Word: hitler
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...Hitler has gone down in history as the personification of evil, Mussolini has won his own immortality as the archetypal thug. But the founder of Fascism was a complex thug who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fearsome breaker of the peace, like his neighbor to the north, or a geopolitical showman, the P.T. Barnum of international politics. Judging from Denis Mack Smith's study, by far the more solid and persuasive of these two new biographies, the Duce (chief) was a bit of both...
Roger Rosenblatt's excellent piece on the Anglo-American relationship does, however, perpetuate a myth. America did not "save England's neck." This is particularly true of World War II. For well over two years America slept while Britain held Hitler's forces at bay. By the time the U.S. awakened, the Battle of Britain had been...
...history as in popular art, the general taste runs to horror shows rather than tragedy. How else explain the enduring fascination with Hitler's Germany and the continuing lack of interest in Stalin's Soviet Union? In the atrocity sweepstakes, Hitler runs a distant second to Stalin, who sanctioned the deaths of 20 million to 50 million of his countrymen. Nor can Nazism, a brutally simple triumph of the goons, touch the tragic complexities of Stalinism-a political torch fanned by the world's idealists while one avuncular pipe smoker in Moscow was wielding...
...charm. At an early Nazi reception, Speer's wife (Blythe Danner) surveys the panoply and calls it "a dress rehearsal for disaster." It was no dress rehearsal; it was a superproduction of the real thing, and the main characters acted as if they were in their own movie. Hitler (Derek Jacobi) does malicious impersonations of Mussolini and Chamberlain; he sits raptly before a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza; he watches himself at a filmed rally and mouths the Führer's words. He was both the big star and his biggest fan. And Speer (Rutger Hauer)-the young...
...elegant tone. Gielgud is haughtily endearing, a stiff-collared gentleman who speaks in the cadences of Schiller and dreams in the images of Goethe. Robert Vaughn displays a flinty decency as Field Marshal Milch, who probes surgically for Speer's conscience, or at least his common sense. As Hitler, Jacobi spellbinds-first with the ingratiating gifts of the born orator, then with capricious viciousness. Finally, as the cracked shell of a dictator, he feebly insists that "it is easy for me to end my life." It would indeed have been, if Hitler could have guessed how his malignant legend...