Encyclopedia
Adolf Hitler was
Chancellor of Germany from 1933, and
Führer of
Germany from 1934 until his death. He was leader of the
National Socialist German Workers Party , better known as the Nazi Party.
Hitler gained power in a Germany
facing crisis after
World War I, using
charismatic oratory and
propaganda, appealing to economic need of the lower and middle classes,
nationalism and
anti-Semitism to establish a totalitarian or
fascist dictatorship. With a restructured economy and rearmed military, Hitler pursued an aggressive foreign policy with the intention of expanding German
Lebensraum which triggered
World War II in Europe when he ordered the invasion of Poland. At the height of its power,
Nazi Germany occupied most of Europe, but it and the
Axis Powers were eventually defeated by the
Allies. By then, Hitler's
racial policies had culminated in the genocide of 11 million people, including about six million
Jews, in what is now known as
the Holocaust.
In the final days of the war,
Hitler committed suicide in
his underground bunker in
Berlin with his newlywed wife,
Eva Braun.
Early years
Childhood and heritage
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 at
Braunau am Inn,
Austria, a small town in
Upper Austria, on the border with
Germany. He was the third son and the fourth of six children of
Alois Hitler , a minor customs official, and Klara Pölzl , his second cousin, and third wife. Because of the close kinship of the two, a papal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage. Of Alois and Klara's six children, only Adolf and his younger sister
Paula reached adulthood. Alois Hitler also had a son and a daughter by his second wife.
Alois was born illegitimate and for the first thirty-nine years of his life bore his mother's name, Schicklgruber. In 1876, Alois began using the name of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, after visiting a priest responsible for birth registries and declaring that Georg was his father . The name was variously spelled Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler and probably changed to "Hitler" by a clerk. About the origin of the name there are two theories:
- From German Hittler and similar, "one who lives in a hut", "shepherd".
- From Slavic Hidlar and Hidlarcek.
Later, Adolf Hitler was accused by his political enemies of not rightfully being a Hitler, but a Schicklgruber. This was also exploited in Allied
propaganda during
the Second World War when
pamphlets bearing the phrase "Heil Schicklgruber" were
airdropped over German cities. Adolf was legally born a Hitler, however, and was also closely related to Hiedler through his maternal grandmother, Johanna Hiedler.
Hitler's given name, "Adolf", comes from the Old High German for "noble wolf" . Hence, not surprisingly, one of Hitler's self-given nicknames was
Wolf or
Herr Wolf — he began using this nickname in the early 1920s and was addressed by it only by intimates up until the fall of the Third Reich. The names of his various headquarters scattered throughout continental Europe seem to reflect this.
Hitler was not sure who his paternal grandfather was, but it was probably either Johann Georg Hiedler or his brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. There have been rumours that Hitler was one-quarter
Jewish and that his paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had become pregnant after working as a servant in a Jewish household in
Graz. During the 1920s, the implications of these rumours along with his known family history were politically explosive, especially for the proponent of a
racist ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler, the leader of the
anti-Semitic Nazi Party, had Jewish or
Czech ancestors. Although these rumours were never confirmed, for Hitler they were reason enough to conceal his origins.
Soviet propaganda insisted Hitler was a Jew, though more modern research tends to diminish the probability that he had Jewish ancestors. According to Robert G. L. Waite in
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Hitler made it illegal for German women to work in Jewish households, and after the
Anschluss with Austria, Hitler had his father's hometown obliterated as an artillery practice area. Hitler seemed to fear that he was Jewish, and as Waite points out, this fact is more important than whether he actually was.
Because of Alois Hitler's profession, his family moved frequently, from
Braunau to
Passau, Lambach,
Leonding, and
Linz. As a young child, Hitler was reportedly a good student at the various
elementary schools he attended; however, in sixth grade , his first year of
high school in Linz, he failed completely and had to repeat the grade. His teachers reported that he had "no desire to work."
Hitler later explained this educational slump as a kind of rebellion against his father Alois, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official, although Adolf wanted to become a
painter. This explanation is further supported by Hitler's later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on January 3, 1903, when Adolf was 13, Hitler's schoolwork did not improve. At the age of 16, Hitler left school with no qualifications.
Early adulthood in Vienna and Munich
From 1905 onward, Hitler was able to live the life of a
Bohemian on a fatherless child's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna due to "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay rather in the field of
architecture. His own memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject:
"The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest." .
Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was the path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for
architecture school:
"In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect.
To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.'".
On December 21, 1907, his mother Klara died a painful death from
breast cancer at the age of 47. Hitler gave his share of the
orphans' benefits to his younger sister
Paula, but when he was 21 he inherited some money from an aunt. He worked as a struggling painter in Vienna, copying scenes from
postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists . Several biographers have noted that a Jewish resident of the house named Hanisch helped him sell his postcards.
After the second refusal from the Academy of Arts, Hitler gradually ran out of money. By 1909, he sought refuge in a homeless shelter, and by the beginning of 1910 had settled permanently into a house for poor working men.
Hitler first became an active anti-Semite in Vienna, which had a large Jewish community, including many Orthodox Jews from
Eastern Europe and where traditional religious prejudice mixed with recent racist theories. Hitler was influenced over time by the writings of the race ideologist and anti-Semite
Lanz von Liebenfels and polemics from politicians such as
Karl Lueger, founder of the
Christian Social Party and mayor of Vienna, one of the most outrageous demagogues in history, and
Georg Ritter von Schönerer, leader of the pan-Germanic
Away from Rome! movement. He later wrote in his book
Mein Kampf is the signature work of Adolf Hitler [i], combining elements of autobiography [i] with ...
that his transition from opposing anti-Semitism on religious grounds to supporting it on racial grounds came from having seen an Orthodox Jew:
"There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanized in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans. The reason why I did not then perceive the absurdity of such an illusion was that the only external mark which I recognized as distinguishing them from us was the practice of their strange religion. As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their faith my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a systematic anti-Semitism.
Once, when passing through the inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz. I carefully watched the man stealthily and cautiously but the longer I gazed at the strange countenance and examined it feature by feature, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: Is this a German?"
Hitler began to claim the Jews were natural enemies of what he called the
Aryan race. He held them responsible for Austria's crisis. He also identified certain forms of
Socialism and especially
Bolshevism, which had many Jews among its leaders, as Jewish movements, merging his anti-Semitism with anti-Marxism. Blaming Germany's military defeat on the 1917 Revolutions, he considered Jews the culprit of Imperial Germany's military defeat and subsequent economic problems as well.
Generalising from tumultuous scenes in the parliament of the multi-national
Austria Monarchy, he developed a firm belief in the inferiority of the democratic
parliamentary system, which formed the basis of his political views. However, according to August Kubizek, his close friend and roommate at the time, he was more interested in the
operas of
Richard Wagner than in politics.
Hitler received the final part of his father's estate in May 1913 and moved to
Munich. He later wrote in
Mein Kampf is the signature work of Adolf Hitler [i], combining elements of autobiography [i] with ...
that he had always longed to live in a "real" German city. In Munich, he became more interested in architecture and the writings of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Moving to Munich also helped him escape
military service in Austria for a time, but the Austrian army later arrested him. After a physical exam and a contrite plea, he was deemed unfit for service and allowed to return to Munich. However, when Germany entered
World War I in August 1914, he immediately petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in a Bavarian regiment, this request was granted, and Adolf Hitler enlisted in the
Bavarian army.
World War I
Hitler saw active service in
France and
Belgium as a messenger for the regimental headquarters of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment , which exposed him to enemy fire. Unlike his fellow soldiers, Hitler reportedly never complained about the food or hard conditions, preferring to talk about
art or history. He also drew some
cartoons and instructional drawings for the army newspaper. His behaviour as a soldier was considered somewhat sloppy, but his regular duties required taking dispatches to and from fighting areas and he was twice decorated for his performance of these duties. He received the
Iron Cross, Second Class in December 1914 and the Iron Cross, First Class in August 1918, an honour rarely given to a
Gefreiter. However, because of the perception of "a lack of leadership skills" on the part of some of the regimental staff, as well as Hitler's unwillingness to leave regimental headquarters , he was never promoted to
Unteroffizier. Other historians, however, say that the reason he was not promoted is that he did not have German citizenship. His duty station at regimental headquarters, while often dangerous, gave Hitler time to pursue his artwork. During October 1916 in northern France, Hitler was
wounded in the leg, but returned to the front in March 1917. He received the
Wound Badge later that year, as his injury was the direct result of hostile fire.
