He was born in Braunan-Am-Inn, Austria on April 20, 1889. His father was Alois Hitler. Hitler loved his mother passionately. She wanted Hitler to become an artist. He experienced privation in his early years. In 1914 he enlisted in the army as a private, became a corporal and served on the Western Front, and was wounded, gassed, and temporarily blinded. In 1919, while still with his regiment but acting as a sort of spy with the duty of reporting on workers’ meetings, he came into contact with a socialist group called the German Worker’s Party. By his remarkable powers of oratory he soon rose to become the leader of the group.
Germans wanted more territory after the First World War. Hitler by his violent speeches convinced most Germans of his divine mission to unify them as a people and lead them to world domination. The Nazis attempted a rising in Munich against the Bavarian government in 1923 but were quelled. Hitler was arrested and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He was released after serving only eight months. While in prison he wrote his autobiography called Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
In 1930 the Nazis again rose to prominence with 107 seats in the Parliament compared to 12 seats in 1928. A political crisis led to the formation of a coalition government with Hitler as chancellor. After arresting all Communist members of the Parliament he obtained a vote conferring upon him dictatorial powers. In a short time all parties except the Nazis were forbidden, trade unions suppressed and free speech denied. On the death of the aged president Hitler became president as well as chancellor, the Fuehrer (leader) of the Reich.
In 1934, Ernest Rohm and other rivals were killed at the instance of Hitler. By breaking the power of the Brownshirts he relied on the German army for his power. In March 1935 he reintroduced military conscription in defiance of the Versailles Treaty and in 1936 he marched into the Rhineland, previously demilitarize. In 1938 he seized most of Czechoslovakia. These achievements of Hitler terrified Europe and bedazzled Germany. Hitler was raised to the position of a demi-god in the eyes of the German people.
His personal character also made him famous. He was a vegetarian and neither drank nor smoked. The Nazis declared the three chief enemies to be the Jews, the Communists and the Russian. A part of friendship was signed between Russia and Germany in August 1939 which surprised observers. This pact left Hitler free to attack Poland. He attacked Poland on 1 September 1939 thus beginning the Second World War. In 1941, he broke his pact with Russia and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. This was a fatal move. In 1941, he took over the high command of the army. And a few months later dismissed his best strategist, Halder. The generals plotted to kill him on July 20, 1944 when a bomb was carried to his conference room. He had a lucky escape but took a terrible revenge on suspected conspirators and their friends. Fifty officers and hundreds of others were executed. He was a master of diplomatic trickery and retained his almost hypnotic power over his followers right to the end of his life.
He married Eva Braun, the day before his death. She also committed suicide on the day Hitler died. He killed himself by shooting a pistol in his mouth.
No statesman has ever been so closely in touch with the irrational forces of human nature as was Adolf Hitler. He understood mass emotion and knew how to utilize it to an extraordinary degree. He identified himself with the savage passions he aroused and yet could control them. He was a consummate actor, able to change from rage to quiet at a moment’s notice, and as Alan Bullock has written, the swiftness of transition from one mood to another was startling; one moment his eyes would be filled with tears, with pleading, the next blazing with fury, or glazed with the faraway look of the visionary. He was convincing when he said, “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker”.
The Nazi regime could have been established only in Germany, whose men loved authority more than liberty. Even so, it is astonishing that the insistence of one man could induce a nation to carry out a policy which involved not only the enslavement of many thousands and their use merely as expendable material, but which also involved the degradation, torture and mass-murder of six million Jews.
Hitler’s career left behind no legend-only a sense of horror. It was great, but revolting. For other political leaders whose crimes were of the scale of their qualities, men can find some redeeming features? But Hitler was wholly evil, like Attila, a scourge. Judgments are fallible in the light of posterity. This judgment is not likely to prove so.
