http://remember.org/Facts.root.hitler.html
Copyright 1990 Gary M. Grobman
Hitler's Early
Life
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, the fourth child
of Alois Schickelgruber and Klara Hitler in the Austrian town of Braunau. Two of
his siblings died from diphtheria when they were children, and one died shortly
after birth. Alois was a customs official, illegitimate by birth, who was
described by his housemaid as a "very strict but comfortable" man. Young Adolf
was showered with love and affection by his mother.
When Adolf was three years old, the family moved to
Passau, along the Inn River on the German side of the border. A brother, Edmond,
was born two years later. The family moved once more in 1895 to the farm
community of Hafeld, 30 miles southwest of Linz. Another sister, Paula, was born
in 1896, the sixth of the union, supplemented by a half brother and half sister
from one of his father's two previous marriages.
Following another family move, Adolf lived for six months
across from a large Benedictine monastery. The monastery's coat of arms' most
salient feature was a swastika. As a youngster, Adolf's dream was to enter the
priesthood. While there is anecdotal evidence that Adolf's father regularly beat
him during his childhood, it was not unusual for discipline to be enforced in
that way during that period.
By 1900, Hitler's talents as an artist surfaced. He did
well enough in school to be eligible for either the university preparatory
"gymnasium" or the technical/scientific Realschule. Because the latter had a
course in drawing, Adolf accepted his father's decision to enroll him in the
Realschule. He did not do well there.
Adolf's father died in 1903 after suffering a pleural
hemorrhage. Adolf himself suffered from lung infections, and he quit school at
the age of 16, partially the result of ill health and partially the result of
poor school work.
In 1906, Adolf was permitted to visit Vienna, but he was
unable to gain admission to a prestigious art school. His mother developed
terminal breast cancer and was treated by Dr. Edward Bloch, a Jewish doctor who
served the poor. After an operation and excruciatingly painful and expensive
treatments with a dangerous drug, she died on December 21, 1907.
Hitler spent six years in Vienna, living on a small
legacy from his father and an orphan's pension. Virtually penniless by 1909, he
wandered Vienna as a transient, sleeping in bars, flophouses, and shelters for
the homeless, including, ironically, those financed by Jewish philanthropists.
It was during this period that he developed his prejudices about Jews, his
interest in politics, and debating skills. According to John Toland's biography,
Adolf Hitler, two of his closest friends at this time were Jewish, and he
admired Jewish art dealers and Jewish operatic performers and producers.
However, Vienna was a center of anti-Semitism, and the media's portrayal of Jews
as scapegoats with stereotyped attributes did not escape Hitler's fascination.
In May 1913, Hitler, seeking to avoid military service,
left Vienna for Munich, the capital of Bavaria, following a windfall received
from an aunt who was dying. In January, the police came to his door bearing a
draft notice from the Austrian government. The document threatened a year in
prison and a fine if he was found guilty of leaving his native land with the
intent of evading conscription. Hitler was arrested on the spot and taken to the
Austrian Consulate. Upon reporting to Salzburg for duty, he was found
"unfit...too weak...and unable to bear arms."
Hitler's World War
I Service
When World War I was touched off by the assassination by
a Serb of the heir to the Austrian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Hitler's
passions against foreigners, particularly Slavs, were inflamed. He was caught up
in the patriotism of the time, and submitted a petition to enlist in the
Bavarian army.
After less than two months of training, Hitler's regiment
saw its first combat near Ypres, against the British and Belgians. Hitler
narrowly escaped death in battle several times, and was eventually awarded two
Iron Crosses for bravery. He rose to the rank of lance corporal but no further.
In October 1916, he was wounded by an enemy shell and evacuated to a Berlin area
hospital. After recovering, and serving a total of four years in the trenches,
he was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Belgium in October 1918.
Communist-inspired insurrections shook Germany while
Hitler was recovering from his injuries. Some Jews were leaders of these
abortive revolutions, and this inspired hatred of Jews as well as Communists. On
November 9th, the Kaiser abdicated and the Socialists gained control of the
government. Anarchy was more the rule in the cities.
Free Corps
The Free Corps was a paramilitary organization composed
of vigilante war veterans who banded together to fight the growing Communist
insurgency which was taking over Germany. The Free Corps crushed this
insurgency. Its members formed the nucleus of the Nazi "brown-shirts" (S.A.)
which served as the Nazi party's army.
Weimar
Republic
With the loss of the war, the German monarchy came to an
end and a republic was proclaimed. A constitution was written providing for a
President with broad political and military power and a parliamentary democracy.
