Adolf Hitler Essay, Research Paper
Adolf Hitler, a strict and cruel man who was the cause of the Holocaust became the
leader of the Nazi party. Hitler started off as a calm child in Austria, but as he got older
he became more power hungry and powerful in Germany.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20th, 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria. His father,
Alois, worked as a customs officer on the border crossing and his mother, Klara, had
previously given birth to two other children , Gustav and Ida, but they both died in their
infancy. In 1896, Klara gave birth to Adolf?s sister, Paula, who survived longer than
Adolf. Adolf?s mother gave birth to two other children but they died very early on also.
(http://www.stokesey.demon.co.uk/wwii/ahitler.html).
Adolf?s father died in 1903 after suffering a pleural hemorrhage when Adolf was
at the age of only 14. Now that Alois was dead, Klara had to take care of Adolf and Paula
all by her self. Only four years after the death of Alois, Adolf?s mother died from the
development of terminal breast cancer. She was treated and taken care of by a Jewish
doctor named Dr. Edward Bloch, who treated the poor. (www.AdolfHitler.com).
In 1906 Adolf wanted to go to Vienna to take up art school after he saw that he
was going no where in school. During his first year in Vienna he applied for a fine arts
school but was quickly rejected. After two years in Vienna he became virtually penniless
and homeless. He then wandered the streets, sleeping on park benches and on street
sidewalks begging for money from other people. During this period was when he first
developed his prejudices for Jews, his interests in politics, and he began to learn about the
skill he had for debating.(http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html).
In May of 1913, Adolf, looking to avoid military services for Austria, left Vienna
for Munich, which is the capital of Bavaria. In Munich, Hitler went to and aunts house
who was dying, and stayed there for a little while. In January of the next year, the police
came to his door with the draft notice from the Austrian government. The paper said that
Adolf would have to go to be a year in prison and fine if he was guilty of leaving his
home land to escape military services. Adolf was then arrested on the spot. He was
brought to the Austrian Consulate and was found unfit, too weak, and incapable of
bearing arms and then went back to Munich, Germany.
(http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html).
Adolf Hitler had a great pride in Germany and in August of 1914, he volunteered
for the German army to help them fight in World War I. As Hitler heard of the first news
of the begining of World War I, he sank to his knees and thanked heaven for being alive.
(http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/homeless.htm).
After living homeless and poor for many years in Vienna, Hitler had finally found
himself a home in the trenches and on the battle field of the ?War to end all wars.? Many
teenage boys eagerly volunteered for the war, thinking it was going to be a short war, but
just long enough for them to see some action and to participate in the ?great adventure.? It
turned out to be a very long war in which millions died and an entire generation of young
men got wiped out. (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm).
During World War I, Hitler escaped death many times, but still kept volunteering
for the dangerous jobs. Adolf during most of the war was a dispatch runner, taking
messages back and forth from the command staff in the rear to the fighting units near the
battlefield. Adolf, unlike most of the other men around him during the war, didn?t
complain about the bad food or conditions, and liked to talk about art and history.
On October 7, 1916, Adolf?s luck of avoiding injury during battle has run out. He
was hit and wounded from a shell fragment. He was hospitalized in Germany and it was
his first time from being away from the front of the war in two years. After recovery,
Adolf was assigned to light duty in Munich. He did like the anti-war conspiracy going
around German civilians and blamed it all on the Jews. To get away from the anti-war
German civilians, Hitler asked to go back to the front of the war and was sent back in
March of 1917. (http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm).
In 1918, after Adolf returned to the front of the war, he was blinded by poison gas
and was in the hospital recovering from his illness. While he was recovering, he heard
about Germany?s defeat in World War I and was devastated.
In January 1919, after the wars ending, Corporal Adolf Hitler returned to Munich
and was searching for political groups for the Germans army. In September, 1919 Hitler
was investigating the German?s Worker?s Party and attended one of their meetings. W
at this meeting Adolf was aloud to stand up and talk to the party. Anton Drexler, the
leader of the party liked the speech so much that he invited Adolf to join the party. So,
Adolf decided to join. At this very moment, Adolf learned where his true talent was. He
learned that he was good at speeches. A short time after joining the party, in February
1920, Adolf took over the party and renamed it the ?Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiter-Partie? or National Socialist German Workers’ Party and adopted the red flag
with the swastika. Shortly after becoming the leader of the National Socialist German
Workers? Party, Adolf left the German army to concentrate on the party.
(www.AdolfHitler.com).
Adolf and some of the party staff came up with a party program consisting of
twenty-five points. The platform they made was presented at a public meeting on
February 24, 1920 with over 2,000 people. In this speech and the twenty-five points,
Adolf brought up the issues of the Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits,
expropriating land without compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for
Jews, and expelling those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began.
(http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html).
The Bavarian government defied the Weimer republic. Adolf endorsed the fall of
the Weimer republic and declared at a public rally on October 30, 1923 that he was ready
to march into Berlin and get the communist and Jews out of the government. On
November 8th, 1923, Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and declared a revolution.
The next day he lead 2,000 armed men in an attempt to take over the Bavarian
government but was stooped by the police, 12 men were killed in the fighting, Adolf
broke his arm, and was arrested and sentenced to five years in Landsberg. (The Concise
Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia)
Of his five year sentence in jail, Adolf served only nine months. During prison,
Adolf spent his time writing the first volume of Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf was partly an
autobiography. The book also showed, in detail, his views of the future of the German
people. The worst part of the book, Adolf saved for the Jews. In this part he blamed the
Jews for democracy, communism, and internationalism. He also blamed the defeat in
World War I on the Jews. He stated that Jews were the German?s nation true enemy and
that they were not a race but and anti-race.
(http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm).
A second volume of Mein Kampf was published in 1927 which included the
history of the Nazi party, and also a primer on how to get political power, and how to
build a political organization. Mein Kampf also stated that the Jews wanted to take over
the world and the only way to stop them is to eliminate them. The book struck the
German?s that it was their destiny to dominate the world. The book sold over five million
copies by the outbreak of World War II.
(http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html)
After being imprisoned, Adolf decided to get power with words rather than with
force. He now began speaking to mass numbers of people and told them to resist the
influences of the Jews and of communism and to build and empire that would rise to
power and rule the world for 1,000 years. (www.Adolfhitler.com)
Hitler?s Nazi party captured 18% of the popular vote in the 1930 elections, and in
1932 Adolf ran for president and got 30% of the popular vote, and in 1933 Hitler was
named chancellor of Germany in exchange for his sapport.
In 1934, the current dictator Hindenburg had died and now Hitler had taken that
position. Now that he was in this position he was free of other political parties and of
government institutions. As soon as he became dictator he began building the army for
war, and by 1937 he was confident enough to put his master plan into action, which was
world domination. He called together his top military aides and stated the plan to them
and whomever disagreed with the plan was dismissed from the meeting.
(http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm).
On September 1,1939 Hitler launches the war by invading Poland and that making
France and England declare war on Germany. Hitler used the war tactic called a
Blitzkrieg, otherwise known as a lighting war. Using this tactic, Hitler swept through
most of Western Europe.
In 1939 Hitler ignored a non-aggression pact he had signed with the Soviet Union.
Hitler was winning battles in many place until the United States entered the war on the
Allies side in December, 1941. The Allies had started bombing Germany and Italy
(Germany?s biggest allied force). Italy had fallen out of the war and on to the Allies side
in 1944 and German cities were being destroyed terribly.