Holloway: I don't have time to really go into this like I usually do here, but Hitler was incredibly incompetent. The only reason he looks good is that he managed to do a lot of things in the short term by seriously overextending himself that were not sustainable in the long term. He burned out the supply of natural resources on almost an entire continent; one of the major reasons he lost the war is he ran out of simple things like food and gasoline for his troops. Most of his big public works projects were only half finished (you can't even see most of them because they were torn down after the war). The reason for that once again is that he chewed through resource stockpiles and used them up much, much faster than they could be replenished; a lot of what he did manage in terms of manpower was based off slave labor, which also was unsustainable simply because he wasn't interested in caring for the basic needs of his slaves, and they were weakening and dying off faster than he could repopulate them.
This is not the behavior of an intelligent, competent leader. Part of good leadership on a national level is resource management. That's not even to mention diplomacy; WWII could have never happened if he had simply been less stubborn in his dealings with other countries. He was just an insanely irresponsible person. He's like the guy in an RTS that takes all his money and spends it building his most expensive units, then rushes the enemy with every single force he has including his peons and when he gets trashed by better strategy, then monkeystomped on the turn around, blames it on bad luck. Honestly I'd be surprised if the dude could win a game of chess, or in the modern age manage a simple game like Sim City, let alone real life diplomacy and population management.
He was insane, incompetent and incredibly destructive to his country; to take a narrow viewpoint and only look at the 'good' things he a accomplished at the height of productivity in Nazi Germany and cut out everything that came before, after, and the wasteful and unsustainable means he used to accomplish that peak is incredibly shortsighted. You're looking at a guy who burned down a forest and planted five trees that grew up real big and calling him a great environmentalist, you're looking at a guy who smashed a beach worth of sandcastles and built one turret with a cup and calling him a grand architect. Seriously man. He was a failure and a scourge of his own country, nothing positive he did begins to justify or explain the ruin he brought on Europe.
With proper management of manpower, resources, and diplomacy like you see in an actual good leader, even a nutty one like Roosevelt during our own depression during almost the same time, countries can pull themselves out of the kind of depression and recession Germany dealt with and have massive economic booms. Look at Japan today; it went from being a miserable heap after it was nearly completely destroyed in WWII to being one of the most advanced, fastest growing and most respected countries in the world. Hirohito ran it into the ground, the leadership after the war built it back up into something stronger and more powerful than his narrow view of the world could have even conceived, and without any of his drastic methods of conquest and subjugation. That's good leadership, that's amazing and nearly miraculous, not throwing your weight around and building up a little power for a few years and running your nation into the ground in the process, pissing off the entire world and ending up dead and in a heaping ruin of a country.
