Adold Hitler

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.

Abraham Lincoln

He was born on 12 February 1809 in a log cabin on a barren farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, USA. His father Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter. His mother Nancy died when Abraham was nine. His father married again Sarah, the widow of one Mr. Johnston, whom he had courted vainly before his first marriage. In 1861 Abraham’s father settled on the Indiana shore near which village Gentryville soon sprang up. His father was of a peacable and inoffensive temper but on great provocation could turn to a bully with surprising and dire consequences. Abraham could not visit is father on his deathbed and had written to him that an interview, it were possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both of them. Abraham confessed that he owed everything that he was to his mother.

As an older child he had taken charge of a ferry boat and took a voyage in a cargo boat with two mates down by river to New Orleans. His stepmother encouraged him in his early studies. He had a stepbrother, John Johnston. Abraham thought early that he was odd. He was nearly six foot four when he was nineteen. He had an ungainly figure but had great muscular strength. He shot a turkey when he was eight and never shot afterwards at all. With intermittent schooling between his eighth and fifteenth birthdays he taught himself to read, write and do sums. At New Orleans he saw Negroes being auctioned, chained, maltreated and whipped.

His life was austere and he had a shy reverence for womanhood. In 1831, at the age of twenty-two he settled at Salem and became a clerk. He purchased a store on credit but the business failed. He became a surveyor of the country and then a postmaster. In 1834 he became a candidate for the Illinois Legislature and was elected at the age of 25. He contemplated great future reforms-abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy.

He fell in love with Miss. Ann Rutledge of exquisite beauty in 1833. After her engagement to Lincoln, she fell seriously ill and died in 1835 when Lincoln was twenty-six. On 4 November 1842, when Lincoln was nearly thirty-three, he remarried; Mrs. Lincoln had a high temper. She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and resolution.

Lincoln was a member of the House of Representatives for two years in 1847. He remained a member of the Illinois Legislature from 1834 to 1842. At this time Lincoln was argumentative. He did not drink, smoke or chew. In 1843, Baker was preferred to him in his constituency. He went into partnership in 1844 with the young lawyer Mr. Wilhaim Herndon. He now devoted all his energy to his law practice. Lincoln left political life in 1849 to return again in 1854 at a sudden call.

From 1854 onwards Lincoln was continuously occupied at public meetings, in correspondence, in secret consultation with those who looked to him for advice, with the sole aim of strengthening the Republican movement in his own state of Illinois. He worked unselfishly. In 1858 he fought elections against the Democrat Doughlas for Illinois. At that time the Republican Party had taken the stand that slavery was fundamentally wrong. Lincoln desired that slavery should not spread further in the Territories under the Union. Lincoln foresaw gradual abolition of slavery and was prepared to wait for it. He lost the election to Douglas. When in 1859 it was suggested to him to become the nominee for Presidentship he had said, “I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” Lincoln was good-natured and could hardly say “no” to anybody. Just after Lincoln was elected as President in November 1860 the Southern States rebelled to secede from the Union. The Southern states were in favor of continuing with slavery. They formed a Confederacy and wanted it to be recognized by Washington and demanded the peaceful surrender of forts and the like within its border. For liberating Fort Sumter additional forces were demanded but Lincoln sent instead additional provisions. A civil war broke out between the Northern and the Southern states. The North at first expected an easy victory but disappointment came soon and this state continued for long.

Lincoln as President issued a proclamation calling upon the Militia of the several states to furnish 75,000 men for the service of the United States. In the autumn of 1861, North and South had split into something like two countries. The President was expected to patronize those who had worked for the party with various offices under the Government and Lincoln spent a great deal of time consulting local Senators and Representatives of his own party on this.

Due to the civil war, loss and suffering was caused to England from interruption of trade and from suspension of cotton supplies by the blockade. Lincoln was for the restoration of the union absolutely and without compromise.

In 1862 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that on 1^st January 1863, slaves were to be forever free. In December 1862, Lincoln submitted to Congress a comprehensive policy for dealing with slavery justly and finally. In 1864 the representatives of Maryland passed an amendment to the state Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation.

Missouri followed Maryland’s example in January 1865. The Republican Convention of 1864 chose again Lincoln as its candidate for Presidency. In January 1865 the Resolution to abolish slavery once for all throughout America through a constitutional amendment was passed by two-thirds majority. On 18 December 1865 the requisite majority of states had passed this constitutional amendment. The Conscription Law was enacted to raise soldiers for the Army. At the beginning of 1864 the end of the Civil War seemed near. He was sworn in as President in 1865 for a second term.

On 14 April 1865, the day of Good Friday, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln drove together and went to the theatre. The play was Our American Cousin. Sometime after 10 o’clock, a shot was heard and Abraham Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, escaped. At 7:22 on the morning of 15 April 1865 he died at the age of fifty-six.