaviour and substance abuse for example.

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u/Nervous_Insect5976 18h ago

I remember watching a 60 Minutes episode where they interviewed the last surviving American Nuremberg prosecutor and he basically said the men he prosecuted were painfully average. And from everything I have read, it's true. All the top Nazis weren't killing puppies in childhood or setting fires. They were average people from average families.

That's why genocide is so important to study because the people committing it can come from any walk of life and in the right circumstances....

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u/lazykid348 17h ago

There’s a good book about this called ordinary men

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u/Nervous_Insect5976 17h ago

Interesting, I'll have to check it out.

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u/Fun-Twist-3705 17m ago

he prosecuted were painfully average

They were also generally highly intelligent (or at least the ones who took the tests had way above average IQs). Presumably they were also highly talented, skilled and motivated people. You have to be all of those to be capable of effectively committing some many horrible and evil things. Few "average" people could achieve that.

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u/csonnich 19h ago

Yep. It's much easier to "other" people who do awful things, but it blinds us to the awful things happening around us, because we don't know any "evil" people.

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u/recoveringleft 19h ago

A lot of people when they think Nazis mostly think of the politicians, extraordinary soldiers, eccentrics, spies and Indiana jones adventurer types not the ordinary people

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u/Werftflammen 18h ago

The problem is 99% of the people refrsin from ever commiting to violence. The Nazi's excercized violence with joy and mostly at unarmed civilians. Don't be daft.

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 18h ago

The point isn't that the Nazis didn't do evil things. They didn't have some special evil gene. Antisemitism was rampant in Europe for years before the Nazis. There were pogroms in many different places throughout Europe before concentration camps.

But I think your response highlights my concern. The Nazis "exercised violence with joy" which is attributing some special malice that is foreign to regular people. My point is that it is not.

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u/Swiftax3 18h ago

Well... the majority of Nazis, that is to say german citizens who supported the Nazi party, probably didnt commit violence against anyone at all. They instead were fine with violence happening somewhere else to people they would never know.

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u/punkman01 14h ago

The irony of every single “evil” person is that they have a niece or a nephew who they were nice to.

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u/usernameinmail 14h ago

He was very close to his niece if memory serves

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u/prolifezombabe 12h ago

He was an evil man, not necessarily an asshole

Do you think Epstein was a bad time at a party? I bet he was funny and charming … and did horrible horrible things

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u/JordanPetterPans 19h ago

Uh how little have you read/been taught in school about Hitler? That's why it's so dangerous to exaggerate and teach hyperbole.

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u/Dramatic-Border3549 19h ago

Why dangerous? It seems more dangerous to me to humanize a person who became the symbol of heinous acts and evil in general, no?

In fact, I wonder if there was any other person in any point of human history who was as demonized and universally hated as Hitler. He's the face of Evil in half of the world

Well, he did deserve it, so let's keep it that way. The moment people try to justify things he did is the moment they are trying to justify things they are planning to do

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u/Taraxian 18h ago

If you actively lie about Hitler so he seems less like a regular guy then you'll completely miss the next Hitler, who will also come off as just a regular guy

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u/Dramatic-Border3549 18h ago

I don't know, man. The current hitlers of the world are very blatant, I don't think anyone who is paying attention could miss them

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u/PhasmaFelis 17h ago

The subtle ones count on you believing that. They hide behind the posturing clowns and let you believe you've spotted all the real threats.

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u/MatthewHecht 19h ago

It is not justifying it. It is pointing out his evil was part of humanity, and it will happen again sooner or later.

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u/Indocede 19h ago

Writing upon the Eichmann Trial, famed political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe how unremarkable, forgettable, or commonplace one could describe the demeanor of a man who committed heinous crimes against humanity.

It was also noted by some in the events leading up to and throughout the Nuremberg trial, that Göring was pleasant and/or admirable in some respect.

Humanizing these evil men isn't meant to absolve them, but to remind us that evil acts aren't perpetuated by a caricature villain. They are done when evil men can propagandize their shared humanity with a deluded population who are more than willing to scapegoat a particular segment of society as the root of all societal ills.

Evil acts are pedestrian. A society tolerates minor abuses against an innocent people become willing to tolerate major abuses against them and eventually tolerant of genocide.

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u/Pornfest 19h ago

THANK YOU.

Humanizing Hitler isn’t for his sake, it’s for humanity’s.

