Hitler

[Michael Ragland]

HITLER
    Hitler's father Alois, who died in 1903, was a customs
inspector at the border, a job of prestige and economic standing
(considerably higher than a school headmaster). The family was middle
class. In his childhood, Hitler lived in relatively privileged
circumstances. A willful child and an indifferent student, he was
forever suffering the rebuke of his father, a man who accomplished a
respectful position in life and wanted the same of his son, possibly a
job in the imperial bureaucracy. The young Hitler recoiled at the
prospect. His mother Klara was a gentle woman who merely pointed to her
husband's row of pipes on the kitchen shelf when she wanted her
childrens' attention. The father and mother were distantly related and
the father was considerably older than his bride, who he met when she
was a bar maid in the local tavern. Alois Hitler barely spoke a word to
his wife at home. In 1900, Hitler's younger brother Edmund died of
measles. Neither the father or mother attended the funeral nor supplied
a stone marker. Eleven year old Hitler attended the burial in a snow
storm with one sibling at his side. Two other of Hitler's siblings died
of diphtheria. Klara Hitler died of cancer in 1907, and her Jewish
doctor received an appreciative card from the son. In March 1938 the
doctor was allowed to leave Nazi-occupied Austria by special order of
the fuehrer.
    At age 18, Hitler arrived in Vienna to enroll at the esteemed
Academy of Fine Arts. With a hundred and twenty other candidates, Hitler
took the entrance exam. He passed the first exam; thirty-three others
failed. Students then submitted sample drawings. Hitler's samples did
not realistically portray human beings. He was rejected along with
fifty-one other candidates. Of the original hundred and twenty
candidates, only twenty-eight passed both exams. It was suggested that
he try to enroll in architecture school, but he lacked a high school
diploma, the necessary prerequisite. His lackadaisical attitude as a
school boy had come back to haunt him. Typical of the culture, he blamed
the Jews for his setbacks. In the beginning of his sojourn in Vienna,
Hitler lived off an orphan's pension and held to the pretenses of a
young nobleman, sporting an ivory-handled walking stick and dressing in
"a most presentable outfit," said his friend Kubizek. Hitler attended
the theater regularly and enjoyed the works of Richard Wagner, the arch
Nationalist and Jew hater (whose operas gave Hitler the inspiration for
the dramatic Nuremburg Party rallies). Soon the young Hitler was reduced
to tattered clothing and to sleeping in the park or in homes for the
down and out. In all, Hitler lived in sixteen different places while in
Vienna, one (to repeat) financed by a Jewish philanthrophist (Epstein).
Among the downtrodden Hitler learned the tactics of cunning and deceit
that he took to be the ways of the world. Hitler made a meager living by
painting water colors of traditional scenes in Vienna. He later sued his
partner, accusing him of theft. Hitler spent inordinate amounts of time
in Viennese cafes, gulping down pastries and cups of tea filled with
sugar. In these cafes he read free newspapers and argued, or shouted
down, the regulars on the subjects of politics, the communist threat
(known as the Great Dread), the corrupt Habsburgs, the glorious Germans,
and the despised Jews.
"In the dim twilight of underground Vienna," the German historian
Joachim Fest has written, "anti-Semitism was merely the concentrated
form of his hitherto general and undirected hatred, which finally found
its object in the Jews."
    It is no coincidence that Hitler became a full fledged
anti-Semite precisely at the time when he had used up his orphan's
pension. Vienna, Hitler later wrote, was the "most thorough school of my
life." The only companion who didn't abandon him, he later bitterly
observed, was "hunger."
    In his 1924 autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler described his
first encounter with the Eastern Jews living in Vienna.
"Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered
an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was
my first thought. Is this a German?"
    Hitler's race theory was in part based on what the historian
Joachim Fest calls "sexual-envy complexes."
In his autobiography, Hitler wrote, "With satanic joy in his face, the
black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for an unsuspecting girl whom he
defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people."
    Hitler believed that the Jewish people were the "eternal
enemy" of the German people. In order to save the German people, he had
to exterminate the Jews. Not some of the Jews. But all of them,
particularly the children lest they grow up to avenge the murder of
their parents (as Himmler said in 1943 with a tape recorder running).
WORLD WAR I
    On August 1, 1914, the First World War began when the German
armies attacked France by way of Belgium. In the exultant first days of
that August, twenty-five year old Adolf Hitler joined a Bavarian
regiment in his new home of Munich. He reached the front lines in
October 1914 and immediately went into combat. Hitler served as a
messenger and displayed notable bravery for which he was rewarded with
the prestigious Iron Cross (first class). The award gave Hitler de facto
German citizenship, which he lacked, being an Austrian.
    During four long years, war raged across the European
landscape, laying waste to much of northern France and Belgium as well
as to virtually all of Poland. In the end, when the German high command
surrendered on November 11, 1918, communist revolutions broke out in
Germany. Communism was indelibly identified with the Jews. In Poland
they called it "zydo-kommunism," or "Jew-communism." The revolutions,
most notably in Munich and Berlin, were crushed by German soldiers
thoroughly brutalized by four years at the front. These were the
so-called Freikorps who would later comprise the ranks of Hitler's
storm-troopers, the SA or Brownshirts. The Weimar Republic, based on a
liberal constitution and despised by conservative forces and founded in
the city of Weimar, was established on shaky ground indeed. After they
came to power in 1933, as if to mock the liberal association with
Weimar, the Nazis constructed one of the concentration camps a few miles
outside of it. It was named Buchenwald.
 
