Word: hitlers
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...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...
Early on, Hitler had a central insight: "All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written but by the spoken word." He concentrated on an inflammatory speaking style flashing with dramatic gestures and catch phrases: "Germany, awake!" He ingeniously added a series of symbols that caught the national imagination. The most powerful was the Hakenkreuz (hooked cross), set in a circle and inscribed on a banner. "In red," he proclaimed, "we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalist idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan...
...acquaintances were once astonished to see Adolf put seven spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. When Frau Hoffmann offered to buy him a gift, he suggested a rhinoceros-hide dog whip like the one Alois had used long ago. There was every reason to agree with the appraisal of Hitler offered by the wife of an early follower: "I tell you, he is a neuter...