Adolph Hitler was a prominent politician in the German history of the twentieth century. He was born in the provincial Austrian town of Braunau in 1889. After the death of his mother in 1907, Hitler moved to the city of Vienna, where he hoped to join the Art Academy. He did not succeed in securing a place at the academy, and so he spent most of his time doing various jobs especially selling sketches and paintings of Vienna. He referred to this as the most miserable phase of his life. He displayed a personality with temperamental issues, and often he burst out with rage, especially if corrected by his colleagues. Hitler had a lot of interest in reading newspapers, political articles, and many other German histories and mythology books. His condition of languishing in poverty extremely influenced him to take up a ruthless and cruel state of mind.
Historians have generally argued that he suffered psychological distress in his childhood. At the age of 21, he concentrated his interest on the politics of Vienna. He witnessed protest marches by workers and admired the way they used fear and propaganda as political weapons in their rallies. In Vienna, he developed a hate passion for the multicultural Austrian empire after studying Jewish and distinguished them from the rest of humanity. He chose to become an anti-Semite. He later moved to Munich, where he volunteered to the German government during the Second World War. After the war, he joined the German Workers Party in 1919, and this marked his entry into politics. In 1920 the Nazi party was formed, and Hitler demanded the chairman position with dictatorial powers. This was granted to him due to his great influence on the party.
In 1993 Hitler attempted to overthrow the German Bavarian government and make himself the new leader using his Nazi party. Upon failure of the Nazi revolution, Hitler was arrested and charged guilty of treason. He was sentenced to five years in jail. In his private cell of the old fortress at lands berg, he continued expressing his political ideas, and this gave birth to his book,” Mein Kampf.”
In this book, Hitler outlines his political and racial ideas, which later came into reality in his reign after acquiring power. Hitler categorized humans based on their physical appearance and whether they established higher and lower orders. He gave the highest rank to the German man with fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. He called this type of person an” Aryan,” who he placed as a supreme human or a master race. Aryan, in this case, referred to the noble or the most honored German man. Having expressed his thoughts of supreme humans, he discussed the less supreme humans who he referred to as the racially inferior. This position was assigned to the Jews and the slaves, who were the Czechs, Poles, and Russians.
In Mein Kampf, he stated that the Nazi philosophy had no place for equality of races, and with respect to their differences, the philosophy recognized races of higher value and those of lesser value. In accordance with the eternal will that dominated the universe, Hitler placed Nazis as obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker. The Aryans, according to Hitler, were also culturally superior to other races. He argued that the first cultures which became the first technical instruments in service of developing culture arose in places where the Aryans lived. He also stated that the people of lesser value actually benefited from being conquered since they gained a lot of experience from being in contact with the Aryans. This, however, was only possible if the Aryans remained the masters and did not intermarry with the inferior people. He blamed the Jews for conspiring to prevent the superior race from holding its position as rulers of the world by ruining its cultural and racial purity. He accused the Jews of forming governments in which the Aryans came to believe in equality and consequently losing on its racial superiority. He described the struggle of the world as a continued racial, cultural, and political battle between the Aryans and the Jews. In this respect, he accused the Jews of internationally conspiring to take charge of global finances, control of the press, the invention of liberal democracy, Marxism, prostitution, and taking advantage of culture to disrupt harmony. In his entire book, Hitler despised the Jews and used very harsh words to refer to them.
“Hitler refers to Jews as parasites, liars, dirty, crafty, sly, wily, and clever, without any true culture, a sponger, a middleman, a maggot, eternal bloodsuckers, repulsive, unscrupulous, monsters, foreign, menace, bloodthirsty, avaricious, the destroyer of Aryan humanity, and the mortal enemy of Aryan humanity…”
Hitler’s idea of competition between Jews and Aryans turned out to be a great belief in Nazi and was even taught to the children. This racial attitude towards the Jews influenced the Germans to get rid of the Jewish race. The book further defends the military conquests by Hitler and Germans, explaining that the Germans who were deemed as the masters had a right to acquire more land for themselves. He Cleary states that the land to the east of Germany (Russia) would be acquired by force. The slaves who had occupied the land were either to be removed, eliminated, or enslaved, and the land used to cultivate food and room for the expansion of the growing Aryans population. This was to be achieved only after the Germans defeated France in order to gain the dominion of the western borders. He traces the defeat of the First World War to the political treachery in Germany and largely blames the Jewish conspiracy. Though the book did not get a good command of the market after its release, it was later read by millions of people, but it did not trigger any thoughts of what lay in the future.
