Everyman, even Adolf Hitler, has some good qualities or talents--a fact which this author seems not able to admit.

According to Alan Wykes, Adolf Hitler was scum from the day he was born. He is variously described as "stupid," and "lazy," and simply a no talent bum; a would-be artist without talent. Actually, I have seen some of Hitler's drawings reproduced, and they were quite good--and I am a retired professional commercial artist.

If Hitler had anything to do with the powerful symbolism of the National Socialist party (The Swastika, etc.) and the striking uniforms of the German Army and the Luftwaffe--and I have no doubt his was the last word--he shows a very strong sense of graphic drama. It will be a while before the world again views such powerful graphic symbolism.

Aside from that, Wykes makes a flimsy case for Hitler's having contracted a case of syphillis in his early life in Vienna. The case is extremely circumstantial, and I think dubious. Throughout his adult life, he appeared to be of robust good health and physically attractive. Besides, even if true, so what? The point seems to be that anyone with "the syph" is automatically a worthless scumbag. Therefore it's worth tagging Hitler with it, or at least his being a sexual pervert, which many others have intimated.

Losers don't write history, and there is much that Hitler's regime perpetrated that led to a binge of hatred after the war on the part of the vistorious allies. Much of it, of course, was propaganda (yes, we, too, created propaganda.)

This is not meant to be a defense of Hitler, which would be a difficult task even if I were an admirer, which I'm not, but it would be refreshing, after nearly sixty years, to be able to read a somewhat neutral account of the Second World War, written by someone not infected with virulent hatred for the losers.

After the "Civil" war in the United States, histories were written by the victors who made Abe Lincoln out to be a saint who freed the slaves, and the Southern states to be cruel
slave-masters who deserved whatever they got. Of course, such an account is far from the truth. Lincoln was in fact a dictator who nearly destroyed the Constitution, and suspended the Bill of Rights during his term,imprisoning his political enemies without trial and bringing about a totally unnecessary war that caused over 600,000 American deaths. That part is universally overlooked, until recently when aome authors,like Thomas DiLorenzo for example, have begun to show what really happened.

I'm waiting for such a book about Germany, depicting its warriors as being as courageous and honorable as our own. Some have surfaced already, like Joseph Gilbey's "Langsdorf of the Graf Spee."

Maybe it will take a little longer--more distance between us and WWII.In any case, it would be refreshing to be able to read a more objective history of Hitler's life, without the author's pen dripping with hatred, loathing and belittling of everything associated with him. Hate is poor motivation for writing anything of value.

Joseph H. Pierre