Fact of the Day : What award was given to Adolf Hitler during World War I? (from The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World )
Hitler, Adolf. Probably no leader in world history has been so despised, adulated, and feared as Adolf Hitler. His responsibility for endless human suffering and vast numbers of deaths is rivaled only by Stalin. During the twelve years of the Third Reich his charismatic sway enthralled millions of Germans who listened raptly to his words and followed his leadership to the very end. At the height of his power in 1942 he dominated almost all of Europe and western Russia while his armies and Schutzstaffel (SS) units moved from conquest to conquest.
To the present time he is virtually the only historical figure whose malignant notoriety has not been subject to significant revisionist interpretations.
The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler presents an exception to Newton's principle that no effect can be greater than its cause. He was a man who came out of nowhere. Until the age of thirty he showed no evidence of superior talents, no disciplined work habits, and no capacity for stable relationships.
He had little education and few coherent ideas. Before he came to power in 1933, most dismissed him as an eccentric nonentity or an unreliable extremist. Finally, he was not even a German.
Hitler was born in 1889 at Braunau am Inn in Austria. The son of an Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, Klara, who came from a peasant background, Hitler was a sullen, rebellious child. The early conflicts with his authoritarian father were soothed by his indulgent mother. When she died of cancer in 1908 he lost an anchor in the stormy seas of his adolescence.
By that time he had already abandoned the Catholic church and any pretensions to middle-class respectability.
From 1907 to 1913 he lived a vagrant life in Vienna. Rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts, he drifted aimlessly, taking odd jobs and hawking his own sketches on streets and in taverns.
Although he claimed impoverishment, it was really self-imposed; he received orphan's benefits from the state and could have lived comfortably if he had wished.
During this period Hitler picked up his basic political ideas, most of them from the seamy netherworld of lower-class Vienna. They included crackpot Aryan racism with a fanatic preoccupation with “purity of blood,” a stereotypical antisemitism set forth in violent sexual imagery, and a polyglot list of enemies: Marxism, capitalism, democracy, pacifism, the stock exchange, and the press. Suffusing all of these ideas was the dream of a Greater Germany.
Continued..
http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2012-01-10
How to cite this entry:
Richard M. Hunt "Hitler, Adolf" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 10 January 2012
