“Humanizing” Hitler is disrespectful

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By: Gabi Herman

There's a famous photograph of Adolf Hitler walking along a path, hand in hand with a little girl. The year was 1936. It was years into his power, and Germany was hosting the Summer Olympics. Anti-Semitic posters were temporarily removed, as Berlin was the stage for Nazi Germany to showcase its crowning achievements as a respectable member of the international community. Hitler is posing with the daughter of a good friend, Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda.

Last week was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the picture showed up everywhere I looked online. The comments are unsettling: “Look! It's Hitler with a child!” or “Hitler loved dogs and art, you know. He was a vegetarian!” Hitler is being used as an example of the complexity of humankind, of the moral grey. Apparently, Hitler is just a misunderstood anti-hero. On the day of remembrance of one of the largest genocides in human history, I was confronted with the call to “stop dehumanizing Hitler!”

One of my favourite childhood authors shared the picture. She wrote about how much can be learned from an enigma like Adolf Hitler, and how important it is to learn that monsters are people as well. To paraphrase: “Here is Adolf Hitler, a valuable and educational thought experiment!”

Hitler killed six million of my people, the Jews. He killed five million more, among them disabled people, mentally ill people, Romani people, people of colour, and homosexuals. My grandmother still has nightmares about the time she spent hiding in cellars from Nazis. Even if we wanted to, Jews could not forget the effects of the Holocaust. We lost most of a language, Yiddish, and most of Yiddish's vibrant culture. The worldwide Jewish population is still more than a million short of what it was before World War II.

What lessons can a staged picture with the daughter of his greatest ally in genocide teach us? Certainly not that Hitler was anything approaching a good man. He might have liked dogs, but Hitler was not a likable antagonist. He was a real man who was responsible for the deaths of millions. Nothing moral can be learned from analyzing Hitler like a complicated character in literature class. Using him to show off your own deep-thinking abilities or to illustrate an abstract concept about human nature is self-indulgent and insensitive. Every reminder of what happened still hurts Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and this one isn't even useful. Have some respect.

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