Nigel Blundell - Adolf Hitler

IMAGES OF WAR

IMAGES OF WAR

NIGEL BLUNDELL

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

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Barnsley,

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Copyright Nigel Blundell, 2017

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 52670 199 2

eISBN 978 1 52670 201 2

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52670 200 5

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T here is usually something in a mans face that gives a hint as to his character. In the case of the young Adolf Hitler, however, there was no clue. No warning to the world.

The intriguing mystery about the rise of historys most despised despot is just how completely ordinary he once seemed. A chubby child, a mummys boy, an idle student, an undistinguished artist, a disgruntled ex-soldier, a self-pitying social outcast, a face in the crowd the early images of him give no indication of the demonic spirit that created this twentieth-century tyrant.

Only later in his tormented life came the metamorphosis, and it is fascinating to see how this mundane mask gradually fell away to reveal the manic monster lurking beneath.

The aim of this book is to trace this dramatic process in photographs some iconic, some rare and intimate of a man whose destructive legacy still touches us today.

These archive images cover the life of the seemingly unexceptional son of a minor customs official in provincial Austria as he rebuilt a German empire from the ashes of World War I defeat and led it into a new dark age.

They demonstrate the spellbinding effect that Hitler had over his followers as he developed his oratory from his early beer hall meetings to his later mass rallies.

They reveal his mesmerising power over ordinary members of the public, both male and female, who readily accepted the myth of an Aryan race of young blond demigods as propounded by a squat, dark-haired man with a comic moustache, poor health, chronic flatulence and, ultimately, opiate addiction.

Even more difficult to comprehend is the spell he cast over cynical diplomats, hard-headed business leaders and global opinion makers. The original captions to many of the contemporary photographs in this book are reverential in their descriptions of Herr Hitler, the German Chancellor, the person Time magazine proclaimed as its 1938 Man of the Year.

Only months later, bent on global domination, he launched a war ultimately involving 61 countries and 1.7 billion people, three-quarters of the worlds population. The death toll was more than 50 million.

The fascination with the cataclysmic events he caused remains as strong today as it did in the previous century. The mystery of how one man could exert so much power over so many people that he was able to plunge the whole world into war remains unanswered.

But the changing faces of Adolf Hitler, portrayed in this book from pampered baby to bar-room rabble-rouser to ranting megalomaniac, provide for us a graphic insight into the mind of a monster and the instigator of historys bloodiest drama.

T he character of Adolf Hitler, as legend probably correctly has it, was built on the foundation of a harsh father and a doting mother. There is no reason to believe that the former, a stiff and formal civil servant, did not love his son. However, intensely proud of his rise to middle-class respectability, he demanded impeccable behaviour from his family, reinforced by violent punishments. Thus it was his mother whom the young Adolf revered. She gave him the affection that his father seemed unable to. In short, she loved her son too much. The result was that, ironically, the man who ended up a ranting tyrant spent his childhood as a bit of a mummys boy.

Adolf Hitler was born an Austrian citizen and a Roman Catholic at 6.30pm on 20 April 1889 at Braunau-am-Inn, close to the border with Bavaria. His mother, Klara, was the third wife of his father Alois, a customs official in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Contrary to the story that gained credence during the war, Hitler was not illegitimate. He did not carry his grandmother's name of Shicklgruber because, although his father Alois had been born out of wedlock, he subsequently had his birth legitimised by persuading the local priest to alter his birth documents to give him his father's name of Hitler. The confusion over Hitler senior's documents allowed later detractors to allege that Hitler's real maternal grandfather had in fact been a Jew named Frankenberger, who had been in the household where Alois's mother, Maria Anna Shicklgruber, was in service.

Baby Adolf (above) was doted on and spoiled by his mother Klara. His father Alois, however, was a strict disciplinarian.

The birthplace of Adolf Hitler at Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, on 20 April 1889.

Yet there is no doubt that Alois Hitlers private life was less than orthodox. When his first wife died in 1883 he married his mistress, who was pregnant with their second child. When she too died shortly afterwards he married his second cousin Klara Polzl, who was 23 years his junior and also carrying his child.

Adolf was the fourth of six children. Two older brothers and a sister died in infancy and a younger brother died of measles at the age of 11, reportedly affecting young Adolf deeply. This meant that his only surviving sibling was a younger sister, Paula. From his father's second marriage, there was also a half-brother Alois, who ran away from home at the age of 14, and a half-sister Angela, later to become the housekeeper at Hitlers Bavarian retreat of Berchtesgaden.

Adolfs actual place of birth was a room on the first floor of a three-storey house, the ground floor of which was an inn called Gasthof Zum Pommer. His parents rented a suite of rooms above the hostelry where Alois reputedly drank to excess in the saloon downstairs before staggering upstairs to abuse his timid wife.

The family continued to live in Braunau-am-Inn until 1892 when they moved to Passau, where the River Inn joins the Danube. Only recently has it emerged from old newspaper cuttings that a four-year-old child, believed to be Adolf, was rescued from drowning in the river in 1894. In Passau, the Austrian customs house lay on the German side of the border, so Adolf, then aged three, grew up speaking German with a Bavarian accent, rather than the more cultured tones of a Viennese.