Was Hitler the most evil person in history?

By moral evil are understood the deviation of human volition from the prescriptions of the moral order and the action which results from that deviation. Such action, when it proceeds solely from ignorance, is not to be classed as moral evil, which is properly restricted to the motions of will towards ends of which the conscience disapproves. The extent of moral evil is not limited to the circumstances of life in the natural order, but includes also the sphere of religion, by which man’s welfare is affected in the supernatural order, and the precepts of which, as depending ultimately upon the will of God, are of the strictest possible obligation (see SIN). The obligation to moral action in the natural order is, moreover, generally believed to depend on the motives supplied by religion; and it is at least doubtful whether it is possible for moral obligation to exist at all apart from a supernatural sanction.

Source: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Evil

If you look at the volume of harm caused, Hitler is unchallenged. If you factor in the total dead from the Holocaust and WWII, you are looking at 80+ million dead. The amount of suffering he caused on a per capita basis is mind boggling.

To be the most evil person, you have to:

1. Know that you are causing suffering and death and with malice aforethought, engage in an evil act (your conscience telling you it is evil), with the intent of causing suffering and death.
2. Planning ahead and laying in wait adds to the severity, because you have time to consider what you are doing.
3. The more people you plan to harm and kill, the more severe the level of evil.

Hitler hated not just Jews, but communists, disabled people, Romanis, the mentally retarded, Slavs, blacks, and others. Essentially he believed that some should be outright exterminated, like Jews, whereas blacks could be permitted to live as slaves. He believed the Aryans were genetically superior to others. In order to agree to his Final Solution, he dehumanized people simply for being inferior in his mind. These were innocent human beings, including children. To have that level of cold, unfeeling regard for other human beings is as evil, and he was comfortable with exterminating millions.

Mitigating factors: He forbid human zoos, he didn’t like animals being hurt and was a vegetarian, and he was nice to Aryan children.

Dr. Mengele:

1. He was a doctor. His profession was dedicated to healing people. And he betrayed this calling by doing human experimentation, unspeakable acts of seeing how human beings would respond to freezing temperatures, vivisection alive, etc. He did horrific experiments on twins, even children. He regarded people as less than things.
2. When there were outbreaks of disease he would send an entire bunker of people to be gassed.
3. Because he was the one doing the harm to people directly, his conscience should have been well notified of the depravity of his behavior,so this adds an extra level of culpability.

Albert Fish

Fish was a child rapist, serial killer, and a cannibal. He boasted of his horrors, claiming he “had one in every state.” He was known to have killed at least 5 people, but most likely far, far more. He also stabbed several people.

The challenge is how you define “evil.” Psychopaths have no empathy. They are cold blooded predators. When they kill it doesn’t even feel evil to them. They consider other people weak for having empathy. They don’t have a conscience to violate.

Hitler was not considered a psychopath. He did not torture animals as a child. Instead he was motivated by extreme hate, because he believed Jews and communists were responsible for the fall of Germany and the moral degradation of the world. In this sense he had a sense of justice, but that sense of justice was completely warped. So does this make him less “evil?” Or does it make him more evil because he knew the difference between right and wrong and chose to do the wrong? Of course one might argue that in his mind he was actually making the world a better place, as twisted and wrong as that is.

A psychoanalyst reviewed Hitler’s medical and psychological data.

Dr. Redlich believes one cannot adequately assess Hitler’s actions without taking into account not only the historical facts, but the Nazi leader’s ‘’psychological reality.’’ For example, Hitler believed that his father was half-Jewish and had died of syphilis. These beliefs, the author argues, may have affected the Nazi leader’s behavior, whether or not they were true. (There is no clear evidence, Dr. Redlich writes, to support either claim.)

Dr. Redlich theorizes that Hitler may have thought his physical abnormalities — his hypospadia and spina bifida occulta — were signs that he had inherited syphilis from his father. And his rage at this may have fueled his anti-Semitism, and his obsession with syphilis as a ‘’Jewish disease,’’ a theme he dwelled upon for 10 pages in ‘’Mein Kampf.’’

One of the most puzzling aspects of Hitler’s childhood is that investigators have been able to find little there to foreshadow the adult he would become. He did not torture animals (though there is a single, often repeated, story about a billy goat), and from the little that is known, he seemed a fairly normal child, though sexually shy in adolescence. ‘’Psychohistorians assume that the child had troublesome, deep conflicts (including ambivalent feelings about his mother and father),’’ Dr. Redlich writes. ‘’I am more impressed with the fact that useful data about eating habits, sleep disorders and toilet training are lacking.’’

Indicators of Hitler’s peculiarities in later adulthood, of course, are abundant, from his sexual inhibition (he may never have had sexual intercourse with Eva Braun, Dr. Redlich writes) to his phobias of disease, his explosive rages, his delusions and his conviction that he would die at an early age (he died at 56). In his book, Dr. Redlich runs through a list of psychiatric symptoms — paranoia, narcissism, anxiety, depression, hypochondria, to name a few — and finds some evidence for every one. Proof that Hitler was overtly self-destructive or sexually perverse is sparser and less compelling, the author says.

Yet Dr. Redlich concludes that attaching a formal psychiatric diagnosis to the Nazi leader is not very useful. When applying such diagnoses, he writes, he often feels ‘’as if I were in a cheap clothing store: Nothing fits, and everything fits.’’ Ultimately, the psychiatrist portrays Hitler as a man who was more than the sum of his pathology, entirely responsible for his actions.