    Embittered by war and disillusioned by peace, the German
people faced an uncertain future. Twice within four years the economy
collapsed. For a people who strove for order, there was none. How did
this dramatic turn of events occur? The answer was simple: Germany lost
the war because she had been "stabbed in the back" by the Jews.
    So began the twenty-one year hiatus between the First and the
Second World Wars. The Jews were blamed for World War I. The Jews were
blamed for the Treaty of Versailles. The Jews were blamed for the Soviet
takeover in Russia. The Jews were blamed for the economic depression.
The Jews were blamed for the black market. The Jews were blamed for the
unpredictable weather. The Jews prospered while the good Germans
suffered. Hard feelings had always existed towards Jews, and hard
feelings intensified with the deep insecurity of the post-war period. In
Munich, Hitler began giving speeches that explained the difficult
circumstances. It was the fault of the Jews, he repeated ad nauseam.
This point always elicited a strong approval from the audience. Hitler
later said that if he did not have the Jews to blame everything on, and
to unify the masses in the common bond of hatred, then he would have had
to invent them. Yet Hitler took anti-Semitism a step further. Life was
based on racial struggle, he stressed. Conversion or expulsion of the
Jews was no longer viable. The way to get rid of the problem was murder.
In Mein Kampf, referring to the First World War, the future
Reichschancellor wrote:
"If at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen
thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under
poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German
workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not
have been in vain."
    In the end Hitler would keep only one promise. It was his
promise to murder the Jewish people of Europe.
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
    The Treaty of Versailles, signed to conclude the First World
War, reduced the size of the much vaunted German army, ceded parts of
the former Reich to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France
(Alsace-Lorraine), militarized the Rhineland with French troops
(including black colonial troops), saddled Germany with onerous
reparations and a war guilt clause. The nation, totally unprepared for
defeat because of its own government's false propaganda, was stunned,
confused, angry, and humiliated. Owing to the continued Allied blockade
for several months after the cessation of fighting (to force
compliance), starvation reigned in Germany. The new German government,
the Weimar Republic, was a democracy that enjoyed little tradition or
support. The German people, unified as a nation since 1871, had always
been ruled by a king (or kaiser) or by a local prince. The hierarchy of
society was based on a leadership principle. Obedience was an admired
characteristic, offering a sense of order (and security) to the nation.
In the popular mind of many Germans, democracy, which required
individual responsibility and personal decisions, was linked with
corruption, decadence, weakness, and, of course, the Jews.
 
