Hitler Thought He Was A Genius Too

Well... recently we had Donald Trump declare himself to be "a very stable genius," so I thought I'd do a little piece on something Hitler had said.

Traudl Junge was one of Hitler's personal secretaries for the last two and one half years of his life. After the war, she wrote down the recollections of her time in that secretarial position, but then those actual recollections were not published until 2002 (2003, in English), after Viennese writer Melissa Müller* found Junge and did a series of video interviews with her. Müller published Junge's postwar notes in a book called, "Bis zur letzten Stunde" ("Until the Last Hour"). The notes were published without corrections to mistakes, and only with notations indicating illegible words or phrases, although Müller added extensive footnotes of her own to the back of the book to correct the errors, as well as to give a bit of background on the various people Junge mentioned, as many people on Hitler's staff and in his immediate circle were not generally known to the public. The video interviews, which largely parallel Junge's notes, were also released on DVD as, "Im Toten Winkel"("Blindspot," literally, "In the dead angle"), and with English subtitles. In her notes, as well as in the interview with Müller, Junge tells how Hitler had said that he hadn't married because he could not devote sufficient time to a wife, and that he did not want children of his own, as he believed, "offspring of geniuses have a difficult time in the world" ("Nachkommen von Genies haben es meist sehr schwer in der Welt"). And that these children were expected to be of the same caliber as their famous parent and that they wouldn't be excused for being just average. "Moreover, they are mostly Cretins" ("Außerdem werden es meistens Kretins;" that is, "idiots").** And Junge then comments about how she thought it odd that Hitler considered himself to be a genius, and that Hitler's statement made her flinch inside ("innerlich gezuckt"). It should be noted, by the time Traudl Junge, then known by her maiden name, Traudl Humps, went to work for Hitler, German cities were becoming ever greater targets of Allied air attacks. Wow, what a genius!

* Melissa Müller is the author of "Anne Frank: The Biography," first released in 1998.

** German text from, "Bis zur letzten Stunde," 2011 German paperback edition, by Traudl Junge in cooperation with Melissa Müller, List Taschenbuch

WORD HISTORY:
Genius-This word, related to Latin-derived "genus," and to "genealogy," a word tracing back to Greek, both words borrowed by English, goes back to Indo European "gen," which had the notion, "offspring, produce." This gave its Latin offspring the verb "gignere," meaning "to produce, to give birth to." This then produced the Latin noun "genius," which meant, "guardian spirit which accompanies and guides a person from the time of birth," but also, in some cases, "the intellect of a person."This was borrowed into English in the second half of the 1300s with the "guardian spirit" meaning, along with the secondary meaning of "intellect," but it wasn't until the 1600s that the "intellect" meaning became primary, with the added, "high intellectual capacity" meaning. German borrowed its form of the word, "Genie," from French in the 1700s.