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Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood, and Youth
180 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1967
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January 30, 2025
An academic and non-sensational book on the youth and adolescence of Adolf Hitler, Bradley F. Smith's 1967 monograph is commendable for its sobriety. Many myths surround Hitler, and there is a general temptation in our culture to view him as either a ranting buffoon or a fated Antichrist, "demonic – an alien spirit whom mankind cannot accept as one of its own" (pg. 9), when in fact the most disturbing and most instructive thing about Hitler is how banal, flawed and human he was. That is where the real lesson of the Nazi holocaust is to be found. This tendency to mythologise also happens with discussion of Hitler's youth, not least in the persistent rumour that his grandfather was Jewish. As interesting as this irony would be, numerous biographers (including Smith here) show it to be baseless.
Any history should seek to be judicious and even-handed, of course, but when the subject is as complicated, emotive and compromised as that of Hitler and Nazism the soberness of Smith's account becomes even more valuable. Not for Smith the lurid, ironical tales of Jewish grandfathers or warning signs in a pre-teen Adolf of the monster he would become. Instead, Smith begins by stating that the "conditions and influences" that made Hitler Hitler "lie outside the period considered here" (pg. 9) and he is not tempted to move from this point, concluding that "more was probably lacking than present in 1913" (pg. 156), the year the book ends. Smith does not even succumb to the temptation to attribute undue influence to Hitler's time in Vienna, and when the book ends with Hitler crossing the German border to Munich on the eve of the First World War, the young man is still very much an isolated, undisciplined and unconnected failed artist than a ruthless political firebrand. A reader who had no knowledge of what was to come (as impossible as it would be to find such a reader) would find what happened next very hard to believe.
Indeed, such is the skittishness, isolation, petty pride and desperation of the young Hitler, and the dysfunction of the family he grew up in, that, as Smith says, he "invites our sympathy" (pg. 8). Whether by his mother's deathbed or tramping to the dosshouse in the Viennese winter, Hitler is human, living with the consequences of his birth, his upbringing and of his adolescent actions. Considering the vast load of pain and evil this one man was to willingly unload onto the world in the following decades, from such an inauspicious beginning, that one fact – that Hitler was a plain, unremarkable human of flaws, vices and, yes, some small qualities – should disturb everyone. Because there are a great many plain, unremarkable humans in the world, and all of us come across a great many forks in the road. The road to hell begins with a single step.
Any history should seek to be judicious and even-handed, of course, but when the subject is as complicated, emotive and compromised as that of Hitler and Nazism the soberness of Smith's account becomes even more valuable. Not for Smith the lurid, ironical tales of Jewish grandfathers or warning signs in a pre-teen Adolf of the monster he would become. Instead, Smith begins by stating that the "conditions and influences" that made Hitler Hitler "lie outside the period considered here" (pg. 9) and he is not tempted to move from this point, concluding that "more was probably lacking than present in 1913" (pg. 156), the year the book ends. Smith does not even succumb to the temptation to attribute undue influence to Hitler's time in Vienna, and when the book ends with Hitler crossing the German border to Munich on the eve of the First World War, the young man is still very much an isolated, undisciplined and unconnected failed artist than a ruthless political firebrand. A reader who had no knowledge of what was to come (as impossible as it would be to find such a reader) would find what happened next very hard to believe.
Indeed, such is the skittishness, isolation, petty pride and desperation of the young Hitler, and the dysfunction of the family he grew up in, that, as Smith says, he "invites our sympathy" (pg. 8). Whether by his mother's deathbed or tramping to the dosshouse in the Viennese winter, Hitler is human, living with the consequences of his birth, his upbringing and of his adolescent actions. Considering the vast load of pain and evil this one man was to willingly unload onto the world in the following decades, from such an inauspicious beginning, that one fact – that Hitler was a plain, unremarkable human of flaws, vices and, yes, some small qualities – should disturb everyone. Because there are a great many plain, unremarkable humans in the world, and all of us come across a great many forks in the road. The road to hell begins with a single step.
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