How did Hitler's childhood affect his rule in Germany ?
Answers
This April 20 marks the 127th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler, the unremarkable artist who would rise to become the dictator of Germany and the instigator of the Holocaust.
Given the devastation left in Hitler's wake, a major question for historians of the 20th century has been how Hitler captured the German imagination and came to power. He was not, as a person, a charismatic character; biographer Ian Kershaw described him as an "empty vessel outside his political life." He had few genuine friends, an overinflated view of his own intellect and no inborn connections to propel him to the top.
"He comes, obviously, from nowhere, sort of a lower-middle-class family in Austria," said Karl Schleunes, author of "The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39" (University of Illinois Press, 1970), who is working on a new book on 1930s Germany. Nor did Hitler have especially original ideas; the German Workers' Party he joined in 1919, which would become the Nazi Party under his leadership, was just one of approximately 70 right-wing groups in Germany after World War I, Kershaw wrote in the biography "Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998).
But in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, it was Hitler's group that would gain dominance