Sebastian Haffner, referring to Hitler's experience at the front, suggests he did have at least some understanding of the military.
On October 15, 1918, shortly before the end of the war, Hitler was admitted to a
field hospital, temporarily
blinded by a
poison gas attack. The English psychologist David Lewis and Bernhard Horstmann indicate the blindness may have been the result of a hysteria. Hitler later said it was during this experience that he became convinced the purpose of his life was to "save Germany".
Some scholars, including Lucy Dawidowicz, argue that an intention to mass murder Europe's Jews was fully formed in Hitler's mind, though he probably hadn't thought through how it could be done.
Two passages in
Mein Kampf is the signature work of Adolf Hitler [i], combining elements of autobiography [i] with ...
mention the use of
poison gas:
- At the beginning of the Great War, or even during the War, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison-gas . . . then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain. .
- These tactics are based on an accurate estimation of human weakness and must lead to success, with almost mathematical certainty, unless the other side also learns how to fight poison gas with poison gas. The weaker natures must be told that here it is a case of to be or not to be.
Hitler had long admired Germany, and during the war he had become a passionate German
patriot, although he did not become a German citizen until 1932. He was shocked by Germany's capitulation in November 1918 even while the German army still held enemy territory. Like many other German
nationalists, Hitler believed in the
Dolchstoßlegende which claimed that the army, "undefeated in the field", had been "stabbed in the back" by civilian leaders and Marxists back on the
home front. These politicians were later dubbed the
November Criminals.
The
Treaty of Versailles deprived Germany of various territories, demilitarized the Rhineland and imposed other economically damaging sanctions. The treaty also declared Germany the culprit for all the horrors of the Great War, as a basis for later imposing not yet specified reparations on Germany . Germans, however, perceived the treaty and especially the paragraph on the German guilt as a humiliation, not least as it was damaging in the extreme to their pride. For example, there was nearly a full demilitarisation of the armed forces, allowing Germany only 6 battleships, no submarines, no air force, an army of 100,000 without
conscription and no armoured vehicles. The treaty was an important factor in both the social and political conditions encountered by Hitler and his National Socialist Party as they sought power. Hitler and his party used the signing of the treaty by the "November Criminals" as a reason to build up Germany so that it could never happen again. He also used the 'November Criminals' as scapegoats, although at the Paris peace conference, these politicians had very little choice in the matter.
The early years of the Nazi Party
Hitler's entry into politics
After the First World War, Hitler remained in the army, which was mainly engaged in suppressing
communist uprisings breaking out across Germany, including Munich , where Hitler returned in 1919. He took part in "national thinking" courses organized by the
Education and Propaganda Department of the Bavarian
Reichswehr Group, Headquarters 4 under Captain Karl Mayr. A key purpose of this group was to create a
scapegoat for the outbreak of the war and Germany's defeat. The scapegoats were found in "international Jewry", communists, and politicians across the party spectrum, especially the parties of the Weimar Coalition, who were deemed "November Criminals".
In July 1919, Hitler was appointed a
Verbindungsmann of an
Aufklärungskommando of the Reichswehr, for the purpose of influencing other soldiers toward similar ideas and was assigned to infiltrate a small party, the German Workers' Party , which was thought of to be a possibly
socialist party. During his inspection of the party, Hitler was impressed with
Drexler's
anti-Semitic,
nationalist and anti-
Marxist ideas, which favoured an
Hegelian concept of the strong universally present state, a "non-Jewish" version of socialism and mutual solidarity of all members of society. Here Hitler also met
Dietrich Eckart, one of the early founders of the party and member of the occult
Thule Society. Eckart became Hitler's mentor, exchanging ideas with him, teaching him how to dress and speak, and introducing him to a wide range of people. Hitler in return thanked Eckart by paying tribute to him in the second volume of
Mein Kampf.
