history of Adolf Hitler

Hina 11(MISS Einstein) · #1 Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The History of Hitler

By David Sedivy

The Irony Of It All

It has been said that one man cannot change history. Alexander the Great, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abraham Lincoln, all brought out the best and the worst in men. Throughout time, we have put immense power in the hands of few and now their names live on forever.
But how can one man change history?
How does the son of an Austrian factory worker come to European power and become responsible for the deaths of as many as 35 million people?

Adolph Hitler was born in the year 1889. His father died in 1912 and left him a meager inheritance. Adolph fancied himself a sensitive artist, and moved from Austria to Bavaria where many unemployed artists of his time lived. Bavaria was much like Greenwich Village in the 1960's and Adolph Hitler was a hippie of sorts.

World War I was in full swing, at the time, and Austria sent Hitler his draft notice, which he claimed he never received.
He was arrested for dodging the draft and was sent back to Austria. Upon his return, he was sent to take his Army physical and flunked. He returned to Bavaria and there enlisted in the German Army as an Austrian citizen. After basic training, Hitler was sent to the Western Front where he was assigned the duty of messenger. He was responsible for running orders from the Field Commander to the front line, usually under heavy fire.
Hitler was twice awarded the Iron Cross. He beat incredible odds just to survive and later referred to his days at the Front as the best of his life.
In October, 1918, he was blinded by poisionous gas and was still recovering when the Armistice cease-fire was signed.

After the Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending World War I, Corporal Hitler went to work for the Weimar (democratic) government, as a spy. His job was to observe the new political parties starting up in Germany and his orders were to watch and attend the meetings of the German Workers party in Munich. Hitler reported that the group was not very threatening, that they mostly got together, drank beer, got drunk, and went homeRegardless, Hitler was ordered to infiltrate the organization and become a member. He was quickly accepted into the group and was put in charge of recruitment and propaganda.

In Februaury of 1920, Adolph Hitler gave his first recruitment speech, one which would become familiar. He spoke about anti-semitism, anti Treaty of Versailles, anti democracy. One week after this meeting, the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party -- NAZI.

Up to this point in his life, Hitler had been an introvert with no friends; he was painfully shy and afraid of large crowds.

All of this was changing, and in April of 1920 he resigned from the German Army. He now would devote all his energy to politics and the Nazi party. Hitler, at the age of thirty-one, had finally found something he was good at. Did he fall into this by sheer luck? Or was it destiny? This was a man whose high school guidance counselor likely told him he would never amount to anything. Hitler did research on German mythology and adopted the Swastika as the symbol of the party because, according to myth, it is the symbol of the beginning of all creation. Hitler was beginning to create his ideal world.

In 1923, Hitler thought it was time to make his move; he organized a putsch (a take-over of a government) on the city of Munich. It failed miserably. Hitler and his followers were arrested and charged with treason. Hitler turned his trial into a propaganda triumph and received a great deal of publicity when he pleaded guilty, not of treason, but of being a patriot. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but he never served his full time because no one in authority truly believed him to be any kind of a threat.

Hitler learned many lessons from the failed Munich putsch; prison gave him time to think and set goals. While imprisoned, he wrote a book entitled Mein Kampf, meaning, my struggle.

In his book he explains his ideas on race, and
describes his ideas for his Two Thousand Year Government moving into the east and taking over Russia.
It completley explained all of his plans, which he would eventually follow to the ‘T'.
Hitler believed that he had survived World War I because it was his destiny to create the third German empire -- the Third Reich. It was all there in black and white and no one bothered to read the book except Winston Churchill, who was denounced for expressing concern about Hitler when the rest of the free world was preoccupied with fears about Russia and communism.

Once out of jail, Hitler started to rebuild his party and was secretly receiving subsidies from the German army in support of the Nazi party. He started using powerful propaganda that would eventually become known as The Big Lie.
The theory behind the Big Lie was that the masses would believe a big lie more than they would belive a little lie, if they heard it often enough.
Hitler bombarded the people with talk of peace, nonviolence and a strong unified Germany, while all along he was sytematically planning to attack Russia and purge Germany of all non-Arians.

Hitler made his Nazi party as visable as possible, using bright colored uniforms, arm bands, flags and banners.

He glorified the military by starting the Hitler Youth program.

Hitler established his S.S. (the secret police) to act as his body guards and started out with seventy five soldiers.

Hitler placed Heinrich Himmler at the head of the S.S., an evil, wicked man who would eventually be responsible for the murders of millions of people. Himmler himself only ever witnessed one execution, as his stomach was too weak for the gore. He lost his lunch.

The Weimar government was run by a coalition of fascists, communists, socialists, and so on. All of the parties were pulling for power and when they had to elect a new Chancellor of Germany, none of the parties had enough votes to win the position, so they all decided to elect Hitler, as a puppet figurehead, because he seemed harmless enough.

