J Robert Smith – If you never watched the brilliant German movie, Downfall, do so.  It stars the late Bruno Ganz, whose portrayal of Adolf Hitler during his last days in his Berlin bunker was powerfully chilling.

Hitler was a psychopath, whose unshakable certitude and will were central to driving National Socialism’s capture of the German people.  Both were also central to the numbing devastation that Hitler’s hubris brought to Germans in the end.

Seeing the movie again, and having had read various accounts of Hitler’s and the Nazi’s rise and fall, I’m left with two key takeaways: at core, National Socialism was a cult, and it was terribly evil. Continue reading →