World War 2

[Tyler Robinson]

                                     

Hmm. Will document this 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

             

 

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

 

                                  

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

                                

 

Hitler as a baby - 

After spending four years in the Realschule in Linz, he left school at the age of sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter. In October 1907, the provincial, middle-class boy left home for Vienna, where he was to remain until 1913 leading a bohemian, vagabond existence. Embittered at his rejection by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, he was to spend “five years of misery and woe” in Vienna as he later recalled, adopting a view of life which changed very little in the ensuing years, shaped as it was by liberalism and the cosmopolitan Habsburg monarchy.

Existing from hand to mouth on occasional odd jobs and the hawking of sketches in low taverns, the young Hitler compensated for the frustrations of a lonely bachelor’s life in miserable male hostels by political harangues in cheap cafes to anyone who would listen and indulging in grandiose dreams of a Greater Germany.

In Vienna he acquired his first education in politics by studying the demagogic techniques of the popular Christian-social Mayor, Karl Lueger. 

From crackpot racial theorists like the defrocked monk, Lanz von Liebenfels, and the Austrian Pan-German leader, Georg von Schoenerer, the young Hitler learned to discern press, prostitution, syphilis, capitalism, Marxism, democracy and pacifism – all were so many means which were to  undermine the German nation and the purity of the creative Aryan race.

                        

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                             

In May 1913, Hitler left Vienna for Munich and, when war broke out in August 1914, he joined the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment, serving as a dispatch runner. Hitler proved an able, courageous soldier, receiving the Iron Cross (First Class) for bravery, but did not rise above the rank of Lance Corporal. Twice wounded, he was badly gassed four weeks before the end of the war and spent three months recuperating in a hospital in Pomerania. Temporarily blinded and driven to impotent rage by the abortive November 1918 revolution in Germany as well as the military defeat, Hitler, once restored, was convinced that fate had chosen him to rescue a humiliated nation from the shackles of the Versailles Treaty. 

           

Hitler during World War 1 (c.1915)

                                

       

                                 

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                   

Assigned by the Reichswehr in the summer of 1919 to “educational” duties which consisted largely of spying on political parties in the overheated atmosphere of post-revolutionary Munich, Hitler was sent to investigate a small nationalistic group of idealists, the German Workers’ Party. On September 16. 1919, he entered the Party (which had approximately forty members), soon changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and had imposed himself as its Chairman by July 1921.

                                  

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                     

Hitler was a vegetarian who did not smoke or drink. Dr. Ernst Gunther Schenck, who studied Hitler’s medical record, said, “'Hitler`s initial complaints were the colitis that had bothered him for years, a mild kidney condition and a problem with a leg injury suffered during World War I. Morell helped him with all three problems. From the date they met in 1937 until April 1945, Hitler had absolute confidence in Morell.”

                             

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                 

 

Besides resisting a complete physical, Hitler refused to be X-rayed. “Many of his symptoms were psychosomatic,” Schenck added. “Almost daily, he complained to Morell about numerous pains. He demanded injections of invigorating and tranquilizing drugs, complained of headaches, stomach aches, constipation and diarrhea, constant colds, insomnia and many other discomforts. He described every pain very carefully and he complained bitterly.”

He was given hundreds of injections he believed would restore his energy and believed he would feel better if he could execute the generals that betrayed him, “But in truth, he probably had an irritable bowel syndrome, and the stress aggravated it beyond his endurance.”

                               

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                               

 

Schenck said Hitler was prescribed 92 different medications, some of which had not been scientifically tested. Morell owned companies that manufactured 20 of the drugs. “Hitler used many drugs, but he never became addicted to any one, including morphine, which was administered to him 25 times during 1943-44, for his stomach cramps. But he was psychologically dependent upon the idea of drugs as magic.”'

                          

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                    

 

In addition, according to historians Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie, “Hitler himself is believed to have had two forms of genital abnormality: an undescended testicle and a rare condition called penile hypospadias in which the urethra opens on the underside of the penis.”

Another historian, Ian Kershaw, said Hitler avoided sexual activity because he feared catching an infection. Others, however, have said he had a healthy sex life and was involved with several women, most notably his mistress Eva Braun and contrary to some reports, he never contracted syphilis.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                    

Schenck also had an answer to the question of whether Hitler was insane. He compared him to other mass murderers in history – Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon – whose behavior he said “cannot be explained medically or psychologically.” He concluded, “'Hitler was not insane. He had a political obsession that led him to attempt insane things. The German people followed him because, like Hitler, they believed that they were surrounded by dangerous enemies.”

