finally gotten around to reading a bit of Hitler's War tbh
he was too innocent for this world lads
The sheer complexity of that character is evident from a comparison of
his brutality in some respects with his almost maudlin sentimentality and
stubborn adherence to military conventions that others had long abandoned.
We find him cold bloodedly ordering a hundred hostages executed for every
German occupation soldier killed; dictating the massacre of Italian officers
who had turned their weapons against German troops in ; ordering
the liquidation of Red Army commissars, Allied commando troops, and
captured Allied aircrews; in he announced that the male populations
of Stalingrad and Leningrad were to be exterminated. He justified all these
orders by the expediencies of war. Yet the same Hitler indignantly exclaimed,
in the last week of his life, that Soviet tanks were flying the Nazi swastika as
a ruse during street fighting in Berlin, and he flatly forbade his Wehrmacht
to violate flag rules. He had opposed every suggestion for the use of poison
gases, as that would violate the Geneva Protocol; at that time Germany
alone had manufactured the potentially war winning lethal nerve gases Sarin
and Tabun. In an age in which the governments of the democracies attempted,
engineered, or condoned the assassinations, successfully or otherwise, of
the inconvenient* – from General Sikorski, Admiral Darlan, Field Marshal
Rommel, and King Boris of Bulgaria to Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba,
and Salvador Allende – we learn that Hitler, the world’s most unscrupulous
dictator, not only never resorted to the assassination of foreign opponents
but flatly forbade his Abwehr to attempt it. In particular he rejected Admiral
Canaris’s plans to assassinate the Red Army General Staff.