WAPO article suggests Hitler wasn’t evil, just sad victim of his strict father, or an Oedipus complex?

The Washington Post’s Michael Rosenwald last week gave the antisemitic crowd something to admire, when he set the stage for yesterday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day by wondering:

The questions have been asked again and again. Was it because of his (Hitler’s) father? Was it because a Jewish doctor couldn’t save his mother? Was there a Freudian thing that set this all off?

Rosenwald’s epistle relies on testimony by Paula Hitler, Adolf’s sister, and the works of historians Ian Kershaw and John Toland. The Washington Post author paints a picture of Hitler as an oppressed little boy, misunderstood by everyone but mommy:

“He was a scrubby little rogue,” Paula said of her brother, “and all attempts of his father to thrash him for his rudeness…were in vain.”

But their mother was always there after the beatings to caress him and bathe him in kindness. “My mother,” Paula said, “was a very soft and tender person, the compensatory element between the almost too harsh father.”

About 30 million humans were killed by Hitler’s WW2, including the six million Jews honored yesterday. Rosenwald doesn’t mention the Holocaust in the article.

Hitler’s father struggled to keep the boy in line with discipline. His father died when he was 14, and nobody tried to control the teenager, but just the opposite. Rosenwald writes:

In 1905, when he was 16, he faked an illness “to persuade his mother that he was not fit to continue school and gladly put his schooling behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out,” the historian Ian Kershaw wrote in “Hitler: A Biography.” “Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother.”

Klara, her sister Johanna, and Paula all enabled Adolf’s slothful existence, looking “after all his needs, to wash, clean, and cook for him,” Kershaw wrote.

If he sounds like a spoiled brat…

Adolf fantasized about becoming a musician and artist. Klara bought him a grand piano. He drew and painted. He wrote poetry. At night, he went to the theater, often with his mother. He bought her a ticket every year for her birthday.

“It was little wonder,” Kershaw wrote, “that Hitler came to refer to this period as ‘the happiest days which seemed to me almost like a beautiful dream.’”

Rosenwald apparently believes in the old saying: some of my best friends are Jews”:

With pain in her breast, she went to see the family doctor, Eduard Bloch, who was Jewish. In 1907, he diagnosed Klara with breast cancer…

Suddenly, Rosenwald writes, Hitler was reformed:

Klara slept in the kitchen, the warmest part of the apartment, so he slept there too. Klara’s sickness seemed to center her son. His cross, disobedient ways seemingly vanished. “He would scold Paula for doing poorly at school and one day made her swear solemnly to their mother that she would henceforth be a diligent pupil,” historian John Toland wrote.

Rosenwald waxes sentimental:

But Adolf could not succeed in the first thing he truly wanted to succeed at — saving his mother. In late December 1907, in the early morning darkness pierced by the flickering lights of a Christmas tree, Klara died…

Bloch came over at sunrise to sign the death certificate.

Now, here is where Rosenwald reinforces that “best friends” lie:

Bloch tried to comfort Adolf.

“In all my career,” he later wrote, “I never saw anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.”

Adolf was thankful for the care the doctor had provided.

“I shall be grateful to you forever,” he told the doctor, bowing.

The Bloch family received postcards from Adolf for several years after. An Israeli medical journal documented the relationship in a 2014 article.

“The Hitler family send you the best wishes for a Happy New Year, in everlasting thankfulness,” Adolf wrote.

After reading this excuse of Hitler’s absolute evil, I decided it was only fair to learn more about Rosenwald. Besides writing for WAPO, he is also a prolific user of Twitter. I have selected one of his twits, which gives a clue to the machinations of the author’s mind:

The worst place to be stung by a bee is not the “penis shaft”

Rosenwald’s article was published April 20 to mark Hitler’s birthday anniversary.

The best comment on this WAPO article came from a Bill Shatner:

Michael Rosenwald should win an award for the most asinine article ever. If Trump wrote this he’d be pilloried as a racist anti-Semitic; but because it is in WAPO it is of human interest. The assumption is that that rogue Hitler, victim of a bully father, loved his mother. How does one know that his affections were love and not warped ego, such as along the lines of Norman Bates in psycho (based on a real life person)? The reality is that sociopaths don’t feel love – this is basic – and whatever Hitler projected on his mother was likely something else, such as control. For Rosenwald to not even question his premise indicates he wanted to write an article that gets attention, and it does, but for the wrong reasons. My question, if (Jeff) Bezos approved this, is it not proof that WAPO is anti-Semetic?…

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Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Amazon. Companies that have been funded at least in part by Bezos Expeditions include: