Maureen Dowd: Hitler’s Talking Dogs

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.

At this late date, when we believe we know absolutely everything about Adolf Hitler, could it be that he was even crazier than we thought?

From Caligula to Nero to Qaddafi, dictators are often not just cruel and evil, but lunatics. It’s very rare to find a rational dictator. Absolute power deranges them and gives them delusions and fantasies. So we shouldn’t be surprised by news reports suggesting the Führer was batty beyond even Mel Brooks’s satire.

First, an MI5 document was declassified in London in April, revealing megalomaniacal schemes for Nazis to rise again if they lost the war by scattering sleeper agents around the world; and by killing Allied officers with poison infused in sausages, chocolate, Nescafé coffee, cigarettes, schnapps and Bayer aspirin.

German agents said they were instructed to first offer Allied targets a cigarette treated by Nazi scientists to give the smoker a headache, then finish the job with a poison aspirin that would kill within 10 minutes....