In 1933, Hitler was elected by a democratic process to the position of Chancellor of Germany. Less than one month after he was elected Chancellor, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building (similar to our congress) known as the Reichstag Fire. Hitler seized the moment and claimed the fire was really a coup attempt by the communists. The S.S. destroyed documents and framed the communists. All of the communist leaders were arrested and sent to Dachau -- the beginning of the concentration camps. As Chancellor of Germany, Hitler declared a state of emergency, taking away all personal rights and freedoms. The accidental fire allowed Hitler the opportunity to become Dictator.

In April, 1933, Hitler issued another decree, blaming the Jewish people for all of Germany's problems. A boycott of all Jewish business took place over a period of months. Hitler segregated the Jews. The German people did not buy into beliefs of antisemitism and Hitler knew that even a dictator needed the support of the people to go to war; so, under the cloak of darkness and secrecy, Jews began to disappear from their homes.

On June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered his S.S. to begin killing Nazi party leaders. They were ordered to kill anyone too weak or too strong. This was known as the Night of Long Knives. He required absolute, blind loyalty or you died. Hitler successfully purged his party of all his rivals. He now had one party, that of Adoph Hitler.

As the saying goes, the rest is history. One man did change the world forever.

Was Hitler's rise to power truly destiny?

The hippie son of an Austrian factory worker leading the most feared Nazi government. Few men have had such an impact as Adolph Hitler. He did bring out the best and worst in men and his name lives on forever. After Hitler's reign of power the world became a different place than it had been before and it will never be the same again.

******************************************

details will properly be posted step wise.....it is just a brief summary of it.......

Hina 11(MISS Einstein) · #2 Thursday, October 22, 2009

Adolf Hitler:

The Holocaust....

Birth:
At half past six on the evening of April 20th, 1889 an innocent child was born in the small town of Braunau Am Inn, Austria. The name of the child was Adolf Hitler.

Secretive Background:
During his lifetime, Hitler was very secretive about his background. He was the son of a Customs official Alois Hitler, and his third wife Klara. He falsified his father's occupation, changing him from a customs official to a postal official. He repulsed relatives who tried to approach him. One of the first things he did after taking over Austria was to have a survey carried out of the little farming village of Dollerscheim where his father's birth had been recorded. As soon as it could be arranged the inhabitants were evacuated and the entire village was demolished by heavy artillery. Even the graves in the cemetery where his grandmother had been buried were rendered unrecognisable.

Adolf's mother, born Klara Pölzl, was 23 years younger than Alois. She was so closely related to her husband that a special dispensation was sought from Rome before they could marry in 1884. Of the six children born of this marriage, only two survived, Adolfand a younger sister called Paula.
Klara Hitler died from cancer when Adolf was nineteen. She was held in love and affection by Hitler, her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, later recalled: 'I have never witnessed a closer attachment.' Hitler carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker. Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at his alpine residence near Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg. His mother may well have been the only person Adolf Hitler genuinely loved in his entire life.

Centre young Adolf with schoolmates 1900

Initially Alois had taken his mother's name, Schicklgruber, but changed it in 1876 and became Hiedler, or Hitler. Quite important - it is hard to imagine tens of thousands of Germans shouting "Heil Schicklgruber!" instead of "Heil Hitler!"

Adolf Hitler later confided to his only childhood friend, August Kubizek, "that the name Schicklgruber 'seemed to him so uncouth, so boorish, apart from being so clumsy and unpractical. But 'Hitler' sounded rich and was easy to remember."

His father, Alois, retired from civil service in 1895, when Hitler was only six, which created a tense, strict atmosphere at home.

Young Adolf attended church regularly, sang in the local choir and spent hours playing 'cowboys and Indians' and revelled in the westerns penned by Karl May. He grew up with a poor record at school and left, before completing his tuition, with an ambition to become an artist or architect. Alois Hitler had died when Adolf was thirteen and Klara brought up Adolf and his sister, Paula, on her own. Times were tough for the Hitler household. In 1905, at age 16, Adolf quit school and never returned.

A neighbour of the Hitler family later recalled:'When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn't like to join the post-office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist ...'

Hitler as an Artist:
Hitler dreamed of becoming an artist, so in 1907 he applied to the painting school at the Vienna Academy of Art. He did not pass the entrance exam.

In 1908 he again tried to apply to the Vienna Academy of Art but this time was not even allowed to take the test. Two months later, his mother passed away from breast cancer.

Hitler didn't get much out of it - but in 1999 two paintings and a line drawing by Hitler - completed between 1911 and 1914 - were sold at auction for a total of $131,000.

Hitler spent the next four years in Vienna, living off what little he earned from selling postcards of his architectural drawings and the small inheritance from his mother.Within a year he was living in homeless shelters and eating at charity soup-kitchens. He spent his time reading anti-Semitic tabloids and pamphlets available at the newsstands and at local coffee shops. He had declined to take regular employment and took occasional menial jobs and sold some of his paintings or advertising posters whenever he could to provide sustenance. During this period of time, Hitler started to dabble in politics and became especially influenced by pan-Germanism.

Hitler left school at 16 with no qualifications and struggled to make a living as a painter in Vienna. This was where many of his extreme political and racial ideas originated.

