| Term Paper Title |
Adolf Hitler |
| # of Words |
3790 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) |
15.16 |
Adolf Hitler
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Founder and leader of the Nazi Party, Reich Chancellor and guiding spirit of the Third
Reich from 1933 to 1945, Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,
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.
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...Read entire document
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