The year his father
retired from the customs service at the age of fifty-eight, the six-year-old
Adolf entered the public school in the village of Fischlham, a short distance
southwest of Linz. This was in 1895. For the next four or five years the
restless old pensioner moved from one village to another in the vicinity of
Linz. By the time the son was fifteen he could remember seven changes of
address and five different schools. For two years he attended classes at the
Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm.
There he sang in the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own
account, dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs
official settled down for good in the village of Leonding, on the southern outskirts
of Linz, where the family occupied a modest house and garden.
At the age of eleven,
Adolf was sent to the high school at Linz. This represented a financial sacrifice
for the father and indicated an ambition that the son should follow in his
father’s footsteps and become a civil servant. That, however, was the last thing
the youth would dream of.”Then barely eleven years old,” Hitler later recounted
”I was forced into opposition (to my father) for the first time . . . I did not
want to become a civil servant.”
The story of the
bitter, unrelenting struggle of the boy, not yet in his teens, against a
hardened and, as he said, domineering father is one of the few biographical items
which Hitler sets down in great detail and with apparent sincerity and truth in
Mein Kampf. The conflict aroused the first manifestation of that fierce, unbending
will which later would carry him so far despite seemingly insuperable obstacles
and handicaps and which, confounding all those who stood in his way, was to put
an indelible stamp on Germany and Europe.
I did not want to
become a civil servant, no, and again no. All attempts on my father’s part to
inspire me with love or pleasure in this profession by stories from his own
life accomplished the exact opposite. I ... grew sick to my stomach at the
thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master
of my own time and being compelled to force the content of my whole life into
paper forms that had to be filled out. . .
One day it became clear
to me that I would become a painter, an artist. . .My father was struck speechless. ”Painter? Artist?”
He doubted my sanity,
or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or misunderstood me. But when he was
clear on the subject, and particularly after he felt the seriousness of my
intention, he opposed it with all the determination of his nature. . .
”Artist! No! Never as
long as I live!” . . . My father would never depart from his ”Never!” And I intensified
my” Nevertheless!” One consequence of this encounter, Hitler later explained,
was that he stopped studying in school. ”I thought that once my father saw how
little progress I was making at high school he would let me devote myself to my
dream, whether he liked it or not.”
This, written
thirty-four years later, may be partly an excuse for his failure at school. His
marks in grade school had been uniformly good. But at the Linz high school they
were so poor that in the end, without obtaining the customary certificate, he
was forced to transfer to the state high school at Steyr, some distance from
Linz. He remained there but a short time and left before graduating.
Hitler’s scholastic
failure rankled in him in later life, when he heaped ridicule on the academic
”gentry,” their degrees and diplomas and their pedagogical airs. Even in the
last three or four years of his life, at Supreme Army Headquarters, where he
allowed himself to be overwhelmed with details of military strategy, tactics
and command, he would take an evening off to reminisce with his old party
cronies on the stupidity of the teachers he had had in his youth. Some of these
meanderings of this mad genius, now the Supreme Warlord personally directing
his vast armies from the Volga to the English Channel, have been preserved.
When I think of the men
who were my teachers, I realize that most of them were slightly mad. The men
who could be regarded as good teachers were exceptional. It’s tragic to think
that such people have the power to bar a young man’s way. – March 3, 1942.
I have the most
unpleasant recollections of the teachers who taught me. Their external
appearance exuded uncleanliness; their collars were unkempt . . . They were the
product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of thought,
distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to become the
pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a thing of
the past. – April 12, 1942.”
When I recall my
teachers at school, I realize that half of them were abnormal . . . We pupils
of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our
professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them
were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God
lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not
the slightest aptitude for foreign languages though I might have, had not
the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him. –
August 29, 1942.
Our teachers were
absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth; their one object was to stuff
our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If any pupil showed
the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him relentlessly, and the
only model pupils whom I have ever got to know have all been failures in
afterlife. – September 7, 1942.
To his dying day, it is
obvious, Hitler never forgave his teachers for the poor marks they had given
him – nor could he forget. But he could distort to a point of grotesqueness. The
impression he made on his teachers, recollected after he had become a world
figure, has been briefly recorded. One of the few instructors Hitler seems to
have liked was Professor Theodor Gissinger, who strove to teach him science.
