The Cruelest Nazi Leader

HE MIGHT WELL have been the cruelest among the many cruel National Socialist leaders. He hated, with a nearly unparalleled passion, all Jews; Gypsies; homosexuals; the Catholic church, and particularly the Jesuits; the Poles; the Freemasons; handicapped or retarded fellow-Germans; all Communists; the Soviet Union; socialists; liberals; democrats; members of the rival Abwehr, the German military counter-intelligence service; the inefficient and corrupt Old Nazi Party bosses; conservative generals; and anyone who had ideas different from his own on how to build an ever greater National Socialist Germany. He was an ideological fanatic, but also an opportunist who always sensed which way the wind was blowing.