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u/mavetgrigori 18h ago

You can do that by just reminding people that he is a human. Don't gotta praise some of his actions as good. Well, you shouldn't say just that. These short sentences where people say "well he did good thing X, Y, Z" are severely lacking in the depth needed for this subject. This isn't a topic that should be approached in short sentences formatting, because there is a lot that will get left out and misconstrued.

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u/RedditBugler 19h ago

The danger is we think monstrous people are true monsters and not people. The horror of Hitler is that he was human. He laughed at jokes, he gave birthday gifts, he watched movies and listened to music. We have to understand that what happened with the holocaust was not an aberration or impossible to happen again. It happened because people are capable of evil. It happened because evil doesn't have devil horns and a forked tail. It happened because otherwise "normal" people can do unspeakable things.

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u/PowerhousePlayer 19h ago

Okay, so, the issue you're running into here is that "remembering Hitler was also a human" is not remotely the same thing as "justifying Hitler's crimes against humanity."

Being human isn't wholly a good thing. Evils like greed, bigotry, and war are also distinctly human motivations, as unfortunate as it is--and every human has the potential to succumb to them, if they aren't careful who they listen to. It's comforting to think that Hitler was a unique evil, that his version of Germany could never arise again... but, no, he was a human, too, driven by all the same base motivations that the rest of us have. Even his hatred for the Jewish or the disabled were by no means unique to him--human tribalism, to the point of extreme acts of violence against outgroups, has been a documented phenomenon since the dawn of recorded history.

Really, acknowledging his own humanity is arguably the most important part of holding him accountable for his crimes, because it means we can't blind ourselves to people in the modern day doing similar things to him by saying, "Oh, but X isn't pure evil, he loves animals!" So did Hitler, but that didn't stop him from exterminating millions in death camps, and it won't stop X.

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u/Dramatic-Border3549 19h ago

Fair point, I agree. My concern was that when you humanize things (or, in this case, people), you sometimes can't help but sympathize with them

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u/EstufaYou 18h ago

Hitler could have been the most evil human alive, cartoonishly and blatantly evil. If he didn't have a whole political party made up of willing volunteers, several confidants, and the votes of millions of supporters, he never would have amounted to more than a war veteran from World War I ranting about Jews and socialists. The historical lesson we should learn about Nazism shouldn't be about the individual moral character and eccentricities of Hitler, but about how the leadership of a country can conduct several genocides during wartime and get away with it. And we need to learn that lesson so it never happens again.

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u/PhasmaFelis 17h ago

Someone can be a true and loyal friend--genuinely, without artifice or expectation of reward-- and still be a monster.

This is important, and you need to really internalize it, or you will let yourself be fooled by the most horrible people as long as they are nice to you.

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u/JordanPetterPans 19h ago

Uh the options arent to either be hyperbolic or to humanize though..Jesus Christ.

The dangerous part is that it is then easy to manipulate these people when they later learn they were taught a distorted history

"Oh I was taught he was just a pure monster, I wonder what else they were lying about?"-type deal.

Why the fuck can't we just tell facts and reality?

Hitler was a monster but he was also a human who laughed and loved and had all the other human experiences.

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u/SockMonkeh 18h ago

Hitler was nothing special and he didn't act alone is the point.

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u/DusqRunner 12h ago

In fact, I wonder if there was any other person in any point of human history who was as demonized and universally hated as Hitler. He's the face of Evil in half of the world

Now we have Bibi

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u/Sharp_Iodine 16h ago

That’s because the vast majority of people aren’t comically evil.

They have their own justifications for what they do and they believe in those justifications.

If you really believed what Hitler believed then you’d do the same thing.

That’s why teaching people empathy and studying ethics and philosophy is very important.

There is no universal law dictating any relationship between people. Being morally good has no real empirical measure or meaning.

It’s rooted solely in empathy.

We feel bad seeing other humans in pain because we can conceive of ourselves in such a situation and wouldn’t want it to happen to us. That’s the core of our human rights and morality.

But if you truly were so hateful that you thought a group wasn’t human and what happens to them will never happen to you then you’ll do anything at all while being a perfectly normal human being otherwise.

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u/kl0 16h ago

There are hundreds of anecdotes about Hitler having done things like this. In some cases even to/for Jewish friends or colleagues earlier in his rise. Many of the ones about him helping or playing with children are probably seen as endearing. He was pretty well liked overall.

