Word: austrian
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...reason to despise what had gone before. Hitler's father was an Austrian civil servant, born illegitimate as Alois Schicklgruber (Alois was 39 before he acknowledged his origins and took his presumed father's surname). Although Alois was nominally a Roman Catholic, he placed his faith in the whip. When the sixth of his eight children misbehaved, he was beaten unmercifully. Schicklgruber/Hitler died when Adolf was 13, a lively and artistic youth racked by the need for recognition and the appetite for vengeance...
...early 1914 Adolf, his head spinning with unassimilated ideas, was rejected by the Austrian army as "unfit for combatant and auxiliary duties, too weak. Unable to bear arms." The Bavarian military had no such reservations. At the beginning of World War I, he was issued a uniform and sent to the front. Even there the trooper was set apart. He received no mail, shared no confidences, had no girlfriend. A fellow enlistee remembered "this white crow among us that didn't go along with us when we damned the war to hell." In France the white crow distinguished himself under...
...Kaiser Wilhelm II had fled into exile in Holland. The Social Democrats had proclaimed a republic, with themselves in charge, and the Communists were challenging them for control of the streets. And in a hospital northeast of Berlin, raging at the nation's defeat, lay a 29-year-old Austrian corporal partly blinded by mustard gas. "In vain all the sacrifices," Adolf Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf (My Struggle). "In vain the death of 2 million . . . Hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed . . . I decided to go into politics...
...Nazis kept winning elections. In the summer of 1932, the Nazis doubled their Reichstag seats, to 230 out of 608; Hitler's blustering, barrel- shaped lieutenant, Hermann Goring, became president of the legislature. Hindenburg despised Hitler, "that Austrian corporal," but he asked him to serve as Vice Chancellor under Hindenburg's protege, Franz von Papen. Hitler rejected any compromises...
...Schleicher, decided to make a deal with Hitler. At a secret meeting, several prominent financiers promised credit to the financially pressed Nazis. Once again, Hindenburg proposed a Papen-Hitler coalition, only with Hitler as Chancellor. & This time Hitler agreed. And so, on Jan. 30, 1933, this half-educated ex- Austrian with a genius for manipulation and deceit became, quite legally, the leader of Germany...