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Overview
One of the most intriguing mysteries about the rise of history’s most despised dictator is just how utterly ordinary he once seemed. A chubby child, a mama’s boy, an idle student, a failed artist, self-pitying outcast, and just another face in the crowd. The early images of Adolf Hitler give no hint of the demonic spirit bent on global domination. Only later in his tortured life came the metamorphosis, and the mask fell away to reveal a monster.
Adolf Hitler: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives traces this dramatic process in photographs—some iconic, some rare and intimate. And they are all revealing in their gradually subtle and disturbing transformation, demonstrating the mesmerizing power that Hitler wielded not only over the German public but also statesmen, industrialists, and the global media. Many culled from the author’s private collection, the photographs collected here provide unique insight into the mind of a megalomaniac and architect of the twentieth century’s most unfathomable atrocity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781526702012 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Series: | Images of War |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 34 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The character of Adolf Hitler, as legend probably correctly has it, was built on the foundation of a harsh father and a doting mother. There is no reason to believe that the former, a stiff and formal civil servant, did not love his son. However, intensely proud of his rise to middle-class respectability, he demanded impeccable behaviour from his family, reinforced by violent punishments. Thus it was his mother whom the young Adolf revered. She gave him the affection that his father seemed unable to. In short, she loved her son too much. The result was that, ironically, the man who ended up a ranting tyrant spent his childhood as a bit of a 'mummy's boy'.
Adolf Hitler was born an Austrian citizen and a Roman Catholic at 6.30pm on 20 April 1889 at Braunau-am-Inn, close to the border with Bavaria. His mother, Klara, was the third wife of his father Alois, a customs official in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Contrary to the story that gained credence during the war, Hitler was not illegitimate. He did not carry his grandmother's name of Shicklgruber because, although his father Alois had been born out of wedlock, he subsequently had his birth legitimised by persuading the local priest to alter his birth documents to give him his father's name of Hitler. The confusion over Hitler senior's documents allowed later detractors to allege that Hitler's real maternal grandfather had in fact been a Jew named Frankenberger, who had been in the household where Alois's mother, Maria Anna Shicklgruber, was in service.
Yet there is no doubt that Alois Hitler's private life was less than orthodox. When his first wife died in 1883 he married his mistress, who was pregnant with their second child. When she too died shortly afterwards he married his second cousin Klara Polzl, who was 23 years his junior and also carrying his child.
Adolf was the fourth of six children. Two older brothers and a sister died in infancy and a younger brother died of measles at the age of 11, reportedly affecting young Adolf deeply. This meant that his only surviving sibling was a younger sister, Paula. From his father's second marriage, there was also a half-brother Alois, who ran away from home at the age of 14, and a half-sister Angela, later to become the housekeeper at Hitler's Bavarian retreat of Berchtesgaden.
Adolf's actual place of birth was a room on the first floor of a three-storey house, the ground floor of which was an inn called Gasthof Zum Pommer. His parents rented a suite of rooms above the hostelry where Alois reputedly drank to excess in the saloon downstairs before staggering upstairs to abuse his timid wife.
The family continued to live in Braunau-am-Inn until 1892 when they moved to Passau, where the River Inn joins the Danube. Only recently has it emerged from old newspaper cuttings that a four-year-old child, believed to be Adolf, was rescued from drowning in the river in 1894. In Passau, the Austrian customs house lay on the German side of the border, so Adolf, then aged three, grew up speaking German with a Bavarian accent, rather than the more cultured tones of a Viennese.
Adolf was educated locally at village and monastery schools, until the age of 11 when his father paid for him to attend secondary school, with the intention that he would also become a civil servant. But by then the years of his mother's mollycoddling – she had convinced herself that the boy was in poor health and needed constant attention – had made him a less than dedicated pupil.
At school he was a reasonably able pupil, although too shiftless to continue for long in any project. He failed exams and was refused promotion to the next grade. A teacher later recalled him as one who 'reacted with ill-concealed hostility to advice or reproof, at the same time demanding of his fellow pupils their unqualified subservience, fancying himself in the role of leader'. According to the myth later perpetuated by Nazi propagandists, Hitler the schoolboy led all the playground games, being a natural leader and 'understanding the meaning of history'. In reality, the young Adolf was a dreamer who made few friends.
On his retirement in 1895, Alois had moved his family to Leonding, near Austria's third largest city Linz, which Adolf thereafter considered his 'home town'. There, in 1903, his father walked to his favourite inn where he ordered a glass of wine but collapsed and died of a lung haemorrhage before it arrived.
Young Adolf, now 13, broke down and cried when he saw the body laid out. A local newspaper published an obituary that included the following telling description of the deceased: 'The harsh words that sometimes fell from his lips could not belie the warm heart that beat under the rough exterior.' But for Adolf, there would be no more harsh words and no more discipline from his domineering father, whose death had left the family with a healthy pension. The teenager abandoned all scholastic efforts to pursue his dream of becoming a great artist.
