Nick

In April 1888 a German customs official named Alois Schnickelgruber was subjected to a vicious assault by an unknown assailant with a cork hat and Australian accent. After castrating the unfortunate victim with a masive Bowie knife the attacker vanished in a puff of smoke.
How would history have been changed, if at all? Would another madman lead the Nazis, and how different would his policies be? Would the Communists win the power struggle after WW1? Or would Hitler's mother sleep around and get pregnant anyway?

Inflames

Its hard to imagine the Nazi's without Hitler, after all he was a major reason why the Nazis rose to power. He was a master of public speaking and he basically changed the way German politics worked, how countless politicians afterwards would rally support.

No one else could have lead the Nazi's to power as Hitler did imo and his presence within the party was a freak occurrence that led to a series of events that no other man could have duplicated.

Not a fan of Hitler obviously but his rise to power was unique.

He just as easily could have died in WW1 as sooo many others did.

Edgewaters

None of his ideas were unique, they were fairly common throughout the Freikorps movement ... but, he was a powerful catalyst. So if no other catalytic individual appeared, it's quite possible that these fringe elements would never have become organized and eventually, would have faded into irrelevance.

Inflames

If the "none of his ideas were unique" part of your post was directed to my post than I would disagree. I agree with the rest of your post though.

The hatred of the Jews obviously was nothing new to anyone but he had some unique ways of dealing with things.

Edgewaters

How so? Himmler was the architect of the Final Solution, and he got his ideas from a guy named Richard Walther Darre. He was heavily involved in the Blood and Soil movement in the 20s, but in his day job, did agricultural work on selective breeding - from which he derived his theories of racial purification.

scholar

Which oddly lead to great agricultural revolutions when it was realized to be a potent method of creating different versions of the same species for a particular purpose. The potato used for Potato Chips is actually a selectively breed organism made purely for Potato Chips. And this has spilled over into many other things. The Banana for instance. Corn is also a genetically engineered product made from thousands of years of selective breeding of basically a grass with some extra grain on it.

So... what doesn't apply to people oddly applies to plants and some domesticated animals. It's not entirely unfeasible for someone to use that as a base for racism. If he can make plants and animals perfect for certain roles, why not people? I'm not saying this was smart, without racism, prejudice, bias, and quite possibly hatred to the ten thousandth degree, but it is enough to find it understandable for people who just didn't know better and started buying into anti-Semite propaganda.

What I find rather odd is that these blond haired blue eyed people supposedly the best and brightest in every field were absolutely dumbfounded with Japanese Progress in aviation and most of the people actually in the government had black or brown hair with brown eyes.

sylla1

IMHO the industrial genocide of the undermenschen as we know it would have probably not happened, at least at the time; a late re-match after Versailles would have still been quite likely.

Inflames

I just meant how he visited multiple cities in one day to put his popularity on steroids, he applied many newly used for such a occasion devises to stir up the crowds he spoke too, the man was pure evil but he could work a crowd. He used symbols, music, powerful settings, he even made up things as he went along to help the Nazis seem powerful/racially pure and whatever he felt they needed.

Edgewaters

Oh! You mean as a politician, orator, organizer, crowd manipulator ... yes, he was utterly unique in that regard.

Emilio Primo

Heh, this reminds me of an episode of the Twilight Zone.