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ADOLF HITLER
BORN BRAUNAU AM INN AUSTRIA 20 APRIL 1889
DIED 30 APRIL 1945 BERLIN
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Adolf
Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on 20 April 1889. The son of a
fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and
his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the backwoods of
lower Austria, the young Hitler was a resentful, discontented child. Moody, lazy,
of unstable temperament, he was deeply hostile towards his strict, authoritarian
father and strongly attached to his indulgent, hard-working mother, whose death
from cancer in December 1908 was a shattering blow to the adolescent Hitler.
After spending four years in the Realschule in Linz, he left school at the age
of sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter. In October 1907 the provincial,
middle-class boy left home for Vienna, where he was to remain until 1913 leading
a bohemian, vagabond existence. Embittered at his rejection by the Viennese
Academy of Fine Arts, he was to spend 'five years of misery and woe' in Vienna
as he later recalled, adopting a view of life which changed very little in the
ensuing years, shaped as it was by a pathological hatred of Jews and Marxists,
liberalism and the cosmopolitan Habsburg monarchy.
Existing from hand to mouth on occasional odd jobs and the hawking of sketches
in low taverns, the young Hitler compensated for the frustrations of a lonely
bachelor's life in miserable male hostels by political harangues in cheap cafes
to anyone who would listen and indulging in grandiose dreams of a Greater
Germany.
In Vienna he acquired his first education in politics by studying the demagogic
techniques of the popular Christian-social Mayor, Karl Lueger, and picked up the
stereotyped, obsessive anti-semitism with its brutal, violent sexual
connotations and concern with the 'purity of blood' that remained with him to
the end of his career. From crackpot racial theorists like the defrocked monk,
Lanz von Liebenfels, and the Austrian Pan-German leader, Georg von Schoenerer,
the young Hitler learned to discern in the 'Eternal Jew' the symbol and cause of
all chaos, corruption and destruction in culture, politics and the economy. The
press, prostitution, syphilis, capitalism, Marxism, democracy and pacifism - all
were so many means which 'the Jew' exploited in his conspiracy to undermine the
German nation and the purity of the creative Aryan race.
World War I
In May 1913 Hitler left Vienna for Munich and, when war broke out in August
1914, he joined the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment, serving as a despatch
runner. Hitler proved an able, courageous soldier, receiving the Iron Cross (First
Class) for bravery, but did not rise above the rank of Lance Corporal. Twice
wounded, he was badly gassed four weeks before the end of the war and spent
three months recuperating in a hospital in Pomerania. Temporarily blinded and
driven to impotent rage by the abortive November 1918 revolution in Germany as
well as the military defeat, Hitler, once restored, was convinced that fate had
chosen him to rescue a humiliated nation from the shackles of the Versailles
Treaty, from Bolsheviks and Jews.
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Assigned by the Reichswehr in the summer of 1919 to 'educational' duties which
consisted largely of spying on political parties in the overheated atmosphere of
post-revolutionary Munich, Hitler was sent to investigate a small nationalistic
group of idealists, the German Workers' Party. On 16 September 1919 he entered
the Party (which had approximately forty members), soon changed its name to the
National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and had imposed himself as its
Chairman by July 1921.
Hitler discovered a powerful talent for oratory as well as giving the new Party
its symbol - the swastika - and its greeting 'Heil!'. His hoarse, grating voice,
for all the bombastic, humourless, histrionic content of his speeches, dominated
audiences by dint of his tone of impassioned conviction and gift for
self-dramatization. By November 1921 Hitler was recognized as Fuhrer of a
movement which had 3,000 members, and boosted his personal power by organizing
strong- arm squads to keep order at his meetings and break up those of his
opponents. Out of these squads grew the storm troopers (SA) organized by Captain
Ernst Rohm and Hitler's black-shirted personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel
(SS).
