User:Generaloberst
Most people who I talked with who disliked Hitler, always mention he was "stupid" or lacked intellectual capabilities. This is a response to "those people".
This passage was taken from SS officer Leon Degrelle's uncompleted multivolume series of the life and legacy of Adolf Hitler "Degrelle's Hitler: Born at Versallies".
"Hitler was self-taught and made no attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremmiting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics. I don't think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book everyday, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work's interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision... Even at the height of the war. His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare and Goethe; and of analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel. He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer... from memory. And for a long time carried a pocket edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about willpower. His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He sprent hunderds of hours studying the works of Tcitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz and empire builders such as Bismarck. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the master-pieces of Homar, Sophacles, Horace, Void, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary. His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.
The universality of Hitler's knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual miocrity; or than Pierre Laval, with his mere cursory knowledge of history or than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels."
Adolf Hitler (20 april 1889 - 30 april 1945)
