I'm not sure how much I buy into this idea of the Hitler Myth. While it does make sense that he was a very charismatic individual who managed to convince the German public that the Nazi party and its ideals, I'm still not sure how much of that actually had to do with this idea of him as a person who was destined for "greatness". I feel like a lot of this has to do with his reputation after his death. I remember in class, we talked about how many politicians (including American presidents) have this mythical ideal attached to their time in history, but in part due to the fact that the discussion ended up naming pretty much every major president of the last 100 years (and could've easily gone beyond that) I'm left wondering how much of the myth is created after they've left their office. Hitler definitely needed, and achieved, massive amounts of popular support among the German people. That said, I feel like Hitler is in a lot of ways an example of someone who managed to be in the right spot at the right time. He was definitely somewhat of a revolutionary before his rise to power and WW2, but was essentially passed off as being yet another person in a society that was crying out for some sort of leadership, and his radical beliefs were just viewed as that. Still, when I read everything I do about the period under Nazi Germany, I'm left feeling like his mythical persona is being blown up for the sake of explaining why someone was able to lead a country to pursue genocide.

Post 10/5 -10/11

Reading the chapter in Germans into Nazis dealing with the events of November of 1918, I find the role of the Freikorps to be especially fascinating. With the sheer influx of military personel returning after the War, it seems obvious that they would eventually band together, but I never would have thought that they would be placed into anti-leftist groups. Still, it does make sense considering the fact that the German government had always used the Communists as one of the bigger scapegoats, and with the worker's revolt and other social groups rising to prominance it's easy to see how the government would have looked for some way to combat that. It does seem like this spelled the end for yet another German revolution, as the revolutionaries had to shift their positions now that they were facing some sort of armed resistance. At the end, it seems like the Freikorps helped to keep the German public fractured after the failings of Weimar.

Post 9/28 - 10/4

During the discussions and lectures about World War I, there was one thing I couldn't stop thinking was "How could the Germans be so stupid?" From the beginning it seems like they were destined to lose the war, mostly due to their inability to plan correctly. The Schlieffen Plan in particular is kind of stunning in how shortsighted it was, requiring a speedy defeat of the French and a lack of participation by the British. That said, I do feel like the overconfidence has a very logical explanation, the Germans increase in industrial and economic power made them feel like they were above the rest of Europe. It seems that military and industrial technology had grown faster than anyone expected, and they were left to fight a war using what was then high-tech equipment, but without a strategy that could take advantage of these advances. Then, you've got the German navy, which was probably an even bigger failure than the Schileffen plan due to its inability to do much of anything. While I'd already known that there was still a Prussian influence in Germany during this time, due to the lands that had been Prussia making up the majority of the Germanic Empire, Germany's failures in WW1 seem to be directly due to this influence. Still, I'm left wondering how anyone involved thought this could be a good idea, unless they were so blinded by Germanic pride that they couldn't imagine anything less than a total victory.