Adolf Hitler
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Adolf Hitler (
German pronunciation: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ]; 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an
Austrian-born
German politician and the leader of the
National Socialist German Workers Party (
German:
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly known as the Nazi Party. He was
Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and served as
head of state as
Führer und Reichskanzler from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is most remembered for his central leadership role in the rise of
fascism in Europe,
World War II and
the Holocaust.
A decorated veteran of
World War I, Hitler joined the precursor of the Nazi Party (
DAP) in 1919, and became leader of NSDAP in 1921. He attempted a
coup d'état known as the
Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred at the
Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in
Munich on 8–9 November 1923. Hitler was imprisoned for one year due to the failed coup, and wrote his memoir,
Mein Kampf (in English "My Struggle"), while imprisoned. After his release on 20 December 1924, he gained support by promoting
Pan-Germanism,
antisemitism and
anti-communism with
charismatic oratory and
propaganda. He was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, and transformed the
Weimar Republic into the
Third Reich, a
single-party dictatorship based on the
totalitarian and
autocratic ideology of
Nazism.
Hitler ultimately wanted to establish a
New Order of absolute Nazi German
hegemony in continental Europe. To achieve this, he pursued a
foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing
Lebensraum ("living space") for the
Aryan people; directing the resources of the state towards this goal. This included the rearmament of Germany, which culminated in 1939 when the
Wehrmacht invaded Poland. In response, the
United Kingdom and
France declared war against Germany, leading to the outbreak of World War II
in Europe.
[2]
Within three years, German forces and their
European allies had occupied most of Europe, and most of
North Africa, and the
Japanese forces had occupied parts of
East and
Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. However, with the reversal of the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, the
Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onwards. By 1944, Allied armies had invaded German-held Europe from all sides. Nazi forces engaged in numerous violent acts during the war, including the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians,
[3] including an estimated six million Jews targeted in
the Holocaust and between 500,000 and 1,500,000
Roma,
[4] added to the
Poles, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals,
Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents.
In the final days of the war, during the
Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress
Eva Braun. To avoid capture by Soviet forces, the two
committed suicide less than two days later on 30 April 1945 and their corpses were burned.
[5]
Early years
Ancestry
Hitler's father,
Alois Hitler, was an
illegitimate child of
Maria Anna Schicklgruber, so his paternity was not listed on his birth certificate; he bore his mother's surname.
[6][7] In 1842,
Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria and in 1876 Alois testified before a notary and three witnesses that Johann was his father.
[8] Despite this testimony, Alois' paternity has been the subject of controversy. After receiving a "blackmail letter" from Hitler's nephew
William Patrick Hitler threatening to reveal embarrassing information about Hitler's family tree, Nazi Party lawyer
Hans Frank investigated, and, in his memoirs, claimed to have uncovered letters revealing that Alois' mother was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in
Graz and that the family's 19-year-old son,
Leopold Frankenberger, fathered Alois.
[7] No evidence had, at that time, ever been produced to support Frank's claim, and Frank himself said Hitler's full Aryan blood was obvious.
[9] Frank's claims were widely believed in the 1950s, but by the 1990s, were generally doubted by historians.
[10][11] Ian Kershaw dismissed the Frankenberger story as a "smear" by Hitler's enemies, noting that all Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until years after Alois' birth.
[11][12]
At age 39, Alois took the surname Hitler. This surname was variously spelled
Hiedler,
Hüttler,
Huettler and
Hitler, and was probably regularized to
Hitler by a clerk. The origin of the name is either "one who lives in a hut" (
Standard German Hütte), "shepherd" (Standard German
hüten "to guard", English
heed), or is from the
Slavic word
Hidlar and
Hidlarcek.
[13]
Childhood
Adolf Hitler was born at around 6:30 pm on 20 April 1889 at the Gasthof zum Pommer, an inn in
Braunau am Inn,
Austria–Hungary, the fourth of six children to
Alois Hitler and
Klara Pölzl.
When he was three years old, his family relocated to Kapuzinerstrasse 5
[14] in
Passau,
Germany, where Hitler would acquire
Lower Bavarian rather than
Austrian as his lifelong dialect.
[15] In 1894, the family relocated to
Leonding near
Linz, then in June 1895, Alois retired to a small landholding at Hafeld near
Lambach, where he tried his hand at farming and beekeeping. During this time, the young Hitler attended school in nearby Fischlham. As a child, he played "
Cowboys and Indians" and, by his own account, became fixated on war after finding a picture book about the
Franco-Prussian War among his father's belongings.
