Rehabilitating Hitler?

In one of Gwynne Dyer's latest columns (published in late April) he asks if Hitler might not be rehabilitated after the generation that suffered under Nazism dies:

You don't think that could happen? Consider the way we now treat the "Corsican ogre", Napoleon Bonaparte. He has become a veritable industry for military historians, and is revered by half the population of France because he ruled the country at the height of its power and led the French to several dozen great military victories before his boundless ambition finally plunged them into total defeat. Nobody seems particularly perturbed by the fact that his wars caused the deaths of about four million people.

That is a far smaller number than the thirty million or so deaths that Hitler was responsible for, but Europe's population was a great deal smaller in Napoleon's heyday. Europeans actually stood about the same chance of dying as a result of Napoleon's actions at the height of his power in 1808 as they did from Hitler's actions in 1943 -- and Napoleon has been forgiven by history. So if all of those who died in Hitler's war are soon to enter the same weightless category of the long-dead, what is to keep history from forgiving him, too?

Well, the one thing that might do it is film. The US Civil war has long held a tighter grip on American memory because of the fact that early cameras documented the battlefields of the time, whereas the Revolutionary war has often taken second place in people's memory because all accounts were written, not pictorial. World War II has had an even tighter grip on memory, largely because of historical proximity, but also - I would argue - because of the ubiquity of motion pictures capturing much of the action. Like real memories, they don't even need to actually correspond to reality - the famous flag-raising at Iwo Jima is emblematic of the war, but how many people my age (24) know where Iwo Jima is, or that it was the Marines who raised the flag? The image transcends historical facts, and represents hard-won victory - even though the flag raising happened at the beginning of the battle for Iwo Jima, more than a month before the fighting ended on that island.

Conversely, the two Iraq wars are liable to have a far "looser" grip on people's memory - I'm sure there's plenty of video out there, but the Pentagon isn't exactly playing nice with it. And aside from Saddam's statue, or "Mission Accomplished", can you name a single notable image from the latest war?