I don't absolutely know that Hitler was deluded, Ringer...but I very strongly suspect that he was. That is what the historical record seems to suggest. Only his most loyal and unswerving supporters would disagree that he was deluded, and I'm definitely not one of them.

Actions can be disastrous when they result in various forms of destruction, loss, and failure that were totally unexpected by he who iniated the actions. That was certainly the case with Hitler's attempts at building a new German empire in the 30s and 40s. ("Reich" means "realm" or "empire") The effort failed utterly, resulted in a partitioned and devastated Germany, the rise of 2 superpowers (Russia and the USA), and the creation of a Zionist state in Israel which is now one of the most effective military powers in the world, AND a member of the exclusive little community of nuclear-armed powers. For Hitler and the Germans this was a disaster. For the Jews is was a disaster. For most of Europe it was a disaster. It pretty much bankrupted the UK. Only the Russians and Americans came out of it with much reason to be pleased by the results of that conflict.

What I meant by "all is sacred" was this: All is sacred in its original or intrinsic nature, prior to the use of free will. The moment you have the use of free will, then relativity arises...all forms of conscious separation arise....and judgements of good and evil arise in the mind of the observer(s).

With free will we have...

you and me
us and them
here and there
"good" and "bad"

And we all know perfectly well what those are..."good" (for us) is what we feel positively toward and "bad" is what we feel negatively toward. Whether someone else agrees with us on those labels in any specific case is totally up to them and is dependent on their use of free will.

What the Nazis were doing (in general) was "good" as far as Hitler and Goebbels and many of their loyal supporters were concerned. It was "bad" as far as a far greater number of people in the world were concerned. These kind of disputes about good and evil have been going on all through history, and they are judged by those who live through them and survive them.

People generally judge something according to how they've been taught to judge it by their culture, their parents, their leaders, their churches, their teachers, their peer group.....they tend to let someone else set up their set of moral values for them, and then they repeat what they were told.

This made it pretty easy for Hitler to get some Germans to arrest and kill Jews (and many other people), and it's made it pretty easy for the American public to passively give consent to a series of wars of choice in the Middle East. A war of choice is not a war where somone attacked you. It's a war where YOU decided to attack someone else first, and you justified it in your own mind. That's exactly what Hitler did in the case of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Russia. (It doesn't apply to his fight with England or France, however, because they declared war on him first, as a result of the Polish invasion.)

Most people are conformists by nature. They tend to believe and follow whatever their society teaches them to believe and follow, and it is on that basis that they decide what is "good" and what is "evil". There are some things (such as rape, murder, theft, fraud, arson, lying, cheating) that almost all societies label as "evil"....so most of us are agreed when it comes to how we see those things. We don't find it nearly so easy to agree on most political issues...

Consider a society that believed that animals have souls, and that they have the same right to life as human beings. In such a society it might well be considered "evil" to kill animals and eat them. And if you'd been born into that society, you would see it as evil...unless you were a real nonconformist and determined to challenge that idea.

To understand a nation, you must first understand what they think is "good" and what they think is "evil". Get that figured out, and you are on the way to at least understanding them, even if you don't agree with them.