We have seen that maturity came to Hitler relatively late - a condition that led Heer to write that throughout his life there remained something incomplete in his personality...it might even be argued that this astonishing man, with all his talents and self-discipline, never really achieved maturity - by which I mean the existence of that deep-seated private judgement whereby a person comes to terms with the relationship of himself and his circumstances (a recognition that is not necessarily identical with his view of his destiny, or with a sense of that resignation which comes with age....Peter Kleist, one of Ribbentrop's satellites, wrote in his memoirs: "I had the oppurtunity to study his face carefully. It has amazed me because of the multiplicity of expressions it contained...Photography, by selecting only a single moment out of context, could show only one aspect, thereby giving a false impression of the duplicity or multiplicity of being which lay behind this image." He added: "I tried to find some explanation for the hypnotic effect of those eyes without arriving at any explanation."...
...Schramm's remarks about the ambivalence of Hitler's expressions: "The friend of women, children and animals - this was one face of Hitler neither acted nor feigned, but entirely geniune. There was, however, a second face which he did not show to his table companions, though it was no less geniune."
One element in his character was that of the artist. He was a talented draftsman and painter, and a potential architect...A bohemian Hitler was, as Speer often remarked, very evident in his working habits - untill about 1942 he rose late, ate late, and frittered away many hours. Speer commented, "I have often asked myself often: when did he really work?" (This when he was the most powerful dictator in the world)....
...Hitler was a desperate man, while at the same time, he was a visionary of a new, heroic, pagan, and scientific world. He was an unhappy child and an unhappy adolescent, spurred by shame and resentment, surely after 1918...He was also a strong man; and a fundamental source of his strength was hatred. Yet his hatreds did not coagulate untill he was thirty years old. Before that he remained a boy; at thirty, he became a man suffused with vengence. And what is vengence but the idea of causing suffering in order to heal one's own suffering? The German word for vengence is "Rache". There are few more threatening guttural words in the German language.