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                             

Hitler discovered a powerful talent for oratory as well as giving the new Party its symbol — the swastika — and its greeting “Heil!.” His hoarse, grating voice, for all the bombastic, humorless, histrionic content of his speeches, dominated audiences by dint of his tone of impassioned conviction and gift for self-dramatization. By November 1921, Hitler was recognized as Fuhrer of a movement which had 3,000 members and boosted his personal power by organizing strong- arm squads to keep order at his meetings and break up those of his opponents. Out of these squads grew the storm troopers (SA) organized by Captain Ernst Röhm and Hitler’s black-shirted personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (SS).

                                    

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                

 

By November 1923, Hitler was convinced that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse and, together with General Ludendorff and local nationalist groups, sought to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. Bursting into a beer-hall in Munich and firing his pistol into the ceiling, he shouted out that he was heading a new provisional government which would carry through a revolution against “Red Berlin.” Hitler and Ludendorff then marched through Munich at the head of 3,000 men, only to be met by police fire which left sixteen dead and brought the attempted putsch to an ignominious end.

                               

 

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                       

 

Hitler was arrested and tried on February 26, 1924, succeeding in turning the tables on his accusers with a confident, propagandist speech which ended with the prophecy: “Pronounce us guilty a thousand times over: the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to pieces the State Prosecutor’s submission and the court’s verdict for she acquits us.”

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Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

                                  

 

The failure of the Beer-Hall putsch and his period of imprisonment transformed Hitler from an incompetent adventurer into a shrewd political tactician, who henceforth decided that he would never again confront the gun barrels of army and police until they were under his command. He concluded that the road to power lay not through force alone but through legal subversion of the Weimar Constitution, the building of a mass movement and the combination of parliamentary strength with extra-parliamentary street terror and intimidation. Helped by Goering and Goebbels he began to reassemble his followers and rebuild the movement which had disintegrated in his absence.

                        

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

                   

                         

 

In January 1925, the ban on the Nazi Party was removed and Hitler regained permission to speak in public. Outmaneuvering the “socialist” North German wing of the Party under Gregor Strasser, Hitler re-established himself in 1926 as the ultimate arbiter to whom all factions appealed in an ideologically and socially heterogeneous movement. Avoiding rigid, programmatic definitions of National Socialism which would have undermined the charismatic nature of his legitimacy and his claim to absolute leadership, Hitler succeeded in extending his appeal beyond Bavaria and attracting both Right and Left to his movement.

                        

                                 

                              

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

 

Though the Nazi Party won only twelve seats in the 1928 elections, the onset of the Great Depression with its devastating effects on the middle classes helped Hitler to win over all those strata in German society who felt their economic existence was threatened. In addition to peasants, artisans, craftsmen, traders, small businessmen, ex-officers, students and déclassé intellectuals, the Nazis in 1929 began to win over the big industrialists, nationalist conservatives and army circles.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

With the backing of the press tycoon, Alfred Hugenberg, Hitler received a tremendous nationwide exposure just as the effects of the world economic crisis hit Germany, producing mass unemployment, social dissolution, fear and indignation. With demagogic virtuosity, Hitler played on national resentments, feelings of revolt and the desire for strong leadership using all the most modern techniques of mass persuasion to present himself as Germany’s redeemer and messianic savior.

        

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

          

In the 1930 elections, the Nazi vote jumped dramatically from 810,000 to 6,409,000 (18.3 percent of the total vote) and they received 107 seats in the Reichstag. Prompted by Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen, the great industrial magnates began to contribute liberally to the coffers of the NSDAP, reassured by Hitler’s performance before the Industrial Club in Dusseldorf on January 27, 1932, that they had nothing to fear from the radicals in the Party.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

 

The following month Hitler officially acquired German citizenship and decided to run for the Presidency, receiving 13,418,011 votes in the run-off elections of April 10, 1931, as against 19,359,650 votes for the victorious von Hindenburg, but four times the vote for the communist candidate, Ernst Thaelmann.

In the Reichstag elections of July 1932, the Nazis emerged as the largest political party in Germany, obtaining nearly fourteen million votes (37.3 per cent) and 230 seats. Although the NSDAP fell back in November 1932 to eleven million votes (196 seats), Hitler was helped to power by a camarilla of conservative politicians led by Franz von Papen, who persuaded the reluctant von Hindenburg to nominate “the Bohemian corporal” as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

     

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson

[Tyler Robinson]

 

 

Once in the saddle, Hitler moved with great speed to outmaneuver his rivals, virtually ousting the conservatives from any real participation in government by July 1933, abolishing the free trade unions, eliminating the communists, Social Democrats  from any role in political life and sweeping opponents into concentration camps. The Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, had provided him with the perfect pretext to begin consolidating the foundations of a totalitarian one-party State, and special “enabling laws” were ramrodded through the Reichstag to legalize the regime’s intimidatory tactics.

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Tyler Robinson