UNZ: 23-10-2025,
In his living room, studded with signed photographs of the rich and famous, Henk Visser, the arms collector and businessman, once told me about his wartime experience. Barely eighteen years old, he had joined the Dutch resistance, was captured by the Germans and sentenced to death. While he was awaiting his execution, his mother wrote a letter to Hitler, begging him not to have her son executed. Hitler granted the request and Henk Visser survived.
This simple anecdote serves to illustrate that Hitler was not the crazed, bloodthirsty monster he is made out to be in the prevailing narrative on the 1930s and 1940s. Such anecdotes compel us to reconsider the concepts and facts that constitute our frame of reference and that consequently determine and shape the way we think, talk and act. The most important events and historical figures are multifaceted, but for clarity’s sake have been narrowed down to one-dimensional proportions.
Whereas history has many protagonists who, to say the least, are controversial, none of them has been vilified to the extent to which Hitler has virtually become the devil incarnate. This may be due in large party because as the leader of Germany, Hitler fought the British Empire and the US. In other words, he was the enemy of the Anglosphere, which would explain the negative image imposed on the world during and especially after the war. More than one century earlier, Napoleon was another sworn enemy of the Anglosphere and one could say that before Hitler appeared on the stage,