Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill in the Mirror

“Germany should be bombed regularly

every 50 years even for no reason “.

Cit. Sir Winston Churchill

It’s time to make some comparisons between these two historical figures: Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. I will be very brief and I hope not to say stupid things, I who am not a historian.

Art and politics, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, had them in their blood and more precisely, the first, Adolf Hitler, had them in his heart; the second, Winston Churchill, had them in his brain. Of the first it is said that he was a monster, with a heart I would add; of the second it is said that he was a great man, with the brain I would add. Let’s start with the latter.

Sir Winston Churchill, thanks to his brain, he would have sent 400,000 soldiers, mostly British, to the slaughterhouse on the beach of Dunkirk if it would have been up to him, and perhaps the Second World War could have ended there; the Führer Adolf Hitler, thanks to his heart, didn’t bomb those 400,000 thousand soldiers stranded in Dunkirk either from the air or from the ground; Sir Winston Churchill, thanks to his brain, in the Operation Catapult 1940, shot French ships, his allies, for fear that the Germans could seize them and then use the ships against the British; the Führer Adolf Hitler, thanks to his heart, spared Paris and its monuments despite the negative behavior of the French against the Germans, particularly in the Versailles negotiations at the end of the First World War; Sir Winston Churchill, thanks to his brain, in 1940 many Londoners wanted peace, he wanted war and he got it; the Führer Adolf Hitler, thanks to his heart, delayed his attack on Russia for three months (and it was fatal for him and Germany, some experts said, due to the change of season) to go to help the poor Italian soldiers who ended up under the fire of the Greeks; Sir Winston Churchill, while the war raged in the desert of El Alamein, he painted quietly and happily in a palace in Marrakech; the Führer Adolf Hitler, thanks to his heart, had begun to understand at a certain moment of the war that his generals no longer obeyed him; Sir Winston Churchill, thanks to his brain, at the end of the Second World War, when Germany was now just a pile of debris, had Dresden and other German cities that still breathed razed to the ground; the Führer Adolf Hitler, thanks to his heart, in the last days of his life married his partner, Eva Braun, and then committed suicide together with his wife in order not to end, both he and she, neither alive nor dead in the hands of the enemy.

Winston Churchill was part of the English rulers. For generations his family had consisted of generals, people that killed for royal reasons. He lived in a great palace with a large park and in the greatest wealth; Adolf Hitler was the son of a stationmaster. He had lost his parents when he was very young, he had tasted hunger, injustice, loneliness and during the First World War he had spent four years in the trenches, the most atrocious and most inhuman experience that can be had. Perhaps Adolf Hitler, after all what he had lived, had some reason to shoot Europe and the monuments of Paris, but can we say the same about Sir Winston Churchill?

Hitler had an artistic vision of life. He wanted a healthier, more beautiful and happier humanity. Churchill had a subjective and greedy view of life. In the first there was an artist’s heart, a true, realistic heart, interested in improving the human race; in the second there was a trained, servile, calculating brain, always ready to protect, rightly and wrongly, their masters and their interests and, therefore, also his interests.

Great Men like Sir Winston Churchill have a discriminatory and individual view of history and do everything to be seen as the opposite of what they really are; the little men a la Adold Hitler have a vision of history in the plural, in a human and social sense. This is what fundamentally distinguishes these two historical figures.