HOLOCAUST SUMMARY
 
THE RISE OF HITLER
    The end of World War I devastated Hitler. He was twenty-nine
years old, and lay in a hospital near Berlin, having been blinded by
British tear gas towards the end of the war. Life in the army had
provided him with the only sense of family life he had known. Other
soldiers received letters from home; Hitler did not (except from his
former landlord in Munich). He was one of the few soldiers who liked the
war. The war had given him purpose, a sense of belonging, and, not
least, a job. As the historian Fest has written, "In no man's land he
felt at home." Hitler returned to Munich and witnessed the street
fighting (and war of extermination) between the communists and the right
wing Freikorps troops, whom Hitler sided with but did not join. In his
job as an observer (a spy, really) for the local army command, Hitler
was assigned to report on an obscure rightist political party named the
German Worker's Party. Hitler attended a meeting of the fledgling party,
interrupted the meeting, unleashed his hatreds in a violent torrent of
words, and impressed the participants sufficiently enough that he
received a polite invitation to return to the next meeting. He became
its seventh member. As a political agitator in Munich, Hitler gave his
first speech in October 1919, wherein he demonstrated his remarkable
ability to read the grievances written across the faces of a dispirited
people. He was a mirror of the age. He sensed their anger, their fear,
their frustration, and he explained it all in a way conditioned by
history: the Jews are responsible for Germany's defeat; the Jews are
behind communism (and everything filthy); the Jew is the plague of the
German people; the Jews must go. The link between Jews and communism was
deeply imbedded in the popular mind, and Hitler seized upon it and
hammered it deeper. In addition to virulent anti-Semitism, always the
most well received of his rhetoric, Hitler deftly combined the two most
important movements of the twentieth century: nationalism and socialism.
According to the historian Joachim Fest, "Socialism meant the
responsibility of the whole for the individual, whereas nationalism was
the devotion of the individual to the whole, thus the two elements could
be combined in National Socialism [Nazism]."
    Workers, middle class types, and aristocrats flocked to the
Nazi banner. Hitler and his movement tried to appeal to everyone no
matter their class origin. With his demagogic talent, propaganda flair,
and deft touch at sensing the mood of the people, Hitler seized control
of the German Worker's Party, changed the name to the National Socialist
German Worker's Party, or NSDAP, expanded the party, inaugurated terror
("Cruelty impresses," said Hitler) in street brawls with the communists,
won the increasing support of the disillusioned middle class as well as
the vital support of wealthy benefactors of the higher social plateau
whose beliefs the Austrian corporal espoused in a way they could never
hope to and to an audience they could never reach.
BEER HALL PUTSCH
    On November 8, 1923, Hitler and his fledgling Nazi party
staged a putsch (or revolt) in Munich. At the Burgerbraukeller (a beer
hall), Hitler fired a shot from his pistol on the ceiling and
dramatically announced the start of the "national revolution" to
overthrow the Weimar Republic. The next day he and followers staged a
march through the streets of Munich to the Feldenhallplatz, a central
point in the city. The march ended when soldiers of the German army
fired on the Nazis. The first row of the Nazi procession, locked arm in
arm, scattered at the first volley, and Hitler injured his shoulder when
pulled to the ground during the melee. He fled the scene, although with
his usual modesty he later constructed a tale of helping an injured
child from the scene. He even produced the child. Hitler was hunted
down, arrested, and put on public trial. The public trial was a stroke
of luck. Hitler adroitly sensed the opportunity to seize the national
stage. He quickly recovered his spirits, and while the other
conspirators denied any involvement in the failed putsch, Hitler claimed
all the responsibility, explaining before a deferential court that the
republican government was weak, corrupt, democratic, Jewish, etc. This
sort of plain speaking won the silent applause of many people; Hitler's
grievances reflected their own. The Nazis later converted the debacle of
the "beer hall putsch" into one of the most glorious events in the
Nazis' long struggle for power. They celebrated November 8th annually
with a return to the famous beer hall and a flourish of nostalgic
speeches.
    Hitler was sentenced to a short prison term at Landsberg in
Bavaria, a slap on the wrist punishment during which Hitler dictated his
autobiography, Mein Kampf. In a turgid, plodding, ungrammatical style,
Hitler mapped out his later plans with remarkable bluntness (many
Germans would later say they never read it, although it was an
obligatory "gift" to all newly married couples). He planned to establish
a dictatorship, but only after coming to power using "legal" means (this
was the lesson of the failed putsch). He planned to smash the communists
at home. He planned to restore order and pride. He promised jobs. He
planned to win lebensraum, or living space, in the East, meaning the
Soviet Union, which of course he viewed as a Jewish conspiracy with whom
he must one day settle accounts. The famous black soil of the Ukraine
would well serve the German colonialists. And, of course, the budding
fuehrer promised to deal with the Jewish problem in Germany. They owned
all the big department stores, after all!
WORLD DEPRESSION
    The world depression of 1929 was the saving grace of Nazism.
The party's efforts appeared on the brink of collapse, but, as reflected
in parliamentary seats, support for the Nazis shot up when the effects
of the Wall Street collapse were felt in Germany. The figures speak for
themselves: before the economic catastrophe, the Nazis had seven seats
in the German parliament (the Reichstag). In September 1930, however,
the Nazis had won 107 seats. Economic security intensified the search
for a leader who promised to save the nation. The German people had
already experienced two severe bouts of inflation (1918 and 1924),
dealing a double blow to the pocket book and to the self-esteem of the
people. The impact of this third assault on the pursuit of a
well-ordered life was devastating. Chaos prevailed in Germany. There was
street fighting between the Communists and the Nazis. Order was absent.
Germany's fling with democracy appeared a failure. The average German
might begin asking questions that were hard to answer. Is the Weimar
republic capable of saving the nation? Is Hitler the right man for the
job? 'Let's see what he can do,' said many a humble citizen.

Tulane University

The so-called medical experimentation was
certainly purely sadistic.

"Not at all. They wanted to create a world without terrible diseases and
deformities. They wanted to rid the world of illness."

David E. Michael
2004-05-01
18:11:09 PST
Post 32 in thread of "A brief discussion of terminology