HITLER'S BEEN HIDING THERE ALL ALONG

Theories about Hitler's escape from his 1945 Berlin Bunker just won't go away. Evil genius always mesmerizes us. From Nero to Rasputin, from John Wilkes Booth to Charles Manson, from the witches of Macbeth to Cinderella's stepmother, we can't seem to let go of them. Why....?

Perhaps for the same reason Eve was seduced by the serpent, Stephen King writes horror stories, and as children we are forever fascinated by fire. It's this compulsion to touch without being burned. To wrestle with the Devil, but at the last minute escape his clutches.

So the question still lingers -- did Adolf Hitler get away?

To those who believe he did, their hideaway of choice has always been Argentina. Others have simply been satisfied to say he "lives on" in night-time cable television, for there is rarely a night when you can't find another black&white documentary on Hitler, Hitler's SS, Hitler's concentration camps, Hitler's lovers, and of course Hitler's mother (for ever since Freud, everyone knows everything wrong with the world begins with some insensitive mother).

I have a more practical theory. Adolf Hitler did indeed kill himself on that April night, but the spirit of his evil instantly left his burned corpse to infiltrate every paranoid, vengeful, disordered personality in the world. From Berlin to Budapest to Brooklyn; from then to now; from here to eternity. Because, you see, Hitler was less a disease, and more a symptom. A living, infectious symptom of what has plagued mankind from the beginning...

....his fears of inadequacy, his frustration with failure, his certainty that others are to blame, his rage for revenge, and his taste for tyranny.

When Martin Scorsese makes a film about the mafioso, these are his lead characters! When the media covers serial killers and campus shooters, these are their subjects! When little men and women dream twisted dreams at night of getting back at the world, these are Hitler's children! When street gangs kill...when Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck rage with unsupported fury about "them," they are unwittingly spreading the Gospel of Adolf....when the boys at the corner saloon and the big boys in the Wall Street bars wink at the "weak idealism" of Obama's agenda, they are the storm troopers keeping alive the capitalistic cabal that whispers survival-of-the-fittest-and-screw-the-stupid.

Want some evidence...? Some statistical data to prove my theory...? Well, no, they don't usually ask this in surveys or report this in the Wall Street Journal. But history offers us a pretty loud hint that evil in the world -- like some of the mists and fogs in a Gothic novel -- hover over the world, finding rest in whatever angry hearts they can find.