Hitler as a person
Many journalists have tried to analyze Hitler's psyche, from the decisive influences in his childhood, over the rejections he experienced as the artist he wanted to be, to his relationship to women as a grown-up (e.g., Guido Knopp has written a whole book about "Hitler's Women", which was aired as one episode of a - rather populistic - Guido Knopp tv series about Hitler in Germany, too), always trying to find the crucial motives that made such a monster out of this person.
In my history class, the same discussions were started over and over again when coming to Hitler, but I still keep considering looking at the whole "Third Reich" item from this point of view as precarious, because it can easily distract from the more essential issues.
I'm sure Germany, as any other country, has always had, and will always have, a Hitler, that is: Any kind of brutal, pathologically mislead tyrant, obviously lacking everything usually considered as "human" ("human" in the positive sense). The question is whether this person has the opportunity (a society which will provide enough support, or, at least, enough lack of interest, as well as political and financial "mentors" and a matching point in historical development) to realize what would otherwise just stay the megalomaniac fantasies of a poor moron who might as well work as a street sweeper or a dentist or a shopkeeper, mentioned in the newspapers only in his obituary.
And who knows, if things had worked out differently, Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler might have been some unimportant civil servants as well. But, in fact, they happened to find things settled for their purposes, and this is the really terrible thing. Although the best national election results the NSDAP ever managed were only 43,9 percent (on March 5, 1933)1, and despite the nonvoters, this was obviously sufficient for their intentions. And the public gets what the public wants...
1Informationen zur politischen Bildung 123/126/127, "Der Nationalsozialismus", Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn, Germany, 1991.