Revulsion is epitomized by Adolf Hitler – the racist megalomaniac who plunged the world into a devastating war a second time, and the monster architect of the Holocaust which saw millions of Jews murdered mainly in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and many more. His hands are indelibly stained with the blood of millions of innocents killed in the devastation of the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust. But Hitler was not born a brutal tyrant, he became one.
His was a case of a mistaken identity by his adopted country. The man they elected into power by popular vote as the saviour of the nation, was the very man who lead the country and its people to ruin on account of achieving his flawed desire of exterminating the Jews. Though he portrayed himself as the knight in shining armor ready to give his life for his beloved country, he had neither love for the land; nor its people – only the fanatical desire to achieve his end, in which he used the gullibility of the countrymen to the maximum. Conniving was his trademark. None could have been farther removed from actuality than the man his propagandists reeled out.
His beginnings were ordinary if not humble. Born April 20, 1889, to Austrian parents in a small town on the Austrian-German border, his father’s dominance and short temper cost him a psychological withdrawal in the secondary school. He left school at 16 with no qualification. Hitler dreamt of a career as an artist. After the death of his parents he moved to Vienna and eked out a Bohemian life. Hitler’s ideology was shaped by the anti-Semitic politics of the then Vienna’s Mayor Karl Lueger he was exposed to during his late teens. He hated the multi-ethnic, multi-religious composition of Austria’s ruling empire.
Though he moved to Munich in 1913, determined to avoid military service for the Austrian empire, soon he found his purpose in war. When the world plunged into war in 1914, keen to prove his loyalty to his adopted country he soon enlisted. It won him wounds as well as two medals for bravery. However, Germany’s surrender in 1919 enraged him and he fallaciously saw it as the betrayal by Jews and socialists at home.
Chance sparked political ambition in him, soon fuelled by deceit. Though Hitler was sent to report on an emerging far-right group, the German Workers’ Party, while on duty in the German Army, instead, he joined it and quickly rose through the ranks using his oratory skill and charisma. He engaged in propaganda tactics to publicise his meetings, – sending out party supporters in trucks with swastikas to leaflet the area and make their presence felt. Wielding total control of the party, was his objective. Though the party founder Anton Drexler was cautious of the fact; a single move of the party in the wrong direction – namely forming an alliance with a socialist group – put the party reins in Hitler’s hands. He renamed it the Nazi Party. Bloodthirsty, Hitler chose armed conflict to gain power.
While the world was drowning in an economic depression, Germany plunged into debt, unemployment and chaos. Now a German citizen, Hitler capitalized on the misery and suffering of its people. He led the Nazis to become the largest party in Germany with over 37% of the popular vote in the elections of July 1932. Then German President von Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor (or the head of government) in January 1933.
Hitler quickly consolidated his position. Political parties, organisations and unions unassociated with the Nazis were soon disbanded. Nazism was the only political ideology allowed in the country. Ruthless, annihilation was his method of getting rid of foe and friend alike, when it suited him. Hitler arranged for the assassination of many hundreds of the very men who put him in the seat of power as he purged the Nazi Party one June night in 1934. President Hindenburg’s death a few months later brought Army support for Hitler who was elevated to Führer the ultimate leader.
He was now the Reich President (head of state), Reich Chancellor (head of government), and Fuehrer (the ultimate head of the Nazi party). According to the “Fuehrer principle,” Hitler stood outside the legal state and determined matters of policy himself. He was now in total control. The Nazi state (or the Third Reich) unleashed its full force. Set for pogrom the killer wheels of Germany started turning along with the spools of his propaganda.
Extensive propaganda was used to spread the regime’s goals and ideals. Hitler was a good propagandist, “The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. He exploited people’s emotions to the maximum, especially, with the help of skilled people like Goebbels. His larger than life portrayal was that of a selfless man, working for the greater good, the shining knight against the elites and protector of the working class who was to bring prosperity to the country once more. How was this to be achieved? The “racially pure Aryans” the superior German population was to establish permanent rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by exterminating all non-Aryans, especially Jews.
