Hitler: Adolf the Great?

Hitler: Adolf the Great?

Justin Bestor

HIS 492

Professor Marx

13 December 2007

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Perhaps no other man’s name can strike as many emotions into a person’s heart as Adolf Hitler’s. Upon hearing his name one person may feel disgust, hatred, repulsion, and shock, while another person may feel pride, honor, admiration, and respect. These emotions encompass who Hitler was and what he stood for. He was able to change the lives of so many people along with the landscape of world history in just a short 12 years. He was such a powerful man, that it took the coalition of nearly all the world’s nations to defeat him. Hitler had many positive qualities as a leader and statesman that made him deserving of the title “the Great,” but the unforgettable horrors and tragedies that he caused far outweigh his positive qualities, deeming him unworthy of the title “Adolf the Great.”

Hitler was born April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria, near the German border. He was born into a middle class family led by his father, Alois. Alois was a customs official who frequently whipped Hitler and his siblings. From the repeated beatings, Hitler began to fear his father and became even closer with his mother, Klara. His mother was a kind and loving women, who would do anything to protect her five children. She felt a special attachment to Hitler, as he was the oldest of her children to survive childhood.

Hitler led a very normal childhood and at the age of six he began his formal schooling in Austria. Many people believed that as a young child, Hitler was a monster and an uncontrollable child. This was not that case at all. At school his teachers gave him high marks for behavior and learning. He also got along very well with his playmates. They looked up to him as the leader of their group, as they frequently played

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cowboys and Indians together in Hitler’s hay barn. Hitler’s happy and normal childhood would soon change with the death of this six-year-old brother, Edmund.

The ten-year-old Hitler was very close to his younger brother. Along with his mother, Adolf took Edmund’s death very hard. Hitler, not understanding why God would do this to him and his family, gave up his boyhood dream of becoming a priest and began to become withdrawn from his friends and school. The next fall, Hitler entered Realschule (secondary school) in Linz, Austria. “Here, surprisingly, he proved to a total failure. Twice he had to repeat a grade, and his report cards regularly gave him the mark “unsatisfactory”. On the whole, his record was so poor that he left the school.”1

Many factors could be used to explain Hitler’s failure in school. He came from a small rural town, where he was looked upon as a leader and wealthy. In Linz, with a population of 55,000, he was now looked down upon as a peasant. Hitler never got along well with his classmates. Many of his classmates came from wealthier families and saw Hitler as lower class and not worth their time. From being looked upon as an outsider, Hitler started to see the world in terms of class distinctions for the first time.

Another factor that may have contributed to his failure at school was his father. Hitler’s father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and find a career in the civil service.

This did not sit well with the young Adolf, as he had his mind set on becoming an artist. His father said, “An artist, no, never as long as I live!”2 Hitler’s father’s words ceased to matter as he died shortly after when Hitler was fourteen. He died from lung

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1 Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 18.

2 James C. Giblin, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Clarion Books, 2002), 7.

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complications after stopping in for a drink at a local establishment.

Hitler continued his education at many different schools, but his grades did not improve. With his grades slipping and his father no longer around, Hitler dropped out of school in 1905, at the age of sixteen. Done with the rigidity of school and now living on his own, Hitler decided to dedicate his life to his pursuit of becoming an artist. Along with art, Hitler also immersed himself in opera, theater, and reading.

Two years later in 1907, Hitler decided to leave Linz and move to Vienna. Once in Vienna he took an entrance exam for the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was denied entrance to the Academy for not completing his schooling and having unsatisfactory sample drawings. Hitler would try again for entrance to the Academy the following year, but again he was rejected. This was a severe blow to Hitler’s dreams, as he gave up on becoming a famous artist. Hitler was so crushed by this news that he could not even tell his mother of his failure.

Soon he received even worse news. His mother had fallen ill with breast cancer. He returned home to Linz to be with his mother. He stayed by her bedside for days, until she died on December 21, 1907. He was stricken with grief as he lost the person that meant more to him than anyone else in his life. His mother’s doctor stated that, “In all my career I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.”3 With his rejection from the Academy and the loss of his mother, Hitler was left wondering what was next for him.

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3 Walter S. Frank, Adolf Hitler, 2004, available from http://smoter.com/hitler.htm; Internet; accessed 1 December 2007.

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The next five years were the toughest of his life. He soon ran out of money and was forced to live on the streets of Vienna. Using his rough artistic ability, Hitler began to paint postcards of Vienna’s landmarks, and sold them to people visiting the city. With the money he made from selling his postcard paintings, Hitler was able to move into a small boarding house. It was here that he began to enter the world of politics.

At the boarding house he began to engage in lively discussion with the other residents about the political events of the day. He would also read newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets and attend political meetings and rallies. It was during this time that he began to develop his beliefs of racial superiority. He began to see the Jews as the root of all the political, social, and economic problems in Vienna. He later stated in Mein Kampf,

“The more I saw, the more sharply they (Jews) became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity...for me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite.”4

Though he stated he was an anti-Semite, he still had held relationships with Jewish people during these years and even stayed at a shelter that was funded by a Jewish family.

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4 The History Place, The Rise of Adolf Hitler, 1996, available from http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/index.htm; Internet; accessed 1 December 2007.

