Did Hitler do it for us?

I had a conversation this week with an acquaintence I have run into for seven summers now.  He asked me what I do now that I am retired. I said that I study ancient and medieval history, the history of the Third Reich and the Bible. I told him  that I was currently reading David Irving’s great biography of Field Marshall Irwin Rommel, the “desert fox”. He said that Rommel was a controversial figure as was the author of the book. Then he added that he was a student of WWII also. My thinking was that he is one of us. He is probably also respectful of the leaders of the Third Reich but is capable of expressing it only in code language. About 30 years ago I used to go to a local used bookstore and I would look for works on the Third Reich as well as  works on other topics that I study. I once asked the clerk why there were so few books on Nazi Germany. He replied that the  bookstore gets a lot of books about Hitler, Goebbels and others but that they are sold as soon as they hit the shelves. I think that a lot of white men admire these leaders. They killed a lot of innocent people but then a lot of innocent people were killed on both sides in WWII. Forty thousand elderly men, women and children were killed in the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Between 30,000  and 130,000 denizens of Dresden, many of them refugees, were killed by Bomber Harris in the final stretch of the war. As a Christian I abhor the killing of innocent people. You will hear in the media today what monsters the Nazis were because they killed a lot of innocent people like the Jews. But I don’t think I am going to let the establishment choose my heroes for me because the people I pick are not perfect. Hitler made it clear that he was going to die in the Bunker rather than flee or surrender to the enemy. His reason was that he wanted to set an example for future generations who might be attracted to the Nazi cause. That is something that white men understand and appreciate whether they acknowledge it or not.