Some have argued that any attempt to explain Hitler is wrong, because understanding inevitably breeds excuse. Dr. Redlich disagrees: ‘’I tried to put myself as far as I could into Hitler’s shoes, to study him as a psychiatrist would study a forensic patient, to understand what makes him tick,’’ he said. ‘’Empathy is not the same as sympathy.’’ In fact, there is little possibility that in trying to fathom Hitler’s actions this particular author could also forgive him. Dr. Redlich, 88, is himself an Austrian of Jewish descent, who trained in Vienna before the war and fled the Nazis for the United States in 1938. ‘’This book,’’ he said, ‘’is in a way my answer to Hitler.’’

Source: Insane or Just Evil? A Psychiatrist Takes a New Look at Hitler

The most evil person would be someone who knew the difference between right and wrong, chose to do wrong intending to do great harm, on a mass scale, and with plenty of time to consider it and for no meaningful reason. The person would be physically healthy, and had no mitigating childhood or adult circumstances.

Consider the diary entries of Dr. Mengele:

The diary begins in June 1960, in Argentina, 19 years before the world’s most hunted Nazi war criminal drowned — or possibly suffered a stroke — while swimming off the shore of Bertioga, Brazil.

“I see how right my plans have been all along and I understand now that following people’s advice mostly results in irreparable nonsense. But I refuse to pass guilt onto others: I was solely responsible for my decisions,” writes Mengele, who was 49 when he started the journal.

Unless the world adopted breeding programs like those he pursued in Auschwitz, “mankind is doomed, even without war,” he writes.

Referring to morality, aesthetics and genetics, Mengele writes: “The real problem is to define when human life is worth living and when it has to be eradicated.”

“There’s only one truth and one true beauty … There’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in nature. There’s only ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ … Both sides receive equal chances. Nevertheless, nature provides a strainer. Things that are ‘inappropriate’ fall through since they lose in the struggle for survival.”

Discussing the Indian caste system, Mengele notes, “Brahmans are built nicely; some of them even have blue eyes. They have small, straight noses and they’re in general high quality human beings. And this is because the Brahmans used the highest caste to preserve their noble blood. They are the descendants of Nordic peoples who once conquered and ruled India.”

Mengele discusses how to create an upper class: “It can only be done by selecting the best.”

“Everything will end in catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons,” he warns, predicting that 90 percent of humans will starve due to stupidity and the remaining 10 percent will survive “like reptiles survived. The rest will die, just like the dinosaurs did … we have to prevent the rise of the idiot masses,” he writes.

“The feeble-minded person (‘village idiot’) was separated from farmers because of his social status and low income,” he writes.

“This separation is no longer the case in the age of technology. He is now on the same level with the farmer’s son who went to the city.

“We know that selection rules all nature by choosing and exterminating … Those who were unfit had to accept the rule of more accomplished human beings, or they were pushed out or exterminated. Weaker humans were excluded from reproducing. This is the only way for human beings to exist and to maintain themselves.”

He says “inferior morons” should be exterminated, adding, “We have to make sure that nature’s suspended eradication will continue through human arrangements … birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes.”

Mengele goes on to advise Germany to abandon feminist ideology and control childbirth. “Biology doesn’t support equal rights. Women shouldn’t be working in higher positions. Women’s work must depend on filling a biological quota. Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized after the fifth child.”

Source: In his diary, Mengele predicted 90% of humans would die of stupidity

It is hard to read these words without tearing up. The reduction of human beings to less than insects is hard to fathom. Mengele doesn’t for a moment consider that human beings have emotions, love, joy, happiness, laughs, and tears. That one’s ability to enjoy the gift of life is not contingent upon the straightness and size of one’s nose, one’s physical build, or one’s intelligence. To reduce human beings to such things is a step beyond evil. And he admits he knew he was doing wrong. He personally did these things directly, sadistically, and appeared to enjoy human experimentation, regardless of the pain and misery it caused his victims, because they weren’t even human in his eyes.

Fish was a psychopath. He had no conscience. His killing was cold, predatory, and sadistic. It is a given that he was a reptile. He is so bad that it is hard to even consider him a moral actor, given his level of depravity. His kind usually are the result of being born with the genetic predisposition toward psychopathy, combined with severe childhood abuse. The conscience doesn’t exist already, but the cruel treatment leaves the person uninterested in developing cognitive empathy. This is doing right by people because you agree to be a prosocial person, even though you don’t feel empathy. Jeffery Dahmer had a similar upbringing, as did Charles Manson. These types of psychopaths enjoy predating on others because it thrills them. Otherwise they feel dead inside. Due to genetics and childhood abuse, one gets the sense that they aren’t fully alive in the moral sense. There is something wrong with them, deep down in their most essential selves. They are like vampires who dwell among the living, but must feed upon the blood of those who are alive to sustain their bloodless, lifeless corpses. They have no souls.

In my mind Dr. Mengele is worse than Fish and Hitler. Mengele is in possession of a conscience, yet he does wrong. He admits it, but he doesn’t care. He reduces human beings to less than vermin. He stood in a position of power and personally committed unspeakable acts on innocent people. He is the embodiment of the most terrifying form of evil. That is why he was appropriately called, The Angel of Death.