A megalomaniac
Newsweek magazine in its March 20 issue published an interesting article. It is amazing that World War II was instigated by one man, Hitler, who was an unknown person before his debut. He has no great personality either, a corporal in the army, short of stature, sporting a Charlie Chaplin moustache with a tuft of hair on his forehead.
But what went on in his mind was truly amazing. That man had a dream, namely he could consolidate all European countries under his command and in the long run he could conquer the world. For this purpose, he dreamed of creating a master race (Herrenvolk).
So he established a so-called lebensborn (source of life) houses all over Germany and some in Norway. In those houses, girls were gathered and soldiers from the Wehrmacht (armed forces) were more than willing to father children without any responsibility for them.
The so-called Hitler Jugend (youth) came into existence. The children belonged to the state. Hitler thought that a super race could be mass produced without a formal wedding ceremony, and what was worse, without the parent's consent or God's blessing.
But what happened? In the beginning, Hitler's troops were indeed successful, one after another European country fell to the onslaught of the Nazi troops.
Years later, the Allied forces began to win one battle after another and when Hitler capitulated in 1945, the Lebensborn children and mothers were humiliated by the people of their society and it turned out that about 80 percent of the Lebensborn children grew into mentally retarded children. So what do we learn from this story?
That children who are created without the benediction and sanctity of marriage, justified with God's blessing are bound to fail. We cannot mass produce human beings at our own free will.
The irony of all this: Hitler dreamt of consolidating European countries under his leadership by force and millions of lives were lost; six million Jews were exterminated during World War II, now European countries are united under the name of the European Union without shedding a drop of blood.
The famous Gen. MacArthur, the man who forced Japan to surrender in the Pacific War, said: "An old soldier never dies, he just fades away..." Likewise we can say about Hitler, the megalomaniac whose mortal remains were never found: "Hitler never dies, he just fades away into oblivion...".
A. DJUANA
Jakarta