Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

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nedz
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#16

Post by nedz » 25 Apr 2010, 15:48

Surely the supposed similarities are mostly a case of Geographical reality.

Invading Russia is a logistical nightmare.
Invading Britain is (apparently) much harder.
The rest of Europe is (comparativly) easy to conquor (though the Balkans and Iberia are very hard to control)

So the apparent similarity is due to the geography of the continent in question.

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Tim Smith
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#17

Post by Tim Smith » 26 Apr 2010, 16:53

Napoleon's achievements were made without the benefit of panzers and Stukas. So I'd say that makes them more impressive. Winning without a technical advantage is harder than winning with one.


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LWD
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#18

Post by LWD » 26 Apr 2010, 17:01

But his opponents didn't have tanks and planes either. Quallitatively Napoleon may have had more of an edge than Hitler.

PeterOT
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#19

Post by PeterOT » 27 Apr 2010, 10:12

Speaking broadly, I would say that both were extremely gifted at their primary occupations & less gifted at their seconday ones, but that overall Napoleon was more adept at both.

Napoleon remains one of the great military commanders of all time. Not only was he a brilliant field commander whose victories & conquests rank him wiht the likes of Caesar, Alexander, Ghengis Khan & Atilla, but he was also an innovator in areas of tactics & logistics (just off the top of my head). Not only did his ideas overshadow military thinking for generations, but he is still studied by military men.

As an administrator (his secondary occupation) Napoleon also had successes. He was able to unite a nation fractured by revolution & violence & help to create a very modern nation state. Over time, however, enlightemnent gave way to nepotism & despotism. His lasting achievement, however, was one of the great documents of the modern world - the Code Napoleon. A legacy to outlast political faulires.

Hitler was, to a point, an extremely talented politician. Within his own nation he was peerless & probably belongs in company with Bisrmack & Frederick. Indeed, so successful was he that he took one of the best educated nations in the world & re-shaped it into a quasi-theocracy with him at the centre. As an international statesman pursuing the interests of his nation he was able to wrongfoot & outwit opponents to restore Germany to a position of greatness in Europe without firing a shot. Like Napoleon, however, his successes also contained the seeds of defeat. They both shared the failing of many great Men - the inability to know when to stop.

In his secondary field - military strategy & tactics - Hitler had a decidedly mixed record. He can claim no credit for the military ideas & innovations that outlived him, but he did make some clever desicions, notably altering the plan to take France. His failures, however, were much greater than his virtues & came at a terrible cost. Unlike Napoleon there is no great lasting achievement here to offset the failures.

I would argue that for all their similarities, Napoleon can be said to have left a positive & very direct legacy in the form of military & civil reforms. Hitler not only left no such legacy, but the generations after his demise (going on 3 now) have been marked by the comprehensive repudiation of his ideology & many of his ideas. By 1880 the modern nation state was rapidly becoming the dominant form of government in Europe & the Americas, modern nationalism was the norm & the Code Napoleon had been enormously influential. There has not been a single Fascist regime since 1945 (one or two flirted) & the ideas that drove Hitler remain consigned to the margins.

If this is a contest, Napoleon wins.

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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#20

Post by takata_1940 » 28 Apr 2010, 13:55

Hello,

The most stricking similarity between both was that they acquired this huge power while being not part of the ruling class/establishment. Of course, this was also due to French/German social contexts, both period being "revolutionary" for the old ruling class and both men used very well this context to raise into such position.

Nonetheless, Bonaparte was a soldier and became a field general due to its own merits. He certainly was outstandingly gifted as an organizer, and not only for the Army as pointed above by PeterOT. Bonaparte was quite practical and, acting like a real despote, imposed his view on every matter with very long lasting effects that dwarfed his military and political carreers. Moreover, even when the Monarchy was restaured by his worst enemies, almost nothing of what he has did on administrative/legal fields was ever changed in France. But Bonaparte never really cared of being loved/aduled by its own people. He transformed France for serving his self-glory and power. He never really had a plan for France and French people, he just used them as a tool.

The contrary can be said about Hitler. Almost everything he wished to build for the future of Germany relied on pseudo-mystical racial fantasy that could not survive his regime. Hitler was to be considered the Messiah of Germany. He had powerfull talents for persuading people of irrealities and abused people for doing all the hard work for him. He considered himself the mystical force behind Germany, being above all practical contingencies. The only thing he really cared to do himself was leading the Armed forces but he never achieved complete legitimacy on this field. Finally, his only successes were on local politcal ground as I'm considering that he uterlly failed what he attempted at international level.

Beside, both had sent a lot of people to death, but for widely different reasons.

S~
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#21

Post by Tmaxson0165 » 26 Apr 2017, 01:53

Napoleon's goal was to "control" the world...where as Hitler wanted to "enslave" the world!!!

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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#22

Post by Nautilus » 26 Apr 2017, 15:38

PeterOT wrote:Hitler was, to a point, an extremely talented politician. Within his own nation he was peerless & probably belongs in company with Bisrmack & Frederick. Indeed, so successful was he that he took one of the best educated nations in the world & re-shaped it into a quasi-theocracy with him at the centre. As an international statesman pursuing the interests of his nation he was able to wrongfoot & outwit opponents to restore Germany to a position of greatness in Europe without firing a shot. Like Napoleon, however, his successes also contained the seeds of defeat. They both shared the failing of many great Men - the inability to know when to stop.
How will the Emperor rule without the bureaucracy? - Star Wars

The fact "Hitler lacked ability to know when to stop" is actually a cliche carried on for 4 generations. An attempt to explain the contradiction between "greatness" and "utter defeat" in the space of a few years. The attempt being fueled by the modern propensity to judge things based on talent, intelligence, ability and coolness, like the political leaders involved are some sort of James Bonds.

