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“The more I know people, the more I love dogs.”
-- Adolf Hitler, March 1945, a month before committing suicide
Well, not everyone can be a prince like Hitler. Yeah, it can be hard to keep one's faith in humanity. The world is so full of creeps and bullies, not to mention homicidal maniacs. Poor Hitler.
Robb Fritz has an interesting essay on Hitler and his dogs.
_ _ _
He was a romantic—a twisted, demonic romantic of the most dangerously delusional kind, but a romantic nevertheless. Even his brutality grew out of a belief in a racially and culturally pure Edenic state bearing no resemblance to reality. As such, he was a great lover of mystical signs, and he deeply appreciated the fact that his name Adolf translated from Old High German as “noble wolf.” Wolves were considered the purer manifestation of dogs’ original warrior nature, and German Shepherds were bred to be closer to their lupine source. Hitler chose to go by the nickname Wolf, which was the basis for the name of his massive military bunker in Poland, the Wolf’s Lair. As a dedicated self-mythologist who read personal meaning into everything, he took this connection to wolves, the “pure” dog, seriously.
[... Robb Fritz discusses the movie "Downfall" and the last days of Hitler.]
As the Soviets moved on Berlin in April 1945 and the inevitable end approached, Hitler stationed himself with Eva Braun and his central staff in the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. The film Downfall depicts Hitler’s last ten days in depressingly gruesome detail. The film, or at least the four minutes of the film in which Hitler goes into a yelling frenzy upon learning that the Soviets have reached Berlin and that the war is truly lost, has yielded YouTube comic gold in parodies that change the subtitles to depict Hitler despairing over various setbacks in contemporary life. In fact, my first experience of Downfall was watching one of these videos in which Hitler reacts explosively to the possible passage of SOPA.
Hitler is played by Bruno Ganz in an almost miraculously coherent performance that somehow holds all of the contradictions that Hitler contained—kind one second and ranting the next, warm then suddenly demonically ruthless, calculating then completely unhinged. It was the first time—and nearly 60 years after the war—that a German-speaking actor had depicted Hitler, and Ganz spend four months intensely researching Hitler before playing the part.
[...]
The movie itself raised a great deal of concern on its release, voiced most straightforwardly by the tabloid Bild: “Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?” Filmmaker Wim Wenders suggested that the filmmakers consulted closely with historians for the sole purpose of inoculating themselves from criticism, and suggested that the film somehow defanged Hitler, even somehow glorified him. I can honestly say this was not the film’s effect on me. Yes, Hitler did gain complexity and even warmth from the film, but no more complexity than I’d gathered from reading his biography. Regardless, I was left as mystified and horrified by the evils he’d unleashed on the world as I’d ever been before. If anything, knowing that he was a far more complex individual than the ranting cartoon of evil I’d grown up with made this evil darker, more mysterious and more real.
As the film progresses, Hitler and Eva Braun begin to make repeated references to their impending suicides in tones more surreally blasé than resigned, and Hitler insists that they be thoroughly cremated, dreading the thought of being turned into an exhibit by the Russians. Near the end he doubted that the cyanide he’d been given by the SS was real, and forced his dog handler Fritz Tornow to test the poison on Blondi, an act that horrified Tornow. The cyanide immediately killed her, leaving Hitler distraught. The next day, on April 30th, after Eva had killed herself with cyanide and Hitler had killed himself by shooting himself through the temple, Tornow was ordered to shoot the puppies that Blondi had given birth to a month earlier as well as Eva Braun’s Scottish Terriers, Blondi’s companion Bella and Tornow’s own dachshund. In 2006, Erna Flegel, a German Red Cross nurse stationed in the bunker at the time, rather cruelly observed that there was more grief over Blondi’s death than that of Eva Braun.
This string of deaths grows mind-numbing, until one comes to the unspeakable evil which occurred the next day on May 1st, when Magda Goebbels would first drug all five of her children that were living in the bunker, and then, when they were asleep, kill them with cyanide, after which she and Josef Goebbels took their own lives. It was in this final onslaught of death—countless suicides and the murder of beloved pets and innocent children—that the Third Reich would come to its close.
-- Robb Fritz at McSweeneys.net
_ _ _
We also have a post that shows a striking and somewhat amusing scene between Hitler and his dog Blondi: The Stuffenberg Plot.
