The Early Life of Adolf Hitler and its Connection to the Holocaust

The Holocaust was a horrible event that took many lives and disturbed may people and was considered to be one of the cruelest acts ever in history. This was a time after World War I and before World War II began. However, this is not where it all started. It all started on April 20, 1889, when an innocent child was brought into the world, by the name of Adolf Hitler. “Perhaps in trying to understand Hitler’s psyche, we can come closer to understanding how what it is in ourselves that drives us to embrace such an alien world as the Holocaust represents”. Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau an Inn to an Australian customs official by the name of Alois Schickelgruber Hitler and his third and very young wife, Klara Poezl. In primary school, Hitler was thought to have a very bright academic future in front of him. He also showed outstanding leadership qualities. All of his pupils respected him and he was well-liked.

In secondary school, Hitler soon realized he was not at the top of his class and was not liked as well as he was in primary school. The only teacher that he liked was a man by the name of, Leopold Potsch, a history major. Potsch was a German Nationalist, among many other. He taught Hitler about the first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck. Otto von Bismarck was President of Prussia in 1862 and deliberately provoked the France-Prussian War and “as a result was able to obtain Alsace and Lorraine from France. To counteract the danger of Russia and France joining forces against Germany, Chancellor Bismarck formed the Triple Alliance in 1879. ” Bismarck was one of Hitler’s first early historical heroes. By this time, Hitler had a very bad attitude, was lazy, had an unstable temperament, and was deeply hostile towards his strict father. Hitler told his father that he did not want to be in the civil service, but instead wanted to be an artist.

His father did not take this news very well, as a matter of fact, he was furious and as a result, they had a falling out. The dispute between the two of them ended when Alois Hitler died in 1903. The family-owned their own home and received a very generous pension from the civil service, so they did not struggle. Hitler was always very close to his hardworking mother, much closer than he was to his father. At the age of fifteen, he did so badly at his examinations that he was told he would have to repeat the grade. He managed to convince his mother to let him drop out without receiving his secondary education qualification. When Hitler was eighteen, He inherited some money from his father’s will and moved to Vienna to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He then, applied to the Vienna Academy of Art and the Vienna School of Architecture.

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He was rejected by both. Not having the heart to tell his mother, he stayed in Vienna and let her believe he was attending school.Hitler’s mother died soon after that when he was just nineteen years old in 1908.She died of cancer. He was so heartbroken over her death that he carried a picture in his pocket of her. It is even said that he had it in his hand when he died in 1945. In 1909, Hitler was supposed to register for military services, but he was unwilling to serve for Austria because he despised them. When authorities caught up with him four years later he was rejected due to the fact that he was deemed unfit for combat, too weak, and unable to bear a firearm. A fresh start was provided for Hitler when the First World War started. He wanted to prove that Germany was superior to all other European countries. Hitler volunteered for the German Army, in times of war medical examinations were not as crucial. Hitler claimed that when he heard the news of war: "I was overcome with impetuous enthusiasm, and falling on my knees, wholeheartedly thanked Heaven that I had been granted the happiness to live at this time”. Hitler liked being in the army.

He impressed his commanding officers by volunteering for dangerous missions.It seemed like he liked the fact that he was fighting alongside other people for a common goal. One of his fellow soldiers even said that he was “odd and peculiar” and that Hitler was a very isolated person and would randomly make negative speeches about the Jews and the Marxists. In October of 1918, there was a mustard gas attack and Hitler was temporarily blinded. By the time he recovered the war was over and he was very disappointed. He stayed very isolated after that. He would refuse to even talk to people at times. Nation of nations: a narrative of the American republic. Boston, Ma. McGraw-Hill) As it was said, Adolf Hitler had very strong leadership qualities, even as a child.That is when Hitler first realized he wanted to be a leader.

At the same time, he wanted to get all Jews under his thumb. When the Germans surrendered Hitler blamed a lot of people and a number of groups such as the socialist, liberalist, but most of all he blamed the Jews. This is when Hitler wrote the book, Mein Kampf. It was full of racial rantings and this built the platform for the Nazi army. By 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and had plenty of practice throwing rallies against Jews.There were even some historical Jews that attended some of these rallies and cheered for Hitler when he emerged. One woman that attended said, “I am still appalled that I would do such a thing. The Nazi’s that came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that the Germans were radically superior to all other (including the Jews) were an alien threat to the “German racial community”. This is when the era of the Holocaust began. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. ”Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire. "

The Jews were not the only ones that were targeted by the Nazis, because of their “racial inferiority”; there were also the Gypsies (Roma), the disabled, and some of the Slavic people. Others, such as Communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Homosexuals were mistreated because of their political, ideological, and behavioral grounds. The Jewish population in Europe was over nine million, in 1933. By 1945, the Germans had killed two out of every three European Jews as part of the “final solution”. Even though Jews were the primary targets for the Nazis, other victims included 200,000 mentally or physically disabled, 200,000 Gypsies, and any German that was living in an institutional setting. All these people were murdered in the Euthanasia Program.

The so-called "Euthanasia" program was National Socialist Germany's first program of mass murder, predating the genocide of European Jewry, which we call the Holocaust. ” The National Socialist government created concentration camps to hold real and imagined political and ideological opponents. More so, in the time before the war, SS and police incarcerated Jews, Gypsies, and others of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. Hitler wanted to monitor the Jewish population so; the Germans created ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps for the Jews during war years. In June 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen (were squads composed primarily of German SS and police personnel) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, went behind German lines to complete mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials.German SS and police units murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories to ghettos and killing centers. These camps were called extermination camps, where the Jews were murdered in gas facilities.

During the final months of World War II, guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches (called death marches) in an attempt to stop the liberation of mass quantities of prisoners. These marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day that the German armed forces surrendered to the Allies. World War II ended the next day on May 8 (V-E Day) and the Soviet Union announced the end of the war on Mat 9, 1945. Many of the survivors of the Holocaust found shelter in displaced person (DP) camps administered by Allied powers. 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, between 1948 and 1951, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Others immigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp that was opened finally closed in 1957. The unthinkable crimes committed by Hitler during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities that resided in Eastern Europe.

Six million Jews were killed during the p of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was responsible for every one of these innocent people’s deaths. If it were not for his racial outlooks on life, many of the people that suffered and perished during the Holocaust would have lived to see another day. The Holocaust was a horrible event that took many lives and disturbed may people and was considered to be one of the cruelest acts ever in history.  I probably could have gone on for much longer about the Holocaust and all of the mental and emotional suffering that many Jews went through during said time. However, I did not want to get docked points for making it longer than you originally told us to write. I am very passionate about this subject and really appreciate the opportunity to write about it.

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