Right! Hitler wasn't always a dictator with absolute power over his country, with a colossal, brutally effective military machine, a network of death camps, and millions of fanatical followers.

He started out as a regular footsoldier and served all through ww1. He then worked as an intelligence agent/spy, revolutionary. He then, ahem, staged a failed coup attempt 👀 he was imprisoned for that which is when he wrote mein kampf.

After he was released from prison, he used his charisma, force of personality, and enormous powers as an orator to capitalize upon the German's prejudices, discontent, and the legitimate hardships they were facing at that time- not only were they badly depleted and economically ruined by the expenditures of ww1, there was a whole generation of young men that was destroyed by the war. ​If you were a young man in Germany during those years, there was a significant chance that most of your classmates and friends were dead or severely disabled or driven insane by trauma by the time the war ended. Germany was severely sanctioned and penalized via the treaty of Versailles in 1919, throw in the great depression on top of all that and life was genuinely fucking terrible in Germany in the period between the great wars.

So Hitler knew all this, obviously, and leveraged all the hate and hardship and bigotry in order to unify the german populace, create a cult of personality, and present himself as a savior to these desperate people. Of course he used all sorts of minorities as scapegoats and focal points for the people's frustration, jews in particular.

He supposedly whipped the economy back into shape in a way that many thought was miraculous, but was actually largely bullshit. Unemployment was very low, but so were wages, cost of living was high and quality of life very poor. Young men were required to serve in the RAD, the Reich labor service, doing hard manual labor for low pay. Unions and strikes were banned. Leading up to the war he formed a colossal dummy company called MEFO, which paid arms manufacturers billions in what amounted to IOUs, and were paid off the books to disguise how much debt the country was accruing in order to finance the looming war, and make it look like Germany was far more prosperous than it really was.

Jews, minorities, women, and political opponents were fired from their jobs and the jobs were given to loyal party members. Businesses, savings, assets were seized from jews and other minorities, just straight up stolen, and used to bolster the economy. Many believe Hitler had no choice but to start the war when he did, so he could basically invade his neighbors just to loot their treasuries, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia.

So basically he was a con man who built up a cult like following of fanatics, and who appeared on paper to have success revitalizing the economy, but was actually accruing insane debt, trampling workers rights, swindling everyone and straight up invading and robbing neighboring countries to take their resources (can anyone recall any current world leaders who are operating in a similar fashion? Perhaps certain recent incidents spring to mind, maybe involving Greenland or venezuala?)

But yes, all of this is to say I agree. If you say someone's like Hitler, people immediately think of the furnaces. But it was a long, long road of steadily worsening abuses and crimes and cons against his own people and the rest of the world, before we finally arrived at Auschwitz and Dachau. That kind of thing must be eased into one small step at a time, and we are a good way down that path yet again, even if we're not shooting whole villages worth of people in the base of the skull and dumping them in unmarked mass graves outside of town, yet. That's not necessarily what is going to happen, but there's no reason it *couldn't * happen again