The extremities of human nature never fail to amaze us. Good and evil, anger and passivity, love and hate- they all are woven into the fabric of our humanness. But of all the extremes, evil bewilders us the most, and sometimes, overpowered by fits of sanctimoniousness and engulfed by our ideologies, we unleash immense horror upon fellow human beings. Such is the story of Adolf Hitler. He was a man who was born to achieve greatness; maybe not for the best of reasons, but greatness indeed.
Baby Adolf
Born on April 20th, 1889, Adolf was Alios and Klara Hitler’s fourth of six children. He grew up on the German-Austrian border with his family. He had regular clashes with his father who would beat him, but was deeply attached to his mother who always sought to reason with him with love. Hitler wanted to be an artist when he was young and made attempts to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. The accounts of his younger sister Paula and his boyhood friend August Kubizek reveal that since his early years Adolf showed characteristics that would become an inherent part of his personality when he became the Fuhrer, like a venomous temper, intolerance for those who disagreed with him, inability to establish ordinary human relationships, hatred towards the Jews, and a tendency towards escapism.
The passing away of his mother when he was nineteen disturbed him, after which he moved from Vienna to Germany. For some time, he worked menial jobs and lived in a homeless shelter. When World War I started, Hitler volunteered to fight in the War and was twice decorated for bravery. Germany lost the War and by imposition of the Treaty of Versailles, was made to accept the blame of starting the war and pay a sum of 132 billion marks. This left the German economy in tatters. It was at this point of time that Hitler joined the Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers Party. It called for the Germans of the world to unite into one nation and to abolish the Treaty of Versailles. Dietrich Eckart became Hitler’s mentor and in 1921, Hitler became the leader of the Party which gained huge membership due to his powerful oratory. In 1923, Hitler attempted a ‘Benito Mussolini style’ Campaign to Munich with the objective of a coup de etat which came to be known as Beer Hall Putsch. He was arrested on the charges of high treason, but was released by the Bavarian Supreme Court even before had served one year in prison.
Hitler became the saviour of Germany
While imprisoned, he wrote his autobiography Mein Kampf (seemingly less of an autobiography and more of a collection of his political views), which included blaming the Jews for all the problems of the world including democracy, capitalism and communism. Once Hitler was out of prison, the rebuilding of the Nazi Party was in order. Hitler’s oratory appealed to the German public because of his ability to provoke their offended national pride. When the worldwide recession hit Germany in 1930, Hitler began to openly propagate his ideas of ridding the nation of Jews and communists. The Nazi Party, with Hitler as its head won the national elections in 1932 and in 1933 Hitler was made the Chancellor of Germany and established a Nazi state known as “Third Reich”. He was now portrayed as the savior of Germany from the economic depression, the Versailles treaty, communism and other “undesirable” minorities. His time saw the greatest industrial expansions, civil improvements and infrastructure development that Germany had ever seen, so much so that there was nearly full employment in the economy. This was also the time when Hitler set out making new alliances with nations such as Italy and Japan.
The Holocaust
Hitler, during this time also unleashed diabolical malevolence upon the nation known as the Holocaust, also called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, through which he put his anti-Semitic thoughts into actions and pursued his dream of a racially pure nation. Jews, whom he alluded to as the “anti-race”, were banished from government jobs, universities and their shops were boycotted. The notorious Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 and Jews were declared as German “subjects” rather than citizens. A roundup of Jews with Polish citizenship was also enacted in 1938. Concentration camps were established and its first victims were children with developmental disabilities. The inmates of the Concentration Camps were not only Jews and communists, but included ethnic Poles, Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, persons with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other political and religious opponents. Inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or mistreatment. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in Eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were confined in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were systematically killed in gas chambers. This genocide took approx 6 million lives.
World War II between the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) and the Allied powers from 1942 to 1944 saw the defeat of the Axis powers. In 1944, as part of Operation Valkyrie, Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in Hitler’s headquarters but Hitler narrowly escaped death and obliterated the resistance. Hitler had an affair with Eva Braun for sixteen years, which was kept shrouded such that even some his intimate advisors did not know about her. In 1945, they married and then committed suicide. Hitler shot himself in the head while simultaneously biting into a capsule of cyanide.
Though he let loose untold grief upon people, one cannot deny the genius of Hitler, or the brilliance of his oratory or the charisma that he exuded. Though we are impulsively compelled to condemn the Holocaust with utmost vehemence, we must admire the perseverance of one man who has become one of the most feared people in history.
