Hitler Essay, Research Paper

The rise of Adolf Hitler to the position of dictator of Germany is the story of a frenzied ambition that plunged the world into the worst war in history. Only an army corporal in World War I, Hitler became Germany’s chancellor 15 years later.

He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, of German descent. His father Alois was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. In middle age Alois took the name Hitler from his paternal grandfather. After two wives had died Alois married his foster daughter, Klara Poelzl, a Bavarian, 23 years younger than he. She became Adolf’s mother.

Hitler’s rambling, emotional autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’ (My Struggle) reveals his unstable early life. His father, a petty customs official, wanted the boy to study for a government position. But as young Hitler wrote later, “the thought of slaving in an office made me ill . . . not to be master of my own time.” Passively defying his father, the self-willed boy filled most of his school hours with daydreams of becoming a painter. His one school interest was history, especially that of the Germans. When his teacher glorified Germany’s role, “we would sit there enraptured and often on the verge of tears.” From boyhood he was devoted to Wagner’s operas that glorified the Teutons’ dark and furious mythology.

Failure dogged him. After his father’s death, when Adolf was 13, he studied watercolor painting, but accomplished little. After his mother’s death, when he was 19, he went to Vienna. There the Academy of Arts rejected him as untalented. Lacking business training, Hitler eked out a living as a laborer in the building trades and by painting cheap postcards. He often slept in parks and ate in free soup kitchens.

These humbling experiences inflamed his discontent. He hated Austria as “a patchwork nation” and looked longingly across the border at energetic, powerful Germany. He wrote, “I was convinced that the State [Austria] was sure to obstruct every really great German and to support . . . everything un-German. . . . I hated the motley collection [in Austria] of Czechs, Ruthenians, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, and above all that ever-present fungoid growth–Jews . . . I became a fanatical anti-Semite.”

Hitler’s hatred of poverty, his rabid devotion to his German heritage, and his loathing of Jews combined to form the seeds of his later political doctrine. He studied the political skill of Vienna’s mayor and took special note of that leader’s practice of “using all instruments of existing power, and of gaining the favor of influential institutions . . . so he could draw the greatest possible advantages for his own movement from such old-established sources of power.” Hitler later applied this technique in Germany.

In 1912 Hitler left “wretched” Vienna for Munich, a “true German town.” There he drifted from job to job as carpenter, architect’s draftsman, and watercolorist. Always he ranted about his political ideas.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he gave up his Austrian citizenship to enlist in the 16th Bavarian infantry regiment. He would not fight for Austria, “but I was ready to die at any time for my people [Germans].” In his first battle, the Ypres offensive of 1914, he shouted the song ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.’ On the Somme in 1916 he was a “front fighter” against British tanks, rose to lance corporal, won the Iron Cross as dispatch runner, and was wounded. In 1917 he fought in the third battle of Ypres.

The armistice found him in a hospital, temporarily blinded by mustard gas and suffering from shock. The news of Germany’s defeat agonized him. He believed defeat had been caused by “enemies within,” chiefly Jews and Communists.

Now no longer an Austrian citizen and not yet a German citizen, Hitler at the war’s end was a man without a country. Bewildered, he remained in the army, stationed in Munich. In the political and economic tempest that swept defeated Germany, Munich became a storm center. Officers of the beaten Reichswehr (German army) conspired to win control of Germany. They maintained “informers,” one of whom was Adolf Hitler. He was assigned to report on “subversive activities” in Munich’s political parties.

This political spying was the turning point of Hitler’s life. One night in 1919 he threaded his way through the Herrenstrasse to a bleak little restaurant where a handful of young people sat around a half-broken gas lamp. This little band was the German Workers’ party. Guided by “intuition,” Hitler joined as its seventh member. He soon took the lead. Then a Reichswehr officer, Capt. Ernest Roehm, saw the party as a possible means of overthrowing the liberal Bavarian republic. Like other officers, Roehm had built one of the private “volunteer” armies, which grew up as arms of the Reichswehr in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. Roehm assigned his arrogant, iron-hard Brown Shirt army to aid the Workers’ party. Bulwarked by these armed ruffians, Hitler became the orator of the group.

In 1920 he changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ party), abbreviated to Nazi. Sneering at the liberal generalities of the various bourgeois parties and hating the Communists, Hitler shouted accusations against the Jews and cried out to the Germans to form an all-powerful national state. His voice, torn and hoarsened by mustard gas, was a hypnotic one. His speeches kindled the anger of rivals, especially the Communists, and they tried to break up his meetings. They were prevented from doing so by the brutal Nazis.

The flamboyant spirit of the growing Nazi party now began to attract the varied restless men who were to become its core. They included chiefly Alfred Rosenberg, Russian-born engineer and “philosopher,” anti-Jew, and anti-Christian; Rudolf Hess, Egyptian-born mathematician and geographer; Hermann Goering, Bavarian combat pilot; Gen. Erich von Ludendorff, war hero; and Maj. Gen. Franz von Epp, Bavarian infantry commander. All helped to persuade Communist-fearing German industrialists to give money to the party, for Hitler assured them that “we combat only Jewish international capital.”