Hitler focused his propaganda against the Versailles Treaty, the 'November
criminals', the Marxists and the visible, internal enemy No. 1, the 'Jew', who
was responsible for all Germany's domestic problems. In the twenty-five-point
programme of the NSDAP announced on 24 February 1920, the exclusion of the Jews
from the Volk community, the myth of Aryan race supremacy and extreme
nationalism were combined with 'socialistic' ideas of profit-sharing and
nationalization inspired by ideologues like Gottfried Feder. Hitler's first
written utterance on political questions dating from this period emphasized that
what he called 'the anti-semitism of reason' must lead 'to the systematic
combating and elimination of Jewish privileges. Its ultimate goal must
implacably be the total removal of the Jews.'
By November 1923 Hitler was convinced that the Weimar Republic was on the verge
of collapse and, together with General Ludendorff and local nationalist groups,
sought to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. Bursting into a beer-hall
in Munich and firing his pistol into the ceiling, he shouted out that he was
heading a new provisional government which would carry through a revolution
against 'Red Berlin'. Hitler and Ludendorff then marched through Munich at the
head of 3,000 men, only to be met by police fire which left sixteen dead and
brought the attempted putsch to an ignominious end. Hitler was arrested and
tried on 26 February 1924, succeeding in turning the tables on his accusers with
a confident, propagandist speech which ended with the prophecy: 'Pronounce us
guilty a thousand times over : the goddess of the eternal court of history will
smile and tear to pieces the State Prosecutor's submission and the court's
verdict for she acquits us.' Sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Landsberg
fortress, Hitler was released after only nine months during which he dictated
Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to his loyal follower, Rudolf Hess. Subsequently the 'bible'
of the Nazi Party, this crude, half-baked hotchpotch of primitive Social
Darwinism, racial myth, anti- semitism and lebensraum fantasy had sold over five
million copies by 1939 and been translated into eleven languages.
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The failure of the Beer-Hall putsch and his period of imprisonment transformed
Hitler from an incompetent adventurer into a shrewd political tactician, who
henceforth decided that he would never again confront the gun barrels of army
and police until they were under his command. He concluded that the road to
power lay not through force alone but through legal subversion of the Weimar
Constitution, the building of a mass movement and the combination of
parliamentary strength with extra-parliamentary street terror and intimidation.
Helped by Goering and Goebbels he began to reassemble his followers and rebuild
the movement which had disintegrated in his absence.
In January 1925 the ban on the Nazi Party was removed and Hitler regained
permission to speak in public. Outmanoeuvring the 'socialist' North German wing
of the Party under Gregor Strasser, Hitler re-established himself in 1926 as the
ultimate arbiter to whom all factions appealed in an ideologically and socially
heterogeneous movement. Avoiding rigid, programmatic definitions of National
Socialism which would have undermined the charismatic nature of his legitimacy
and his claim to absolute leadership, Hitler succeeded in extending his appeal
beyond Bavaria and attracting both Right and Left to his movement.
Though the Nazi Party won only twelve seats in the 1928 elections, the onset of
the Great Depression with its devastating effects on the middle classes helped
Hitler to win over all those strata in German society who felt their economic
existence was threatened. In addition to peasants, artisans, craftsmen, traders,
small businessmen, ex-officers, students and declasse intellectuals, the Nazis
in 1929 began to win over the big industrialists, nationalist conservatives and
army circles. With the backing of the press tycoon, Alfred Hugenberg, Hitler
received a tremendous nationwide exposure just as the effects of the world
economic crisis hit Germany, producing mass unemployment, social dissolution,
fear and indignation. With demagogic virtuosity, Hitler played on national
resentments, feelings of revolt and the desire for strong leadership using all
the most modern techniques of mass persuasion to present himself as Germany's
redeemer and messianic saviour.
In the 1930 elections the Nazi vote jumped dramatically from 810,000 to
6,409,000 (18.3 per cent of the total vote) and they received 107 seats in the
Reichstag. Prompted by Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen, the great industrial
magnates began to contribute liberally to the coffers of the NSDAP, reassured by
Hitler's performance before the Industrial Club in Dusseldorf on 27 January 1932
that they had nothing to fear from the radicals in the Party. The following
month Hitler officially acquired German citizenship and decided to run for the
Presidency, receiving 13,418,011 votes in the run-off elections of 10 April 1931
as against 19,359,650 votes for the victorious von Hindenburg , but four times
the vote for the communist candidate, Ernst Thaelmann. In the Reichstag
elections of July 1932 the Nazis emerged as the largest political party in
Germany, obtaining nearly fourteen million votes (37.3 per cent) and 230 seats.