A national election was held to elect 423 deputies to the National Assembly. The
centrist parties swept to victory. The result was what is known as the Weimar
Republic. On June 28, 1919, the German government ratified the Treaty of
Versailles. Under the terms of the treaty which ended hostilities in the War,
Germany had to pay reparations for all civilian damages caused by the war.
Germany also lost her colonies and large portions of German territory. A 30-mile
strip on the right bank of the Rhine was demilitarized. Limits were placed on
German armaments and military strength. The terms of the treaty were humiliating
to most Germans, and condemnation of its terms undermined the government and
served as a rallying cry for those who like Hitler believed Germany was
ultimately destined for greatness.
German Worker's
Party
Soon after the war, Hitler was recruited to join a
military intelligence unit, and was assigned to keep tabs on the German Worker's
Party. At the time, it was comprised of only a handful of members. It was
disorganized and had no program, but its members expressed a right-wing doctrine
consonant with Hitler's. He saw this party as a vehicle to reach his political
ends. His blossoming hatred of the Jews became part of the organization's
political platform. Hitler built up the party, converting it from a de facto
discussion group to an actual political party. Advertising for the party's
meetings appeared in anti-Semitic newspapers. The turning point of Hitler's
mesmerizing oratorical career occurred at one such meeting held on October 16,
1919. Hitler's emotional delivery of an impromptu speech captivated his
audience. Through word of mouth, donations poured into the party's coffers, and
subsequent mass meetings attracted hundreds of Germans eager to hear the young,
forceful and hypnotic leader.
With the assistance of party staff, Hitler drafted a
party program consisting of twenty-five points. This platform was presented at a
public meeting on February 24, 1920, with over 2,000 eager participants. After
hecklers were forcibly removed by Hitler supporters armed with rubber truncheons
and whips, Hitler electrified the audience with his masterful demagoguery. Jews
were the principal target of his diatribe. Among the 25 points were revoking the
Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits, expropriating land without
compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for Jews, and expelling
those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began.
The following day, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
were published in the local anti-Semitic newspaper. The false, but alarming
accusations reinforced Hitler's anti-Semitism. Soon after, treatment of the Jews
was a major theme of Hitler's orations, and the increasing scapegoating of the
Jews for inflation, political instability, unemployment, and the humiliation in
the war, found a willing audience. Jews were tied to "internationalism" by
Hitler. The name of the party was changed to the National Socialist German
Worker's party, and the red flag with the swastika was adopted as the party
symbol. A local newspaper which appealed to anti-Semites was on the verge of
bankruptcy, and Hitler raised funds to purchase it for the party.
In January 1923, French and Belgian troops marched into
Germany to settle a reparations dispute. Germans resented this occupation, which
also had an adverse effect on the economy. Hitler's party benefited by the
reaction to this development, and exploited it by holding mass protest rallies
despite a ban on such rallies by the local police.
The Nazi party began drawing thousands of new members,
many of whom were victims of hyper-inflation and found comfort in blaming the
Jews for this trouble. The price of an egg, for example, had inflated to 30
million times its original price in just 10 years. Economic upheaval generally
breeds political upheaval, and Germany in the 1920s was no exception.
The Munich Putsch
The Bavarian government defied the Weimar Republic,
accusing it of being too far left. Hitler endorsed the fall of the Weimar
Republic, and declared at a public rally on October 30, 1923 that he was
prepared to march on Berlin to rid the government of the Communists and the
Jews. On November 8, 1923, Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and
proclaimed a revolution. The following day, he led 2,000 armed "brown-shirts" in
an attempt to take over the Bavarian government. This putsch was resisted and
put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the fighting.
Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee, was arrested, and was
imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year sentence.
Mein Kampf
Hitler served only nine months of his five-year term.
While in prison, he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. It was partly an
autobiographical book (although filled with glorified inaccuracies, self-serving
half-truths and outright revisionism) which also detailed his views on the
future of the German people. There were several targets of the vicious diatribes
in the book, such as democrats, Communists, and internationalists. But he
reserved the brunt of his vituperation for the Jews, whom he portrayed as
responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly
democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany's defeat in the
War. Jews were the German nation's true enemy, he wrote. They had no culture of
their own, he asserted, but perverted existing cultures such as Germany's with
their parasitism. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race.
"[The Jews'] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the
promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of
the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the
extirpation of the folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of
his own people," he wrote. On the contrary, the German people were of the
highest racial purity and those destined to be the master race according to
Hitler. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to avoid intermarriage with
subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs.
Germany could stop the Jews from conquering the world
only by eliminating them. By doing so, Germany could also find Lebensraum,
living space, without which the superior German culture would decay. This living
space, Hitler continued, would come from conquering Russia (which was under the
control of Jewish Marxists, he believed) and the Slavic countries. This empire
would be launched after democracy was eliminated and a "Führer" called upon to
rebuild the German Reich.
