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Adolf Hitler
Synopsis
Adolf Hitler, a charismatic,
Austrian-born demagogue, rose to power in Germany during the
1920s and early 1930s at a time of social, political, and
economic upheaval. Failing to take power by force in 1923, he
eventually won power by democratic means. Once in power, he
eliminated all opposition and launched an ambitious program of
world domination and elimination of the Jews, paralleling
ideas he advanced in his book, Mein Kampf. His "1,000 Year
Reich" barely lasted 12 years and he died a broken and
defeated man.
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."
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 "F?hrer" 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 "F?hrer 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. |
