We know for sure that he did not suck anti-Semitism through his mother's milk. Did he hate the Jews because he was not admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts? Did he succumb to his schoolmates who were pissing for Jews? Or maybe he was blinded by the peror of political mentors? When did the leader of the Third Reich become anti-Semite?
Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, his real name was Schicklgruber - as a child born out of wedlock he bore the surname of his mother. It wasn't until the age of 40 that Alois got the surname Hitler (his mother's husband). So who was Alois's father and Adolf Hitler's grandfather? Speculation never ran out - an investigation commissioned before the war by the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss revealed that the dictator's grandmother became pregnant while working for the extremely influential Baron Solomon Mayer Rothschild, after which she was fired.
Another version was presented after the war, in the shadow of the gallows, by the otherwise well-informed Hans Frank:
Cook Schicklgrober - Adolf Hitler's grandmother - served at home with a Jewish family named Frankenberger when she gave birth to the baby. And this Frankenberger, from the birth of the child until the age of 14, paid this Schicklgrober maintenance for his son. The whole story was very unpleasant indeed .
However, Peter Longerich, the author of a new, monumental biography of Hitler, is skeptical about these revelations:
However persistently explored this thesis, it lacks any foundation. However, it is easy to understand that Hitler was not interested in spreading the history of his family because of this and other scandalous stories drawn after another. .
Without resolving the matter, it must be indisputably assumed that the persistent rumors that Hitler's father was a "Jewish bastard" could later have had a significant impact on the demons born in young Adolf's mind.
Is that Hitler's grandfather? Very doubtful. Baron Salomon Meyer Rothschild, Jewish banker, on a lithograph by Josef Kriehuber from 1839.
School debuts
In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler clearly emphasizes that the home was dominated by cosmopolitan my father's views, and anti-Semitism was absolutely unthinkable. The story of the "noble Jew" - Eduard Bloch, who looked after Adolf Hitler's mother, Klara, is well known and gained his lifelong respect and gratitude (in 1940 he even allowed him to emigrate). However, as is often the case, when parents try hard to protect their children from errors and toxic ideas, school also has a destructive role to play.
This was also the case with the young Hitler, who encountered the first adherents of Judaism in the real school in Linz. The subject of their difference must have appeared in the political talks of rebellious teenagers - at the age of 14, the future dictator of the Third Reich first met the word Jew which aroused in him, as he recalled, "a slight aversion and an unpleasant feeling" .
Cosmopolitan or Jewish Vienna
The breakthrough in Hitler's anti-Semitic crusade was, however, only the Vienna period, which we know firsthand, thanks to the memories of his friend - August Kubizek. The city, apparently global and wealthy, presented a completely different picture on closer inspection. As Peter Longerich writes in his book Hitler. Biography ":
brutal social inequalities and poverty of the masses of the population were beating in the eyes (...), but also deeply rooted national conflicts of the monarchy, even tangible in multi-ethnic Vienna.
Hitler, aggressive by nature, enters his first conflicts here:he was irritated by the behavior of Jews in the canteen he himself attended, and then he had an unpleasant relationship with a Jewish peddler - a beggar. He was also irritated by the Jewish audience at the opera, but despite the Viennese anti-Semites on duty, he defended the staging of Wagner's works under the baton of the Jew Gustav Mahler - this is another, after Eduard Bloch, example of Hitler's inconsistency.
Despite his irritation to the Jewish audience, Hitler defended the performances of Wagner's works under the baton of the Jewish composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (pictured in the above photo by Moritz Nähr in 1907).
When reluctance turns into politics
These first scratches began to intensify along with the growing interest of Adolf Hitler in politics. His first teachers - Georg Schönerer, leader of the all-German party, and Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna - were militant anti-Semites.
Of course, Hitler would never admit that someone had a decisive influence on his views. In Mein Kampf thus describes his twenty-year "maturation" to anti-Semitism in the process of "persistent struggle" , your "most difficult transformation" of .
