Quote from Osayidan;311151:
Other than the whole holocaust deal and wanting to conquer the world, I think he was a genius.
He had a lot of research going on in architecture and other fields and lead to a lot of innovations. Some of the technology Germany researched during the war didn't show up mainstream until decades later.
A lot of people would go back in time to kill him, but I'd go back in time to convince him not to become a douchebag and lead Germany to prosperity rather than war.
This is what makes you a good and awesome person, and not a douche. Too many would easily just do the knee-jerk reaction of killing off the guy if they were given that kind of power.
Hitler was a terrible leader. The successes Germany saw in military were due to the strategic skill of his generals doing the actual leading. Whenever Hitler interfered with what they were doing they failed. One well-known example is the attack on Russia. Hitler ignored his advisors and -forced- his generals to march on Russia, to their doom.
Hitler also did not do much of anything as a civil leader either. The architecture, volkswagon, autobahn, and other marvels that went on under Hitler's reign were the creations of other men.
The only thing Hitler could do well was be a public speaker. He had charisma, and could talk to crowds and sway people opinions. He was the perfect puppet for the Nazi party, to get Germany to rally under their ideals and ideas.
Also, to more clearly understand the situation with the Jews: Even long before 0-BC jewish people have been stereotypically good with loans, banking, and using money to make money through interest and debts. Even the bible itself mentions "money lenders" as being a sinful or bad type of person. Jews have been typically not well liked by most people throughout history typically because Jews tend to get into control of things through wealth. Fast forward to the late 1930's and you have Germany in huge amounts of debt do to reperations from WW1, you have massive inflation to the point where the Mark (german currency) was nearly worthless and probably would collapse. Unemployment was at crippling levels. But during that all, jewish businessmen were doing fine, and were profiting off of the German people's hardship with loans. The jews would take anything of value the Germans had, and were economically leeching every drop out of their economy.
Enter the Nazi party. There was no way to legally get out of the massive debt Germany was under. The only solution was to go to war. But you can't just throw the Jewish bankers out of your country, even violently, or the world around you would retaliate. So the Nazi party, with the charismatic Hitler getting the populace to support them, initiated huge amounts of industrial revolution. Basically they reneged on their debts, in essence stealing money, to go ahead and just build stuff.
Rather than wait for the retaliation that was going to happen, Germany attacked first before people really had a chance to realize what was going on in Germany. They took France first because France has a lot of wealth, but they suck as a military power. They pretty much steamrolled over whatever they could in Europe to basically put their government in charge of everything, and completely overthrow the equivelant of the World Bank/International Bank that existed at the time.
The goings on in Europe in WW2 were very much an economic thing. It was a country trying to overthrow an international business.