Adolf Hitler

LITTLETON, Colo. -- The students blamed for killing more than a dozen people in Tuesday's school shooting in suburban Denver belonged to a group of teen-agers described as aloof with a preference for dressing in black, praising Adolf Hitler and glorifying death."

WASHINGTON -- Don't judge a book by its cover. But begin judging Ron Rosenbaum's book by its brilliant dust jacket, which features an old, grainy black-and-white photograph of a cherubic infant, less than a year old, dressed in a white gown with a ruffled collar, staring at the camera with wide, dark eyes, his delicate lips slightly parted, a look of mild curiosity on his round face. How did this small bundle of potentialities become Adolf Hitler?In "Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil," Mr. Rosenbaum, a novelist and literary journalist, takes readers on a mind-bending tour of "the garden of forking paths" in "the trackless realm of Hitler's inwardness."

"The Hitler of History," by John Lukacs. Knopf. 320 pages. $26.His name was Adolf Hitler, alias the Fuehrer, and they called him many things in his time. David Lloyd George, the white-maned former British prime minister, called him "the greatest German of the age ... a born leader who threatens nobody." Another prime minister named Winston Churchill, less afflicted with moral myopia, saw him as a "monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder ... the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrong shame."

The controversial 10-day visit to Baltimore in April 1936 of the German light cruiser Emden with 600 Nazi naval trainees aboard resulted in demonstrations as well as the flying of swastikas over the Port of Baltimore and inside City Hall.The Emden's arrival was of such interest that thousands jammed the waterfront to see and tour the 494-foot long vessel, which was docked at Recreation Pier at the foot of Broadway in Fells Point.Delegations opposed to the visit demanded that Gov. Harry W. Nice and Mayor Howard W. Jackson not receive or hold any public receptions for the visiting Nazis.

NOTHING IN Belarus is as easy as it seems. A deal to defuse a political confrontation between authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko and the country's parliament began unraveling almost as soon as it was struck yesterday.Under the deal, brokered by Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the parliament is to agree not to seek Mr. Lukashenko's impeachment. For his part, the president, who wanted to acquire nearly dictatorial powers and extend his term until the year 2001 through a referendum tomorrow, has pledged to regard the results as non-binding.

Balkan RealitiesFor Bosnia, ''The End Will Come Eventually,'' William Pfaff forecasts in his column. Well, for the Bosnian people, Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike, Bosnia will stay there as a geographical definition, until the end of the world.Too many horrors were committed there by all sides, and not only by the Serbs as the U.S. news media try to tell it.What is the most logical possible outcome for Bosnia? It is that Bosnia become a member state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This solution would mean the end of human suffering, no matter what will be told by news media.

GUARDING THE FUHRER: Sepp Dietrich, Johann Rattenhuber and the Protection of Adolf Hitler. By Blaine Taylor. Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Missoula, Mont. 276 pages. Illustrated. $19.95.I HAVE two memories of Alan Morgenstern, a schoolmate in Britain and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. The first is his bragging about the super-highways in Germany, all built under Adolf Hitler. They were so much better than those in Britain, he said. The second is a picture of him in the school magazine.

TODAY MARKS the 60th anniversary of the death of German Reich President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and a crucial turning point for chancellor Adolf Hitler.The death of the only man Hitler is said to have feared gave the Nazi unbridled power to advance his evil desires, resulting in the holocaust. The 87-year-old field marshal died in his sleep at 9 a.m. on Aug. 2, 1934. By noon that day, in a pre-arranged deal with the Army and Hindenburg's son, Oskar, Hitler announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined in his person, and that his new title was Fuhrer (Leader)

Supporters will invoke the names of slain children; opponents will raise the specter of an American Hitler.The issue dividing them is gun control. And as it moves to center stage in Annapolis tomorrow, it promises to generate some of the most incendiary debate in this year's legislative session.Amid the sound and fury, though, nobody is expected to offer much evidence on the key question: Will any of the proposed measures make Maryland safer?That is because no one really knows.The proposals to be submitted to the legislature are either too new or too hard to analyze in the states where they have been enacted.

Is Boris Yeltsin as important to the United States and the world as the Clinton administration thinks he is? Or are Americans once again exaggerating the effects of a man on the politics of his time?Henry Kissinger has written that he thinks it unwise to gear American policy ''so totally'' to an individual, ''whatever his merits.'' It is mistaken to see the political struggle in Russia as ''a clear-cut contest between democracy and a return to the old system.''Tying the United States so closely to a single leader, Mr. Kissinger argues, involves us in a complex power struggle we may not fully understand and on whose outcome we can have only marginal influence.

