Life history of Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945)
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was
the founder and leader of the Nazi Party and the most
influential voice in the organization, implementation and execution of
the Holocaust, the systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of six
million European Jews and millions of other non-aryans.
Hitler was the Head of State, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and guiding spirit, or fuhrer, of Germany's Third Reich from 1933 to 1945.
Early Years
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Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria,
on April 20, 1889, Hitler was 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
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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.
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 Becomes a Leader
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 Röhm 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."
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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.
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.
Rise of the Nazi Party
In
January 1925 the ban on the Nazi Party was removed and Hitler regained
permission to speak in public. Outmaneuvering 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.
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In the 1930 elections the Nazi vote
jumped dramatically from 810,000 to 6,409,000 (18.3 percent
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), 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.
Hitler As Fuhrer
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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.
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
saber-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.
World War II
On
September 1, 1939, German armed forces invaded Poland and
henceforth Hitler's 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 armor and infantry to follow
up on the first wave of bomber and fighter aircraft. Poland
was overrun in less than one month, 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.
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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 June 22, 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.
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 caliber 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.
Allied Victory and Hitler's Death
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 June 4, 1944. The Allied invasion of
Normandy followed on June 6, 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.
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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
April 29, 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."
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 rule.
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