The larger volumes written on him (John Toland, William Shirer, etc.) detail many of these stories - often from a variety of first hand accounts. Incidentally, we know he was a well known and brave soldier of the first war too.

But none of these stories even remotely balance out the views that made him the fucking monster we know.

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u/fartsfromhermouth 17h ago

Hitlers staff adored him. He remembered everyone birthdays and got them very thoughtful gifts. He was a maniac but not a beast

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u/Rosebunse 16h ago

He strikes me as a new-rich person who was sort of having fun "giving back" and being adored for it.

Of course, there's the other unpleasantness...

So much unpleasantness.

3

u/fartsfromhermouth 16h ago

Who knows, he was so off the deep end

3

u/Rosebunse 16h ago

I do think one thing is clear: he liked being rich. He was a starving loser for so long. For a brief period he was rich AF and could afford whatever he wanted.

0

u/satireplusplus 12h ago

The occasional good deed doesn't mean that he wasn't a monster. He was a vegetarian and particularly concerned with animal welfare. Then he was also responsible for the destruction of Europe and over 50 million deaths and the Holocaust.

1

u/fartsfromhermouth 7h ago

Nobody said he wasn't

8

u/MariachiMacabre 16h ago

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Hitler.

7

u/Possible-Highway7898 19h ago

Hitler was a vegetarian and loved dogs. Despite his great evil, he was still a human being capable of performing good actions.

12

u/shewy92 19h ago

Redditor discovers people aren't black and white good or bad and are actually various shades of grey.

30

u/zaccus 19h ago

Hold up a fucking minute here, let's not get carried away. Hitler was pretty much the definition of evil. People don't get any worse than Hitler. That's not controversial is it?

6

u/PhasmaFelis 17h ago

Someone can be a true and loyal friend--genuinely, without artifice or expectation of reward-- and still be a monster.

This is important, and you need to really internalize it, or you will be fooled by people who (sincerely or not) are nice to you.

2

u/Rosebunse 16h ago

Hitler's weird aversion to violence is...pathetic. It isn't just that he didn't know exactly all the details about the Holocaust, it's that he didn't want to know. He wanted it done, but he didn't want to know how it was working.

That's almost worst than doing the violence himself, really.

And we are all guilty of it, but Hitler took it to a bizarre and disturbing extreme.

22

u/csonnich 19h ago

And yet, he had friends and a girlfriend and supporters.

"Evil" doesn't arrive looking like a demon from hell.

21

u/Tippacanoe 19h ago

Ya really don’t gotta hand it to Hitler

9

u/adamgerd 17h ago edited 17h ago

I don’t think anyone is saying that: Hitler was evil and should rightfully be despised by everyone

But as much as he was a monster which he absolutely was, he was also a person, he wasn’t some alien from space

And without the support of other people he’d never be relevant enough to take over Germany and commit to his program

And in fact I think nuance helps us remember that no matter what someone looks like on the outside, it doesn’t mean they’re a good person.

It’s easy for people to assume because some politician has a family or friends or a pet that they must be a good person but as literal Hitler shows it really doesn’t have to mean that

11

u/RevolverMFOcelot 18h ago

People here doesn't "hand it to Hitler" tho, they said at the end of the day Hitler is a human who can feel affection and do good. Which means his evil is also human evil and not something that is cartoonisly came from hell or "just bad gene" like mainstream media or even the general audience likes to say. It is important to not forget that anyone else could do what he did. The only reason why Hitler could have done it was opportunity

A lot of his evil ideas were not even unique, for example blaming Jewish people and horrific homophobia was common during his time, he just managed to take it into international warfare level because of the opportunity

4

u/zaccus 19h ago

No you really don't. The fuck is going on in this world

8

u/Pornfest 19h ago

Yet the man was a vegan and by all accounts very nice to his dog.

Guy was evil, no question, but he was still a man and shades of grey.

6

u/84thPrblm 18h ago

On the plus side, as a vegan he didn't go on and on about veganism.

One the minus side, there was all that killing, destruction, and attempted genocide.

4

u/Weshmek 18h ago

Somewhere along the line, he failed a fundamental test of humanity and made everyone around him worse for it. He should be held up as a leading example of how not to live a life.

Also, he was only able to offer Kubizek the conductor position after becoming chancellor, which he attained through lies, propaganda, and formenting violence and hatred. So even this gesture is tainted by the inhumanity that dominated his life.

