Hitler’s Rise to Power
Hitler started out his life with a childhood that wasn’t our idea of a “good” childhood. He grew up rarely a father. And when he did have a father he was very strict and harsh. His older brother often took most of his father’s violence and rage. Until one day he ran away so he never had to see his father again. Which meant Adolf (the second child now at age 13) was now first in line to be the father’s punching bag. After Adolf’s father’s death, he tried to follow his dream as an artist, as his father would not let him. He took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of Arts, as his mother dies of breast cancer. He did not get in. In 1908 Adolf’s mother died. He tried once again after moving to Vienna, to get in to the academy. Once again he failed. He lived in homeless shelters for quite a while after that. The little family he had left had pushed him to join the civil service. And after his years in homeless shelters, he knew real poverty as all his sources of income had dried up. The winter of 1909 had started to get better for him. His Aunt gave him a water color paint set. And he painted watercolor paintings of Vienna for a business partner. Which provided enough of an income for him to live off of. He also worked with Jews during that time. After World War 1 Hitler had started to adopt “anti-Semitic” ideology. Hitler was genuinely influenced in Vienna by two political movements. The first was the German racist nationalism propagated by the Upper Austrian Pan-German politician Georg von Schönerer. The second key influence was that of Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to his death in 1910. Still in power when Hitler arrived in Vienna, Lueger promoted an anti-Semitism that was more practical and organizational than ideological. Nevertheless, it reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes and cast Jews as enemies of the German middle and lower classes. Finally, unlike Schönerer, who was always more comfortable with the elitist nationalism of the student fraternities, Lueger was comfortable with big city crowds and knew how to channel their protest into political gain. Hitler drew his ideology in large part from Schönerer, but his strategy and tactics from Lueger.
As a veteran of World War I, he decided to join the German Worker’s Party in 1919. It didn’t take him long to move through the ranks, and as of 1921 he was leading his political party. However, due to a failed coup d’état in 1923 he was imprisoned. It was during this time that he had the opportunity to write his book called ‘Mein Kampf ‘– when translated means ‘My Struggle’. During 1924 he was released from jail, and began to gain public attention yet again. And still tried to pursue his life as a dictator. He was soon to succeed. By 1933 he was appointed Germany’s Chancellor, and it didn’t take him long to transform the Weimar Republic into the more aggressive Third Reich. The Third Reich was based on Nazism, and featured a dictatorship with one party that was both autocratic and totalitarian.
The truth is that the Adolf Hitler and Nazi rise to power movement happened quickly, and this is mostly because Germany’s mood was bleak. The loss of World War I was still sharp on many minds, and the economic depression was in full effect. This made way for a spellbindingly excellent speaker to begin attracting large groups of people who were eager for change in their country. These people never could have seen what was going to