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August 10 - August 18, 2020
and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.
adding two essential ingredients to the formula: a mixture of fear and admiration.
And if he does it shouting, it is because an entire nation, an entire race, is expressing itself through him.”
I have not to this day found any answer: What did God want from this person?” August Kubizek, Hitler’s childhood friend, in The Young Hitler I Knew
Thus the marriage of Alois and Klara was hit by the death of all their children, until their luck changed in 1889 with the birth of Adolf, on April the 20th at 6:30 p.m.
And if he couldn’t lead, then he quit the game and found other boys.”
survivor guilt,
His grades at the Realschule were so bad that after seeing them, Hitler got drunk and used the report card as toilet paper (Fest, 2013).
Spear of Longinus, the Christian relic that supposedly had pierced the side of Jesus. “Whomsoever claims this spear and solves its secrets holds the destiny of the world in his hands, for good or evil,” said the legend (Vazquez, 2017).
performance of Rienzi by Richard Wagner, which ended after midnight.
Today I am firmly convinced that basically and on the whole all creative ideas appear in our youth.”
Mayor Karl Lueger.
Lueger noticed that blaming the Jews for the problems of the middle class aroused the enthusiasm of the masses.
Lueger avoided the hiring of Jewish workers for public works, as well as their acceptance in schools and universities.
That the aspiring painter was impressed by the politician is confirmed by the fact that he later described him as the greatest German mayor of all times.
occultist Josef Lanz,
Lanz claimed that his theories had a biblical basis: the downfall had begun since the time of Eve, the first woman, who had copulated with a demon and produced dark humans; therefore, women should be banned from intermarriage with dark men.
he was a courier
The infamous toothbrush mustache that distinguished him appeared later in World War I due to a curious circumstance: in response to the mustard gas attacks of the English troops, officers ordered the men to cut their long mustaches for the toothbrush style, so that the gas masks would fit better.
Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk. I was amazed at this plethora of warriors of the chosen people and could not help but compare them with their rare representatives at the front.”
According to historian Ian Kershaw, the deep humiliation of the people looked for a scapegoat in the Jews; anti-Semitism began to grow to never-seen-before levels.
DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), founded by a locksmith and toolmaker named Anton Dexler,
as the DAP’s propaganda chief he decided to change the name of the party to “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” The name of its members: Nazis.
“Watch me, Josef,” Hitler told his childhood friend Josef Ransmeir when he visited his hometown that same year. “I will save Germany.”
and instead of parliamentarism, which he saw as a degenerate and useless system, the need of a strong leader to whom absolute obedience ought to be sworn.
Treaty of Versailles,
I would ask you to go to one of our health-resorts; there you will find two sorts of visitors: the German who goes there, perhaps for the first time for a long while, to breathe a little fresh air and to recover his health, and the Jew who goes there to lose his fat.”
if they wanted to keep him, they should appoint him chairman and swear absolute obedience to him. At the meeting on July 29, 1921 Hitler was introduced as the “Führer” (chief, leader) for the first time.
“stab in the back” theory, which Hitler deeply believed—the conviction that the country had never been defeated on the battlefield, but surrendered due to the negotiations of traitors in government, especially Jews and Bolsheviks.
“I can say this to you: Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!” The effect was such that Kahr and the others ended up shaking hands with Hitler in front of the delirious crowd.
Prices and wages rose so rapidly that it was possible to line up in order to buy a sausage at a certain price, and to have to pay five times more for it when arriving at the counter.
Hoffmann was the architect of Hitler’s image and would be a strategic element in the years to come.
The Great Depression of 1929 hit Germany hard; the nation was dependent on US loans and exports to America.
In 1934 President Hindenburg died from lung cancer and Hitler assumed absolute power.
His drive to put people back to work—and he succeeded in one eighteen-month period in getting jobs for some three million—was aided by his rearmament program.
In 1935 he announced the introduction of compulsory military training—a violation of the Versailles treaty—and by the end of May a law had been passed providing one year of army training for all able-bodied Germans,
“For Hitler, the unification of both ‘German’ countries was a priority for two reasons. Austria possessed valuable reserves of gold and raw materials—much the opposite of the German economy, which was becoming increasingly depleted by preparations for war.
In May he negotiated with Italy’s Mussolini the so-called Pact of Steel, through which both leaders pledged to join their fate in case of war.
Jericho Trumpet,
Hitler watched with his binoculars the final attack on Warsaw and saw the city burn a few kilometers away from the inferno. A film has been preserved from that precise moment; it focuses on Hitler’s face and then something surprising happens: a smirk on the face, always sour and adamant, of the German leader.
The fall of France—the hated neighbor, the executioner of 1918—was tantamount to a restoration of honor for Hitler.
Paris signed its surrender on June 22, 1940, in the Forest of Compiègne, inside the famous Compiègne Wagon: the exact same geographical location and the same train wagon where Germany had signed its surrender twenty-two years before. It was Hitler’s small caprice, of enormous symbolic value: the humiliation of the First War had been reversed.
With the fall of France in 1940 Hitler practically had Europe on its knees.
One day before his death, at midnight, he called a judge to the bunker and married Eva Braun, 33. He was 56.