-- Adolf Hitler, March 1945, a month before committing suicide
Well, not everyone can be a prince like Hitler. Yeah, it can be hard to keep one's faith in humanity. The world is so full of creeps and bullies, not to mention homicidal maniacs. Poor Hitler.
Robb Fritz has an interesting essay on Hitler and his dogs.
_ _ _
He was a romantic—a twisted, demonic romantic of the most dangerously delusional kind, but a romantic nevertheless. Even his brutality grew out of a belief in a racially and culturally pure Edenic state bearing no resemblance to reality. As such, he was a great lover of mystical signs, and he deeply appreciated the fact that his name Adolf translated from Old High German as “noble wolf.” Wolves were considered the purer manifestation of dogs’ original warrior nature, and German Shepherds were bred to be closer to their lupine source. Hitler chose to go by the nickname Wolf, which was the basis for the name of his massive military bunker in Poland, the Wolf’s Lair. As a dedicated self-mythologist who read personal meaning into everything, he took this connection to wolves, the “pure” dog, seriously.
[... Robb Fritz discusses the movie "Downfall" and the last days of Hitler.]
As the Soviets moved on Berlin in April 1945 and the inevitable end approached, Hitler stationed himself with Eva Braun and his central staff in the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. The film Downfall depicts Hitler’s last ten days in depressingly gruesome detail. The film, or at least the four minutes of the film in which Hitler goes into a yelling frenzy upon learning that the Soviets have reached Berlin and that the war is truly lost, has yielded YouTube comic gold in parodies that change the subtitles to depict Hitler despairing over various setbacks in contemporary life. In fact, my first experience of Downfall was watching one of these videos in which Hitler reacts explosively to the possible passage of SOPA.
Hitler is played by Bruno Ganz in an almost miraculously coherent performance that somehow holds all of the contradictions that Hitler contained—kind one second and ranting the next, warm then suddenly demonically ruthless, calculating then completely unhinged. It was the first time—and nearly 60 years after the war—that a German-speaking actor had depicted Hitler, and Ganz spend four months intensely researching Hitler before playing the part.
[...]
The movie itself raised a great deal of concern on its release, voiced most straightforwardly by the tabloid Bild: “Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?” Filmmaker Wim Wenders suggested that the filmmakers consulted closely with historians for the sole purpose of inoculating themselves from criticism, and suggested that the film somehow defanged Hitler, even somehow glorified him. I can honestly say this was not the film’s effect on me. Yes, Hitler did gain complexity and even warmth from the film, but no more complexity than I’d gathered from reading his biography. Regardless, I was left as mystified and horrified by the evils he’d unleashed on the world as I’d ever been before. If anything, knowing that he was a far more complex individual than the ranting cartoon of evil I’d grown up with made this evil darker, more mysterious and more real.
As the film progresses, Hitler and Eva Braun begin to make repeated references to their impending suicides in tones more surreally blasé than resigned, and Hitler insists that they be thoroughly cremated, dreading the thought of being turned into an exhibit by the Russians. Near the end he doubted that the cyanide he’d been given by the SS was real, and forced his dog handler Fritz Tornow to test the poison on Blondi, an act that horrified Tornow. The cyanide immediately killed her, leaving Hitler distraught. The next day, on April 30th, after Eva had killed herself with cyanide and Hitler had killed himself by shooting himself through the temple, Tornow was ordered to shoot the puppies that Blondi had given birth to a month earlier as well as Eva Braun’s Scottish Terriers, Blondi’s companion Bella and Tornow’s own dachshund. In 2006, Erna Flegel, a German Red Cross nurse stationed in the bunker at the time, rather cruelly observed that there was more grief over Blondi’s death than that of Eva Braun.
This string of deaths grows mind-numbing, until one comes to the unspeakable evil which occurred the next day on May 1st, when Magda Goebbels would first drug all five of her children that were living in the bunker, and then, when they were asleep, kill them with cyanide, after which she and Josef Goebbels took their own lives. It was in this final onslaught of death—countless suicides and the murder of beloved pets and innocent children—that the Third Reich would come to its close.
-- Robb Fritz at McSweeneys.net
_ _ _
We also have a post that shows a striking and somewhat amusing scene between Hitler and his dog Blondi: The Stuffenberg Plot.