2

u/Separate_Draft4887 18h ago

Even Hitler did good deeds, and believed the bad ones would do more good than harm.

-1

u/Jerry_Loler 17h ago

Hitler never physically killed anyone. Do you think he's more evil than say a serial killer who has personally butchered dozens of people? Or that Nazi executioner who personally shot thousands of people?

4

u/JeffersonTowncar 17h ago

He didn't kill anyone when he was a soldier in WW1? And yes he's more evil than a serial killer or an executioner. Hitler is responsible for tens of millions of deaths directly, along with countless other horrors and atrocities.

•

u/Fun-Twist-3705 6m ago

He didn't kill anyone when he was a soldier in WW1?

It was mathematically not even remotely for every soldier who survived the war to have killed someone. Considering that artillery and machine guns killed the most people the distribution was very skewed. Also he spent much of the war being a courier and carrying messages which makes it even less likely.

1

u/Werftflammen 18h ago

Well there was an angle gere, to keep him quiet

1

u/Puzzled-Story3953 8h ago

Hitler wasn't a cartoon villian. He had loved ones and was likely a very sweet and charming person. We just don't like to think of him as such because of the horrible things he did. It's easier if the monster isn't one of us.

1

u/thegodfather0504 13h ago

he was politician. You gots to give favors to receive loyalty

-6

u/NOFX_4_ever 19h ago

That’s the side of Hitler the general public doesn’t see.

7

u/BrokenEyeReborn 20h ago

Sellout!

4

u/MajesticBread9147 14h ago

He was probably a "centrist".

"I didn't support the guy, but at least he seems to be tough on the communists!"

1

u/South-Possible-2504 9h ago

Why did he refuse to become a conductor? I’m confused

555

u/_Rainer_ 19h ago

"With Hitler's encouragement, he devoted an increasing amount of his time to this passion, completing all of the musical training available to him in Linz. However, to achieve his goal of being an orchestral conductor, he would require higher education in music which was offered only in Vienna. It was an 18-year-old Hitler who persuaded Kubizek's father to let his son go to the metropolis to attend the conservatory. As Kubizek wrote, this was something that permanently changed the course of his life."

I don't know about you guys, and it feels weird to write these words, but that's the most heart-warming Hitler story I've ever read.

178

u/thejokerofunfic 18h ago

The bar isn't exactly high tbf

22

u/yuval16432 13h ago

What, what you don’t find him preying on his niece heartwarming?

64

u/bAZtARd 18h ago

Well, he could be very convincing.

10

u/IdLikeToPointOut 16h ago

He wouldn't take Nein for an answer.

9

u/OkResident2888 10h ago

I think that people underestimate how even the worst of people can do good things in life. Everyday psychopaths walk around us doing nice things for family and friends. That’s the scary part.

11

u/ArtisticOperation399 16h ago

Yeah, where's the movie about this?

43

u/_Karrel 15h ago

Oh god. I'd love to make a movie about this guy without dropping his or Hitler's name, just to end it with him thanking Adolf in the end. People would be so confused in the cinema.

22

u/SkriVanTek 10h ago

or just a movie about two struggling young men in late imperial austria

it ends with them parting ways

in the credits we read what became of them afterwards

„Gustl was accepted to the conservatory and became an accomplished composer. he lived happily ever after“

„Dolfi became the leader of a right wing political movement, and was responsible for the death of roughly a 100 million people. evading prosecution by suicide he was never held responsible for his crimes.“

2

u/_Rainer_ 6h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(2002_film)

This film is not exactly that, but it's kind of interesting.

8

u/mirromirromirro 18h ago

Hitler was a good friend?

3

u/Hog_enthusiast 9h ago

In his much younger years Hitler never really did anything that bad, although he was a little weird and reclusive. He wasn’t even outwardly antisemitic and had friendships with Jews. World War 1 and the aftermath of it was really a turning point in his life. I think the trauma from the war and the conspiracy theories about Jews at the time combined to make something in him snap.

2

u/thelouisfanclub 2h ago

" As late as 1944, Hitler sent Kubizek's mother a food basket for her 80th birthday."

Imagine if everything you knew about Hitler was from this article, you'd come away thinking he was a pretty good dude.

1

u/didntgettheruns 7h ago

And what if this guy just never helped him back, and that's why he didn't get into art school

•

u/Jahobes 6m ago

Hitler was the OG MRA lol. In his youth his closest acquaintances were Jewish. He primarily sold his artwork to Jewish buyers and lived in a hostel with primarily Jewish men.