Hitler was discharged from the army in March 1920 and with his former superiors' continued encouragement began participating full time in the party's activities. By early 1921, Adolf Hitler was becoming highly effective at speaking in front of even larger crowds. In February, Hitler spoke before a crowd of nearly six thousand in
Munich. To publicize the meeting, he sent out two truckloads of Party supporters to drive around with
swastikas, cause a commotion and throw out leaflets, their first use of this tactic. Hitler gained notoriety outside of the Party for his rowdy, polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians and especially against Marxists and Jews.
The German Workers' Party was centered in Munich which had become a hotbed of German nationalists who included Army officers determined to crush Marxism and undermine or even overthrow the young German democracy centred in Berlin. Gradually they noticed Adolf Hitler and his growing movement as a vehicle to hitch themselves to. Hitler traveled to Berlin to visit nationalist groups during the summer of 1921 and in his absence there was an unexpected revolt among the DAP leadership in Munich.
The Party was run by an executive committee whose original members considered Hitler to be overbearing and even dictatorial. To weaken Hitler's position they formed an with a group of socialists from
Augsburg. Hitler rushed back to Munich and countered them by tendering his resignation from the Party on July 11, 1921. When they realized the loss of Hitler would effectively mean the end of the Party, he seized the moment and announced he would return on the condition that he was made chairman and given dictatorial powers. Infuriated committee members held out at first. Meanwhile an anonymous
pamphlet appeared entitled
Adolf Hitler: Is he a traitor?, attacking Hitler's lust for power and criticizing the violence-prone men around him. Hitler responded to its publication in a Munich newspaper by suing for libel and later won a small settlement.
The executive committee of the DAP eventually backed down and Hitler's demands were put to a vote of party members. Hitler received 543 votes for and only one against. At the next gathering on July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler was introduced as Führer of the National Socialist Party, marking the first time this title was publicly used. Hitler changed the name of the party to the National Socialist German Workers Party .
Hitler's beer hall oratory, attacking Jews,
social democrats,
liberals, reactionary monarchists,
capitalists and
communists, began attracting adherents. Early followers included
Rudolf Hess, the former air force pilot
Hermann Göring, and the flamboyant army captain
Ernst Röhm, who became head of the Nazis'
paramilitary organization, the
SA, which protected meetings and attacked political opponents. He also attracted the attention of local business interests, was accepted into influential circles of Munich society and became associated with wartime General
Erich Ludendorff during this time.
The Beer Hall Putsch
Encouraged by this early support, Hitler decided to use Ludendorff as a front in an
attempt to seize power later known as the
Beer Hall Putsch . The Nazi Party had copied the Italian
Fascists in appearance and also had adopted some programmatical points and now, in the turbulent year 1923, Hitler wanted to emulate
Mussolini's "March on Rome" by staging his own "Campaign in Berlin". Hitler and Ludendorff obtained the clandestine support of Gustav von Kahr,
Bavaria's de facto ruler along with leading figures in the Reichswehr and the police. As political posters show, Ludendorff, Hitler and the heads of the Bavarian police and military planned on forming a new government.
However on November 8, 1923 Kahr and the military withdrew their support during a meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall outside of Munich. A surprised Hitler had them arrested and proceeded with the coup. Unknown to him, Kahr and the other detainees had been released on Ludendorff's orders after he obtained their word not to interfere. That night they prepared resistance measures against the coup and in the morning, when Hitler and his followers marched from the beer hall to the Bavarian War Ministry to overthrow the Bavarian government as a start to their "March on Berlin", the army quickly dispersed them .
Hitler fled to the home of
friends and contemplated suicide. He was soon arrested for high treason and appointed
Alfred Rosenberg as temporary leader of the party but found himself in an environment somewhat receptive to his beliefs. During Hitler's trial, sympathetic magistrates allowed Hitler to turn his debacle into a
propaganda stunt. He was given almost unlimited amounts of time to present his arguments to the court, and his popularity soared when he voiced basic nationalistic sentiments shared by some of the public. On April 1, 1924 Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at
Landsberg prison for the crime of conspiracy to commit treason. Hitler received favoured treatment from the guards and had much fan mail from admirers. As he was considered relatively harmless, Hitler was released on December 20 1924.
