••

And, as I have said before, this "revelation" really worked only during the eight and a half minutes it was happening.

Consider: Magneto was turned into a baby, and then aged back to adulthood. Okay, fine. Standard comicbook fare, and it explained (all those years ago) how a Holocaust survivor could be so young and healthy.*

This, of course, was not an option available to Bryan Singer, to so play the Holocaust card in the first X-Men movie, he had to make Magneto a Really Old Guy. Which means we get the young and healthy X-Men beating up on a Really Old Guy.

And here's the catch: if we apply "Marvel Time", then that first issue of X-MEN took place around eight or nine years ago -- which means in that issue the young and healthy X-Men were beating up on a Really Old Guy.

There's really no level on which the Holocaust survivor bit works.

_________

* Tho that was not the intent of the Magneto/baby story. That was years before the Holocause "reveal".

••

Is that a secondary mutation?

Fans -- and some pros -- often call up the "ages slowly" dodge, but it creates problems of its own. Such as When did this slowing of the aging process kick in? Puberty, like other mutant powers? If so, how long did it take Magneto to get from 13ish to 40ish (as seen in the first issue)? It stretches his timeline back further and further.

**

My impression of Wanda and Pietro, when they were first introduced, was that they were teenagers, like the X-Men. This played into my suggestion that they were Magneto's children.

Of course, both have been aged (as have the X-Men) WAY past the teen years, so that whole aging characters problem shows up yet again.

••

That would explain why he looked like an old boxer in his first appearance, and like a matinee idol when Neal Adams drew him without the helmet for the first time!

I see your point. At the same time, I kinda see the abused becoming the abuser.

••

Can you cite a real world example, specific to the Holocaust?

A good 20,000 or so Holocaust survivors joined the IDF and fought in Israel's War of Independence and some of subsequent wars between Israel and its neighbors.  Obviously opinions vary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and which side is in the right, but I think most reasonable observers would acknowledge substantial abuses of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

If that's not sufficient, one might point to Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Lodz ghetto, who used Jewish police units in a fairly vicious manner to control his fellow Jews, and ultimately to help the Germans round up much of the ghetto's population and deport it to Auschwitz.  The camps all featured Jewish kapos to help maintain them as well.

Suffering is not ennobling. One only has to read even a few of the accounts of life in the ghettos or the camps to see that victims of Nazi brutality could and did sometimes themselves become brutal. That loss of human decency by a certain portion of the victims was yet another way in which they harmed by the experience.

Count me among those who think that particular bit of backstory made Magneto more interesting.  He was one of a good half dozen fairly generic megalomaniacal would-be dictators in 1960s Marvel Comics. I think Claremont's revision made his character more three dimensional and his paranoia and willingness to murder and dominate in the name of mutant-kind more understandable.