How did Adolph Hitler come to be? Was he the Antichrist?
The history of Germany and Prussia provided the conditions for a brutal dictator to sprout but fertile fields are not the same as causation. World War I caused World War II. It did not cause Hitler. Throughout human history barbaric dictatorship is the rule, not the exception. Mass murder, genocide, cannibalism, slavery--those too are "family values" when the family is humanity. Hitler was "extreme" as Genghis Khan, Caligula and the other "greats" of human barbarity of antiquity were and Hitler had the "skill set" that they did not have: foremost, German efficiency and modern technology. Was Hitler "merely" extreme but with better tools? I don't think so. Warsaw and Leningrad were to be razed to the ground and their populaces left without food. Murder by starvation was a deliberate tactic of the New Order, the plan partially implemented to systematically exterminate the peoples of Europe and to make those not exterminated outright slave laborers of the Reich. This was the plan of the New Order for the entire world. It knows no equal in human history. It was not "merely" inhuman, it was anti-human.
Antichrist: i believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the finest human being to ever walk the face of the earth. I do not believe that he was a demigod. I believe that Adolph Hitler was the opposite of Jesus, the Antichrist. Human beings have discarded their moral core whenever it has been convenient. Hitler though was anti-morality. The antecedents were there, in Nietzsche. They are just additional fertilizer for the fields, however, they do not provide causation. Nietzsche has been read by millions of people, none but one became a Hitler.
And why did so many barbarians come to power in the 20th century after the birth of Christ? Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Tojo, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, I am surely forgetting some, why were the fields of the 20th century so fertile as to germinate such? When an essayist asks these many questions it means he does not have answers to any of them, and indeed this humble essayist does not. Unquestionably, even with so many competitors in the 20th century, indeed in all of human history, Adolph Hitler was, superlatives fail here, the best I can do is "most evil" human being. He seems more a visitation on humanity of an evil Antichrist from the Apocalypse than merely "human, all too human."
