Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889 in Branau Am Inn, Austria. He died April 30, 1945. His dictatorial rule of Germany, which led to the deaths of millions before and during World War II, upon his direct orders, has placed him among history's most hated villains.

"Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers Mussolini and Franco were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss. "Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler." "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come. The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and evil were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls." [1]

"At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed.

How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant?

Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support. Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.

We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant disdain for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with Eva Braun, who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of Jews, whose survival enraged him — each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers.

And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable paranoid find it within himself to impose gigantic hope as an immutable ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises, or if the winners in 1918 had not imposed on it conditions that represented a national humiliation against which the German patriotic fiber could only revolt? We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His Nationalist Socialist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections. The aging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the Third Reich, which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years.

From that moment on, events cascaded. The burning of the Reichstag came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear descended on the country and squeezed it in a vise. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight emigrated toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late.

Hitler with his dog, Blondie

The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?"[2]

Hitler was born in 1889 in Austria. His mother was his father's niece, and the incestuous relationship may have influenced the development of Hitler's own psychopathic nature. Later on Hitler became involved with his own niece, and this appears to have been a pattern in Hitler's family extending back for several generations and explains Hitler's attitudes about intermarriage. ^[1]

After leaving home he worked as an artisan painter. Hitler did not do particularly well in school, leaving formal education in 1905. Unable to settle to a regular job, he drifted. He wished to become an artist but was rejected from the Academy in Vienna. He immigrated to Germany and served as an enlisted soldier in the Imperial Bavarian Army in World War I, and gained the rank of corporal. He won several awards for bravery, including the Iron Cross First Class.

After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain. There was much discontent among demobilized veterans because of the lack of employment. The German military had felt it had not been defeated; indeed, the German Army stood on foreign soil when the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918 and not a square inch of German soil had been occupied. The Army felt they had done their job, and the nation had been "stabbed in the back" by a gang of traitors who sought to lay hands on the Fatherland. The "myth" that Germany had been defeated was the "big lie" Hitler spoke of, as repeating it often enough would cause people to believe it.

Many returning Army units remained intact, despite being no longer directly under command of the German Army because of limitations set upon it by the Treaty of Versailles. The situation was highly politicized, and it appears Hitler was originally sent to spy on a small splinter group called the "National Socialist German Workers’ Party" (Nazi) were he found only a shell of an organization, but a willing audience to hear him talk. By 1921 he had became leader of the group. With the terrible economic conditions and rapid inflation, support for Hitler’s party grew. By 1923, the Nazi’s had 56,000 members and many more supporters.

Germany in 1923 was marked by social and political unrest caused by hyperinflation. In this time Hitler was able convince Erich Ludendorff, an accomplished general and leader of the German forces in the first World War, to join him in a coup d'etat (Putsch in German). When Hitler learned that the nationalist Prime Minister of Bavaria was giving a speech to 3000 officials in one of Munich's biggest beer halls, he ordered his paramilitaries to surround the building. Hitler went into building and took the prime minister hostage, in an attempt to convince him to join Hitler's coup against Berlin, and to become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but later that night informed the nation via radio, that he did not support Hitler.

The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength. They were stopped by the Bavarian army and police forces. In the ensuing fight at least 14 Nazi supporters and three policemen, were killed, and hundreds wounded. Ludendorff handed himself over to the authorities, while Hitler fled soon after the fighting began. Hitler was arrested a few days later at a friend's house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison. In Landsberg prison Hitler wrote his book Mein Kampf. He was released early, in 1924, after one year of prison.^[2][3]

In the early 1930 Germany was in a permanent political and constitutional crisis. This was caused by rising unemployment during the great depression, combined with frustration about the perceived injustice imposed on Germany by the Versailles treaty, street violence between various extreme groups, and an inability of centrist democratic parties to cooperate. This resulted in a polarization of extremes, Comintern activists on one side and national socialist on the other. The national socialist were also simply known as Hitler movement.

In the first election of 1932 communists and national socialist together won the majority of seats in the Reichstag. This means that the anti-democratic forces outnumbered the democratic forces. In a second election that year, the national socialists lost ground, but the democratic forces were still unable to form a functioning government. After a series of minority cabinets former Chancellor van Papen convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to Chancellor in a coalition government with the national conservative party. Van Papen expected the nation would recognize Hitler to be a fraud within a few months in government. The national socialist celebrated the Machtergreifung (seizure of power in German) on January 30, 1933, with massive marches through Berlin. Two days later new elections for parliament were announced for March.[3]

