On the 20th of April, some133 years ago, Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria.
Zwnewshas culled from online sources, a summary of Adolf Hitler’s life.
Hitler’s father,Alois (born 1837), wasillegitimate. For a time heborehis mother’s name, Schicklgruber, but by 1876 he had established his family claim to the surname Hitler. Adolf never used any other surname.
Early life
After his father’s retirement from the state customs service, Adolf Hitler spent most of his childhood inLinz, the capital ofUpper Austria. It remained his favourite city throughout his life, and he expressed his wish to be buried there. Alois Hitler died in 1903 but left an adequatepensionand savings to support his wife and children.
Although Hitler feared and disliked his father, he was a devoted son to his mother, who died after much suffering in 1907. With a mixed record as a student, Hitler never advanced beyond asecondary education. After leaving school, he visitedVienna, then returned to Linz, where he dreamed of becoming an artist. Later, he used the small allowance he continued to draw to maintain himself in Vienna. He wished to study art, for which he had somefaculties, but he twice failed to secure entry to the Academy of Fine Arts. For some years he lived a lonely and isolated life, earning a precarious livelihood by paintingpostcardsandadvertisementsand drifting from one municipal hostel to another. Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life: loneliness and secretiveness, a bohemian mode of everyday existence, and hatred of cosmopolitanism and of the multinational character of Vienna.
In 1913 Hitler moved toMunich. Screened for Austrian military service in February 1914, he was classified as unfit because of inadequate physical vigour; but whenWorld War Ibroke out, he petitioned Bavarian KingLouis IIIto be allowed to serve, and one day after submitting that request, he was notified that he would be permitted to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. After some eight weeks of training, Hitler wasdeployedin October 1914 toBelgium, where he participated in theFirst Battle of Ypres. He served throughout the war, was wounded in October 1916, and was gassed two years later nearYpres. He was hospitalized when the conflict ended. During the war, he was continuously in the front line as a headquarters runner; his bravery in action was rewarded with theIron Cross, Second Class, in December 1914, and the Iron Cross, First Class (a rare decoration for a corporal), in August 1918. He greeted the war with enthusiasm, as a great relief from the frustration and aimlessness of civilian life. He founddisciplineand comradeship satisfying and was confirmed in his belief in the heroic virtues ofwar.
Rise to power of Adolf Hitler
Discharged from the hospital amid the socialchaosthat followedGermany’s defeat, Hitler took up political work inMunichin May–June 1919. As an army political agent, he joined the small German Workers’ Party in Munich (September 1919). In 1920 he was put in charge of the party’spropagandaand left the army to devote himself to improving his position within the party, which in that year was renamed the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi). Conditions were ripe for the development of such a party.Resentmentat the loss of the war and the severity of the peace terms added to the economic woes and brought widespread discontent. This was especially sharp inBavaria, due to its traditional separatism and the region’s popular dislike of the republicangovernmentinBerlin. In March 1920 acoup d’état by a few army officers attempted in vain to establish a right-wing government.
Munich was a gathering place for dissatisfied former servicemen and members of theFreikorps, which had been organized in 1918–19 from units of the German army that were unwilling to return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the republic. Many of these joined the Nazi Party. Foremost among them wasErnst Röhm, a staff member of the district army command, who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler and who was of great help in furthering Hitler’s rise within the party. It was he who recruited the “strong arm” squads used by Hitler to protect party meetings, to attack socialists and communists, and to exploitviolencefor the impression of strength it gave. In 1921 these squads were formally organized under Röhm into a private party army, theSA(Sturmabteilung). Röhm was also able to secure protection from the Bavarian government, which depended on the local army command for the maintenance of order and which tacitly accepted some of histerroristtactics.
Conditions were favourable for the growth of the small party, and Hitler was sufficientlyastuteto take full advantage of them. When he joined the party, he found it ineffective, committed to a program of nationalist and socialist ideas but uncertain of its aims and divided in its leadership. He accepted its program but regarded it as a means to an end. Hispropagandaand his personal ambition caused friction with the other leaders of the party. Hitler countered their attempts to curb him by threatening resignation, and because the future of the party depended on his power to organize publicity and to acquire funds, his opponents relented. In July 1921 he became their leader with almost unlimited powers. From the first he set out to create a mass movement, whose mystique and power would be sufficient to bind its members in loyalty to him. He engaged in unrelenting propaganda through the party newspaper, theVölkischer Beobachter(“Popular Observer,” acquired in 1920), and through meetings whose audiences soon grew from a handful to thousands. With hischarismaticpersonality anddynamicleadership, he attracted a devoted
The climax of this rapid growth of the Nazi Party in Bavaria came in an attempt to seize power in theMunich (Beer Hall)Putschof November 1923, when Hitler and GeneralErich Ludendorfftried to take advantage of the prevailing confusion and opposition to theWeimar Republicto force the leaders of the Bavarian government and the local army commander to proclaim a national revolution. In the melee that resulted, the police and the army fired at the advancing marchers, killing a few of them. Hitler was injured, and four policemen were killed. Placed on trial fortreason, he characteristically took advantage of theimmensepublicity afforded to him. He also drew a vital lesson from thePutsch—that the movement must achieve power by legal means. He was sentenced toprisonfor five years but served only nine months, and those in relative comfort at Landsberg castle. Hitler used the time to dictate the first volume ofMein Kampf, his political autobiography as well as a compendium of his multitudinous ideas.
Adolf Hitler, bynameDer Führer (German: “The Leader”), (born April 20, 1889,Braunau am Inn, Austria—died April 30, 1945,Berlin, Germany), leader of theNazi Party(from 1920/21) andchancellor(Kanzler) andFührerofGermany(1933–45). He was chancellor from January 30, 1933, and, after PresidentPaul von Hindenburg’sdeath, assumed the twin titles of Führer and chancellor (August 2, 1934).
Hitler’s ideas included inequality amongraces, nations, and individuals as part of an unchangeable natural order that exalted the “Aryanrace” as the creative element of mankind. According to Hitler, the natural unit of mankind was theVolk(“the people”), of which the German people was the greatest. Moreover, he believed that the state existed to serve theVolk—a mission that to him theWeimar German Republicbetrayed. Allmoralityand truth were judged by this criterion: whether it was in accordance with the interest and preservation of theVolk. Parliamentary democratic government stood doubly condemned. It assumed the equality of individuals that for Hitler did not exist and supposed that what was in the interests of theVolkcould be decided by parliamentary procedures. Instead, Hitler argued that the unity of theVolkwould find its incarnation in theFührer, endowed with perfect authority. Below the Führer the party was drawn from theVolk and was in turn its safeguard. britannica.
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