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."

    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?"

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."

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."

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]."

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.

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