Why do the alt-right/neo-fascists admire Hitler?
It goes without saying that Holocaust Denial is just stupid... It's like saying -- at 12 Noon -- that no, that isn't the sun up there, it's the moon.
But why do they continue to admire a pathetic loser like Hitler and his utterly failed Nazi movement?
Other authoritarians & "strongmen" in history have been much more politically successful, dying in bed of illness or old age instead of killing themselves like a sniveling coward, unable to face what they have wrought.
Virtually everything Hitler touched was a cataclysmic failure: his domestic policies, his diplomatic policies, his military strategies. Failure, failure, FAILURE.
Historian David Chandler notably once said that comparing Hitler to Napoleon was a vile slander against Napoleon and a thoroughly undeserved complement to Hitler.
He was 100% correct.
Napoleon was an authoritarian, unquestionably; many would say military dictator. But the average Frenchman living under his rule (1799-1814, 1815) was more free in terms of civil rights than a citizen of Napoleon's enemies: Prussia, Russia, Austria and (in certain respects) even Britain.
Napoleon was a genuine military titan -- one of the three great "Captains of History". (The others are Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.) Crazy, stupid Adolf isn't worthy to shine Bonaparte's boots in this respect, and there is no disputing this. During Napoleon's peak years of power (1805-1812), all of Europe trembled whenever the news went out, "La Grande Armee is on the march."
Napoleon was a ladies' man, who bedded more beauties in the average week than Adolf could have ever dreamed of his entire pathetically neurotic life. (And there's no disgusting "poo play" as been alleged about Hitler, or really anything remotely strange or deviant recorded about him.) In his married life, Napoleon revealed himself to be a genuine family man -- he deeply loved his son Napoleon II, the "King of Rome". Could anyone ever imagine Hitler crawling around on the floor and happily playing with his own child, laughing and smiling?
Apart from Napoleon's views on women's rights (rolled back from the Revolution under his rule, which put France back on a par with contemporary Britain, Prussia, etc. in this regard) and slavery in Haiti, he was surprisingly progressive for a man of his day. Many of his reforms are still reflected in France, as well as Europe at large, even some 200 years after his downfall.
So why do so many modern right-wingers/authoritarians still cling to some form of Hitler worship? Der Fuehrer was a colossal LOSER, a pathetic FAILURE whose stupidity, madness and malignant, homicidal evil destroyed Germany (and Europe).
Why Hitler over Napoleon?
It can only be this: Napoleon is considered a "Righteous Gentile" by Jews.
An agnostic, Bonaparte was disgusted by religious discrimination. Such discrimination was detrimental to his concept of meritocracy. He did not care if someone was Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, Jew, Deist or Atheist... If they had talents or skills that could benefit France and the Empire, then that person should be able to rise as far as those talents and skills could take them. When his army swept through northern Italy, Jewish ghettos were demolished and anti-Jewish laws abolished. (Example: Making Jews wear the Yellow Star was forbidden.) In the First French Empire, discrimination against Jews was ended -- by law.
Send her to the snakes!