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    Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany
    Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany
    Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany
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    Adolf Hitler: A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany

    By Captivating History

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    About this ebook

    Like someone racing under a snowstorm, tracked by a hunter, Adolf Hitler spent a good part of his life trying to blur the footsteps of his past, but also doing his best to deceive the hunter, stamping new ones. The hunter in this case being the historians who at the emergence of the strong man in Germany—the statesman crushing Europe at lightning speed, plunging the world into the most devastating and costly war ever, and leading to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies and other undesirable groups—began to inquire about the moment and circumstances of his enthronement. How and when was he able to mystify an entire nation? Was he, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost ten years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCaptivating History
    Release dateAug 11, 2017
    ISBN9781386044987

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      Book preview

      Adolf Hitler - Captivating History

      Introduction

      Like someone racing under a snowstorm, tracked by a hunter, Adolf Hitler spent a good part of his life trying to blur the footsteps of his past, but also doing his best to deceive the hunter, stamping new ones. The hunter in this case being the historians who at the emergence of the strong man in Germany—the statesman crushing Europe at lightning speed, plunging the world into the most devastating and costly war ever, and leading to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies and other undesirable groups—began to inquire about the moment and circumstances of his enthronement. How and when was he able to mystify an entire nation? Was he, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost ten years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.

      For decades there were uncertainties about his family and childhood; for instance, about the time he was a bohemian vagabond and failed artist in Vienna, about his real achievements as a draftee in World War I, and the details of his rapid rise in the politics of Germany. Everything had been repainted in glorious colors by the Nazi propaganda machine, not to mention that Hitler himself had not given much to talk about in his early days. Some of his most important biographers like Joachim Fest have attributed his obsessive zeal to erase his past to the mind of a skilled propagandist. Today, when Hitler´s zenith has long passed, if there remains a character in history studied to the smallest detail, not only by historians, but also by doctors, psychologists, artists, sociologists, and even architects, it is he. No small irony for someone who went into uncontrollable rage when someone published a photograph of his family or brought to light some unknown aspect of his conflicted and depressive youth.

      Like every major leader, Hitler was the product of greater forces than himself, but the Führer knew how to assimilate and throw them against the right target with the promise to give a final solution to the problems of his people, adding two essential ingredients to the formula: a mixture of fear and admiration. Thus Hitler was able to drive an enlightened, advanced, and cultured society like Germany into barbarism and genocide. For those who study mass movements, of particular interest is how Hitler, who could not have done anything by himself, could manipulate and submit the will of a whole nation—dismissing the ridiculous notion that he was possessed, or the simplistic explanation that he was crazy. As has been noted on several occasions, if the countless films that show the excitement and hysteria that he aroused in public appearances did not exist, it would be difficult to believe that he had the undeniable support of many Germans and other people.

      The psychiatrist Gustav Jung—who once tried to have a respected doctor declare Hitler insane— after seeing him addressing a crowd commented that the Führer, unlike Mussolini whom Jung saw as a mere human, was not lacking individuality, (he was) confused with his nation’s collective soul, and possessed by its Collective Unconscious (...) Not even by the Collective Unconscious of a single nation, but that of an entire race (...) he represents them all, he speaks for all of them. And if he does it shouting, it is because an entire nation, an entire race, is expressing itself through him. On his part, Hitler wrote: Permanent struggle is the law of life, he who would live must fight. One can assume that he was not thinking uniquely about military matters; his words were influenced by the torturous road that, like many Germans, he had to roam in the difficult first three decades of the twentieth century.

      This is not a book about World War II, but about the man, Adolf Hitler, one of the faces and names that still arouse the strongest feelings—repulsion, resentment, and even fanaticism—but one who also had a childhood and a youth, a father and a mother, and above all, a time when he was born guiltless, like any other human being. It is the road to madness—beginning that day in August of 1934 when he took over absolute power and ordered allegiance and loyalty to him alone—that this book is about.

      PART I — ORIGINS

      "Thus I have drawn the portrait of the young Hitler as well as I can from memory.

      But for the question then unknown and expressed which hung above our friendship,

      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

      The son of Alois and Klara

      One of the biggest challenges any biographer of Adolf Hitler encounters is to reconstruct his early years based on the not-very-abundant sources. Accounts of his youth are almost always filtered through the glass of his later deeds. From the third quarter of the twentieth century, historians began to place greater emphasis on the formative years of great figures—to the extent that they were available—not to psychoanalyze them, but to try to understand the forces that shaped the adults they became. To outline the origins of the Führer requires detective work —objectivity has been obscured, despite the relatively short time passed since his death, not due to lack of sources, but because the historian needs to deal with two equally radical positions: first, those who see in him a budding monster since childhood, evil incarnate, a kind of psychologically and spiritually crippled antichrist, portrayed under the worst possible light; second, the one constituted by a few Nazi sympathizers surviving in the form of revisionism in several volumes of recent apparition, which present him from his early youth as a strong, determined, and brilliant teenager on his way to become one of the greatest leaders of his century, no worse than other statesmen of his time. In this reconstruction one must also deal with the testimony of Hitler himself, and his exaggerated self-glorification in his program and autobiography entitled Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written in a Landsberg prison.

      The story begins in

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