• jj4211@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf

    12% had the rather less ambiguous responses of ‘he was at least as good as he was bad’. While 12% of folks were of the maybe defensible technicality of ‘well, even the worst person occasionally will do the right thing’, another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.

      i’d lean towards “i don’t know enough about the facts to make a definitive statement”

      public education isn’t great and even good public education rarely dives deeply in the life of Adolf Hitler beyond the obvious “he was a megalomaniac dictator who killed Jews and wanted to take over the world”

      Hitler became Hitler because of his life experiences. He served in the German military during WW1, he was homeless in Vienna, he grew up poor with a sick mother. These events, along with the movements of the then-current cultural zietgiest, radicalized him in certain directions. It’s a complex story that is hard to break down into simplistic moral platitudes of “good person” or “bad person”