In the lead up to the 1933 election oppression and harassment of political opponents increased. On February 27, 1933, six day before the Reichstag election, the Dutch National and communist Marinus van der Lubbe was caught setting the Reichstag on fire. While the exact events surrounding this event are still contended, it was blamed on a Comintern conspiracy. Georgi Dimitrov, who later became General Secretary of the Comintern, was one of those arrested in the plot. ^[4][5] President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire decree the next day, which increased Hitlers powers and gave him the opportunity to arrest political opponents, among them elected members of parliament.[4] [5]

In the election the national socialist failed to win a majority, but the newly formed Reichstag voted in favor of an Enabling Act with a majority of 69% (67% being the necessary quota), giving the national socialist government the power to enact new laws without interference from parliament or constitution. Only the members of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD) voted against the act. Hitler and the NSDAP had sucessfully tricked the members of the Bayerische Volkspartei and the Zentrum into supporting the act. In the summer of 1933 the Nazi government declared first the communist and social democratic party illegal, briefly afterwards all other parties. At the end of the year the Reichstag cast officially into law that Germany was a one-party-state.

After all political opponents had been neutralised and in order to gain support from the German military, Hitler turned his attention to a key group which had catapulted the Nazi's into power--the stormtroopers (SA) under Ernst Roehm. The German military viewed an armed and trained paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party as a challenge to their power. It was a well known within the Nazi establishment that Roehm was gay, and it was now used against him to discredit him. Heinrich Himmler of the SS, Hitler's personal body guards at the time, was tasked with reigning the SA in. In the so-called Night of Long Knives the entire top of the SA was executed. This marked the eclipse of the SA as within the Nazi Party, and the rise of the SS as the dominant force. Although hestitant at first, Hitler agreed to have Ernst Roehm executed, a friend and associate since their time in Landsberg prison.[6] [7]

After President Hindenburgs death in 1934, Hitler received also all presidential powers and was declared Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). This was approved in August 1934 by 84% of the votes in a nationwide plebiscite.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe was implemented by a government of a modern Western state to exterminate people of Jewish ancestry throughout Germany and all its occupied territories. Approximately six million people of all ages--men, women and children, were systematically murdered under a policy directed by Adolf Hitler. Other groups of "undesirables" and "asocials" were also targeted and killed.[8]

The Night of Broken Glass:

November 9, 1938, an event occurred which revealed the true nature of Hitler's regime to the world and also marked the beginning of deadly radicalization of Nazi policy concerning the Jews. For some months so-called moderate anti-Semites within the Nazi hierarchy had been losing ground to those favoring extreme measures such as the immediate removal of Jews from Germany. The removal of the first big group of Jews in late October 1938 sparked a chain of events resulting in the Night of Broken Glass, a massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout Greater Germany.

On October 27, about 17,000 Jews of Polish origin, including over 2,000 children, were abruptly expelled from Germany on orders of Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS. The Grynszpan family from the city of Hanover were among the Jews forcibly transported in railroad cars then dumped at the Polish border as unwanted persons. Polish border authorities at first denied them permission to enter. The Jews thus ended up in a kind of no-man's-land between the German and Polish borders. The Grynszpan mention is not important on the face, but their 17-year-old son Herschel does. He had gone to Paris for safekeeping at the age of 15 to stay with his uncle who worked there as a tailor. Up hearing about his families plight, he became increasingly depressed and enraged. Driven half-mad with sorrow and anger over all that was happening, Herschel decided to commit a radical act of violence to draw the world's attention to the plight of the Jews. On Monday morning, November 7, he walked into a Paris gun shop and purchased a 6.35-caliber revolver along with a box of 25 bullets. When the shop owner asked why he wanted the gun, Herschel answered that he sometimes carried large amounts of money for his father and needed the protection.

On July 20, 1944, officers of the German Wehrmacht succeeded in planting a bomb in Hitler's secret headquarters in East Prussia which exploded, killing three and injuring Hitler.

In the aftermath and up until the final days of the War approximately 5,000 people, mostly German officers, were executed for treason, disloyalty, or suspected of not offering fanatical resistance to fight to the end.

He married Eva Braun, on 29 April 1945 in Berlin.

Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker next to the Chancellery in Berlin on April 30, 1945, after the Allied forces had invaded Germany, and as the Red Army was fighting its way into the heart of Berlin. [9] He appointed Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz to succeed him as President in his last will, to continue the war against the Red Army. A few days later, Dönitz instructed the military to sign an unconditional surrender, and the war ended officially on May 8, 1945, the date that became known as V-E Day.

1. ↑ Gunther, John, Inside Europe, New York: Harper, 1939.
2. ↑ http://history1900s.about.com/cs/thirdreich/a/beerhallputsch_2.htm
3. ↑ http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/putsch2.htm
4. ↑ The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 19, Spring 2006. Retreived 2 May 2007.
5. ↑ Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. - book reviews National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Ronald Rodosh.

• Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler, His Life and Legend, Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C.