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Adolf HItler (Click to select text)
By: Matthew Pardue E-mail: tj_119@hotmail.com Adolf Hitler (1889-1956) The rise of Adolf Hitler to the position of dictator of Germany is the story of a frenzied ambition that plunged the world into the worst war in history. Only an army corporal in World War I, Hitler became Germany's chancellor 15 years later. He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, of German descent. His father Alois was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. In middle age Alois took the name Hitler from his paternal grandfather. After two wives had died Alois married his foster daughter, Klara Poelzl, a Bavarian, 23 years younger than he. She became Adolf's mother. Hitler's rambling, emotional autobiography 'Mein Kampf' (My Struggle) reveals his unstable early life. His father, a petty customs official, wanted the boy to study for a government position. But as young Hitler wrote later, "the thought of slaving in an office made me ill…not to be master of my own time." Defying his father, the self-willed boy filled most of his school hours with daydreams of becoming a painter. His one school interest was history, especially that of the Germans. When his teacher glorified Germany's role, "we would sit there enraptured and often on the verge of tears." From boyhood he was devoted to Wagner's operas that glorified the Teutons' dark and furious mythology. Failure plagued him. After his father's death, when Adolf was 13, he studied watercolor painting, but accomplished little. After his mother's death, when he was 19, he went to Vienna. There the Academy of Arts rejected him as untalented. Lacking business training, Hitler made a living as a laborer in the building trades and by painting cheap postcards. He often slept in parks and ate in free soup kitchens. These humbling experiences inflamed his discontent. He called Austria "a patchwork nation" and looked longingly across the border at the energetic and powerful Germany. Hitler's hatred of poverty, his rabid devotion to his German heritage, and his loathing of Jews combined to form the seeds of his later political doctrine. He studied the political skill of Vienna's mayor and took special note of that leader's practice of "using all instruments of existing power, and of gaining the favor of influential institutions, so he could draw the greatest possible advantages for his own movement from such old-established sources of power." Hitler later applied this technique in Germany. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he gave up his Austrian citizenship to enlist in the 16th Bavarian infantry regiment. He would not fight for Austria, "but I was ready to die at any time for my people (Germans)." In his first battle, the Ypres offensive of 1914, he shouted the song 'Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.' On the Somme in 1916 he was a "front fighter" against British tanks, rose to lance corporal, won the Iron Cross as dispatch runner, and was wounded. In 1917 he fought in the third battle of Ypres. The armistice found him in a hospital, temporarily blinded by mustard gas and suffering from shock. The news of Germany's defeat agonized him. He believed defeat had been caused by "enemies within," chiefly Jews and Communists. Now no longer an Austrian citizen and not yet a German citizen, Hitler at the war's end was a man without a country. Bewildered, he remained in the army, stationed in Munich. In the political and economic tempest that swept defeated Germany, Munich became a storm center. Officers of the beaten Reichswehr (German army) conspired to win control of Germany. They maintained "informers," one of whom was Adolf Hitler. He was assigned to report on "subversive activities" in Munich's political parties. . In 1920 he changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' party), abbreviated to Nazi. Sneering at the liberal generalities of the various bourgeois parties and hating the Communists, Hitler shouted accusations against the Jews and cried out to the Germans to form an all-powerful national state. His voice, torn and hoarsened by mustard gas, was a hypnotic one. His speeches kindled the anger of rivals, especially the Communists, and they tried to break up his meetings. The brutal Nazis prevented them from doing so. The flamboyant spirit of the growing Nazi party now began to attract the varied restless men who were to become its core. They included chiefly Alfred Rosenberg, Russian-born engineer and "philosopher," anti-Jew, and anti-Christian; Rudolf Hess, Egyptian-born mathematician and geographer; Hermann Goering, Bavarian combat pilot; Gen. Erich von Ludendorff, war hero; and Maj. Gen. Franz von Epp, Bavarian infantry commander. All helped to persuade Communist-fearing German industrialists to give money to the party, for Hitler assured them that "we combat only Jewish international capital." Nazi propaganda had made of Hitler a symbol of strength and national virtue. He had won German citizenship in 1930 only by the scheming of Nazi henchmen, yet he was hailed as the ideal German leader. His indecisions were cloaked as "intuition." Despite his hours and even days of brooding inertia, he was pictured as a man of intense action. Young Germans, whom he had betrayed by his creed, “the entire work of education is branding the race feeling into the hearts and brains of youth”, began to idolize him. Covering his unsavory and cruel character, propaganda built a legend of his ascetic habits and selfless devotion to Germany. Some of this legend vanished when his long, secret association with Eva Braun was revealed. He married her in April 1945, just before he committed suicide in the ruined Reichschancellery. Hitler was declared dead officially Oct. 25, 1956, after his remains had been definitely identified. Word Count: 935
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