I’ve always said that the American Left got more milage out of Hitler than ever did the Afrika Corps. Where the hell would American liberals be without Hitler? Making Der Führer the ultimate villain served to soften Stalin’s image.

Hitler is now lodging at Madame Tussauds in Berlin. Germans born after Hitler’s death will, no doubt, be just as fascinated with Der Führer as the rest of the world seems to be.

Hitler’s fame has survived 63 years after his departure. As fame goes that’s scarcely a blink in historical time. Still, it’s long enough to ask if it will be a fame lasting as long as Alexander the Great’s, Julius Caesar’s, Genghis Khan’s, or even Napoleon’s?

I suspect that Hitler’s name will endure as long as someone is making a buck off him. Who would know Caesar or Alexander without teachers paid to teach “history” along with authors making money writing about long-dead conquerors?

Were I calling the shots at Madame Tussauds, I would have put Joseph Goebbels in the same exhibit with Hitler. Goebbels is the father of modern propaganda techniques. Hitler and Goebbels were so inseparable in life that Goebbels killed himself, and his wife and children, because he did not want to live in a world without Hitler in it.

Goebbels’ suicide was an unavoidable misfortune brought on by the Allied victory. Had he lived in captivity beyond the end of WW II mankind would have learned the truth about how, and why, Nazi Germany functioned in its brief life span. In the same vain, the world learned nothing of value from all of the executed Nazis combined because each one was a piece of the Nazi puzzle.

To this day Hitler himself remains a piece of the puzzle. Goebbels was neither soldier nor politician nor spiritual leader, but he was the only Nazi positioned to connect all of the puzzle’s pieces for the historical record. To use a poor analogy, Goebbels was Charles Foster Kane; he was the only who knew what “Rosebud” meant.

Nowadays, so-called “good propaganda” generates more lasting evil than did all of the specifics Hitler prescribed during his lifetime. Now ask why public purse intellectuals have not examined the professional relationship between Hitler and Goebbels in more detail? Answer: Governments are afraid of what the public will learn about today’s propaganda machinery.

Click on the following link if you want to see some pictures of the wax Hitler. After the Website opens up go over to the right side of the screen and you’ll see a small picture of the Hitler exhibit. Click on the legend below the picture: In pictures: Back in the bunker. That site supplies photos that will save Hitlerphiles the cost of a trip to Berlin.

Hitler returns to Berlin, worried, downtrodden, under guard - and made of wax | World news | The Guardian

Here’s the article containing details about Der Führer’s resurrection in wax:

Hitler returns to Berlin, worried, downtrodden, under guard - and made of wax
Kate Connolly in Berlin
The Guardian,
Friday July 4, 2008

He sits hunched over his desk, one leg hooked under his chair, gazing at a pink file with the
concern of a businessman who has realised the books are looking bad. Encased in a concrete
bunker beneath Berlin, he hears the thud of bombs falling. Defeat is nigh for Adolf Hitler, who
has been rendered in wax for a German branch of Madame Tussauds.

"Dictator Returns to the Capital," declared the Frankfurter Allgemeine, in a tongue-in-cheek
appraisal of the controversial figure, which was previewed yesterday. "He left with a bang,
followed by a small fire in the garden of the Reichs chancellery ... he returns to Berlin as a mere
representation," the paper said.

In the London Tussauds, it is a Hitler in fighting spirit who is on display, punching his fist in the
air as Winston Churchill looks on. But such as pose was out of the question at the Berlin
museum, a stone's throw from Hitler's bunker and near the site of the Holocaust memorial. "Of
course we could not show him triumphant," said the exhibition's director Susanne Keller. "Not in
Germany."

But answering critics who say he should not be shown at all, she said: "He's part of German
history. It would look a bit strange if he wasn't here."

As in London, the curators had wanted to stand Hitler opposite Churchill - arch enemies
eyeballing each other. But instead, after heated debate, Hitler has been placed in a corner of his
own. It makes it seem as if he's been put on a pedestal.

The rules are also stricter. While visitors can stroke Churchill's bald pate, Hitler is cordoned off
by a rope and guards who will be in place to stop anyone taking souvenir snapshots.

Nearby hangs a plaque informing visitors that while Tussauds "actively encourages our guests to
touch and interact with our figures ... in this case we would ask that to avoid insult to other
guests and out of respect for the millions of people who died during the second world war, you
refrain from ... attempting to 'pose' alongside Hitler's figure".

Despite Keller saying "we would hate for him to become the centre of attention", inevitably once
the doors to the exhibition were open, the pack of journalists had only one wax figure in mind.
Streaming past Bismarck, Marx, and the Nazi resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, accompanied by
the alternate strains of cabaret and heavy and mournful orchestral tones, they found the man they
were looking for, flanked by a map of Europe on one side and a picture of a bombed-out
Reichstag on the other.

Lea Rosh, one of the people behind the Holocaust memorial, warned against turning the
"analysis of history" into entertainment and commercialism, while the Central Council of Jews
said that Hitler should be allowed to appear, but only accompanied by a commentary.

The 75 figures in the exhibition were chosen by the German public, with German visitors to
London's Tussauds polled, along with people on the streets of German cities. The figures, spread
over two floors, include the former Wimbledon champion Boris Becker, Albert Einstein,
Beethoven, Bach, Pope Benedict, Angela Merkel, Marlene Dietrich and an array of writers,
artists and TV personalities.

But it has not gone unnoticed that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the man often described
as Germany's greatest hero for his attempts to blow up Hitler, is mentioned only as a footnote in
a wall display. "Clearly not enough people voted for him," Keller said.

The line-up has contributed to a long-running debate about what it means to be German, decades
after the end of the second world war.

Daniel Erk, author of a regular "Hitler blog" in the leftwing Taz newspaper, argues that
rendering Hitler in wax only helps "to prevail the horror and fascination" which surrounds him
still. He argues Germans should take a cue from the Chapman brothers' current London
exhibition, If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be, in which Hitler's oil paintings
have been disfigured with rainbows and stars.

"It's increased the value of the paintings six-fold," he says. "Such a full on confrontation is the
way to go ... but Germany is not even close to showing such a lack of respect."

__________________

Flanders

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refrain, withdraw and abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible. Eric Hoffer