Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. His father, Alois, was a poor but intelligent man who became a senior customs officer and died when Adolf was fourteen. Alois had never shown any appreciation of his son and so the young Adolf was devoted to his mother, Klara, who sadly died when he was only eighteen.
Hitter spent four years in the realschule in Linz; he left school at the age 16. Hitler had very little education and no job. He dearly wished to be an artist but the Academy of Art in Vienna rejected his application. Devastated and bitter, Adolf blamed the Jewish officials for his failure.
Adolf lived in poverty in hostels for tramps and took whatever work he could find. He spoke openly about his hatred of the Jews, whom he had become convinced were the reason why he had been unsuccessful in Vienna.
During his time in Vienna, Hitler became interested in politics and developed a deep dislike and mistrust of foreigners. He supported nationalist parties and bizarrely became convinced that the Jews were the reason that he had been unsuccessful in Vienna.
In Vienna he acquired his first education in politics by studying the demagogic techniques of the popular Christian-social Mayor, Karl Lueger, and picked up his obsessive concern with the "purity of blood" that remained with him to the end of his career.
In May 1913 Hitler left Vienna for Munich and, when war broke out in August 1914, he joined the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment, serving as a despatch runner. Hitler proved an able, courageous soldier, receiving the Iron Cross (First Class) for bravery, but did not rise above the rank of Lance Corporal. Twice wounded, he was badly gassed four weeks before the end of the war and spent three months recuperating in a hospital in Pomerania. Temporarily blinded and driven to impotent rage by the abortive November 1918 revolution in Germany as well as the military defeat, Hitler, once restored, was convinced that fate had chosen him to rescue a humiliated nation from the shackles of the Versailles Treaty and the Jews.
After the war, Hitler returned to Munich and worked as a spy. One of the organisations Hitler spied on was the German workers party.
The Nazi party was a small political party that was opposed to the Weimar Republic. It had started as the German workers party, of which Hitler had become a member of after finding that he agreed with its ideas. It was founded by Anton Drexler in 1919. Hitler was the seventh member to join and was soon given special duties. By the end of the year, he was in charge of the development of the party’s ideas.
In 1920, he and Drexler issued the twenty point progam
The most important points are as follows:
The Treaty of Versailles would be overthrown
Germany would expand its
territory
Only pure-blooded Germans could be citizens of Germany
No Jews
were allowed to be Germans
Only citizens could vote or hold government jobs
There would be very strong state
Also in 1920, the German Workers' party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi party; in 1921 it was reorganized with Hitler as chairman. He made it a paramilitary organization and won the support of such prominent nationalists as Field Marshal Ludendorff.
On Nov. 8, 1923, Hitler attempted the “beer-hall putsch,” intended to overthrow the republican government. Leading Bavarian officials (themselves discontented nationalists) were surrounded at a meeting in a Munich beer hall by the Nazi militia, or storm troopers, and made to swear loyalty to this “revolution.” On regaining their freedom they used the army to defeat the group. Hitler fled, but was soon arrested and sentenced to five years in Landsberg fortress. He served nine months. In prison, Hitler practiced his speeches that captured the Germans hearts and would help Hitler take power.
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112851/ahitler.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/hitler_adolf.shtml
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhitler.htm
by doodles
