reading response #7

Reading response 7

Hitler, A great leader? Or an awful leader?

Not that I am a history expert or anything, but I have learned about Hitler in many history classes during my years of schooling. I don’t know how or why it still bothers me as much as it does, but he really strikes a nerve with me.

When I was attending high school, we had a debate about Hitler. The debate was whether or not Hitler was a great leader. The way it worked was that everyone in the class had to pick a side; however, students were allowed to switch sides at any point during the debate. This made it very interesting. The debate was over when all of the students in the classroom were all standing on one side of the room.

The debate started as most people would think. I would say that 80% of the class was on the side saying that Adolf Hitler was not a great leader, with the other 20% saying he was. It was easy for us to give reasons on why he was not a great leader. Strayer even gives examples of him not being great “Hitler’s leadership proclaimed a message of intense German nationalism cast in terms of racial superiority and bitter hatred for Jews.” (Strayer 639) . Once Hitler came to be in power the first thing that he did was suppress all other  political parties, arrest thousands of people, control the media, and abolished all unions.

Any person that takes those steps once he is brought into power, is not a good leader. That is simply an abuse of power.  A quote that I remember hearing as a young child went something like this “A true test of a man is what he does once he gets a bit of power.” Hitler obviously abused his power and proved he wasn’t a great leader because of the way he chose to use it.

Then it was the other groups turn to debate. I was in shock that they were really going to try to debate the fact that Hitler was a great leader. They started off their argument by defining the word great. They defined it as, unusually or comparatively large in size or dimensions. There argument at first sounded over the top in saying that Hitler was one of the best leaders in the history of the world. They stated facts that he killed numerous amounts of Jewish people and had used all of his power for the wrong reasons.  We quickly made a counter argument and asked, how can one be considered great if they use all their power for the wrong reasons? Their response was that in order to be a great leader, nobody said you have to be a positive leader. Hitler was one of the most negative leaders of all time, but also a great one.

Our debate went on for a couple days, maybe a week. Slowly but surely the entire class, myself included, had moved to the side of Hitler being a great leader. In no way, shape or form did anyone of us support what he did, or how he was responsible for the death of so many people; however we all came to an agreement. We agreed he was a great leader, but for all the wrong reasons. If Hitler were to use his leadership skills and power for a positive reason, the world would have become a better place, a much better place. It is a shame that he chose to do what he did, and I hope that there are no more “great” leaders like Adolf Hitler.