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In 1913, at the age of 24, Hitler left Vienna for Munich, Germany. He always had a love affair for Germany and longed to live there. In Munich, Hitler would continue to advance his political ideals. He believed in a strong unified German state, and viewed

Germany as the strongest nation in Europe. This sense of strong nationalism was spreading through every nation across Europe, leading to the event that would change Adolf Hitler’s life forever, World War I.

Europe was at war shortly after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary and its ally, Germany, were at war with Russia, Britain, and France. In August of 1914, two days after hearing news of the war, Hitler volunteered for the German Army. He felt very proud to be able to serve for Germany, his adopted country.

During the war, Hitler was a dispatch carrier for his regiment. He was to take messages from one section of the front to another. He was always eager for action and always ready to volunteer for dangerous assignments even after many near death experiences. For his courageous work as a dispatch carrier, he received an Iron Cross, Second Class, and was promoted from private to corporal. Hitler’s comrades were very impressed with his courage and bravery as a runner, but they also saw him as a little strange. He never joined in their discussions, but would rather retreat to a corner and read or sketch. They also found it quite odd that he never received packages or letters.

In October of 1916, Hitler received his first injury of the war. Resting in between his runs, a blast occurred near him sending a piece of shrapnel into his thigh. He was sent to a hospital in Berlin to recover. Once he was fully healed, he was given a chance to go

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sight seeing around the German capitol. Throughout the city there was a mood of defeat amongst the citizens. There was widespread hunger, people talking about the soon defeat

of Germany, and a steep decline in patriotic spirit. This did not sit well with Hitler. Looking for an explanation of the citizens’ mood, he blamed the Jews.

As he walked around Berlin and Munich, in his own eyes, that Jews were taking over. He stated that Jews had taken over the offices and jobs, while none of them participated in the war. This was untrue, as many Jewish men enlisted in the German Army during World War I. In fact, a Jewish soldier would later recommend Hitler for his second medal of the war. Hitler also likened the Jewish people to spiders sucking the blood out of the German people. This sense of distrust in the Jewish people was not held just by Hitler. Many German citizens had fallen on difficult times and were looking for someone to blame. They saw the Jews as prosperous and healthy and the Germans turned their hatred towards them.

Hitler would eventually return to battle, only to see Germany and her soldiers defeated. With the United States’ entrance into the war, the Allies soon had command of the war. The German soldiers had low moral and heard news that their people had given up on the war. They began to question what they were fighting for. Hitler was irate that he and his comrades continued to fight even though the German citizens no longer believed in the war. Shortly before the war ended, Hitler received his second injury of the war. He had temporary blindness from a gas attack. He was taken back to Germany and treated. Hitler never returned to the front lines, as the war was officially over a month later. Hitler was crushed and was ready for change.

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After the war, Germany laid in depression. Citizens were unable to find food to feed their families, and the price of money had skyrocketed. “The galloping inflation rate

meant that the value of money changed not by the week or month, but by the hour. In 1923, it took more than six million marks to equal one prewar mark.”5 Money became so useless in post-war Germany that people used their money in fires to heat their homes. With Germany in ruins, Hitler, like many other German people looked for a group that could build Germany back into the world power that it is.

He decided to become involved in the German Workers’ Party. The group held many of the same ideas on socialism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism that Hitler had. He soon became a recognizable figure in the group as he gave rousing speeches across Germany. He spoke out against the Treaty of Versailles, Communism, and the Jews. The more he spoke the larger his crowds grew. Hitler was now becoming the leader of the German Worker’s Party.

Looking to spread the word of his party, Hitler changed the group’s name. He decided on the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party). The new symbol of the group would be a black swastika against a red and white background. As the group’s membership reached 3,000 in 1921, Hitler asked that he become the party chairman and given dictatorial powers. Hitler was granted his request and became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. He was the sole ruler of the party and demanded complete obedience from his followers.

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5 James C. Giblin, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (New York: Clarion Books, 2002), 36.

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As he was working his way up the political ladder in Germany, Hitler began to draw some very powerful men to his side. Ernest Rohm, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, and Herman Goring all believed in Hitler and that he had what it took to make Germany a

great world leader. These men decided that it was time for the Nazi Party to take its next step. They wanted to take over the city of Munich, the state of Bavaria, and then march north to Berlin and overthrow the weak national government in place. With their plan in place, Hitler was able to convince the political leaders of Bavaria to join him in his plan for a new Germany. Hitler promised the Bavarian leaders prominent positions in the Nazi Party with their cooperation, but the men would not stand by their word. They escaped from the clutches of the Nazis and made it back to the government building, where they issued the arrest of the Nazi leaders.

Hitler was able to escape to his friend’s country home, but soon the police where on their way. In fear of being taken by the police, Hitler took out his revolver and pointed it at his head. His friend was able to talk him out of it, and Hitler went quietly with the police. Imagine the pain and agony that the world would have been spared if Hitler would have been alone in his friend’s country home. Hitler would have killed himself and his death would have been but a blip in the world news.

This could have been the end of Hitler’s political aspirations, but it was not to be. “Overnight, Hitler became a nationally and internationally known figure due to massive press coverage.”6

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6 The History Place, The Rise of Adolf Hitler, 1996, available from http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/index.htm; Internet; accessed 1 December 2007.