Roger Kimball from The New Criterion, as a conservative polemist, asked in 2014: how was created the foundation, the stairway on which Hitler raised himself to power? Was it the WWI defeat, the Versailles Treaty, the anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, revolutionary streetfights, as in the common held view, or something else?

For when we go deeper, when we see how the balance of power stood during Hitler's childhood and youth, modern people tend to laugh. We judge things cartoonishly, the age of politicians with funny moustaches, steam trains, African safaris and Victorian prudishn...wait, what?

Fact is, the late-Victorian / early 1900s ages' peaceful image was undermined from the inside. Under the surface, the political and military leaders were digging. For power, gold, military supremacy. With Jules-Vernian tools of the scientific progress. They sought to topple the balance of power by the advance of science and technology. With U-boats, airships, wireless telegraph, battleships and armored cars. With machineguns, tanks and new forms of propaganda.

WWI was ignited by technically progressive, not conservative oligarchs. On their shoulders raised the Roaring Twenties, from their actions stemmed the Depression, their wealth and connections fueled the dictatorships of the 1930s.
In fact, as the historian Andrew Roberts argues in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, there are good reasons for believing that the Treaty of Versailles ought to have been a good deal harsher than it was. Had it divided Germany into two parts, as happened after World War II, or perhaps returned it to its 1870 status of several independent principalities, or even had the Allies merely enforced its original terms, the world would probably have been spared Hitler and the horror of Nazism. There might well have been “no via dolorosa of Rhineland-Anschluss-Sudetenland-Danzig for Europe to walk between 1936 and 1939.”

Germany started the war, which was fought almost entirely on foreign soil, and, along with the other Central Powers, it inflicted horrendous property damage and killed millions. As the historian Sally Marks points out, “France’s ten richest industrial departments were only horrific ruins, over 1,000 square miles now a desert.” German industry was intact. Why shouldn’t Germany pay? Keynes claimed that the Allies sought to revenge themselves upon the Germans. But restitution is not revenge (even if it happens to be mistaken policy). It is merely justice.
Germany of 1919-1929 (apparently crushed under the weight of WWI and 1918 revolutions) was under the skin a technological, economic and military powerhouse, barely second to the USA.

Hitler raised himself from a progressive, modernist, streamlined (the hallmark of the Art Deco age) society. The one which created at the same time, and most likely unknown to him, Henry Miller and Tamara de Lempicka. The society which he shunned, despised, soiled with blood, but on whose gifts his state was created. He aimed a technological empire with television and jet planes to the rural empire of the Soviets. And lost.
It is important to note that the kitsch of Nazism was not only for committed Nazis. Writing in 1944, Mantoux observed that “the German people, as a whole, . . . [have] been a willing, active, and satisfied partner—so long as things went well.” Before Hitler’s podium at those early rallies, the historian Joachim Fest observed, “the masses actually celebrated themselves.” It is often suggested that Hitler was a product of the Depression, hyperinflation, or both. These may well have been enabling or exacerbating events. But there is an important sense in which Hitler, the avid painter and devotee of Wagner, was, as Eksteins puts it, more a “creature of the German imagination rather than . . . of social and economic forces. . . . He was a mental construct in the midst of defeat and failure. The ultimate kitsch artist, he filled the abyss with symbols of beauty.” The Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art,” that Hitler aspired to create involved more than a Wagnerian stage set: Germany as a whole was his stage. “From first to last,” Eksteins writes, “the Third Reich was spectacular, gripping theater. That is what it was intended to be.” Even when Allied bombing was devastating German cities, Hitler made the immediate reconstruction of theaters and opera houses a top priority. The mythmaking had to proceed unabated.

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Guaporense
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#23

Post by Guaporense » 27 Apr 2017, 06:31

Napoleon was way greater. Hitler was actually just repeating out WW1: Germany tried to defeat the world once in WW1, Germany was defeated but the defeat wasn't "obvious" enough since it ended with German troops in France and an armistice. WW1 and WW2 were essentially the same: Germany trying to become the hegemonic power in Europe through military force. In both cases Germany was at war with UK, France, USA and Russia. In both cases Germany had relatively weak allies (Austria and Japan). In both cases the lack of natural resources and the superior manpower resources of the much larger enemy eventually defeated Germany,

Then Hitler came and tried to win essentially the same war against the same countries and in a position where Germany was actually weaker economically relative it's enemies (USSR and US specially) vis the last war. He got very lucky with France in 1940 but besides that German defeat was by a wider margin in WW2 than in WW1.
"In tactics, as in strategy, superiority in numbers is the most common element of victory." - Carl von Clausewitz

Nautilus
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Re: Similarities between Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte

#24

Post by Nautilus » 27 Apr 2017, 08:20

With one tiny twist. In WWI, Germany won against Russia.

Hitlerian government was repeating out WWI for the belief that victory is a matter of tools / resources / technology. Which is a bit natural for the ruling class of a technological empire. If the Zeppelin, U-boat or cannon we used last time did not smash through, we build more and better ones.

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