"Mein Kampf"
While at Landsberg he dictated his political book
Mein Kampf is the signature work of Adolf Hitler [i], combining elements of autobiography [i] with ...
to his deputy
Rudolf Hess. The book, dedicated to
Thule Society member
Dietrich Eckart, was both an autobiography and an exposition of his political ideology. It was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926 respectively, selling about 240,000 copies between 1925 and 1934 alone. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold or distributed .
Hitler spent years dodging taxes on the royalties of his book, and had accumulated a tax debt of about 405,500
Reichsmarks by the time he became chancellor .
The rebuilding of the party
At the time of Hitler's release, the political situation in Germany had calmed down, and the economy had improved, which hampered Hitler's opportunities for agitation. Instead, he began a long effort to rebuild the dwindling party.
Though the
Hitler Putsch had given Hitler some national prominence, his party's mainstay was still Munich. To spread the party to the north, Hitler also assimilated independent groups, such as the Nuremberg-based
Wistrich, led by
Julius Streicher, who now became
Gauleiter of
Franconia.
As Hitler was still banned from public speeches, he appointed
Gregor Strasser, who in 1924 had been elected to the Reichstag, as
Reichsorganisationsleiter, authorizing him to organise the party in northern Germany. Gregor, joined by his younger brother
Otto and
Joseph Goebbels, steered an increasingly independent course, emphasizing the socialist element in the party's programme. The
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Gauleiter Nord-West became an internal opposition, threatening Hitler's authority, but this faction was defeated at the Bamberg Conference , during which Goebbels joined Hitler.
After this encounter, Hitler centralized the party even more and asserted the
Führerprinzip, the German [i] name for the
leader principle, refers to a syst ...
as the basic principle of party organization. Leaders were not elected by their group but were rather appointed by their superior and were answerable to them while demanding unquestioning obedience from their inferiors. Consistent with Hitler's disdain for
democracy, all power and authority devolved from the top down.
A key element of Hitler's appeal was his ability to convey a sense of offended national pride caused by the
Treaty of Versailles imposed on the defeated
German Empire by the
Western Allies. Germany had lost economically important territory in Europe along with its
colonies and in admitting to sole responsibility for the war had agreed to pay a huge reparations bill totaling 32 billion
mark. Most Germans bitterly resented these terms but early Nazi attempts to gain support by blaming these humiliations on "international Jewry" were not particularly successful with the electorate. The party learned quickly and soon a more subtle propaganda emerged, combining anti-Semitism with an attack on the failures of the "
Weimar system" and the parties supporting it.
Having failed in overthrowing the Republic by a coup, Hitler now pursued the "strategy of legality": this meant formally adhering to the rules of the
Weimar Republic until he had legally gained power and then transforming liberal democracy into a Nazi dictatorship. Some party members, especially in the paramilitary
SA, opposed this strategy and
Ernst Röhm ridiculed Hitler as "Adolphe Legalité".
The road to power
The Brüning administration
The political turning point for Hitler came when the
Great Depression hit Germany in 1930. The
Weimar Republic had never been firmly rooted and was openly opposed by right-wing conservatives , Communists and the Nazis. As the parties loyal to the democratic, parliamentary republic found themselves unable to agree on counter-measures, their Grand Coalition broke up and was replaced by a minority cabinet. The new Chancellor
Heinrich Brüning of the Roman Catholic Centre Party, lacking a majority in parliament, had to implement his measures through the President's emergency decrees. Tolerated by the majority of parties, the exception soon became the rule and paved the way for authoritarian forms of government.
The Reichstag's initial opposition to Brüning's measures led to premature elections in September 1930. The republican parties lost their majority and their ability to resume the Grand Coalition, while the Nazis suddenly rose from relative obscurity to win 18.3% of the vote along with 107 seats in the Reichstag, becoming the second largest party in Germany.
Brüning's measure of budget consolidation and financial austerity brought little economic improvement and was extremely unpopular. Under these circumstances, Hitler appealed to the bulk of German
