Thread by @pdacosta

"His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do. Nobody was clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often rely on gut feeling." newsweek.com/hitler-incompe…

"His 'unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair.' Rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on his mood."

"He was incredibly lazy. Even when he was in [the capital] he wouldn’t get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn’t do much before lunch other than [watch] what [the news] had to say about him."

"He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as 'the greatest actor' and wrote to a friend, 'I believe my life is the greatest [movie] in world history.'"

" In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat 'prodigious amounts of cake.'"

"He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others.

"He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked).

"But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him."

"There’s a bit of an argument among [pundits] about whether this [chaos] was a deliberate ploy to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff."

"But when you look at his personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country."

"Why did the elites so consistently underestimate him? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realise that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition."

"So many people failed to take him seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a 'half-mad rascal.' In a sense, they weren’t wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it’s possible to get.

"His personal failings didn’t stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don’t actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things."