Was Hitler the most evil, demagogic, psychopathic leader of any nation that there has ever been?
Was he after world domination of every single country in the world?
Or, did he want Germany to be the new superpower of the 1940s to take over from the British Empire and to rival the USA?
Or, like Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914 who, it seems, wanted German hegemony in Europe, is that what Hitler also wanted?
Was he wanting revenge for the surprise defeat of Germany in 1918? A Germany that had come close to victory in the World War 1914-18, more than once and, that had defeated Russia in 1917.
Was he wanting Germany to become a Great Military Power, like France, UK and like USA, as AJP Taylor argued in 'The Origins of the Second World War'?
We now use Hitler as the benchmark to measure if any other of our present day enemies measure up to his pure evil. For example, the Prince of Wales in May 2014 after Putin had taken back Crimea that had been given by Khrushchev to Ukraine, in 1954. Saddam Hussein was also likened to Hitler to justify his removal from power by the West in 2003.
Yet, it was the British who were the first to use concentration camps and not Hitler. Over 20,000 Boer women and children were killed by neglect and/or deliberate policy by the British in concentration camps. And this was well before even the 1914-18 war in Europe.
It was the British who killed many more Germans than they did us, it seems, between 1939 and 1945. Although, as we know, they killed millions of Jews, gypsies and other minorities in Germany. Yet we, the Christian, democratic West after our success in 1945, carried on with the killing of unknown numbers but perhaps millions in far off countries of which we knew little. Justified as fighting Communism, then militant, extremist Muslims to this day.
It was Churchill who knew about the concentration camps of the Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Yet, even when he was Prime Minister, he failed to order the precision targeting of the rail lines to the camps. Precision targeting of dams; yes. Revenge, saturation, fire bombing of people's homes in the closing months of the war; yes. Saving the millions in the minority groups of Germans; no.
According to the 'Guardian' spread in February 2014, it was us Brits who waged war for every single year over the last one hundred years in many countries around the world. Finally, in 2015, we may be content to lay down our weapons for the first time since 1914. Nearly 17,000 of our men and women in the armed forces were killed since 1945 but, that number must be multiplied by an unknown figure to get the numbers they killed around the world.
If Hitler was the most evil leader of any nation in the history of the world, then we have to say that all individual Germans were just as evil in carrying out his orders from 1933 to 1945. Perhaps, that was how we justified the indiscriminate mass slaughter of German civilians and children in the closing months of the war, even when our victory was assured. Revenge is sweet for Christians, Muslims and Jews - and, for us all. We called our enemies evil then and, in recent years and today, we call them Communists, terrorists and Muslim radicals and extremists.
Since then, peace followed by co-operation and union between the countries of Europe has seen less desire to participate in the wars of the UK and the USA. Only, perhaps, have those European countries membership of NATO compelled them to send troops in this century's Middle Eastern wars that had been started by the United States of Aggression, seconded by the UK ( UK = united killers with the USA?).
