Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show | Opinion

Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren't actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realise that this wasn't enough to stand in the way of his ambition.

Newsweek

The moral of the story of clownish Nazi incompetence:

"We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It's understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn't an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can't immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.

But history suggests that's a mistake, and it's one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them."

Sound familiar?

One slight fine point that the Nazis-as-clowns analysis misses: the Nazis actually DID have an evil genius, but it wasn't Hitler. It was Reinhard Heydrich, chief architect of the Holocaust, a man as evil as Hitler, and incomparably more capable and effective as a planner and administrator. But he was the only one. The Allies had him assassinated in May 1942, and the Nazis didn't have anyone to replace him with. After that, the clown show went on uninterrupted.

I don't see a #Heydrich within the #Trump administration. (Elon Musk certainly isn't that, his personal mythology to the contrary notwithstanding.) Let's hope #Trump doesn't find one.