[16]
His father's efforts at Hafeld ended in failure, and the family relocated to Lambach in 1897. Hitler attended a Catholic school located in an 11th-century
Benedictine cloister, where the walls were engraved in a number of places with crests containing the symbol of the
swastika.
[17] It was in Lambach that the eight-year-old Hitler sang in the church choir, took singing lessons, and even entertained the fantasy of one day becoming a priest.
[18] In 1898, the family returned permanently to Leonding.
His younger brother
Edmund died of
measles on 2 February 1900, causing permanent changes in Hitler. He went from a confident, outgoing boy who excelled in school, to a morose, detached, sullen boy who constantly battled his father and his teachers.
[19]
Hitler was attached to his mother, though he had a troubled relationship with his father, who frequently beat him, especially in the years after Alois' retirement and disappointing farming efforts.
[20] Alois wanted his son to follow in his footsteps as an Austrian customs official, and this became a huge source of conflict between them.
[16] Despite his son's pleas to go to classical high school and become an artist, his father sent him to the Realschule in Linz, a technical high school of about 300 students, in September 1900. Hitler rebelled, and in
Mein Kampf confessed to failing his first year in hopes that once his father saw "what little progress I was making at the technical school he would let me devote myself to the happiness I dreamed of." Alois never relented, however, and Hitler became even more bitter and rebellious.
German Nationalism quickly became an obsession for Hitler, and a way to rebel against his father, who proudly served the
Austrian government. Most people who lived along the German-Austrian border considered themselves German-Austrians, but Hitler expressed loyalty only to Germany. In defiance of the
Austrian monarchy, and his father who continually expressed loyalty to it, Hitler and his young friends liked to use the German greeting "
Heil", and sing the German anthem "
Deutschland Über Alles" instead of the
Austrian Imperial anthem.
[16]
After Alois' sudden death on 3 January 1903, Hitler's behaviour at the technical school became even more disruptive, and he was asked to leave in 1904. He enrolled at the
Realschule in
Steyr in September 1904, but upon completing his second year, he and his friends went out for a night of celebration and drinking, and an intoxicated Hitler tore his school certificate into four pieces and used it as toilet paper. When someone turned the stained certificate in to the school's director, he "... gave him such a dressing-down that the boy was reduced to shivering jelly. It was probably the most painful and humiliating experience of his life."
[21] Hitler was expelled, never to return to school again.
At age 15, Hitler took part in his
First Communion on
Whitsunday, 22 May 1904, at the Linz Cathedral.
[22] His sponsor was Emanuel Lugert, a friend of his late father.
[23]
Early adulthood in Vienna and Munich
From 1905 on, Hitler lived a
bohemian life in
Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of
architecture.
[24] Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was his 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.[25]
The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich, by Adolf Hitler, 1914
On 21 December 1907, Hitler's mother died of
breast cancer at age 47. Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the
orphans' benefits to his sister
Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money. In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the
homeless. By 1910, he had settled into a
house for poor working men on Meldemannstraße. Another resident of the house,
Reinhold Hanisch, sold Hitler's paintings until the two men had a bitter falling-out.
[26]
Hitler said he first became an
antisemite in Vienna,
[25] which had a large Jewish community, including
Orthodox Jews who had fled the
pogroms in
Russia. According to childhood friend
August Kubizek, however, Hitler was a "confirmed antisemite" before he left
Linz.
[25] Vienna at that time was a hotbed of traditional religious prejudice and 19th century
racism. Hitler may have been influenced by the occult writings of the antisemite
Lanz von Liebenfels in his magazine
Ostara; it is usually taken for granted that he read the publication (he recounts in
Mein Kampf his conversion to antisemitism being after reading some pamphlets) and he most likely did read it, although it is uncertain to what degree he was influenced by the antisemitic occult work.
[27]
There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanised 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 antisemitism. 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 appearance in Linz. I carefully watched the man stealthily and cautiously but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?[25]
If this account is true, Hitler apparently did not act on his new belief. He often was a guest for dinner in a noble Jewish house, and he interacted well with Jewish merchants who tried to sell his paintings.
[28]
Hitler may also have been influenced by
Martin Luther's
On the Jews and Their Lies. In
Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to Martin Luther as a great warrior, a true statesman, and a great reformer, alongside
Richard Wagner and
Frederick the Great.
[29] Wilhelm Röpke, writing after the Holocaust, concluded that "without any question,
Lutheranism influenced the political, spiritual and social history of Germany in a way that, after careful consideration of everything, can be described only as fateful."
