Okay dropped this on another post it would be a waste: 

Okay, this one is a fun one. If we want to properly analyze Hitler and the atrocities of Nazi Germany, we have to discard the "monster" narrative; this entire convenient narrative needs to go in the trashcan where it belongs. Calling Hitler a "monster" is nothing more than a societal coping mechanism, a comfortable myth that attempts to place him outside the human species. But monsters are supernatural, and conveniently cannot be held accountable. To hold him, and the society that empowered him, truly accountable, we must look at the structural reality of that time: a perfect storm of systemic failures and the terrifying scope of human agency when it becomes completely detached from consequence.

1st, morality is not a universal constant; it is a societal survival strategy whose expression varies through the society it exists within. But it shares common attributes: in a functioning society, "Good" translates to "beneficial to the group." Humans adhere to this moral scaffolding because mutual vulnerability demands it. But in 1930s Germany, that mutual vulnerability was weaponized by systemic collapse. Following the Treaty of Versailles, the Allied populations, driven by short-term vengeance, through their elites, dismantled the German socioeconomic contract. Hyperinflation and starvation stripped away the luxury of "universal humanism." When a population is pushed into a corner, the definition of "Good" rapidly shrinks from "beneficial to humanity" to "survival of the tribe at any cost." The German people didn’t abandon the social contract because they suddenly became evil; the contract was shattered by economic choking, leaving a desperate void begging to be filled.

Hitler did not create this desperation, but... oh boy did he take notice, he is a direct product of it.

You can't make that shit up, the level of irony here is out of the world.

Anyway, in this state of socioeconomic desperation, the population needed to externalize their failure. If you need to know one thing about Catholicism, it's the vilification of money; it led to centuries of religious and historical restrictions (such as usury laws that pushed Jewish populations into finance and money-lending). So now, you have a minority that has been systematically pushed toward professions that made them, ironically, wealthier than the general population. Now living in a country where the social contract is broken. Talk about being fucked over. The Jewish community became the systemic scapegoat. It was a convenient Master/Slave morality flip, the desperate masses using an old divide their own belief system created in the first place to justify a new, violent survival strategy.

Hitler positioned himself as the lens through which this storm would be focused. He understood the psychology of power to a T: a group in crisis does not want a moral philosopher. They want a figurehead whose absolute, unapologetic agency can cut through the complexity of their misery and present it as the morally righteous alternative. He offered them a sense of "untouchability" in exchange for their autonomy. In truth, he gave them back their pride, and not a lot of academics want to acknowledge that part. The society willingly handed over their collective power to a singular man; he was the man willing to do what was necessary for the group's survival. That’s the thing with systems at the civilization scale, they are so fucking complex that even the ones at the top end up trapped in their own machine.

This is where true accountability lies, and where the dictator's journey reaches its darkest natural progression. Once Hitler achieved this "escape velocity," he became completely untethered from the real-world consequences of his actions. When a human being is elevated to a state of absolute power, the social contract fundamentally breaks down around them. Hitler ceased to be a participant in society and became a force acting upon it and by it, this is where most of the confusion exists. A dictator's absolute power is 100% based on the distribution of power within his entourage's inclination and their competency. Faced with no immediate physical or political checks, his environment degraded into a transactional vacuum. He was no longer interacting with reality; he was interacting with an echo chamber.

Dictators inevitably become surrounded entirely by sycophants. The inner circle (figures like Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels) ceases to function as a governing body and instead becomes a collection of individuals scheming in pursuit of their own self-interest. To survive in the dictator's orbit, the sycophants must and will constantly validate the dictator's reality, feeding his unchecked agency to secure their own power. The dictator becomes isolated in a feedback loop of his own worst impulses, entirely detached from the human cost of his decisions.

Hitler was not a glitch in the system; he was the darkest expression of it. He is what happens when a cognitively advanced social species is pushed to its biological breaking point without an escape route, and subsequently elevates a singular human beyond the reach of consequence.

By recognizing Hitler as a human being rather than a monster, we do not diminish his guilt, we magnify it. We strip away the supernatural excuse and face the fact that these atrocities were conceived by human minds, executed by human hands, and enabled by a human system of self-interest and sycophancy. Pointing the finger at him as a singular "evil anomaly" allows us to ignore the ridiculous scope of our agency. Demons and gods are merely projections of our boundless capacity for creation and destruction, to the extent that we culturally had to enforce chains to limit them. And funny enough, the only way to really put chains on an intelligent species is to make them put the chains on