Although the NSDAP fell back in November 1932 to eleven million votes (196 seats).
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Hitler was helped to power by a camarilla of conservative politicians led by
Franz von Papen, who persuaded the reluctant von Hindenburg to nominate 'the
Bohemian corporal' as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Once in the saddle,
Hitler moved with great speed to outmanoeuvre his rivals, virtually ousting the
conservatives from any real participation in government by July 1933, abolishing
the free trade unions, eliminating the communists, Social Democrats and Jews
from any role in political life and sweeping opponents into concentration camps.
The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 had provided him with the perfect pretext
to begin consolidating the foundations of a totalitarian one-party State, and
special 'enabling laws' were ramrodded through the Reichstag to legalize the
regime's intimidatory tactics.
With support from the nationalists, Hitler gained a majority at the last 'democratic'
elections held in Germany on 5 March 1933 and with cynical skill he used the
whole gamut of persuasion, propaganda, terror and intimidation to secure his
hold on power. The seductive notions of 'National Awakening' and a 'Legal
Revolution' helped paralyse potential opposition and disguise the reality of
autocratic power behind a facade of traditional institutions.
The destruction of the radical SA leadership under Ernst Rohm in the Blood Purge
of June 1934 confirmed Hitler as undisputed dictator of the Third Reich and by
the beginning of August, when he united the positions of Fuhrer and Chancellor
on the death of von Hindenburg, he had all the powers of State in his hands.
Avoiding ANY institutionalization of authority and status which could challenge
his own undisputed position as supreme arbiter, Hitler allowed subordinates like
Himmler, Goering and Goebbels to mark out their own domains of arbitrary power
while multiplying and duplicating offices to a bewildering degree.
Prelude to War
During the next four years Hitler enjoyed a dazzling string of domestic and
international successes, outwitting rival political leaders abroad just as he
had defeated his opposition at home. In 1935 he abandoned the Versailles Treaty
and began to build up the army by conscripting five times its permitted number.
He persuaded Great Britain to allow an increase in the naval building programme
and in March 1936 he occupied the demilitarized Rhineland without meeting
opposition. He began building up the Luftwaffe and supplied military aid to
Francoist forces in Spain, which brought about the Spanish fascist victory in
1939.
The German rearmament programme led to full employment and an unrestrained
expansion of production, which reinforced by his foreign policy successes - the
Rome-Berlin pact of 1936, the Anschluss with Austria and the 'liberation' of the
Sudeten Germans in 1938 - brought Hitler to the zenith of his popularity. In
February 1938 he dismissed sixteen senior generals and took personal command of
the armed forces, thus ensuring that he would be able to implement his
aggressive designs.
Hitler's sabre-rattling tactics bludgeoned the British and French into the
humiliating Munich agreement of 1938 and the eventual dismantlement of the
Czechoslovakian State in March 1939. The concentration camps, the Nuremberg
racial laws against the Jews, the persecution of the churches and political
dissidents were forgotten by many Germans in the euphoria of Hitler's
territorial expansion and bloodless victories. The next designated target for
Hitler's ambitions was Poland (her independence guaranteed by Britain and France)
and, to avoid a two-front war, the Nazi dictator signed a pact of friendship and
non- aggression with Soviet Russia.
On 1 September 1939 German armies invaded Poland and henceforth his main
energies were devoted to the conduct of a war he had unleashed to dominate
Europe and secure Germany's 'living space'.
The first phase of World War II was dominated by German Blitzkrieg tactics:
sudden shock attacks against airfields, communications, military installations,
using fast mobile armour and infantry to follow up on the first wave of bomber
and fighter aircraft. Poland was overrun in nineteen days, Denmark and Norway in
two months, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg and France in six weeks. After the fall
of France in June 1940 only Great Britain stood firm.
The Battle of Britain, in which the Royal Air Force prevented the Luftwaffe from
securing aerial control over the English Channel, was Hitler's first setback,
causing the planned invasion of the British Isles to be postponed. Hitler turned
to the Balkans and North Africa where his Italian allies had suffered defeats,
his armies rapidly overrunning Greece, Yugoslavia, the island of Crete and
driving the British from Cyrenaica.