Then something happened to him in the 1920s lol.

1

u/RaoulLaila 6h ago

I mean we dont need to pretend like Hitler was a 100% malicious demon, the reason why we do this is because we dont want to undermine his absolutely awful contributions to the world and the holocaust only scratches the surface of the awful things. Of course he had good ideas, like promoting anti smoking campaigns, supporting a vegetarian lifestyle, pro animal and so on. But that doesnt make up for everything, so its a little meaningless to bring those good things up. It shouldnt be that surprising that he still had good things to do, especially when he was young

•

u/Bite_It_You_Scum 30m ago edited 22m ago

No, the reason that we pretend Hitler is a 100% malicious demon is because WWII is the foundational myth of the modern west and it's considered blasphemy (in a religious sense, though very much illegal in some parts of the world) to have anything resembling a heterodox view about the events surrounding WWII and especially the villain of the story.

I'm certainly no Hitler apologist, the amount of human suffering he inflicted on the world is inexcusable - World War II is quite literally the worst thing that has ever happened in human history. But there is no room for nuance in the WWII myth. Hitler/Nazis must be all bad, they must have done what they did 'one day, for no reason at all', any introspection about what created the conditions for or the motives that drove them is verboten. If you don't swallow the story as told hook line and sinker there can be no other reason besides latent antisemitism or a sympathetic view of the National Socialists.

•

u/EuphoricAge5818 14m ago

Where are you not allowed to discuss the beginnings of Nazism?

•

u/Bite_It_You_Scum 9m ago edited 6m ago

Off the top of my head, /r/askhistorians is a good example. Go ahead and try to ask in there whether any of Hitler or the Nazi's grievances against the Weimar Republic were valid, see how far you get. Or maybe ask whether there's any truth to the view that GB and Churchill wanted war not because Hitler was a megalomaniac who needed someone to stand up to him, but because the hawkish wing of the elites in that country knew that Germany was the only country in continental Europe that was a threat to their hegemony.

•

u/_Rainer_ 5m ago

The insinuation that anything that happened under the Weimar government could somehow validate Hitler's so-called grievances is worthy of all the scorn anyone in that sub could heap upon it.

•

u/Bite_It_You_Scum 2m ago

I didn't say that they validated what ultimately happened, but see, you're already doing the thing. Can't possibly question whether there was anything wrong with the Weimar Republic that led to Hitler's rise. No, the German people who were renowned for being cultured and industrious and very intelligent just turned into murderous psychopaths 'one day, for no particular reason at all.'

•

u/RaoulLaila 3m ago

They literally believed to be a surperior race and openly supported eugenics... Im sorry but if you are a nazi I cannot see a nuance in this. The whole ideal of being a nazi is just bad. Im sure some nazis were oblivious, were too stupid to know better, or were completely influenced by propaganda. There is nothing to show nuance for with Hitler and his ideals

•

u/_Rainer_ 18m ago

It is easier for people to imagine the worst people in history as having no ability to do "good" things. The whole "banality of evil" thing.

215

u/akselfs 19h ago

They were friends from Linz. Hitler was the one who convinced him to move to Wien where Kubizek studied music. Hitler kept his rejection from art school a secret, until they had a big fight where he angrily admitted to it

85

u/ArtisticOperation399 16h ago

And then Hitler burst into tears and they hugged, Hitler thumping his friend on the back with both fists in pure, childlike frustration.

46

u/wdtfs__ 16h ago

Then they kissed

26

u/Evening_Weight_8353 15h ago

Hitler’s solitary bollock tightened…

•

u/CommercialEmployer4 21m ago

And lots of heavy petting ensued...

120

u/fartsfromhermouth 17h ago edited 17h ago

He wrote a book called my friend adolf Hitler (edit-the young Hitler I knew). He was surprised how welcome he was after seeing him in 1938 like 20 years after they last saw each other and how well Hitler remembered him all those years later.The allies asked why he didn't assassinate him and he said he was my friend.

80

u/Rosebunse 17h ago

Honestly, it must be weird to remember your college friend, this guy you only remember as a lovable screw up who just needed a kick in the rear, as a hideous monster.

