Happy F*cking Anniversary, Adolf

It's the 80th anniversary of the one good thing he did

He was such a cowardly piece of shit.

Hitler wouldn’t be taken alive by the Soviets, because he knew such captivity would be the opposite of fun, but he kept on waiting until the last possible moment, perhaps imagining some possible deliverance from his self-inflicted doom after inflicting horrors and doom on so many millions of others. With the Red Army a mere 500 meters from the Reich Chancellery where he was holed up, he did one good thing: Hitler killed Hitler. The day before he’d been informed of his pal Mussolini being summarily executed by Italian resistance fighters, his body hung then upside down. Asshole Adolf could not abide what the Soviets would do to him or his corpse, and so on April 30, 1945, exactly eight decades ago, he shot himself in the head. Showing that members of a fascist cult are frequently loyal to the end, his final wishes were fulfilled by his minions. They took his body and that of his brand-new wife Eva Braun and placed them into a bomb crater in the garden, soaked them in fuel, and burnt their vile meat sacks to ash. Naught but dental bridges remained, which led to conspiracy fantasies of him not having died but rather escaped, perhaps to live in South America.

That didn’t happen. The cowardly fucker died in that bunker.

He wasn’t always a coward, and I don’t say this to shine a single photon of positive light on the genocidal asswipe. In the First World War, a dorky, non-smoking, non-drinking, virginal Adolf fought bravely on the Western Front, receiving both the Second Class and First Class Iron Cross. As the war turned against Germany and he saw his friends die, Hitler heard rumors Jews were sabotaging the German war effort. This was blatantly false, as German Jews were fighting for their country like everyone else. At the time of Germany’s surrender, Hitler was in hospital, having been temporarily blinded in a gas attack. When he heard the news of defeat, he was distraught and furious at his nation’s sacrifice having been for nothing. He saw the only explanation for the German loss as a “stab in the back” by Jews, and he vowed vengeance.

Just as the 900-plus pages of the Project 2025 manifesto let voters know Trump’s intentions, Hitler made no secret of his leadership plans with the publication of Mein Kampf in 1925. The over seventeen million Germans who voted for him in the 1933 election couldn’t plead ignorance of the evil he was about to unleash. The Nazis made Germany’s racism official state policy in 1935 with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, which also targeted the Romani people for oppression. The war in Europe began in the late summer of 1939 with the invasion of Poland. In early 1942 a group of high-ranking Nazis got together in a Berlin suburb to devise their answer to that “Jewish Question” of what to do with them. Two hours later they called for brandy and cigars to celebrate their “Final Solution.” By this time, only a quarter million Jews remained in Germany, most having either fled or been exiled. Prior to this, Nazis had already been murdering Jews throughout Europe, but their methods were haphazard. The Final Solution was about industrializing the process to make it more efficient, and far more lethal.

Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, more than a third of all Jews living at the time, and their numbers have yet to recover. There are fewer Jewish people alive today than before the Second World War. Additionally, the Holocaust took the lives of about half a million Romani, over a quarter million people with disabilities, and thousands of members of the LGBTQ+ community. For centuries Europeans looked down on other races as savages, barbarians, uncivilized, but the Holocaust revealed the depths of such hypocrisy. It was committed by a people who had been a center of the Enlightenment living in the most advanced and industrialized of nations. The Holocaust was strategic, methodical, bureaucratic, and massive in scope. How could this crime be committed by such a people? Alas, all humans are capable of atrocities. Mass annihilation can be committed by any people under the “right” circumstances, and it was.

It’s happening right now in various parts of the world, and it can happen where you live too. Hopefully an entire world doesn’t have to once again go to war to bring down this generation of fascist leaders.

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