Wagner

"Chuck managed to get the entire 18 hours of Richard Wagner's 'Ring of Nibaloone--Nibalane--Nibalu--Nibalung' ... squashed ... down to just seven minutes"

Hitler told everyone close to him 
"One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner".

In that case, I have had a deep, scientific understanding of National Socialism since I was roughly four.

National Socialism is the tragic doomed love saga of a bald midget (with his spear & magic helmet) who falls in love with a transvestite rabbit from somewhere near Hoboken, New Jersey.

From Shirer :

"There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth.

Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber.

There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber.

It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German.

Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous ”Heils”? ”Heil Schicklgruber!”?

"O mighty warrior of great fighting stock / might I enquire to ask, 'Nyah, what's up, Doc...?' "

Not only was ”Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional ”Hello.”

”Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine. *

The Sam Kelly Abbreviatiated Variant

∗ Hitler himself seems to have recognized this. In his youth he confided to the only boyhoodfriend he had that nothing had ever pleased him as much as his father’s change of names. He told August Kubizek that the name Schicklgruber ”seemed to him so uncouth, so boorish,apart from being so clumsy and unpractical. He found ’Hiedler’ ... too soft; but ’Hitler sounded nice and was easy to remember.” (August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p.40.)

What apparently made those last years of approaching manhood so happy for Hitler was the freedom from having to work, which gave him the freedom to brood, to dream, to spend his days roaming the city streets or the countryside declaiming to his companion what was wrong with the world and how to right it, and his evenings curled up with a book or standing in the rear of the opera house in Linz or Vienna listening enraptured to the mystic, pagan works of Richard Wagner.

A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth who, though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of hysterical anger against those who disagreed with him. For four years he fancied himself deeply in love with a handsome blond maiden named Stefanie, and though he often gazed at her longingly as she strolled up and down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother he never made the slightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so many other objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies.

TRIAL FOR TREASON

[ NOTE : How can be on trial for Treason against Germany? He's an Austrian, and not a German Citizen ]

As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not for long. Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised authorities who had arrested him but – and this was more important – for the first time make his name known far beyond the confines of Bavaria and indeed of Germany itself. He was well aware that correspondents of the world press as well as of the leading German newspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the trial, which began on February 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twenty-four days later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Lossow and Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressed the German people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism, and emblazoned his name on the front pages of the world.

Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length – his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many long harangues.

He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that 

”they knew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world – that they had not the courage to stand by their act ... to step before the judge and say, ’Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’ ”

Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, ”I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”

If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:

One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had – to get rid of the Reich government... If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused. 

The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself defiantly. ”I was no unemployed komitadji” he reminded the court. ”I occupied a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose overpow- ering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely ”the drummer” in a patriotic movement!

A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:

"How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned. "

He invoked the example of Wagner.

"When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as ”Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration – the rest is nothing."

He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would not deny it. Fate had decreed it.

"The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say, ”If you want me or summon me, I will co-operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward. "