Thanks to his mother's generosity, he was able to live idly in and around Linz, where he was to be seen carefully dressed and sporting an ivory-tipped cane, attending the theatre or strolling the fashionable streets. Lacking any real occupation, he instead spent hours creating designs of a new and rebuilt Linz – youthful designs he was to turn to for comfort years later as Berlin was pounded to rubble in the final days of his life.
He bought a lottery ticket and dreamed of a future of artistic grace and leisure. When the number failed to come up, he denounced first the lottery organisation then the cheating government. He took piano lessons and then gave them up. Hitler succumbed to the grandiose music of Richard Wagner and was so stirred after a performance of his opera Rienzi that he walked with his sole boyhood friend, August Kubizek, and suddenly started to declaim about his future and that of his people. When he met Kubizek again 30 years later, he remarked: 'It began with that hour.'
When his mother died in 1907, Hitler moved permanently to Vienna where he had already unsuccessfully applied to enter the Academy of Fine Arts. Despite the knockback, the wayward dreamer found a dazzling new world opening up to him in the city, still at the turn of the century a faded hub of empire. In Vienna he discovered nationalism as a prime force in a multi-ethnic city humming with intrigue as the old Austro-Hungarian system started to break up. In particular, the ruling Germans had become a minority as the empire stretched into Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. Racism was rife, and since the mid-19th Century had focussed itself in particular on Jews, whose emancipation in Austria had for years been encouraging streams of immigrants from Hungary and the East. Between 1850 and 1910, their presence in Vienna had risen from two percent of the population to almost nine percent.
In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler's credo and political life story, he wrote of an orphaned youth of 17 'forced to go far from home to earn his bread'. The reality is very different. Having lived quite comfortably off his widowed mother for several years, he was able to continue receiving his father's state pension by fraudulently claiming to be in full-time education.
In 1908 Hitler was joined by his old friend Kubizek, who was studying music at the Vienna Conservatory. The two shared an apartment, but while Kubizek worked hard at his studies, Hitler seemed content to continue his aimless course. He made plans to tear down and rebuild the Hofburg, he sketched castles and theatres, he developed a recipe for a non-alcoholic drink, he composed pamphlets attacking landlords, he tried to write an opera and a drama. He painted but was rejected a second time when he tried to enter the Academy of Fine Arts. Its director advised him to try architecture, but here he failed because he had not passed his final exams at school, which were a prerequisite for entry.
Jealous of his friend Kubizek's relative success, Hitler abruptly left the shared apartment and rented a room by himself. Nearby was a shop that sold periodicals including one edited by a defrocked monk who called himself Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. This magazine, Ostara, carried such headlines as: 'Are You Blond? Then You Are A Creator And Preserver Of Civilisation'. It invented a world of Teutonic blonds forever beset by mixed race, swarthy subhumans. It advocated castration and selective breeding and programmes of sterilisation, deportation of undesirables to an 'ape jungle' and liquidation by forced labour and murder. These themes were to play a large part in Hitler's later life.
In 1909 Adolf Hitler gave up his room and passed through several addresses, finally ending up sleeping on park benches until the winter forced him to seek shelter in a men's hostel. Here, among the derelicts, the habitual loner found one friend, a vagabond called Reinhold Hanisch. The pair teamed up and Hanisch managed to sell a number of Hitler's paintings. Finally, they quarrelled over a picture of the Vienna parliament building, which the artist felt was worth 50 crowns but which Hanisch had sold for only 10. In 1938, when he was in a position to do so, Hitler had his only friend from these miserable years tracked down and murdered.
By 1913 Hitler had despaired of finding the success that always seemed to elude him in Vienna. Partly for this reason, he moved on to Munich. More pressing, however, was his imminent call-up into the Austrian army. He was eventually arrested by the German police and sent home to report for his medical but was rejected by the Austro-Hungarian army as being 'too weak and unfit to bear arms' – although refusal on such grounds was not unusual given the state of the nation's health at the time. At this stage he had few political ideas but he had certainly acquired the current vogue of anti-Semitism, which had been around since the Pharaohs, was prevalent in Germany and Austria throughout Hitler's youth and which was to become the basis of his later credo.
On the outbreak of war, Hitler petitioned the Kaiser to allow him, although an Austrian, to join a German regiment. Within a week he had been enrolled in the 6th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, his medical problems evidently overlooked. In the army his life was to change. Here he finally found the discipline he may subconsciously have longed for. Though he remained a loner, he also found the equivalent of a family. At any rate, he was essentially happy and he served with distinction as a courier on the killing fields of Flanders.
