Hitler's ultimate irony

Six foot tall— or five-foot-five, if you're female— blond hair, blue eyes. A fair complexion, and not a skin blight anywhere, not even a mole. Sounds familiar, right? It's the usual recipe for the flawless human being, the stereotypical Aryan model perfected by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Absent these traits, you were lucky if Hitler was so generous as to allow you to live. Slaving away in some labor camp in rural Poland on a starvation diet and very little sleep was the least you could do for the human race after polluting the world's population with your very unseemly characteristics.

That much of the Holocaust I have learned, at least. I studied it in elementary school, reviewed it in later grades, and read countless books about that ghastly period. And yet one jarring, indisputable fact is rarely mentioned: the racial characteristics of Hitler himself.

Real-life opera

Aryanism, the foundation for the Holocaust, existed long before Hitler came to power. It was the subtext to most of Richard Wagner's operas. But Hitler, with his charismatic personality, turned the entire world into a real-life sturm und drang opera. The plot was simple and accessible: Tall, blonde, blue-eyed Aryans saving the world by stamping out Jews, gypsies, blacks and any other vile contaminators of the master race.

But here's my problem: Hitler himself wasn't tall, nor was he fair-skinned. He wasn't even blue-eyed. And of course he was Austrian, not German. As for racial purity— his paternal grandmother was an unmarried domestic who was impregnated at age 42 by a person unknown— probably her employer, but who knows? He was about as opposite from the perfect Aryan-German as you could get.

Wishful thinking

Why, then, did millions of Germans swallow his Kool-Aid? Couldn't they see what he looked like with their own eyes?

Here, I think, we enter the realm of the power of wishful thinking. People wanted to believe Hitler. When Hitler spoke of the perfect human, he triggered a nerve that lurks somewhere within each of us. He also brilliantly triggered a subconscious human need to belong to something greater and larger than our own narrow petty selves.

The moral? People can be easily manipulated into ignoring rational evidence when their nation is suffering from war and economic depression. It's something to keep in mind as Americans head into the 2012 presidential election campaign.