Hitler was released in late 1924, having had a clear thought of his actions in the Nazi revolution. He regretted his attempt to overthrow the democratic government without the support of the established institutions and the German Army. He decided to forgo an armed coup to acquire power and followed a slow and lawful process in his ambitions. He decided to reorganize the Nazi party like a government in preparation for taking up power.10This was not easy since the Nazi party and its paper had been banned and its members scattered. In 1925, he managed to convince the then Prime minister to lift the ban and published an article of a new beginning in the Volkischer Beobachter paper.
In 1929, Germany suffered the great depression owing to its reliance on foreign capital. This made it very easy for Hitler, an eloquent public speaker, to make it for his Nazi party in the 1930 September elections.
In the wake of Hitler’s victory, his attitude towards the Jewish took the ground as the Nazi storm troopers celebrated the victory by destroying the Jewish shops, restaurants, and department stores. In 1932 Germans went into a presidential election, and Hitler decided to run for the post against President Hindenburg, but he did not succeed. In 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, and he became very devoted to bringing down the German democratic republic in order to end democracy.He did not have any intentions to abide by the democratic rules but used his position as a stepping stone to dictatorial power and achieved his Nazi revolution. He increased the number of the Nazi members in the Reichstag in order to make it easy to pass his preferred laws legally. With time Hitler managed to use the president to turn things around, including the army, to his favor, and slowly, they managed to take over the states throughout Germany.
The political enemies of the Nazi’s were arrested and subjected to harsh conditions and torture. This marked the beginning of Hitler’s dictatorial power. Anyone who did not conform to his rules or talked negatively was arrested and subjected to torture. Hitler later came up with an act,” Law for Removing the Distress of the people and the Reich.”
The act was voted in, thereby marking the end of democracy in Germany and the legal establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship. In his law, it was clear that the state was supreme to all individuals. All the individuals, on the other hand, were subordinate servants of the state and were to remain obedient to the Fuhrer. Those who disagreed were disposed of. All the German schools were obligated to educate the youths for the service of the Volk and the state in the national socialist spirit. The national socialist teachers taught the Nazi propaganda as true and forced students to recite them.
In response to his tough measures, the Bureaucrats, industrialists, and intellectual persons came out to support him. After the enabling of the act, a national boycott of Jewish shops and department stores was held by the Nazi’s following the orders of one minister Joseph Goebbels. Tracing from his book, Hitler had no place for the Jews and regarded them as the “Eternal enemies.” His thoughts and attitude towards the Jewish since his youth age was well executed in action during his dictatorial regime. The boycott was followed by the enacting of laws that denied the Jewish their rights. In his reign, there were 400 laws and decrees that were directed to the Jews only. The Jewish academies and artistic communities in German cities were taken away from them, following the rules, regulations, restrictions, prohibitions, and bans that were enacted against them. It reached to heights of prohibiting intermarriages and denial of personal freedom. The Germans and the Jews, in his error, lived very frustrating regimes of power.
Hitler was devoted to reviving the Germanic spirit alongside its racial and military qualities and putting an end to Jewish intellectualism. Before his regime, Germany was recognized for its scientific innovation, but this quickly diminished under Hitler. Many intellectuals, such as professors, were forced to forgo their intellectuality and took oaths of the Nazi of intelligence.
Hitler later managed to take over Austria and Czechoslovakia forcefully by manipulating the leaders and issuing death threats. This is also expressed in Mein Kampf, where he says that the supreme had a right to acquire more land by force for its expanding population; in conclusion, we find that the ideas on race and culture that Hitler had expressed in his book came into reality when he gained power. His idea that races were not equal and that only the supreme Germans had power came to be practiced in his regime. He removed all the Jewish intelligence in favor of his Nazi propaganda. He forced all other individuals who he regarded as inferior to conform to his ideologies or face execution. Hitler remains a symbol of the evil leaders in the history of politics and a great threat to democracy. He was a leader who could not cope with defeat but instead blamed his counterparts for betrayal. His regime depicted the dangers of nationalism, the consequences of racism, and the significance of democracy. Hitler committed suicide in 1945 by shooting himself.
Bibliography
Davidson, E. The Making of Adolf Hitler. Macmillan Pub. Co 1977 p 112-125.
Maser, W. Hitler: legend, myth & reality. Harper & Row. 1973 p 24-46.