A second volume of Mein Kampf was published in
1927. It included a history of the Nazi party to that time and its program, as
well as a primer on how to obtain and retain political power, how to use
propaganda and terrorism, and how to build a political organization.
While Mein Kampf was crudely written and filled
with embarrassing tangents and ramblings, it struck a responsive chord among its
target those Germans who believed it was their destiny to dominate the world.
The book sold over five million copies by the start of World War II.
Hitler's Rise to
Power
Once released from prison, Hitler decided to seize power
constitutionally rather than by force of arms. Using demagogic oratory, Hitler
spoke to scores of mass audiences, calling for the German people to resist the
yoke of Jews and Communists, and to create a new empire which would rule the
world for 1,000 years.
Hitler's Nazi party captured 18% of the popular vote in
the 1930 elections. In 1932, Hitler ran for President and won 30% of the vote,
forcing the eventual victor, Paul von Hindenburg, into a runoff election. A
political deal was made to make Hitler chancellor in exchange for his political
support. He was appointed to that office in January 1933.
Upon the death of Hindenburg in August 1934, Hitler was
the consensus successor. With an improving economy, Hitler claimed credit and
consolidated his position as a dictator, having succeeded in eliminating
challenges from other political parties and government institutions. The German
industrial machine was built up in preparation for war. By 1937, he was
comfortable enough to put his master plan, as outlined in Mein Kampf, into
effect. Calling his top military aides together at the "FÅhrer Conference" in
November 1937, he outlined his plans for world domination. Those who objected to
the plan were dismissed.
Hitler Launches
the War
Hitler ordered the annexation of Austria and the
Sudetenland in 1938. Hitler's army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, sparking
France and England to declare war on Germany. A Blitzkrieg (lightning war) of
German tanks and infantry swept through most of Western Europe as nation after
nation fell to the German war machine.
In 1941, Hitler ignored a non-aggression pact he had
signed with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Several early victories after the
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, were reversed with crushing defeats
at Moscow (December 1941) and Stalingrad (winter, 1942-43). The United States
entered the war in December 1941. By 1944, the Allies invaded occupied Europe at
Normandy Beach on the French coast, German cities were being destroyed by
bombing, and Italy, Germany's major ally under the leadership of Fascist
dictator Benito Mussolini, had fallen.
Hitler's Last Days
Several attempts were made on Hitler's life during the
war, but none was successful. As the war appeared to be inevitably lost and his
hand-picked lieutenants, seeing the futility, defied his orders, he killed
himself on April 30, 1945. His long-term mistress and new bride, Eva Braun,
joined him in suicide. By that time, one of his chief objectives was achieved
with the annihilation of two-thirds of European Jewry.
VOCABULARY
Anarchy - The absence of government or law in a
society.
Demagogue - A person who gains power through
impassioned public appeals to the emotions and prejudices of a group by speaking
or writing. Free Corps - A paramilitary organization of German
World War I veterans who organized to oppose Communist insurgency.
Fuhrer - A leader, especially one exercising the
absolute power of a tyrant. Hitler's title as leader of the Nazi party, and
Chief of the German state.
Imperialism - A foreign policy which includes the
taking of territory by force or coercion.
Lebensraum (Living Space) - A German
term indicating the Germans' imperialistic designs on Europe. It also refers to
the additional territory deemed necessary to the nation for its economic
well-being.
Mein Kampf - "My Struggle" in German. A
book written by Hitler while in prison which became the standard work of Nazi
political doctrine.
Nazism - The abbreviation for National Socialist
German Worker's Party. The fascist dictatorship under Adolf Hitler in Germany
from 1933-1945.
Paramilitary - Describing an organization which
operates in the style of an army, but in an unofficial capacity, and often in
secret, such as the S.A. Putsch - A revolt or uprising.
Reparations - Payments made by a defeated country
to the victors to make amends for losses suffered.
S.A. - The Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers), also
known as the "brown-shirts." It was the Nazi paramilitary arm under the command
of Ernst Rîhm. It was active in the Nazi battle for the streets against members
of other German political parties and was notorious for its violent and
terroristic methods.
Swastika - An ancient symbol in the form of a
twisted cross which was adopted by the Nazi party as its logo in the 1920s.
Third Reich - The Third Empire. It
refers to Hitler's name for his German Empire as a successor to the 1st Empire
of the Roman Emperors (First Reich) and the Empire of Bismarck in 19th century
Germany (Second Reich).
Weimar Republic - The German democratic
government from 1919-1934 formed after Germany's defeat in World War I. Its
capital was located in Berlin.
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