Trace the early childhood and political strategies of Adolf Hitler
Answers
Hitler's early life does not hint at his future. The son of a low-level civil servant in Austria, Hitler was groomed by his harsh, authoritarian father to become a bureaucrat as well. Other than the beatings from his father, the future dictator's early childhood was relatively normal, but he became sullen and friendless in adolescence, according to Kershaw's biography. He never finished high school and, from 1905 to 1907, sponged off of his mother.
In 1907, Hitler famously failed to win admission to art school, kicking off a period in which he lived in Vienna, making grand pronouncements about art, architecture and culture, but rarely making any serious effort to secure a future in art himself. In 1909, he ended up living for a time in a flophouse for the homeless. He soon turned to supporting himself by selling cheap paintings of city scenes.
In 1913, Hitler went to Munich, fleeing Austrian authorities who'd noticed that he'd dodged mandatory military service there. It was in the German military, however, that Hitler would find direction — and a springboard into politics.
Service in World War I gave Hitler a place in the world for the first time, Kershaw wrote, even as many of his fellow soldiers viewed him as a bit of a socially awkward oddball and prude. Germany admitted defeat in the war as Hitler rested in a hospital, recovering from a mustard gas attack. He returned to his regiment in Munich, Schleunes said, where he ultimately got a job with the information unit, working in military intelligence.
It was this job that put him on a collision course with the German Workers' Party. Hitler had long held right-wing nationalist views, but in a "critical development," Schleunes said, the army sent him to attend university lectures on German history, socialism and bolshevism — from a right-wing perspective. In particular, Hitler ate up the words of a right-wing economist, Gottfried Feder, and a right-wing historian, Karl Alexander von Müller. It was Müller who noticed that Hitler had a talent for rhetoric, and his recommendations helped Hitler land a job in the intelligence unit as a spy