This lecture is guaranteed to be a shock to Western citizens, for we have all been trained to accept the common notion that Hitler was a totalitarian despot. From the perspective of our own “liberal” democracies, that’s true. He was celebrated by a great many Western intellectuals and leaders when he began his rule of Germany, but he turned out to be the worst of despots. From his own perspective, however, which is examined here, he always protested he was the purest “true democrat” in the tradition of Rousseau and the French Revolution. The German Nazi party, he passionately argued, was shaking off the endless moral and political contradictions of a corrupt Western liberal-democratic system and replacing it with a “true democracy” of the whole German people.
