I'd quite like to spend an evening with AH.  I some ways he was obviously laughable and a cretin, in others he was plausibly a genius and entirely pragmatic.  A German girl, a friend of mine in Freiburg, said, 'I can't believe the brutality of the Nazis.'  But then there is still brutality, but not of that order in Western Europe anymore.  I think it stems from WW1, where tactics were so far behind weapons.  Generals had a mentality formed in a Napoleonic style of warfare, while their men were fighting with weapons suited to modern warfare, the Gatling gun and heavier artillery.  Remember, our ideas, our mentalities, haven't been changed by 4 years of trench warfare, some of the most murderous carnage in human history.  AH, however much he was swept forward on war hysteria, was not responsible for that conflict, and out of that brutalisation of souls, came WW2.   Ah was antipathetic to the! traditional, the 'natural' rulers - in other words, the Prussian Junkers, the Vons, who wanted an authoritarian regime and exclusion of the masses, but not Hitler - the Bohemian Corporal.  Hitler once said - 'they call us barbarians, well we are proud to be called barbarians.'  Now the traditional ruling classes, such as the King of the Belgiums, had committed atrocities on a larger scale than Hitler - but these are rarely mentioned publicly.  Historians, the historians employed as academics in our universities, largely focus on the crimes of Hitler and Stalin - who both ruled countries for tiny time scales compared to the traditional ruling elites of Europe.  Hitler destroyed the Europe he had been born into - the Europe of Metternich, the Europe of Napoleon, the Europe of the Congress of Europe.  I see him as a symptom rather than a problematic in his right.  He was a symptom of the deep seated complacency and hypocrisy of the Western Eu! ropean ruling classes, and their super-optimistic belief in progress which foundered in the mud at the Somme, Verdun and Ypres.