1012 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and DictatorshipHitler and the Rise of the Nazis in Germany
Like Italian fascism, the rise of the Nazis became closely identified with
the rise to power of a charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Hitler
was born in the small Austrian town of Braunau, on the border with
Bavaria. His father was a customs official of modest means. As a boy, the
young Hitler lacked discipline and was, as a teacher remembered, “notori
ously cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and bad-tempered. He had obvious
difficulty in fitting in at school.”
Hitler quit school in 1905. Turned down for admission to the School of
Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he nonetheless moved to
the imperial capital where he lived in a hostel with little money and few
friends. In the 1914 city directory, Hitler had himself listed as “painter
and architect,” although his painting amounted to earning a little money
painting postcards for tourists.
Hitler was of average height with a large head, dark hair, broad cheek
bones, and an unusually high forehead. Wearing baggy clothes and sport
ing his characteristic trimmed mustache, he was not an impressive-looking
man. He had bad teeth and poor eyesight. Hitler was compulsive about daily
routines, did not drink coffee or smoke, was a vegetarian, and took only an
occasional drink. He enjoyed the company of women but may, in fact, have
been impotent.
During this time in Vienna, Hitler expressed great hatred for the Social
Democrats, not Jews, despite Vienna’s rampant anti-Semitism. He moved
to Munich and, as a German nationalist, cheered the proclamation of war.
He joined the German army and was wounded in the leg in 1916, gassed in
a British attack just before the end of the war, and decorated on three
occasions for bravery. But his superiors found Hitler unfit for promotion to
the officer corps, believing that he lacked leadership qualities.
Hitler would later recall “the stupendous impression produced on me by
the war—the greatest of all experiences... the heroic struggle of our peo
ple.” He claimed to have warned fellow soldiers that “in spite of our big guns
victory would be denied” to Germany because of “the invisible foes of the
German people,” Marxists and Jews. The war accentuated Hitler’s fanatical
German nationalism and transformed him into a raging anti-Semite.
In 1918, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) published the first volume of The
Decline of the West. He blamed Germany’s defeat on the decay of Western
civilization. “We no longer believe,” he wrote, “in the power of reason over
life. We feel that life rules over reason.” He anticipated that new, powerful
leaders would emerge out of the maelstrom to destroy “impotent democra
cies.” Spengler believed that the German race would emerge victorious in a
biological struggle against its competitors. German culture would be embod
ied in a new state in which the individual would be subsumed in the racial
nation.