THE EDUCATION OF A DICTATOR:ADOLF HITLER’S YOUTH AND START IN

POLITICS

1889: Born in Braunau, where his father collects tolls on the border between Bavaria and Austria

1898: Move to Linz (where Adolf struggles in high school)

1905: Earns a “small diploma” at 16 and persuades his mother that his health does not permit further study

1907-13: VIENNA YEARS—Hitler twice fails the entrance exam to the Vienna Art Academy and then scrapes by, painting watercolors for tourists

1914-20: SOLDIER YEARS—German Army recruits Hitler as a political agent at the end of WW I

The Hitlers came from the borderland between Lower Austria & Bohemia, in an Austrian Empire wracked by

ethnic tension

Austria granted Home Rule to Hungary in 1867 but no such rights to Czechs, Croats, etc.

Alois Hitler (1837-1903):This illegitimate son of a

maid achieved respectability as an Austrian civil servant

Klara Hitler (1860-1907), the third wife of Alois

and his second cousin

“I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved.”

(Mein Kampf, end of chap. 1)

Where’s Adolf? (School photo at age 10.)

TWO YEARS LATER HITLER WAS STRUGGLING IN HIGH SCHOOL AND FLUNKED HIS FIRST YEAR

WHILE WRITING MEIN KAMPF IN 1924,HITLER INSISTED ON THE FOLLOWING POINTS:

1. He had become a militant pan-German nationalist already in high school in Linz [probably true].

2. In Vienna he had learned all about the “Social Question” and understood the grievances of workers [?].

3. In Vienna he had also learned on a construction site that the socialist labor movement was a “pestilential whore” after Marxist trade unionists dragged the Fatherland, religion, and morality through the mud [???].

4. “Wherever I went [in Vienna] I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” Jews accounted for “nine-tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy.”

5. He had formed his complete Weltanschauung in Vienna and never learned anything important thereafter [???].

Georg von Schönerer (1842-

1921)excluded Jews from

his Austrian Pan-German

League,called himself the

Führer, and exhorted young

men to keep their bodies pure.

“Carriage Shafts” (Austria, 1900):“Schmul’s Patented Automobile. Cheapest

operation!Completely safe!”

Hitler displayed NO political activism or work ethic before World War I (watercolor painted in Munich,

early 1914)

Munich’s Odeon Square, August 2, 1914

“To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy

enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to

live at this time” (Mein Kampf, p. 161)

Adolf Hitler with two

fellow dispatch

runners and his dog, Foxl, in Fournes,

France (1915).

He won the Iron Cross, Second and First Class.

Captain Ernst Röhm, who armed Bavaria’s

militias, gave Hitler political training, and

followed Hitler into the

“German Workers’ Party” in

autumn 1919

Anton Drexler, the railroad machinist who invited Hitler into his “German Workers’

Party” in September 1919 and renamed it the National Socialist

German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1920

25-Point Program of the German Workers’ Party (Feb. 1920)

#1. We demand the union of all Germans to form a Great Germany.#3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the nourishment of our people and for settling our excess population.#4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew therefore may be a member of the nation.#7. If it is not possible to nourish the entire population of the state, foreign nationals (noncitizens of the state) must be excluded from the Reich.#8. All non-German immigration must be prevented.#11. Abolition of incomes unearned by work.#13. We demand nationalization of all businesses (trusts).#14. We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared.#16. We demand creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, immediate communalization of wholesale business premises, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders….

Postcard of Hitler in Landsberg Prison (1924), where he dictated vol. 1 of

Mein Kampf

TOTAL GERMAN SALES:

1929: 23,0001932: 80,000

1933: 1,500,000

1945: 10,000,000

Hitler addresses a listless

meeting in Vilsbiburg,

Bavaria, 1925

SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT IMAGEin the photography studio of Heinrich Hoffmann, 1920s

Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), appointed

Gauleiter of Berlin in 1926

Gregor Strasser (1892-1934), pharmacist & Reich Organization Leader of the

NSDAP

Hitler with his niece, Geli Raubal (1929/30):

She shot herself in September 1931.

Eva Braun in the studio of Heinrich Hoffmann(she attempted suicide in 1935 because Hitler

neglected her)