Hegseth announces annual testosterone screenings for service members

[u/mom0nga]

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5969935-hegseth-testosterone-testing-dod/

[u/z900r]

that same dogmatic belief structure that made them Nazis, also made it essentially impossible

A lot of it boils down to Hitler personally and his lack of perspective, personal fixations and paranoia. Of course, the Nazi ideology included the idea of the Führer, who was considered infallible in practice, so I guess your point stands. It wouldn't have been Nazism without Hitler. Still, Germany would have done a lot better on the eastern front if Hitler had left the fighting to the soldiers and stopped meddling, and stopped fixating on things like taking the city named after Stalin.

The attack on the Soviet Union was planned to be a war of annihilation from the beginning, with the idea that the Slavs had to go and the land had to be taken for the superior German people. It's an insane idea even economically, setting aside the genocide and insane racial theory. Nazism, and the Völkisch movement before it, really did include the idea of going back to working the land, and rejecting modernity, to one extent or another. After the war, West Germany showed rather spectacularly that they didn't need all of Russia for farmland in order to have a successful economy. They didn't need even the eastern part of Germany.

[u/PlayfulSurprise5237 → u/z900r]

Yea methamphetamine has a tendency to do that to people. Hyper-fixation, megalomania, paranoia, sounds about right.

[u/z900r → u/PlayfulSurprise5237]

The personality type "malignant narcissist" was coined to describe Hitler after the war. Narcissists are typically paranoid, because they project their way of thinking on other people, and therefore assume that others are scheming in the way that they do themselves. Narcissist always seek control, and if they think someone is threatening their control, they will likely lash out. Or, if the narcissist happens to be particularly malignant and has dictatorial powers, they'll have the threatening person imprisoned / tortured / executed. Being in control and the center of attention is a question of life and death to a narcissist, so they will put a lot of effort into maintaining control. It can come across as hyper-fixation.

The point is that these traits are built into narcissism. No drugs needed in particular. I'm sure the amphetamines didn't help. Towards the end, Hitler was a wreck, looking decades older than he was, and apparently he was also hiding Parkinson's disease.

[u/PermanentRoundFile → u/z900r]

I just want to add to this that in 1941, Hitler was presented with the prototype Sturmgewer Sgt44. This is the archetype of the modern assault rifle, with an intermediate cartridge (smaller than a battle rifle; faster than a pistol round), 30ish round magazine and select fire (semi/full auto) capability.

He rejected it because he preferred the bolt action, 5rd magazine Kar98 that he carried in WW1. Didn't even shoot it, and shuttered the program.

The engineers behind the program reclassified it as a machine pistol and continued to work on the design secretly. They re-presented their work late in 1944 and Hitler actually shot it, called it genius, and immediately put them into production. But it was far too late for them to really prove effective, and they were running low on resources to make them, so they were deployed in extremely low numbers to underwhelming effect.

So yeah, there were a lot of... interesting decisions that came back to bite them in the ass.

(As an added bonus: the difficulty in producing Sgt44 at the end of the war ended up making them call for a new, easier to produce design which became the Sgt45. They finished the first production run as Berlin was being sacked. The gas delayed roller lock design of the Sgt45 re-emerged in Spain as the CETME rifle, and was eventually acquired by H&K in Germany for the G3, HK33, HK21, and Mp5.)