Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the founder and leader of the Nazi Party and the most influential voice in the organization, implementation and execution of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of six million European Jews and millions of other non-aryans.
Hitler was the Head of State, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and guiding spirit, or fuhrer, of Germany's Third Reich from 1933 to 1945.
Born
in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889, Hitler was the son of a
fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, a
young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the backwoods of lower Austria. The
young Hitler was a resentful, discontented child. Moody, lazy, of unstable
temperament, he was deeply hostile towards his strict, authoritarian father and
strongly attached to his indulgent, hard-working mother, whose death from
cancer in December 1908 was a shattering blow to the adolescent Hitler.
After
spending four years in the Realschule in Linz, he left school at the age of
sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter. In October 1907, the provincial,
middle-class boy left home for Vienna, where he was to remain
until 1913 leading a bohemian, vagabond existence. Embittered at his rejection
by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, he was to spend "five years of
misery and woe" in Vienna as he later recalled, adopting a view of life
which changed very little in the ensuing years, shaped as it was by a
pathological hatred of Jews and Marxists, liberalism and the cosmopolitan
Habsburg monarchy.
Existing
from hand to mouth on occasional odd jobs and the hawking of sketches in low
taverns, the young Hitler compensated for the frustrations of a lonely
bachelor's life in miserable male hostels by political harangues in cheap cafes
to anyone who would listen and indulging in grandiose dreams of a Greater
Germany.
In
Vienna he acquired his first education in politics by studying the demagogic
techniques of the popular Christian-social Mayor, Karl Lueger, and picked up
the stereotyped, obsessive anti-Semitism with its brutal, violent sexual connotations and
concern with the "purity of blood" that remained with him to the end
of his career. From crackpot racial theorists like the defrocked monk, Lanz von
Liebenfels, and the Austrian Pan-German leader, Georg von Schoenerer, the young
Hitler learned to discern in the "Eternal Jew" the symbol and cause
of all chaos, corruption and destruction in culture, politics and the economy.
The press, prostitution, syphilis, capitalism, Marxism, democracy and
pacifism--all were so many means which "the Jew" exploited in his
conspiracy to undermine the German nation and the purity of the creative Aryan
race.
On
April 29, 1945, he married his mistress Eva Braun and dictated his final political testament, concluding with the same
monotonous, obsessive fixation that had guided his career from the beginning:
"Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to
scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the
universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry."
The
following day Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself through the mouth with
a pistol. His body was carried into the garden of the Reich Chancellery by
aides, covered with petrol and burned along with that of Eva Braun. This final, macabre act
of self-destruction appropriately symbolized the career of a political leader
whose main legacy to Europe was the ruin of its civilization and the senseless
sacrifice of human life for the sake of power and his own commitment to the
bestial nonsense of National Socialist race mythology. With his death nothing
was left of the "Greater Germanic Reich," of the tyrannical power
structure and ideological system which had devastated Europe during the twelve
years of his totalitarian rule.
By : Faizan Tariq
By : Faizan Tariq
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