I have to admit I'm surprised by some of the venom expressed on this subject. And no, I'm not excusing Hitler or any part of the holocaust.
But has everyone forgotten that if we're looking at killing people off in great numbers, the Stalinist purges over the decades in Russia make Adolf Hitler look like amateur night? And if you could calculate numbers from the dictators of past centuries you'd find other examples.
So can we level the playing field?
I'd like to take another angle here.
From what I've read, we all agree in our pre-life plans before we incarnate this time to where and when we're going to live; not only choosing bodies, families, partners, etc, but also the country that we'll live in, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF WARS/MAJOR DISASTERS.

So remember the maxim: There are no victims, only volunteers. (I think Denise Linn mentions that in her books.)

So I'm asking (because I don't claim to know anything on this): did all the folks who've suffered and died in pogroms and holocausts over the centuries agree at a soul level to take part. Obviously, when you're back home (up there?) you'll maybe be thinking 'Wow, that was an experience and a half. Okay, been there, done that, what's next?'

You plan a lifetime, but you also know how you're going to exit this life. It could be peacefully surrounded by family and friends, it might be in a car accident, it might be in a war. Although from what I've read, free will can mess even that one up!

So Hitler (and Stalin for that matter) might have been acting a very important role in being in the positions that they were in and providing a large chunk of humanity with a crash course in extreme experiences:  war, death, blind ignorance, paranoia, pain.
But through that, maybe some of the souls that experienced this may have found themselves developing soul compassion and empathy to a level and at a speed that normally would have taken many lifetimes to achieve.
That's not to say that they weren't very dark and shady characters, but I would also try looking at the powers behind the throne; the ones who probably aren't in the history books. Maybe the 'great' dictators were only front men for something else entirely.
But (and this is a big but) in the scheme of thousands of lifetimes, maybe the one as a dictator is an important one that might incur a lot of extra karma, but in the end balances out through thousands of other lives spent redeeming the soul quality and refining it through experience and realisation.
But if Shakespeare was right on the money with 'all the world's a stage and the men and women on it merely players', are we playing a part in a play, and at the end of the play (this current life) we got home and choose another part completely?
So if Neale Donald Walsch is correct, the artist formerly known as Hitler
is now planning (may even be living) a life somewhere as a quiet monk or doctor in the most deprived part of the world (or universe?) you can  imagine, and -FROM CHOICE.

Needless to say I can't prove any of this and I can't back it up. It's all conjection on my part and others here will be able to either rebut or back up my thoughts.
You may not forgive Hitler, but you don't know what his original lfe plan was supposed to have been, how it got subverted, and also the life plans of his victims.
I'm guessing that this ELS looks a whole lot different from over there.

Hope that this helps,
Love and best wishes to all,

David.

Hi Kathy,
thanks for the reply: very welcome.
From my reading of Michael Newton's books there can be a quite detailed plan of the future life. The more lifetimes we have under our belts, the more we begin to understand the ELS, and we can start to look at particular aspects of ourselves through those experiences, which includes handling the ego. As I understand it, you might decide in order to progress more/quickly to have a lifetime of real hardship to find out about soul qualities that you either lack or need to explore, and as part of that you may mix with some very unsavoury characters, or indeed become one.
My point is that through experiencing terror, extermination, hatred as both victim AND PERPRETRATOR in different lifetimes your soul (you) comes to fully understand both sides of the coin; what makes someone 'sell his/her soul' to the devil (who is a Christian church construct anyway?), and also experience the results of that persons' actions.
So you get to directly experience this. For example, I might have had a life as a concentration camp guard/executioner, and also a parallel life as a victim of that executioner. Effectively, I kill myself!
Or, you might find that you work with members of your soul group: I'll murder you this time around, you can murder me next time around, then after that we'll get married, then I can be your grandpa....... all options are open I suppose. Sometimes the hardest experiences are with the closest souls.

Newton's books to me have been a revelation. I know that I'm going to have to judge myself at the end of this life and look at all the errors I made, and there's no rationalisations and excuses available.
But the point is that no-one judges you: You do it all, and you can be far harsher on yourself than any judge.
(I know I beat myself up for England in the past over things I've done wrong...)

So (getting back to the point ): just imagine what Hitler would have felt after committing suicide.
(as a side issue, there are various reports that he actually escaped and survived until at least 1958, but that's for another discussion elsewhere).
You've committed suicide, you realise that you still exist, and you undergo the life review.
Now remember that to all intents and purposes, morally Hitler was crazier than a one legged tap dancer, so getting back into spirit might seem like waking from a terrible nightmare, as for the first time in a lifetime (?) he would actually be thinking clearly. No ideologies, no excuses, no belief system to hang on to. You actually see what you've done and relive it. With no cushion of expediency and rationalisation to excuse things, there's no refuge.
So after time alone for deep reflection, it's time to go to the guides and plan what issues to work on. I don't feel that Hitler/Stalin/(insert evil dude here) may be inherently spiritually evil or negative, more diseased. The healing may have to be in the form of experiencing what you inflicted upon others directly, having a lifetime in a very emotionally hard and unforgiving environment, or even having a life on some strange planet where you hardly live at all.
Now all of this is conjection on my part...again 
But I wouldn't myself start slagging off Hitler (or any despot -what's Mugabe's standing spiritually at the moment?) without knowing the full soul story, and that -of course- is impossible for us in the ELS.
Like the American Indian saying: walk a mile in my shoes.
(and at the end, you'll be a mile away and I won't have any shoes  ).

That doesn't mean that we all sit back and relax and let said 'evil dude' continue. But just realise that there are much bigger issues in anyone's life than might be immediately apparent to the outsider.

And finally (sorry for the rambling nature of this post by the way )

quoting Alan:
"There is a verse in the Bible that says “there is a sin against God or man for which there is no forgiveness in this life "or the next life” I think it anyone crossed that threshold it must be Hitler."

Alan, I would regard this quote with some suspicion. The guys who wrote that I'm guessing had an agenda. We all know that the Bible has been subject to an immense amount of revision for political purposes, and one of the tenets of the 'evil church dudes' might basically be summed up as:
'Do what we say or else. Do what we say or after this life you're really going to get it. Even God won't forgive you.'
Well it seems to me that a supreme being who is represented in the bible as a jealous god (10 commandments), loving god, wrathful, demanding obeisance at the slightest pretext, is a bit of a basket case and schizophrenic in the extreme. The Bible version of God has got it wrong, ergo God is not the perfect all being being that established churches would like to con you about.

The basic point as I understand it is that we have free will as our birthright. Therefore, we have the right to screw up royally for as many lifetimes as we want and big G is just going to sit there and let us get on with it. It's our game, and we judge ourselves on the results -not big G, who is way above anything we can conceive of anyway, and probably has far more important things to do, like running everything we can conceive of and much more that we can't.

This lifetime is only one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lifetimes that we'll experience in this universe, and that's not counting all the other universes we have/will experience.
Each life gives us the experiences of everything: saint in one, mass murderer in another, wealthy tycoon here, pauper there, religious bigot here, spiritual pioneer there.
It all adds up in the end.
And we'll all get there in the end .
We can't fail, it's guaranteed.
All we have to decide is by which route and how long it's going to take to get there.

Lots of love to all

David.