Since 1933, the Nazis had tried to exclude Jews and other ‘undesirables’ from public life. The plan was to seize their property, reduce them to slavery and to eradicate them from their land. This was done systematically through enacting varied “Aryan” laws. The first of such, “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933, curtailed the rights of Jewish and “politically unreliable” civil servants and excluded them from state service. They were barred from medical, legal, educational professions. School admission quota was limited to 1.5 percent. Jewish civilians were fired from the army. Mandatory registration and thereafter seizing of properties started.
In 1935, a new phase began – enforced biological segregation. At the party rally held in Nuremberg in September 1935 Hitler announced laws denying Jewish people citizenship and prohibiting marriage with people of “German or related blood”. Anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents was affected, irrespective of whether they belonged to the Jewish religious community. This brought about immediate and concrete segregation.
While 1936 Olympic Games held in the country saw a lull in this anti-Semitic propaganda in the preceding weeks and during the games, soon German authorities stepped up legislative persecution of German Jews. The government intensified its efforts to remove Jews from the German economy requiring them to register their property in order to “Aryanize” German businesses. This meant the dismissal of Jewish workers and managers, and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses by non-Jewish Germans who bought them at bargain prices fixed by government.
The Nazi regime required Jews to identify themselves in ways that would permanently separate them from the rest of the population. Jewish men and women bearing first names of “non-Jewish” origin had to add “Israel” and “Sara,” respectively, to their given names. Jewish passports were stamped with an identifying letter “J”. All Jews were obliged to carry identity cards that indicated their Jewish heritage.
With his vision under way domestically, Hitler set his sights beyond Germany’s borders. Lebensraum – territorial expansion – was next on his agenda. In March 1938 Hitler triumphantly led Nazi troops into Austria, achieving his goal of unifying the country of his birth and the country he ruled. His next target was the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Spurred by his success at Munich, Hitler looked east to Poland. But first he had to make a deal with Stalin’s USSR. Hitler was willing to set aside his hatred of Communism for strategic gain. The two powers agreed the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in late August. Hitler believed his path was clear and on September 1, 1939, the invasion of Poland began.
Though he was confident Britain and France would not go to Poland’s aid he was wrong. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3,1939. Hitler was winning the war. Poland fell quickly. The Blitzkrieg tactics of the German Army destroyed all before them and France surrendered on June 17, 1940.
In April 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on his bunker in Berlin, Hitler accepted the inevitability of his defeat. He set into action his plan to take his own life. Hours beforehand, he married Eva Braun, who had remained by his side for 11 years. They were wed early on the morning of April 29. The next day, a little after 3.30 pm, they bit into thin glass vials of cyanide. Hitler then shot himself through the head. The man responsible for untold suffering, who had almost single-handedly brought the world to the very brink of destruction, was dead.
Hitler is regarded the most vicious man on earth because of the mass murder he instigated. For him, annihilation was child’s play. Concentration camps, torture chambers, gas chambers, labour camps, ghettos, laboratory experiments using humans as lab-rats are some of the wheels that drove the Nazi killing machinery. Hitler’s concentration camps, started early in the Third Reich in small scale to purge the country of his political opponents would soon grow in to mass slaughter houses, where millions were tortured and killed.
They were situated in places where the hardest conditions existed and where hard manual labour was needed. Run by the military, who were well rewarded with girls, gold and glory for their ‘duties’ in the torture chambers, this was a system running as precise as clockwork. Merciless, the vulnerable groups in the community never stood a chance with him. The “euthanasia” program (or the secret massacre program) started early in the Third Reich regime, rid the country of the elderly, the disabled and the children of those other than the ‘Aryan’ origin. By the time of his death Hitler had been instrumental in the death of over 50 million people.
He could not have killed them alone. But, he designed and powered the killing machine. Others at his beck and call, performed the dirty work while the Fuehrer, a strict vegetarian kept his hands “clean”.
Hitler is long dead, but his toxic memes still persist. The poignant factor is, the monster being venerated by the likeminded throughout the world.
(Sources: Adolf Hitler: Man and monsterwww.bbc.co.uk/timelines/zsmm6sg; Detailed Timeline of Hitler’s Lifehttps://credibleresearchsources.com/timeline-hitlers-life-bbc; The Holocaust - Birmingham Holocaust Education Centerhttps://bhecinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/NOTES-The-Holocaust-6-1-07.pdf; www.quora.com)