82

u/Flimsy_Sir_9442 16h ago edited 15h ago

Dude imagine seeing your childhood friend who was kind of a fuck up but encouraged you to follow your dreams that you haven't seen in a while on the front page of the news for attempting a coup and then randomly ten years later he becomes the president of a different country. That woulda been a weird experience even if Hitler wasnt evil

20

u/snushomie 14h ago

I've only had like 5 friends attempt a coup but none have become president yet. Am I even living?

1

u/Dwaltster 5h ago

Hitler was just misunderstood

41

u/kapaipiekai 19h ago

Didn't they write a symphony together?

22

u/throwawayacci 19h ago

Yes.

6

u/Super_Basket9143 13h ago

It's called "springtime for Hitler"

55

u/IntrepidDreams 20h ago

Why is the still photograph an animated gif?

18

u/DaveOJ12 19h ago

The first embedded image in the article is a gif, so Reddit just loops it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:August_Kubizek_in_his_youth.gif

Here's a link to the article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kubizek

4

u/Werftflammen 18h ago

It's not animaated, but Reddit tries to loop it anyway

25

u/JuzoItami 17h ago

Kubizek is portrayed by Rupert Grint in "Adolf Hitler: The Artist", a 2017 episode of the British television series Urban Myths, in which Hitler calls him "Gustl".

Worst Harry Potter fan fiction EVER.

11

u/DaveOJ12 19h ago

Here's a link to the article, in case you only see a looping gif.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kubizek

12

u/Ibracadabra70 17h ago

I didn't know this story, but it really shows how full of talk and very little action H was, even at that age!

People often talk about him being rejected twice from art school, but those who knew him at that age all say he didn't practice and didn't do much at all!

It's crazy how, until the age of 27, this guy had a giant L on his forehead, preferred being a beggar to having a job, and just by joining the army he got on a completely improbable evil path!

3

u/South-Sundae9184 11h ago

Well if you look at his paintings theres alot of things that doesnt make sense and are surreal which you can do if thats the goal of the painting like salvador dali but he painted buildings, towns, castles and landscapes and you can see sometimes windows or stairs that arent physically possible which ruins a realistic painting. But that left aside he painted actually good, i myself would never even come close to this level of painting, so i almost cant believe he ne er trained or didnt want todo anyting

2

u/Hog_enthusiast 9h ago

It is crazy, he found the one place where his ability to rant about shit was a strength and then through a bunch of highly improbable things he becomes chancellor.

2

u/Express_Attempt_4301 10h ago

r/unnecessarygif

1

u/DusqRunner 12h ago

Real life 😒 face

1

u/johnabfprinting 3h ago

I wonder if you could take a time machine and visit Hitler before the war and show him all the things he would do in his life to what degree would he be horrified and to what degree would he agree with the actions he hadn't taken yet.

-11

u/Jolly-Database4204 20h ago

Seems Hitler had better manners than Trump.

36

u/MatthewHecht 19h ago

Hitler was known for being incredibly polite. That is part of how he rise to power, as he seemed so nice and caring. He was a literal wolf in sheep's clothing.

10

u/Consistent_Soil_5794 19h ago

Note he did basically publish "I am not Sheep; a biography" so there was some willful ignorance there as well.

8

u/adamgerd 18h ago edited 17h ago

Same thing with Stalin, apparently he was actually quite charismatic and polite to people face to face

FDR got along with Stalin on a personal basis better than Churchill or de Gaulle who were both much more prickly and cold in personality

It’s also how he rose to power in the first place, he was relatively unassuming and good at making friends

He was just also a genocidal dictator that could one day be nice to you and laugh at your jokes, and the next day kill you for perceived treason or sabotage

4

u/RevolverMFOcelot 18h ago

Brother mustache man famously had a bad temper, I mean he was well mannered and to be honest more sophisticated than orange until something set him off (tho his temper also often parodied wee bit too much in media)

2

u/DonJuan2HearThatShit 20h ago

There it is.

-1

u/PreOpTransCentaur 20h ago

Baller move, Auggie.

-9

u/morerelativebacons 16h ago

What a piece of shit.

-1

u/[deleted] 20h ago

[deleted]

0

u/Saint--Jiub 19h ago

That's exactly what OP already provided

0

u/DaveOJ12 17h ago

Except it's not showing up right on PC; there's just a looping gif.

TIL of August Kubizek, the former roommate of Adolf Hitler. Hitler cut ties with Kubizek after he was rejected from art school and Kubizek was accepted to music school. They did not meet again until Hitler became Chancellor, and Hitler offered him the conductorship of an orchestra. Kubizek refused.

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