Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Paroled on Dec. 19, 1924, Hitler spent the next five years reinvigorating the Nazi Party, exploiting Weimar democracy to bring down the Republic. The party's members were tireless, cajoling, exhorting, running for local offices, gathering about them a brutal elite guard called the Schutzstaffel, or SS. During this period an American journalist, Louis Lochner, watched the Nazi leader addressing students at Berlin University. "I came away from that meeting," he reported, "wondering how a man . . . who ranted and fumed and stamped could so impress young intellectuals. Of all people, I thought, they should have detected the palpable flaws...
...flaws were in Hitler's overconfident detractors. The Nazi Party received strong support not only from the lower middle class but also from university students and professors. The existentialist Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Psychologist Carl Jung grew intoxicated with "the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment." A young architect named Albert Speer found that Hitler's oratory "swept away any skepticism, any reservations...
Among the others swept away were two pretty frauleins. One was Hitler's unstable niece Geli Raubal, the only woman he ever truly loved. It was a sad and unfulfilled affair. On a September evening in 1931, after an argument with & her uncle, Raubal fatally shot herself. He had only one subsequent lover, a young blond named Eva Braun. In 1932, frustrated by Hitler's inattention, she also aimed a pistol at herself, but the attempt failed. Nearly 13 years later, under Berlin's streets, the drama would be eerily restaged when Hitler took Braun for his bride, 40 hours...
Until that Walpurgisnacht, nothing could divert him from the goal of a new world order. In 1931 Hitler adopted a vegetarian diet, but it did not improve his disposition. Convinced -- falsely -- that he was suffering from a precancerous condition, he had a series of tantrums. "I cannot lose even a year," he cried. "I must come to power quickly in order to solve the gigantic problems in the little time remaining to me. I must! I must...
Power arrived on Jan. 30, 1933. The unknown at 30 was named Chancellor of Germany at 43. From the beginning the Third Reich was a reflection of its new Fuhrer. Hitler's triumphs should have increased his confidence. Instead they fed his paranoia. Rohm and his followers were purged and murdered. The nation's most original minds were exiled to a concentration-camp universe from which few returned. Military tactics that demanded objectivity were decided for personal reasons. Friends who came upon the Fuhrer secretly reading with the aid of spectacles were told, "You see, I need glasses...