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Documentary eye for the tyrannical guy


Many historians have alleged that Adolf Hitler had a Jewish grandparent. His self-hatred toward that aspect of identity might begin to explain why he masterminded the deaths of six million Jews. But what about the other six million people that died in Nazi Germany?

Tonight, Cinemax is airing The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality, which suggests that Hitler was a closet queer and that he put sexual “misfits” to death as a response to his self-loathing homophobia.

The facts, however, seem to be sketchy at best. Whether Hitler was actually a closet queer is something we’ll probably never know. This, however, begs the question of why this documentary is being aired. Is it to raise questions and encourage people to question why Hitler masterminded the Holocaust? To figure out what drives tyrants to prevent these types of scenarios from happening again? Or so that historians have something to study and debate about?

What should we take from this? There are those who keep telling us to remember to never forget and to never forget to remember the Holocaust. Is this just another means of doing so? Perhaps. There is, after all, a tendency to privilege discussion of the Holocaust over discussions of other genocides. Some even go so far as to say that referring to mass killings such as those that befell Native Americans or Rwandans as “genocide” trivializes the Holocaust. But most of the people who say that are referring to the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust — not the other six million people.

But there is something unique about The Hidden Fuhrer. It begins to try to explain those other six million deaths. The suggestion that Hitler was a closet queer may not have the facts to back it up, but it raises questions about the persecution of other groups, which Holocaust studies and museums given little attention to.

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