An established Munich journal, Volkischer Beobachter (National Observer) was bought to spread Nazi influence. For his followers Hitler adopted the ancient swastika (hooked cross) as the party emblem and designed the Nazi red banner with the black swastika. He saluted his comrades with raised stiff arm and was greeted by the word Heil!

By 1923 the Nazis had grown strong enough in Munich to try to seize the government. They started the “Beer Hall Putsch,” so-called because Hitler and his henchmen tried to take over the reins of government at a meeting that was held in a beer hall. The attempt failed. Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison. The Bavarian government commuted the term to eight months. While in prison Hitler, aided by the loyal Rudolf Hess, began ‘Mein Kampf’.

Emerging from prison in 1924, Hitler once again seemed destined to failure. The government had banned the Nazi party, and only a handful of the members clung together. For months Hitler took little interest. At length Roehm, Hess, and a newcomer–a small, lame enthusiast named Joseph Paul Goebbels–spurred him back to leadership. Accepting, Hitler said, “I shall need seven years before the movement is on top again.”

He was right. The years 1924-28 were prosperous for Germany, and revolutions do not flourish on prosperity. From 1925 to 1927 Hitler was even forbidden to speak publicly in either Bavaria or Saxony. Then a world-wide depression plunged Germany again into poverty and unemployment, and the Nazis began to gain votes. By 1930 Hitler had the support of many industrialists and the military caste. In 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. The history section in the article Germany traces the steps by which Hitler became dictator and instigator of World War II. (See also World War II.)

Believing himself on the road to world conquest, in 1941 Hitler made himself Personal Commander of the Army and, in 1942, Supreme War Lord. However, on July 20, 1944, a group of officers, dismayed by his “intuitive” military failures, set off a bomb in his office. He escaped with only a nervous shock.

During the depression Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party rose to power (see Hitler, Adolf). Hindenburg was reelected president in 1932, but the next year he appointed Hitler chancellor.

When the Reichstag building burned in a mysterious fire (probably started by the Nazis themselves), Hitler blamed the Communists. He forced through the Enabling Act, which provided a constitutional basis for his dictatorship. The Lander, or states, lost their powers, and the Nazi party was the only political party allowed.

In a blood purge of 1934 many party leaders were executed for an alleged plot against Hitler. When Hindenburg died, Hitler abolished the office of president and took the title Fuhrer, or “leader.”

The totalitarian police state increased in power. Heinrich Himmler was chief of the Gestapo, or secret police. Joseph Goebbels directed the propaganda ministry. Cultural institutions, including the press, theater, and arts, were regimented. Schools and the Hitler Youth indoctrinated young people.

The Nazis persecuted both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, and the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of citizenship. The infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, during which many Jews and their property were brutally attacked, ushered in a new and more violent phase of their persecution, and the Jewish property that was left undestroyed was confiscated.

Hitler talked peace but prepared for war. In 1933 Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. It repudiated the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 and began rearming. Universal military training was restored.

Hitler denounced the Locarno Pact in 1936 and marched into the Rhineland. Germany formed a Berlin-Rome Axis with Italy. During the Spanish Civil War, Germany aided Francisco Franco and tested its new weapons. By 1938 Hitler had the most powerful mechanized army and largest air force in the world.

Great Britain and France followed a policy of appeasement. They offered no opposition in 1938 when Hitler annexed Austria. They signed the Munich Pact to bring “peace in our time.” The treaty gave the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Germany. In 1939 Hitler took Memel from Lithuania and all of Czechoslovakia. Hitler next demanded the return of Danzig, but Poland refused. Britain and France pledged aid to Poland. Hitler concluded a nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, which removed the danger of a second front.

The German army then invaded Poland and began World War II (see World War II). After crushing the Poles, Hitler subdued Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and The Netherlands. France fell in 1940.

Hitler’s plan to invade Britain was foiled when the German Luftwaffe, or air force, lost the air battle of Britain. When Italy’s invasion of Greece and Africa failed, Hitler seized the Balkans and North Africa.

The Nazis imported “inferior races” from conquered countries to relieve the manpower shortage. Those who resisted were herded into concentration camps. About 12 million persons, including about 6 million Jews, were exterminated. (See also Holocaust.)

Hitler next invaded the Soviet Union. He swept on to many victories. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he declared war on the United States. Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), in the Soviet Union, marked the turning point of the war. The Allies drove the Nazis out of Africa, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Germany became a battleground as the Allies closed in from east and west. In 1945 Germany surrendered unconditionally. Just before defeat came, Hitler committed suicide.

Allied armies occupied all of Germany. They found it a wasteland. Allied bombers had almost pulverized the large cities. Thousands of civilians had died in air raids. Some 3,250,000 German soldiers had been killed.

The war left Germany shrunken in size. In early 1939, it had been a country of 183,000 square miles (474,000 square kilometers) with a population of about 60,000,000. In 1945 it was reduced to 144,000 square miles (373,000 square kilometers) and was also reduced by several million inhabitants. The Soviets annexed northern East Prussia. Poland administered southern East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, and Germany’s eastern border was pushed back to the Oder and Neisse rivers.