Was he the anti-Christ? I don't believe in Christ's divinity but I do believe he was about the best human being who ever existed. Hitler was sure the anti-best ever. In addition, there have always been observations of Hitler that make him seem not just super-evil but beyond human capacity for evil, like a spirit. A man, Reinhold Hanisch, who knew Hits and stayed in the same hotel as he did in Vienna, described his physical appearance as like,
"an apparition such as rarely occurs among Christians."
Hitler was down on his luck in Vienna, lived in the gutter, literally, for a time. We all have seen homeless people. Never have I seen a homeless person and thought he was like a ghost and tied his exceptionalism to a religion.
Accounts, even snippets as brief as Hanishch's convince me that Hitler was unique, le mot juste. "No Hitler, No Holocaust" (Milton Himmelfarb). I agree with Ron Rosenbaum that those, foremost Hannah Arendt ("the world's worst court reporter" 😁) who see "banality" in the Nazi regime, who group Hitler with Stalin and Mao as an evil quirk of the 20th century, miss this unique messianic aspect of Adolph Hitler. There was nothing "banal" about Nazi evil, neither in Eichmann nor Heydrich nor Hitler.
