HITLER THE PARANOIAC

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 February 1942, Page 4

HITLER THE PARANOIAC

♦ BELIEF IN BEING A MAN OF DESTINY. “Hitler, the doctors tell me, is a paranoiac, a man who builds a universe of his own round himself and believes that he is the ‘man of destiny’ who will conquer the world,” said Mr Kingsley Martin, editor of the “New Statesman,” in a broadcast to Germany. “If He had known where to stop, he might, indeed, have ruled Europe, but such men never do know where to stop. Hitler might have conquered Europe in the sense that German ideas, German goods, the German economic system and German prestige would, have been recognised as everywhere first in Europe. That was possible for Hitler as late as 1939. But the paranoiac’s star drove him on. We know his weakness. Bill Shirer, America’s great wireless observer in Berlin, tells us in his ‘Berlin Diary’ how he watched Hitler in his frightened mood before Munich; he tells us of the Fuehrer’s carpet-biting phase, of the nervous antics and hysteria he himself witnessed and of the Fuehrer’s swaggering triumph after he had won his way over Mr Chamberlain. But that swagger was fatal; it meant the overconfidence, the arrogance that the Greeks, call ‘hubris’ which goes before a fall. He had to go on, to trick Mr Chamberlain and Britain, to attack the Poles and. make war on mankinds This is the great mistake: to believe himself infallible and all other men his tools or dupes.”