How a man born like any other man would turn into the most baleful dictator the world has ever seen? Adolf Hitler is the incarnation of evil, he is responsible for the death of six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and people with mental and physical disabilities
The niggling question to this day is not how this man lost the war, but how a man who holds such deranged views came into power in one of the most civilized nations. To declare Nero’s Decree, the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure, as a punishment for being defeated in the battle.
The Birth of Adolf Hitler
April 20, 1889, Adolf Hitler is born in Braunau am Inn, a small town in Austria near the German border, where his father Alois Hitler served as a customs official. He is born into a devout catholic family. At an early age, life acquaints young Adolf Hitler with death as he witnesses his three sisters and a brother die in infancy.
His father Alois would always come home drunk violent and abusive. He never spared the rod and from the early days taught Hitler that might be right and strength and brutality were allied to domination. Some beatings were so bad that his mother Clara throws herself across her son to take the blows herself.
According to her (Clara’s) doctor, Edward Bloch, Clara was above all absorbed in the care of her children and although Adolf was not a mother’s boy in the usual sense, he had never witnessed a closer attachment than that. Hitler would draw pictures of her mum and promise her, that in the future he will work hard to give her a better life away from his abusive father.
Adolf Hitler and its Education Background
In 1900, Adolf Hitler moved to Linz and enters High School where he is introduced to a doctrine that would influence him his entire life. It would give him a sense of purpose he never had. His history teacher Leopold fired him up with an idea of German nationalism.
Austria is part of a vast empire with ancient roots, German is a newly created country dating just from 1886, both people speak the same language, and a radical idea is dawning in Hitler’s mind that the two countries should become one.
In 1907 at just 16 old, Adolf Hitler leaves school for the Austrian capital Vienna, one of Europe’s greatest cities. Young Adolf Hitler is armed with a thick set of drawings and determined to train at the prestigious academy of arts. Over 100 candidates apply, and 28 are to be chosen. His childhood dream is about to be fulfilled and his mission to support his mum is a step away from being accomplished.
He submits his drawings which were examined and the examiner’s notes on the left said ‘reasonable, head poorly done, no great talent we do not recommend admission’.
Rejection is followed by a deep personal loss; his mother Clara dies of cancer, then comes a final blow, the ultimate blow, he is rejected again. This is the final attempt.
With the only person he loved dead and his childhood dream killed, Hitler plunges into a deep depression, and he makes no attempt to find a job. He joins the multitude of men out of work. Finally, he ends up in a homeless hostel an experience that would brutalize him forever.
“I owe it to that period that I grew hard, and I am still capable of being hard”,
Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf
To survive he sells pictures of Viennese buildings, and he also becomes a close observer of politics, he is repelled but fascinated by the growing socialist movement. He is especially fascinated by one of their tactics. They use violence to make sure that they get their points across.
“I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror towards the individual and the masses”
Adolf Hitler, Mein kampf
The Making of The Brutal Adolf Hitler
Other observations start stirring in Hitler’s head, Vienna in 1910 had a huge Jewish population there are more than 175000 Jews living in the city and Hitler started to loathe them.
“Wherever I went I now see Jewish, the more I saw them the more they sharply set themselves apart from the rest of humanity, I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
At a mere 21 years of age, the main building blocks of the Nazi’s evil ideology are coming together; intense personal hardness, extreme nationalism, a belief of use violence and terror, and loathing of Jews.
“Vienna was and remain for me the hardest though most thorough school of my life. In it I obtained the foundations of political view which never left me”
– Adolf Hitler
In august 1914, comes an event that would affect Hitler and almost all German-speaking people in the most horrific way. World War 1. This was after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, on June 28, 1914.
At 25 years old Adolf Hitler apparently joins the cheering crowds on the first day of the war. There is a famous photo of Adolf Hitler smiling amidst the crowd after hearing that war has broken. Historians believe he was smiling because he was really thinking that Germany can make its bid for European power, and he wanted to be part of it on that very first day, he signs up to fight for the German army.
A young German nationalist joins the Bavarian infantry regiment as a messenger. His job is to take vital information up to the front area. But carrying messages was not a safe option. The regiment suffered very high casualties. Hitler had found out he wasn’t a coward as he could stand the fact that bullets were whizzing all around him.
In his first year, Hitler is awarded the coveted iron cross for bravery, he also shows his characteristic refusal to compromise. When German and British troops meet at no man’s land on Christmas Day of 1914 to sing carols, Hitler did not join them.
In his mind, he wondered how his fellow soldiers fraternized with the enemy and even shook hands, with the people he wanted dead. This war was a fight to the finish and he wants the Germans to win it.
In 1918, his luck runs out, he is blinded by a British poison gas attack, it was a particularly virulent sort of gas known as mustard gas. Which attacks the lungs, eyelids, and soft tissues.
The wounded Adolf Hitler is taken to a military hospital in northern German for treatment.
Usually, when a person is particularly affected by that attack, he is blinded but the blindness goes away, in a few hours or days. But strangely, Hitler’s eyesight doesn’t return. His doctors can’t understand this.
One story goes, they asked a leading psychologist Edmund Forster to take a look at him, and foster concluded that the blindness was hysterical and not physical. He prescribed that the only way to cure Hitler was to boost his ego.
Foster hypnotized Hitler and tells him that he is blind but since god has made him an exceptional person, he can regain his eyesight again through willpower. Foster allegedly tells Hitler, that he is the person who can make Germany great again.
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Adolf Hitler would have loved, despite his humble rank and his humble background, he was a special being, and the idea that he was singled out by destiny for a special role in history inspires him.
It’s a message that Hitler takes to heart, he is not like other men. Forster then holds a lit candle in front of Hitler’s eyes and says that if he can see the flame, he is cured. The mind game works. Hitler’s vision and he becomes convinced he is a man of destiny.
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