[30][31]
Hitler claimed that Jews were enemies of the
Aryan race. He held them responsible for Austria's crisis. He also identified certain forms of
socialism and
Bolshevism, which had many Jewish leaders, as Jewish movements, merging his antisemitism with anti-
Marxism. Later, blaming Germany's military defeat in World War I on the
1918 revolutions, he considered Jews the culprits of Imperial Germany's downfall and subsequent economic problems as well.
Hitler received the final part of his father's estate in May 1913 and moved to
Munich. He wrote in
Mein Kampf that he had always longed to live in a "real" German city. In Munich, he became more interested in architecture and, he says, the writings of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Moving to Munich also helped him escape
military service in Austria for a time, but the Munich police (acting in cooperation with the Austrian authorities) eventually arrested him. After a physical exam and a contrite plea, he was deemed unfit for service and allowed to return to Munich. However, when Germany entered World War I in August 1914, he petitioned King
Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in a
Bavarian regiment. This request was granted, and Adolf Hitler enlisted in the Bavarian army.
[32]
World War I
A young Hitler (farthest left at bottom row) posing with other German soldiers
Hitler served in
France and
Belgium in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, on the
Western Front as a regimental
runner. He was present at a number of major battles on the Western Front, including the
First Battle of Ypres, the
Battle of the Somme, the
Battle of Arras and the
Battle of Passchendaele.
[33]
Hitler in the German Army, 1914, sitting at right
Hitler was twice decorated for bravery. He received the relatively common
Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918, an honour rarely given to a
Gefreiter.
[34] Yet because the regimental staff thought Hitler lacked leadership skills, he was never promoted to
Unteroffizier (equivalent to a British corporal). According to Weber, Hitler's First Class Iron Cross was recommended by
Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish List adjutant, and this rarer award was commonly awarded to those posted to regimental headquarters, such as Hitler, who had more contact with more senior officers than combat soldiers.
[35]
Hitler's duties at regimental headquarters gave him time to pursue his artwork. He drew cartoons and instructional drawings for an army newspaper. In 1916, he was wounded in either the groin area
[36] or the left thigh
[37] during the Battle of the Somme, but returned to the front in March 1917. He received the
Wound Badge later that year. German historian and author,
Sebastian Haffner, referring to Hitler's experience at the front, suggests that he had at least some understanding of the military.
On 15 October 1918, Hitler was admitted to a
field hospital, temporarily
blinded by a
mustard gas attack. The
English psychologist
David Lewis and Bernhard Horstmann suggest the blindness may have been the result of a
conversion disorder (then known as "
hysteria").
[38] In fact, Hitler said it was during this experience that he became convinced the purpose of his life was to "save Germany." Some scholars, notably
Lucy Dawidowicz,
[39] argue that an intention to exterminate Europe's Jews was fully formed in Hitler's mind at this time, though he probably had not thought through how it could be done. Most historians think the decision was made in 1941, and some think it came as late as 1942.
Hitler had long admired Germany, and during the war he had become a passionate German patriot, although he did not become a German citizen until 1932. Hitler found the war to be "the greatest of all experiences" and afterwards he was praised by a number of his commanding officers for his bravery.
[40] He was shocked by Germany's
capitulation in November 1918 even while the German army still held enemy territory.
[41] Like many other German nationalists, Hitler believed in the
Stab-in-the-back legend (Dolchstoßlegende) which claimed that the army, "undefeated in the field," had been "stabbed in the back" by civilian leaders and
Marxists back on the
home front. These politicians were later dubbed the
November Criminals.
Portrait of Adolf Hitler taken during the war
The
Treaty of Versailles deprived Germany of various territories,
demilitarised the
Rhineland and imposed other economically damaging sanctions. The treaty re-created Poland, which even moderate Germans regarded as an outrage. The treaty also blamed Germany for all the horrors of the war, something which major historians such as
John Keegan now consider at least in part to be
victor's justice; most European nations in the run-up to World War I had become increasingly
militarised and were eager to fight. The culpability of Germany was used as a basis to impose reparations on Germany (the amount was repeatedly revised under the
Dawes Plan, the
Young Plan, and the
Hoover Moratorium). Germany in turn perceived the treaty, especially Article 231 on the German responsibility for the war, as a humiliation. For example, there was a nearly total demilitarisation of the armed forces, allowing Germany only six battleships, no submarines, no air force, an army of 100,000 without conscription and no armoured vehicles. The treaty was an important factor in both the social and political conditions encountered by Hitler and his Nazis as they sought power. Hitler and his party used the signing of the treaty by the "November Criminals" as a reason to build up Germany so that it could never happen again. He also used the "November Criminals" as scapegoats, although at the
Paris peace conference, these politicians had had very little choice in the matter.