The crucial decision of his career, the invasion of Soviet Russia on 22 June
1941, was rationalized by the idea that its destruction would prevent Great
Britain from continuing the war with any prospect of success. He was convinced
that once he kicked the door in, as he told Jodl (q.v.), 'the whole rotten
edifice [of communist rule] will come tumbling down' and the campaign would be
over in six weeks. The war against Russia was to be an anti-Bolshivek crusade, a
war of annihilation in which the fate of European Jewry would finally be sealed.
At the end of January 1939 Hitler had prophesied that 'if the international
financial Jewry within and outside Europe should succeed once more in dragging
the nations into a war, the result will be, not the Bolshevization of the world
and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
Europe'.
As the war widened - the United States by the end of 1941 had entered the
struggle against the Axis powers - Hitler identified the totality of Germany's
enemies with 'international Jewry', who supposedly stood behind the
British-American-Soviet alliance. The policy of forced emigration had manifestly
failed to remove the Jews from Germany's expanded lebensraum, increasing their
numbers under German rule as the Wehrmacht moved East.
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The widening of the conflict into a world war by the end of 1941, the refusal of
the British to accept Germany's right to continental European hegemony (which
Hitler attributed to 'Jewish' influence) and to agree to his 'peace' terms, the
racial-ideological nature of the assault on Soviet Russia, finally drove Hitler
to implement the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' which had been under
consideration since 1939. The measures already taken in those regions of Poland
annexed to the Reich against Jews (and Poles) indicated the genocidal
implications of Nazi-style 'Germanization' policies. The invasion of Soviet
Russia was to set the seal on Hitler's notion of territorial conquest in the
East, which was inextricably linked with annihilating the 'biological roots of
Bolshevism' and hence with the liquidation of all Jews under German rule.
At first the German armies carried all before them, overrunning vast territories,
overwhelming the Red Army, encircling Leningrad and reaching within striking
distance of Moscow. Within a few months of the invasion Hitler's armies had
extended the Third Reich from the Atlantic to the Caucasus, from the Baltic to
the Black Sea. But the Soviet Union did not collapse as expected and Hitler,
instead of concentrating his attack on Moscow, ordered a pincer movement around
Kiev to seize the Ukraine, increasingly procrastinating and changing his mind
about objectives. Underestimating the depth of military reserves on which the
Russians could call, the calibre of their generals and the resilient, fighting
spirit of the Russian people (whom he dismissed as inferior peasants), Hitler
prematurely proclaimed in October 1941 that the Soviet Union had been 'struck
down and would never rise again'. In reality he had overlooked the pitiless
Russian winter to which his own troops were now condemned and which forced the
Wehrmacht to abandon the highly mobile warfare which had previously brought such
spectacular successes.
The disaster before Moscow in December 1941 led him to dismiss his
Commander-in-Chief von Brauchitsch, and many other key commanders who sought
permission for tactical withdrawals, including Guderian, Bock , Hoepner, von
Rundstedt and Leeb, found themselves cashiered. Hitler now assumed personal
control of all military operations, refusing to listen to advice, disregarding
unpalatable facts and rejecting everything that did not fit into his
preconceived picture of reality. His neglect of the Mediterranean theatre and
the Middle East, the failure of the Italians, the entry of the United States
into the war, and above all the stubborn determination of the Russians, pushed
Hitler on to the defensive. From the winter of 1941 the writing was on the wall
but Hitler refused to countenance military defeat, believing that implacable
will and the rigid refusal to abandon positions could make up for inferior
resources and the lack of a sound overall strategy.
Convinced that his own General Staff was weak and indecisive, if not openly
treacherous, Hitler became more prone to outbursts of blind, hysterical fury
towards his generals, when he did not retreat into bouts of misanthropic
brooding. His health, too, deteriorated under the impact of the drugs prescribed
by his quack physician, Dr Theodor Morell. Hitler's personal decline, symbolized
by his increasingly rare public appearances and his self-enforced isolation in
the 'Wolf's Lair', his headquarters buried deep in the East Prussian forests,
coincided with the visible signs of the coming German defeat which became
apparent in mid-1942.
