Mein Kampf and the Formation of Hitler's Ideas Essay

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Pages: 7

The dominant political figure of German history in the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, was born in a lower middle class family in the provincial Austrian town of Braunau am Inn on 20 April 1889. In 1907 Hitler applied to enter the Vienna Academy of Art but his application was rejected. After the death of his mother Klara, Hitler decided to move to Vienna. He drifted from job to job, often selling sketches or painting scenes of Old Vienna and it was a period that he himself later called the most miserable period of his life. Many of Hitler's views of the world were shaped by his experiences on the streets of Vienna and it is probable that his violent anti-Semitism dates from this time.
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<br>In 1924 Hitler was sentenced to five years in

The fundamental duty of the government in Hitler's mind was to preserve the racial purity of state for only this way can the superior race maintains it dominance over inferior races.
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<br>To Hitler, the Aryan (an earlier Indo-European race from which the Germans were descended) was the master race and the other races were inferior. To Hitler the Jew represented the absolute contrast to the Aryan. The Aryans were the creators of culture and civilization, where else the Jew was the destroyer for they had no nation or culture of their own. They were "a parasite in the body of other nations"* contaminating the purity of the blood, exploiting and corrupting the nation. Hitler saw a Jewish world conspiracy and held absolute conviction that the Jews were responsible for all the evils that had befallen Germany – defeat of in war, revolution, economic collapse and Marxism. But above all, they as a people threatened Hitler's vision of a pure racial community. In Mein Kamph he wrote: "What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood…so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted to it by the creator of the