For example, Lueger's anti-Semitism was accused of Christian origins, which made him "apparent anti-Semitism" , who do not understand its essential, racial aspect. Hitler began to associate Jews at this stage with "dirt", both corporeal and moral, polluting German art, literature, theater, music and the press.
Hitler associated Jews with bodily and moral dirt. The photo shows representatives of the orthodox community in Vienna in 1915.
Anti-Semitism explains the world
As Peter Longerich notes, it is difficult not to pay attention at this point to the contradiction between Hitler's declared, aggressive anti-Semitism, and the not-so-rare personal contacts of the future Fuhrer with Jews. The author of Hitler's new biography notes:
( …). Bowing to the ideology propagated by Schönerer, Hitler saw a hostile phalanx in front of him. The monarchy, the state apparatus, the aristocracy, the parliament, the Catholic Church, the Slavs, Jews and the Marxist workers movement formed an ominous coalition in his view (...) his anti-Semitism was one of the hostile "anti-" in him.Undoubtedly, of all the Nazi "anti-" hatred of Jews, in his paranoid mind, he had the greatest potential to explain the whole evil of the world, hence the importance of anti-Semitism in his worldview continued to grow until the tragic end ...
Jewish War Saboteurs
The next stage in the formation of Hitler's political views was the years of World War I. The radicalizing corporal in the last years of the conflict begins to complain intensively about the "Jewish roofers" in the back of the front and the "war speculators" , who sabotage the Germanic war effort. It is worth emphasizing, however, that such stereotypes were very common then, as before in Vienna.
Hitler's complaints against the Jews were therefore in line with a general social trend and were nothing special. Adolf Hitler was certainly not alone in his view that the military defeat was brought to Germany by the coalition of socialists and Jews.
Anti-Semitic Training for Soldiers
After the war, in the strongly left-wing Bavaria, the command of the Munich garrison hired Hitler to conduct political training for returning from captivity German prisoners in order to prevent their revolutionary radicalization. This was the moment when we can unequivocally say that Hitler's anti-Semitism was clearly ahead of the general public. The organizers of the training, agreeing on the merits with the speaker's arguments, also pointed out that Hitler's speech was such a radical "hitting on Jews" that it might not be " well welcomed ”.
Hitler's views on Jews were radicalized during World War I. In this photo from 1914, Adolf is seated first from the right.
Letter to a friend
When a student named Gemlich asked to be further enlightened on the "Jewish question," Hitler wrote him a letter advising him against "purely emotional" anti-Semitism, advising a rather deliberate, political movement based on in-depth knowledge of the facts about this hostile for the Germans, the race (and not just the religious community). As Hitler concluded with the expression:
emotional anti-Semitism there are pogroms, and rational anti-Semitism it must lead to the planned, statutory suppression and abolition of Jewish privileges and its ultimate goal is absolutely the removal of Jews altogether .
In Hitler's statements from this period, one can clearly see the features of pseudoscientific, racist anti-Semitism, which will become the basis of the Third Reich system. As Peter Longerich, the future dictator summarizes in the new biography of Hitler:
has come to believe that the dual threat of "Jewish Bolshevism" and "Jewish capitalism" hangs not only over the existing social order and the German people, but over all civilized humanity - and it was, in his distorted perception, an apocalyptic threat. In this way, anti-Semitism moved from the margins to the very center of his worldview.
By evolution, Hitler changed from a typical anti-Semite of his era into the man responsible for the greatest genocide in history. Photo from the Parteitag in Nuremberg in 1927.
A man of his time and place
When observing the process of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic radicalization, it is most fascinating to notice how much he was a stereotypical product of his time and the prevailing atmosphere at that time. Hitler's attitude towards Jews did not differ much from the average social orientation for a very long time.
The turning point in which anti-Semitism became a hermeneutical perpetual motion machine frustrated by the failure of the corporal, was the lost war. The Jewish conspiracy - by both the great capitalists and the Bolshevik revolutionists - then gained in Adolf Hitler's mind the status of the guiding principle explaining the source of all the misfortunes of the German people and European civilization. Twenty years later, his obsession led to the greatest genocide in the history of the world.
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