Adolf Hitler (help·info) (April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945) was Chancellor of Germany from 1933, and "Führer" (leader) of Germany from 1934 until his death. He was leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), better known as the Nazi Party.
Hitler gained power in a Germany facing crisis after World War I. Using propaganda and charismatic oratory, he was able to appeal to the economic need of the lower and middle classes, while sounding resonant chords of nationalism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism. With the establishment of a restructured economy, a rearmed military, and a totalitarian fascist dictatorship, Hitler pursued an aggressive foreign policy with the intention of expanding German Lebensraum ("living space"), which triggered World War II when Germany invaded Poland. At the height of its power, Nazi Germany occupied most of Europe, but it and the Axis Powers were eventually defeated by the Allies. By then, Hitler's racial policies had culminated in a genocide of approximately eleven million people, including about six million Jews, in what is now known as the Holocaust.
In the final days of the war, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin with his newlywed wife, Eva Braun.
Early years
Childhood and heritage
Adolf Hitler as an infantAdolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 at Braunau am Inn, Austria, a small town in Upper Austria, on the border with Germany. He was the third son and the fourth of six children of Alois Hitler (born Schicklgruber) (1837–1903), a minor customs official, and Klara Pölzl (1860–1907), his second cousin, and third wife. Because of the close kinship of the two, a papal dispensation had to be obtained before the marriage could take place. Of Alois and Klara's six children, only Adolf and his younger sister Paula reached adulthood. Alois Hitler also had a son, Alois Jr., and a daughter, Angela, by his second wife.
Alois was born illegitimate and for the first thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother's name, Schicklgruber. In 1876, Alois began using the name of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, after visiting a priest responsible for birth registries and declaring that Georg was his father (Alois gave the impression that Georg was still alive but he was long dead). The name was variously spelled Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler and probably changed to "Hitler" by a clerk. About the origin of the name there are two theories:From German Hittler and similar, "one who lives in a hut", "shepherd".
From Slavic Hidlar and Hidlarcek.
Later, Adolf Hitler was accused by his political enemies of not rightfully being a Hitler, but a Schicklgruber. This was also exploited in Allied propaganda during World War II when pamphlets bearing the phrase "Heil Schicklgruber" were airdropped over German cities.[citation needed] Adolf was legally born a Hitler, however, and was also closely related to Hiedler through his maternal grandmother, Johanna Hiedler.
Hitler's given name, "Adolf", comes from the Old High German for "noble wolf" ("Adel"="nobility" + "wolf").[1] Hence, not surprisingly, one of Hitler's self-given nicknames was Wolf or Herr Wolf — he began using this nickname in the early 1920s and was addressed by it only by intimates (as "Uncle Wolf" by the Wagners) up until the fall of the Third Reich.[2] The names of his various headquarters scattered throughout continental Europe (Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Wolfsschlucht in France, Werwolf in Ukraine, etc.) seem to reflect this.
As a boy, Hitler was whipped almost daily by his father. Years later he told his secretary, "I then resolved never again to cry when my father whipped me. A few days later I had the opportunity of putting my will to the test. My mother, frightened, took refuge in the front of the door. As for me, I counted silently the blows of the stick which lashed my rear end." [3]Hitler was not sure who his paternal grandfather was, but it was probably either Johann Georg Hiedler or his brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. There have been rumours that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish [1] and that his paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had become pregnant after working as a servant in a Jewish household in Graz. During the 1920s, the implications of these rumours along with his known family history were politically explosive, especially for the proponent of a racist ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler, the leader of the anti-Semitic Nazi Party, had Jewish or Czech ancestors. Although these rumours were never confirmed, for Hitler they were reason enough to conceal his origins. Soviet propaganda insisted Hitler was a Jew, though more modern research tends to diminish the probability that he had Jewish ancestors. According to Robert G. L. Waite in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Hitler made it illegal for German women to work in Jewish households, and after the "Anschluss" (annexation) of Austria, Hitler had his father's hometown obliterated by turning it into an artillery practice area. Hitler seemed to fear that he was Jewish, and as Waite points out, this fact is more important than whether he actually was.
Because of Alois Hitler's profession, his family moved frequently, from Braunau to Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and Linz. As a young child, Hitler was reportedly a good student at the various elementary schools he attended; however, in sixth grade (1900–1), his first year of high school (Realschule) in Linz, he failed completely and had to repeat the grade. His teachers reported that he had "no desire to work."
Hitler later explained this educational slump as a kind of rebellion against his father Alois, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official, although Adolf wanted to become a painter. This explanation is further supported by Hitler's later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on January 3, 1903, when Adolf was 13, Hitler's schoolwork did not improve. At the age of 16, Hitler left school with no qualifications.
Early adulthood in Vienna and Munich
From 1905 onward, Hitler was able to live the life of a Bohemian on a fatherless child's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907 – 1908) due to "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay rather in the field of architecture. His own memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject:"The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest." (Mein Kampf, Chapter II, paragraph 3).
Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was the path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for architecture school:"In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.''"(Mein Kampf, Chapter II, paragraph 5 & 6).
On December 21, 1907, his mother Klara died a painful death from breast cancer at the age of 47. Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his younger sister Paula, but when he was 21 he inherited some money from an aunt. He worked as a struggling painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists (there is evidence he produced over 2000 paintings and drawings before World War I). Several biographers have noted that a Jewish resident of the house named Hanisch helped him sell his postcards.[citation needed]
A watercolour by Adolf Hitler depicting Laon, France.After the second refusal from the Academy of Arts, Hitler gradually ran out of money. By 1909, he sought refuge in a homeless shelter, and by the beginning of 1910 had settled permanently into a house for poor working men.
Hitler first became an active anti-Semite in Vienna, which had a large Jewish community, including many Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe and where traditional religious prejudice mixed with recent racist theories. Hitler was influenced over time by the writings of the race ideologist and anti-Semite Lanz von Liebenfels and polemics from politicians such as Karl Lueger, founder of the Christian Social Party and mayor of Vienna, one of the most outrageous demagogues in history, and Georg Ritter von Schönerer, leader of the pan-Germanic Away from Rome! movement. He later wrote in his book Mein Kampf that his transition from opposing anti-Semitism on religious grounds to supporting it on racial grounds came from having seen an Orthodox Jew:"There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans. The reason why I did not then perceive the absurdity of such an illusion was that the only external mark which I recognized as distinguishing them from us was the practice of their strange religion. As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their faith my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a systematic anti-Semitism.
Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this app |
