Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th, 1889 in Braunau, Austria. He was the fourth child of Alois Schickelgruber and Klara Hitler. The couple’s first three offsprings died as children, but more two more were born later, in addition to Adolf’s half siblings from his father’s previous marriage. A housemaid described Adolf’s father as a strict but comfortable man, and his mother was known to give Adolf much love and affection. As a child, Adolf was very skilled at artwork, and even went to a special school for awhile, but he didn’t do well there. His father died in 1903 of a pleural hemorrhage, and his mother died in 1907 of breast cancer. Hitler spent six years in Vienna, Austria, the center of anti-Semitism. He was virtually penniless. These years helped him develop prejudices about Jews, and an interest in politics. At the time, two of his closest friends were Jewish and he admired many Jewish art dealers and operatic performers and producers. Hitler later was arrested for avoiding military service for World War I. When he was eventually caught, he was found “unfit…too weak…and unable to bear arms.”1 Later, he served four years. Near the end of the war, Hitler was partially blinded when he was exposed to poison gas. In 1919, Adolf joined the German Workers’ Party (later renamed National Socialist German Workers’ or Nazi Party). In 1921, he was elected as the party’s chairman, or Führer. Later in 1923, Hitler led an uprising against the Weimar Republic, the German government. Unfortunately for him, the uprising failed, and he was sentenced to five years in prison. He only served nine moths of this sentence though, during which he dictated his auto-biography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). [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.2 A second volume of Mein Kampf was published in 1927, and more than five million copies of the book were sold before the beginning of World War II.
|