Hitler's baptism of fire was at Ypres and he was always prepared to take on dangerous missions. He won the Iron Cross (second class) that was later converted to first class – a rare honour for an enlisted man. The Iron Cross, awarded on the recommendation of the regiment's Jewish adjutant, stood him in good stead later when he needed to obtain acceptance as a German.
Army life also helped crystallise Hitler's political dogma. He said later that he thought of the war not in the same terms as other soldiers – getting through a battle unharmed and finding somewhere warm to sleep – but rather as a general or a politician, examining the grand scope of a military thrust and bewailing the 'enemy within'. These, in his eyes, were the pacifists, profiteers and Communists, whom he saw as more dangerous than the range of forces mobilised against Germany.
At the end of the war, Hitler was in hospital as a consequence of a British gas attack on his position. Defeat was a bitter pill to swallow, and for him now there could be only one reason for it: the Fatherland had been betrayed, not just by the Marxists and Jews, but also by the politicians.
Defeat brought terrible consequences to Germany. The Treaty of Versailles was imposed on a subjugated nation, under the terms of which the industrial half of Silesia and much of West Prussia was ceded to Poland, Schleswig-Holstein was ceded to Denmark, Malmedy was given to Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine to France. The Rhineland was demilitarised, the army was limited to 100,000 men and, even worse for the German psyche, insulting assumptions were made that Germany should admit sole guilt for the war and hand over certain officers to the victors as war criminals. In addition, harsh war reparations were demanded that left an impoverished Germany seemingly without hope. Not surprisingly, disaffection became widespread.
For the most part, this found its outlet in the spread of Communism, which had succeeded in overthrowing the established order in Russia. Following the 1917 October Revolution, Marxist ideology and egalitarian principles had been promulgated throughout the defeated nations with a great deal of success. The drift to Bolshevism, however, was not without its strident opposition. A strong sense of nationalism first found vent in the coffee houses and bourgeois clubs, where it was translated into political parties and groupings. Hitler, already noted by various rightwing army officers for his anti-Bolshevist views, became their semi-official mouthpiece, addressing and reporting on the nationalist groups.
In September 1919, Hitler now aged 30, found himself in the audience at a meeting of the German Workers' Party, a 40-strong group that purported to attack both business cartels and trade union tyranny. Its leader, Anton Drexler, declared the party to be a 'classless, socialist organisation, to be led only by German leaders'. National Socialism had begun. At the meeting, Hitler was inspired to get up and speak. His words impressed Drexler so much that he was invited to join the party's committee. It was while addressing a party meeting in this capacity two months later that he made the most significant discovery of his life. He had the gift of oratory. And he had what he had subconsciously craved ... an audience to whom he could present himself as a messiah.
Hitler discovered a gift for almost mesmeric public speaking. He threw himself into the organisation of the party, taking it over completely. He changed its name to the NSDAP, short for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party) and developed a programme offering land reform, the abolition of ground rent and various other anti-capitalist notions. He also discovered the value of propaganda — the more half-baked the idea, the louder you have to shout it.
Copying a tactic from the Communists, he sent lorries packed with supporters around the streets. He dressed them in brown-shirted uniforms and his first public meeting in 1920 attracted 2,000 people. Soon his uniformed ex-army supporters were replaced by semi-terrorist thugs sporting his new party emblem, the swastika. Meanwhile, he consolidated his grip on the party. He acquired (probably with money secretly donated from army funds) the local newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter, and relaunched it as the Völkischer Beobachter (the People's Observer). As his fame spread outside Munich, important new allies were joining him.
Among these were his loyal deputy Rudolf Hess, Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, rabble-rousing Ernst Rohm and Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic publication Der Sturmer. However, the greatest triumph at the time was to sign up air ace Hermann Goering, the last commandant of Baron Von Richthofen's 'flying circus' and a national hero. All these disparate characters held extreme nationalistic views but they had one principal belief in common — a vitriolic hatred of the Jews.
In 1921 Hitler began to spread that message of hate in Berlin, where he found a ready group of listeners among those who were sickened by the decadence into which the capital had sunk. His ill-disciplined gang of thugs – that later were to become the highlyorganised SA (Sturm Abteilung, or Storm Troopers) – were to be seen all over Bavaria beating up political opponents, ripping down rival election posters and openly collecting cash for the 'massacre of the Jews'. Any heckler who dared oppose a party speaker at a meeting was soon surrounded by these so-called brownshirts and severely beaten for his pains.
At last the government acted. When the SA disrupted a rival political meeting and assaulted its speaker, Hitler, now officially known in the party as the Führer, was sentenced to three months in jail. He served four weeks and was released a martyr and something of a folk hero. If the chaos after the war had been the launching pad for a fascist-style party ostensibly offering order, it was a twin stroke of fortune for Hitler that propelled the NSDAP into the forefront of national politics.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Images of War Adolf Hitler"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Nigel Blundell.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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