I think for all the breast beating, those who want to investigate the Hitler phenom as if it were the smallpox have done precious little by way of investigating. So I maintain that this thread has been largely troll inspired. That impression is reinforced not only by the paucity of hard analysis or original thought but by the constant use of guest-names.

I think Communism and Nazism were (and are) pretty much the same thing, as if the evil left and the evil right met behind the back and shook hands. Both survived on exploitation, totalitarian terror, military domination of weaker neighbors, and Big Lies. The Nazi phenomenon was built on a pseudoscience of racism tied to a perverted survival of the fittest. The Communist world was built on a pseudoscience called Dialectical Materialism which among other things denied proper Darwinism (and had a racist element all its own).

People who met the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg were moved to remark on the 'banality' of evil.

Saddam used Stalin as his model to power. Both Iraq and Russia are going through Hell in the wake of their perverted leaderships, which spent years eliminating any viable alternates.

Watching Hitler speechify is an absolutely chilling experience. There was some speech he was making to the workers where he said something like progress in labor relations had been made difficult by the labor unions, "so I eliminated the labor unions"! It was hard to tell if he meant this humorously, sardonically, or as a straightforward progress report.