Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Adolf Hitler's lights, there was much to avenge. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice refused to admit the apprentice painter. Very well, then, he would become an architect. But he was unqualified for further study. These rejections were aggravated by the death of Hitler's beloved mother Klara. The young man with no vices -- he neither drank nor smoked nor pursued women -- drifted in the city, living in flophouses, supporting himself by illustrating street scenes and postcards...
...self-education was wide but shallow. Vienna was peopled with brilliant artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire...
...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 fire. Thanks to the initiative of a Jewish officer, Corporal Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class...
After the war, Hitler joined a new and violently anti-Semitic group, the $ forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers' Party -- Nazi for short. There, for the first time since adolescence, he found a home and friends. Within a year, he became the chief Nazi propagandist. Judaism, he told his audiences, had produced the profiteers and Bolsheviks responsible for the defeat of the fatherland and the strangulation of the economy. Jews were bacilli infecting the arts, the press, the government. Pogroms would be insufficient. "The final aim must unquestionably be the irrevocable Entfernung ((removal)) of the Jews...