The head of an Anne Arundel County Republican women's group has apologized for a Web posting comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, after the posting received national attention on blogs and cable television news. Joyce E. Thomann, president of the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County, wrote in a letter on the group's Web site that "Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common in my view. Obama and Hitler use the 'blitzkrieg' method to overwhelm their enemies. FAST, CARPET BOMBING intent on destruction.

theater 'Antebellum': Scarlett O'Hara and Adolf Hitler - separated at birth? This world premiere by Robert O'Hara improbably melds history and fiction. The play is set in 1939 when the world was at war and the premiere of Gone With the Wind took place in Atlanta. It runs through April 26 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. N.W., Washington. Showtimes vary. Tickets are $26-$60. Call 202-393-3939 or go to woollymammoth.net. Mary Carole McCauley art 'Sacred Stitches': Sacred Stitches, an exhibit featuring historic vestments from the collection of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, will be on display through Sept.

Tonight, when the fanfare is complete and the final pitch is thrown, either to or by an Oriole, the light standards towering above Yankee Stadium in the Bronx will go dark. And 85 years of baseball - starting with Babe Ruth's three-run homer in the park's opener, April 18, 1923, and finishing with an anticlimactic regular-season contest between two American League East also-rans - will come to an end. Tonight's Orioles-New York Yankees game is likely the last sporting event to be held in the old stadium at the corner of East 161st Street and River Avenue, a sports cathedral that also hosted legendary NFL and college football games and prizefights.

Here's a proposal for Landmark Theaters before the national art-house chain opens the Harbor East cinemas Nov. 2: Make one of the seven screens a revival house. In the days before home video and Turner Classic Movies, revival theaters were a mainstay of thriving movie markets. Their programmers offered casual fans and die-hard movie lovers alike the kinds of services that can't be found in mail-rental catalogs and video stores. And I don't just mean seeing movie classics where they belong, on the big screen - though that is a huge selling-point.

The Castle in the Forest Norman Mailer Random House / 478 pages / $27.95 Ever since folklorist Lewis Spence published his Occult Causes of the Present War in 1940, historians have noted the Nazi hierarchy's loony dependence on runes, mysticism, esoteric rituals, worship of the war god Odin and even Satanism. High officials in the party justified eugenics and genocide with crackpot theories such as "theozoology," which maintained that interstellar deities electrically sired the so-called Aryan people while ethnically inferior races were the progeny of humans who had consorted with apes.

BERLIN -- In a wacky corner of cyberspace, rubber ducks stamped with Adolf Hitler faces sing in the bathwater. Their voices in squeaky unison, they bob to reggae music as bombs fall on Berlin, while the Nazi dictator himself, a manic cartoon trapped in a bunker, sings: "Surrender? No, it's not my cup of tea." The voice belongs to Thomas Pigor, a cabaret singer with a mischievous sense of timing. He and irreverent comic-book writer Walter Moers collaborated on the short video Adolf - The Bonker.

CHICAGO -- Among the many innovations generated by the Internet is an axiom called Godwin's Law, which says that given enough time, any online discussion will produce a comparison involving Nazism or Adolf Hitler. So common is this phenomenon in cyberspace arguments that it also spawned an informal rule: Whoever first mentions the Nazis loses. By that standard, the Bush administration is getting trounced in the debate on Iraq. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to the American Legion convention and likened critics of our policy to those who discounted the threat posed by Nazism.

Is there a humorous side to adults having sex with minors? I don't think so. But either I'm wrong or comedian Bill Maher is. Maher had a show four years ago that aired on network television. It was called Politically Incorrect because its host often was. But Maher's show was canceled when he said, in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon, that the perpetrators of the act had courage. Bad timing, Bill. Maher has since claimed he is a "First Amendment martyr."

Otto Guensche, 86, an aide to Adolf Hitler who burned the Nazi dictator's body to keep it from the advancing Soviets in the final days of World War II, died Oct. 2 at his home in Lohmar, Germany, his eldest son said. An SS officer and member of Hitler's inner circle, Mr. Guensche spent the last hours with the Nazi leader in Hitler's bunker in Berlin before Hitler and companion Eva Braun committed suicide April 30, 1945. Mr. Guensche lived quietly in West Germany after the war following several years in Soviet captivity.

Otto Guensche, 86, an aide to Adolf Hitler who burned the Nazi dictator's body to keep it from the advancing Soviets in the final days of World War II, died Oct. 2 at his home in Lohmar, Germany, his eldest son said. An SS officer and member of Hitler's inner circle, Mr. Guensche spent the last hours with the Nazi leader in Hitler's bunker in Berlin before Hitler and companion Eva Braun committed suicide April 30, 1945. Mr. Guensche lived quietly in West Germany after the war following several years in Soviet captivity.