The Hitler home movies: how Eva Braun documented the dictator's private life

[Bucky]

4. I totally agree. I understand Hitler was actually really fond of children, liked to play with them.

In part, he was fascinated by their innocence. I think also in part he probably had an emotional inability to bond with equals. People who dismiss him as a madman tend to overlook the quite rational way he went about turning his neuroses into public policy. Until the mid-30s, most people warning the world about Hitler were considered extremists. The world saw him as an exemplar of the German common man, a working class cure for the power-crazed culture of the stuck up Junkers who started The World War. I'm reading a book about FDR's first ambassador to Germany right now, Garden of the Beasts. Most of the American diplomatic corps were certain that, now that Hitler was in power in 1933, he'd become more responsible and start to curtail the efforts of his rank and file National Socialist followers to attack the Jews. More than a couple of the quotes include comments about how the Jews were kinda asking for it for the role they'd played in harming the German economy--I shit you not.