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January 19 - January 19, 2023
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, a town in what is now Austria, on April 20, 1889.
Hitler was eight years old at the time, and he was active in the church there. He sang in the choir and considered becoming a priest.
after Edmund’s death, he became a morose, detached child who fought with his father and teachers regularly.
After Hitler’s father died suddenly in 1903, his performance in school deteriorated even further,
After the death of his mother in 1907, he then went to live a bohemian lifestyle in Vienna, working as a casual laborer, and on occasion, as a painter.
Early on in his life, Hitler, like many Austrian Germans, had developed strong German nationalist ideas.
Vienna’s mayor Karl Lueger spouted virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric to great political effect.
Hitler had Jewish friends in his hostel as well as in Vienna in general.
Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism didn’t develop until after Germany’s defeat in World War I.
moved to Munich after failing a physical exam required to enter service into the Austro-Hungarian army.
He believed that the German army had been “stabbed in the back” by civilian leaders and Marxists, who were later described as the “November criminals.”
DAP.
Hitler became enthralled with founder Anton Drexler’s ideas, which were nationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist, and he became increasingly involved with the party, finally joining in 1919.
National Socialist German Workers’ Party or NSDAP. The shortened version of the name was the Nazi Party. Hitler had designed their banner, which consisted of a swastika in a white circle with a red background.
During this period, he was heavily influenced by the Aufbau Vereinigung, a group of white Russian exiles who introduced Hitler to the idea of a Jewish conspiracy.
On November 8, 1923, Hitler and the NSDAP attempted a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Hitler was arrested for his role in the coup on November 11, 1923.
It was in prison where Hitler dictated the majority of the first volume of Mein Kampf
Taking advantage of the dire consequences in Germany as a result of the U.S. stock market crash on October 24, 1929, Hitler and the NSDAP promised to strengthen the economy and provide jobs.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the war began.
Alois was a conceited man and had a terrible temper. He often took his problems out on his wife and children.
Angela was the only one of Hitler’s siblings that he mentioned in Mein Kampf.
Hitler himself was a sickly child whose mother fretted over him constantly.
His father, though nominally Catholic, was anticlerical and skeptical of religion; his mother, with whom he was particularly close, was a practicing, devout Catholic.
Hitler was confirmed in the Catholic Church in May 1904. He regularly attended services throughout his childhood and even sang in the choir at the Benedictine Monastery when the family lived in Lambach. It is also said he dreamed of becoming a priest at that time.
Some scholars argue that though Hitler continued to espouse a belief in Christianity throughout his life, he did so mainly for political reasons.
when he rose to power, he allowed persecution of the Catholic Church and promoted what was called Positive Christianity, a movement which rejected several traditional Christian doctrines, including the Apostles’ Creed, as well as several Jewish elements of Christianity including the Old Testament.
he did not believe in God, but rather was a rationalist who objected to Christianity on the basis that it rebelled against the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest.
Hitler was rejected both times that he applied to the art school.
many of Hitler’s clients were Jewish, and in fact, the NSDAP found unsold pieces of Hitler’s work in two Jewish stores in 1938.
Hitler had long been a proponent of German nationalism, and while in Vienna, closely followed the racist nationalism espoused by the Upper Austrian Pan-German politician Georg von Schönerer.
Hitler’s unit, the 1st Company, fought in the Battle of Ypres in October 1914. The battle is remembered in Germany as the Massacre of the Innocents after approximately 40,000 men from nine infantry divisions were killed over the course of 20 days.
Hitler adopted a stray dog in 1915 which he named Foxl, meaning “little fox.”
Ironically, he was recommended for the First Class Iron Cross by a Jewish List adjutant, Hugo Gutmann.
Hitler himself was also wounded in the Battle of Somme in October 1916.
Hitler was wounded again in October 1918 after a British mustard gas attack.
He was temporarily blinded, and according to at least one source, he also lost his voice. He was hospitalized, and while there, he learned of Germany’s defeat in the war. He reportedly suffered a second bout of blindness from the shock of receiving the news.
Hitler was outraged by the Treaty of Versailles in which Germany had to admit it started the war and was stripped of various territories. It also had to demilitarize the Rhineland, and damaging economic sanctions were imposed. Hitler wrote that, while he was in the hospital bed, h...
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Hitler was particularly influenced by the DAP’s leader, Anton Drexler.
Drexler, Harrer, Gottfried Feder, and Dietrich Eckart decided to found the Germany Workers’ Party, or DAP, in January 1919.
Drexler invited Hitler to join the DAP, and on September 12, 1919, he became the group’s 55th member.
clear foreign policy consisting of the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a “Greater German solution” unifying all German-speaking people under one state, and the exclusion of Jews from citizenship.
By November 1923, the value of the mark against the U.S. dollar was 4,210,500,000,000 to 1. In this environment of economic catastrophe, political destabilization and violence followed.
On November 8, 1923, he and his associates marched on the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall where Kahr was making a speech in front of 3,000 people.
Two days later, he was arrested and charged with treason. The attempted coup became known as the Beer Hall Putsch, and Hitler’s subsequent trial and imprisonment would provide him with a national platform to present his ideas.
He took sole responsibility for the putsch, and claimed that there was no such thing as treason against the “traitors of 1918,” those politicians who had ended World War I—in his opinion prematurely—and stabbed the German army in the back.
In his book, Hitler divided humans into three categories based on physical appearance. He declared the Aryan race as biologically and culturally superior to other races. He described Aryans as fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed. Jews and the Slavic people of Poland, Russia, and what is the now the Czech Republic formed the most racially inferior group.
he outlined his belief that Jewish people had conducted an international conspiracy to control world finances and the press, to promote prostitution, and to invent both liberal democracy and Marxism.
In the midst of these changes within Germany, the global economy faced a significant new challenge with the crash of the U.S. stock market on October 24, 1929, and the Great Depression that followed. The crash had a global impact, and by the early 1930s, millions of people were out of work in Germany. This further weakened German confidence in their government and many people found Hitler to be a refreshing change.
in 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor—head of the German government.