Hitler's nature:
His only boyhood friend, August Kubizek, recalled Hitler as a
*shy,
*reticent young man,
*yet he was able to burst into hysterical fits of anger towards those who disagreed with him.
The two became inseparable during these early years and Kubizek turned out to be a patient listener. He was a good audience for Hitler, who often rambled for hours about his hopes and dreams.
*Sometimes Hitler even gave speeches complete with wild hand gestures to his audience of one.
*Hitler would only tolerate approval from his friend and could not stand to be corrected, a personality trait he had shown in high school and as a younger boy as well.

Adolf Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life:
*inability to establish ordinary human relationships,
*intolerance and hatred of especially the Jews,
*a tendency toward denunciatory outbursts,
*readiness to live in a fantasy-world and so to escape his failure.

Decisive event in Hitler's life:
Then one day in 1905 the pair went to see a performance of Wagner's Rienzi at the Linz Memorial Theater. This became a decisive event for the teenaged Hitler, as he was to refer to it after he came to power. In Kubizek's biography of Hitler The Young Hitler I Knew, 1953, he recalls how it had a terrifying impact upon Hitler, who left the Theater in a state of trance: "Adolf stood in front of me; and now he gripped both my hands and held them tight. He had never made such a gesture before. I felt from the grasp of his hands how deeply moved he was. His eyes were feverish with excitement .. Never before and never again have I heard Adolf Hitler speak as he did in that hour, as we stood there alone under the stars, as though we were the only creatures in the world. He now spoke of a mission that he was one day to receive from our people, in order to guide them out of slavery, to the heights of freedom .."

Thirty years later, the boyhood friends would meet again in Bayreuth, and Kubizek told Adolf Hitler what he remembered of that night, assuming that the enormous multitude of impressions and events which had filled these past decades would have pushed into the background the experience of a seventeen year old youth. But after a few words Kubizek sensed that Hitler vividly recalled that hour and had retained all its details in his memory. Hitler's words were unforgettable for August Kubizek: "It began at that hour!".

Hina 11(MISS Einstein) · #3 Friday, October 30, 2009

Hitler Serves in World War I:

To avoid military service in the Austrian army, Hitler moved to Munich, Germany in May 1913 but as soon as World War I broke out, Hitler asked for and received special permission to serve in the Bavarian-German army.
Adolf Hitler quickly proved to be a courageous soldier.

Hitler was twice decorated for bravery, but only rose to the rank of corporal.By December 1914, he was awarded the Iron Cross (Second Class), in October 1916 he was wounded by a grenade splinter, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class).

Temporary Blindness:

On October 13, 1918, a gas attack caused him to go temporarily blind. While recuperating in a hospital, Hitler heard the news of the end of the war and of Germany's defeat. His anger and feelings of betrayal shaped his and the world's future.

Versailles Treaty:
The Versailles Treaty that ended the war stripped Germany of much of its territory, forced the country to disarm, and ordered Germany to pay huge reparations. When the army returned to Germany the country was in despair. As many in Germany felt betrayed by the German government for their sudden and unexpected surrender. The country was bankrupt and millions of people were unemployed.

Corporal Hitler (right) with two other soldiers

Hitler Gets Political:
In 1919, Hitler was working for an army organization in which he checked-up on burgeoning local political groups. While spying on these groups in September 1919, Hitler found one he liked.
In 1920, Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers Party known as the Nazis. The Nazis called for all Germans, even those in other countries, to unite into one nation; they called for a strong central government; and they called for the cancellation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler became leader of the Nazi party and built up membership quickly and became the 55th member mostly because of his powerful speaking ability.

Hitler's Coup:
Adolf Hitler endorsed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and declared at a public rally on October 30, 1923 that he was prepared to march on Berlin to rid the government of the Communists and the Jews. On November 8, 1923, Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and proclaimed a revolution. The following day, he led 2,000 armed "brown-shirts" in an attempt to take over the Bavarian government. This putsch was resisted and put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the fighting. Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee, was arrested, and was imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year sentence.

Book of Mein Kampf:
Hitler served only nine months of his five-year term. While in prison, he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. It was partly an autobiographical book although filled with glorified inaccuracies, self-serving half-truths and outright revisionism. He reserved the brunt of his vituperation for the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany's defeat in the War. Jews were the German nation's true enemy, he wrote. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race.

Hitler comes to power in Germany:
After Hitler came to power, sales of Mein Kampf skyrocketed, making him a rich man. In Germany, where newlyweds received a copy of the book from the government, 6 million copies had been issued before World War 2, and by 1942, Hitler himself boasted that Mein Kampf had the largest sales of any book in the world – apart from the Bible. By one estimate, Hitler received $1 million a year in royalty payments alone.

In 1930, a worldwide depression hit Germany and Hitler promised to rid Germany of Jews and Communists and to reunite the German speaking part of Europe. In July 1932, the Nazis received about 40% of the vote and became the strongest party in Germany. As Hitler had enough support to run for president of Germany, though he lost the election to Paul von Hindenburg On January 30,1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Once in this position, Hitler moved quickly toward attaining a dictatorship. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler already had control of Germany.So within a year and a half, Hitler was able to take over both the position of president (Hindenburg died) and chancellor and combine them into one position of supreme leader, the Führer.

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