Before Adolph Hitler preached his doctrines of the master
race” and The Thousand Year Reich Fuhrer was simply a German word for leader.
But Nazi blood purges, millions dead in gas chambers and concentration camps,
towns like Lidice wiped off the map, broken treaties, militarism and planned
world conquest made both his name and title symbols for a mad tyrant or
megalomaniac. Der Fuhrer was the title Hitler chose when he combined the offices
of president and chancellor on 1934. He is undoubtedly the most familiar true
horror tale in all history, yet he would never have believed himself anything
but a kind and gentle man. His favorite books were the children's stories of
Karl Mays about hunters and trappers, a thirty-volume set of which he kept by
his bedside. (Which fits in well with Erich Fromm's estimate of him as a
necrophilic aggression-prone character, attracted to all that is dead, sick,
unalive, or purely mechanical . . . [who] hates and wants to destroy life.”)
Hitler is said to have committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker in 1945, aged
fifty-six, but legends persisted that he was still alive many years after.
Unfortunately, symbolically, he does still live. Shicklgruber is another word
often used to describe someone like him, but contrary to widespread belief, it
was not his legal name - Hitler's father, Alois, an illegitimate child, bore his
mother's name, Shicklgruber, for a time, but changed it to Hitler, his father's
name, before Adolph was born. A Hitler or Mr. or Mrs. Hitler is a blustering,
domineering person.