Rommel's defeat at El Alamein and the subsequent loss of North Africa to the
Anglo-American forces were overshadowed by the disaster at Stalingrad where
General von Paulus's Sixth Army was cut off and surrendered to the Russians in
January 1943. In July 1943 the Allies captured Sicily and Mussolini's regime
collapsed in Italy. In September the Italians signed an armistice and the Allies
landed at Salerno, reaching Naples on 1 October and taking Rome on 4 June 1944.
The Allied invasion of Normandy followed on 6 June 1944 and soon a million
Allied troops were driving the German armies eastwards, while from the opposite
direction the Soviet forces advanced relentlessly on the Reich. The total
mobilization of the German war economy under Albert Speer and the energetic
propaganda efforts of Joseph Goebbels to rouse the fighting spirit of the German
people were impotent to change the fact that the Third Reich lacked the
resources equal to a struggle against the world alliance which Hitler himself
had provoked.
Allied bombing began to have a telling effect on German industrial production
and to undermine the morale of the population. The generals, frustrated by
Hitler's total refusal to trust them in the field and recognizing the
inevitability of defeat, planned, together with the small anti-Nazi Resistance
inside the Reich, to assassinate the Fuhrer on 20 July 1944, hoping to pave the
way for a negotiated peace with the Allies that would save Germany from
destruction. The plot failed and Hitler took implacable vengeance on the
conspirators, watching with satisfaction a film of the grisly executions carried
out on his orders.
As disaster came closer, Hitler buried himself in the unreal world of the
Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, clutching at fantastic hopes that his 'secret weapons',
the V-1 and V-2 rockets, would yet turn the tide of war. He gestured wildly over
maps, planned and directed attacks with non-existent armies and indulged in
endless, night- long monologues which reflected his growing senility,
misanthropy and contempt for the 'cowardly failure' of the German people.
As the Red Army approached Berlin and the Anglo-Americans reached the Elbe, on
19 March 1945 Hitler ordered the destruction of what remained of German industry,
communications and transport systems. He was resolved that, if he did not
survive, Germany too should be destroyed. The same ruthless nihilism and passion
for destruction which had led to the extermination of six million Jews in death
camps, to the biological 'cleansing' of the sub-human Slavs and other subject
peoples in the New Order, was finally turned on his own people.
On 29 April 1945 he married his mistress Eva Braun and dictated his final
political testament, concluding with the same monotonous, obsessive fixation
that had guided his career from the beginning: 'Above all I charge the leaders
of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race
and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples,
international Jewry.'
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The following day Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself through the mouth
with a pistol. His body was carried into the garden of the Reich Chancellery by
aides, covered with petrol and burned along with that of Eva Braun. This final,
macabre act of self-destruction appropriately symbolized the career of a
political leader whose main legacy to Europe was the ruin of its civilization
and the senseless sacrifice of human life for the sake of power and his own
commitment to the bestial nonsense of National Socialist race mythology. With
his death nothing was left of the 'Greater Germanic Reich', of the tyrannical
power structure and ideological system which had devastated Europe during the
twelve years of his totalitarian
Born: 20. April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria.
Suicide: 30. Apr. 1945 in the Führerbunker, Berlin.
NSDAP-Nr.: (Joined Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP), 16. Sep. 1919)
Positions Held:
Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres: 19. Dec. 1941 - 30. Apr. 1945.
Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht: 4. Feb. 1938 - 30. Apr. 1945.
Führer und Reichskanzler: 12. Aug. 1934 - 30. Apr. 1945.
Reichskanzler: 30. Jan. 1933 - 30. Apr. 1945.
Oberster SA- und SS-Führer: Jan. 1931 - 30. Apr. 1945.
Vorsitzender der NSDAP: 29. Jul. 1921 -
World War I Service:
Notes:
Married Eva Braun, 29. Apr. 1945.
Decorations & Awards:
1914 EK I
1914 EK II
Verwundetenabzeichen, 1918 in Schwarz
Ehrenkreuz fur Frontkampfer
Goldenes Parteiabzeichen
Blutorden