The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer

Rating:
Summary: The making of evil
Review: What are the causes of evil? Why do some people commit
evil acts? What is evil? Does evil always carry
within itself its own destruction?

These are eternal questions. And questions that we as
a society must be able to answer, if we are ever to see
an improvement of the human condition.

The rise and fall of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler is
a case story of evil. But all too often the intricacies of WW2 battles and details of Holocaust crimes overshadows the psychology of the people and leaders involved in this the most epic of wars.
With his new book David Lewis tries to correct this by giving
us the psychology of the man who was to be known as the Fuhrer.
Raised in a family with a distant and unloving father,
the young man becomes an orphan after having watched his mother die in agony. Hitler then travelles to Vienna where he soon
joins the ranks of the down and out. Sees his artistic dreams
squashed and eventually welcomes war as a salvation
from the hell he finds himself engulfed in.

All of this we have heard before -
surely the seeds of evil are there, but still there is a mystery:
In ww1 Hitler never rises above the rank of corporal and never
shows any leadership potential. Then after ww1 the former outcast suddenly has a purpose in life and an iron will to make all his dreams come true. Before the war he is without the will
to make anything happen except being down and
out in Vienna on his own. After the war he eventually rises to the position of absolute ruler of Germany.

Surely ww1 did something to Adolf Hitler. But
this books offers more - the tantalizing new theory that the psychopathology of post ww1 Adolf Hitler was also the result of psychiatric treatment for hysterical blindness gone horriblely wrong. That the doctor who was supposed to cure Hitler for his illness after (the supposed) gas attack, actually pushed him further in the direction of megalomania and world conquest.

I suppose the theory is still speculation, and I am not sure
that it actually adds that much to the picture of the causes of evil that we have already.
But the book makes it plausible that evil was not cured by doctor, but made worse by a doctor.
Thats pretty stunning stuff.

-Simon