Gissinger later recalled,”As far as I was concerned. Hitler left neither a
favorable nor an unfavorable impression in Linz. He was by no means a leader of
the class. He was slender and erect, his face pallid and very thin, almost like
that of a consumptive, his gaze unusually open, his eyes brilliant.”
Professor Eduard
Huemer, apparently the ”congenital idiot” mentioned by Hitler above – for he
taught French – came to Munich in 1923 to testify for his former pupil, who was
then being tried for treason as the result of the Beer Hall Putsch. Though he
lauded Hitler’s aims and said that he wished from the bottom of his heart to
see him fulfill his ideals, he gave the following thumbnail portrait of the
young high-school student:
Hitler was certainly
gifted, although only for particular subjects, but he lacked self-control and,
to say the least, he was considered argumentive, autocratic, self-opinionated
and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline. Nor was he
industrious; otherwise he would have achieved much better results, gifted as he
was.
There was one teacher
at the Linz high school who exercised a strong and, as it turned out, a fateful
influence on the young Adolf Hitler. This was a history teacher, Dr. Leopold
Poetsch, who came from the southern German-language border region where it
meets that of the South Slavs and whose experience with the racial struggle
there had made him a fanatical German nationalist. Before coming to Linz he had
taught at Marburg, which later, when the area was transferred to Yugoslavia
after the First World War, became Maribor. Though Dr. Poetsch had given his
pupil marks of only ”fair” hi history, he was the only one of Hitler’s teachers
to receive a warm tribute in Mein Kampf. Hitler readily admitted his debt to
this man.
It was perhaps decisive
for my whole later life that good fortune gave me a history teacher who
understood, as few others did, this principle . . . of retaining the essential
and forgetting the nonessential . . . In my teacher, Dr. Leopold Poetsch of the
high school in Linz, this requirement was fulfilled in a truly ideal manner. An
old gentleman, kind but at the same time firm, he was able not only to hold our
attention by his dazzling eloquence but to carry us away with him.
Even today I think back
with genuine emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his words,
sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by magic, transported us into
times past and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical
facts into vivid reality. There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes
even moved to tears . . . He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of
educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. This teacher
made history my favorite subject. And indeed, though he had no such intention,
it was then that I became a young revolutionary.
Some thirty-five years
later, in 1938, while touring Austria in triumph after he had forced its
annexation to the Third Reich, Chancellor Hitler stopped off at Klagenfurt to
see his old teacher, then in retirement. He was delighted to find that the old
gentleman had been a member of the underground Nazi S.S., which had been
outlawed during Austria’s independence. He conversed with him alone for an hour
and later confided to members of his party, ”You cannot imagine how much I owe
to that old man.” Alois Hitler died of a lung hemorrhage on January 3, 1903, at
the age of sixty five. He was stricken while taking a morning walk and died a
few moments later in a nearby inn in the arms of a neighbor. When his
thirteen-year-old son saw the body of his father he broke down and wept.28 His
mother, who was then forty-two, moved to a modest apartment in Urfahr, a suburb
of Linz, where she tried to keep herself and her two surviving children, Adolf
and Paula, on the meager savings and pension left her. She felt obligated, as
Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, to continue his education in accordance with his
father’s wishes – ”in other words,” as he puts it, ”to have me study for the
civil servant’s career.” But though the young widow was indulgent to her son,
and he seems to have loved her dearly, he was ”more than ever determined
absolutely,” he says, ”not to undertake this career.” And so, despite a tender
love between mother and son, there was friction and Adolf continued to neglect
his studies. ”Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks
decided my future and the eternal domestic quarrel.”
The lung ailment which
Hitler suffered as he was nearing sixteen necessitated his dropping out of
school for at least a year. He was sent for a time to the family village of
Spital, where he recuperated at the home of his mother’s sister, Theresa
Schmidt, a peasant woman. On his recovery he returned briefly to the state high
school at Steyr. His last report, dated September 16, 1905, shows marks of
”adequate” in German, chemistry, physics, geometry and geometrical drawing. In
geography and history he was ”satisfactory”; in free-hand drawing, ”excellent.”
He felt so excited at the prospect of leaving school for good that for the
first and last time in his life he got drunk. As he remembered it in later years
he was picked up at dawn, lying on a country road outside of Steyr, by a milkmaid
and helped back to town, swearing he would never do it again.
While his mother
suggested – and other relatives urged – that he go to work and learn a trade he
contented himself with dreaming of his future as an artist and with idling away
the pleasant days along the Danube. He never forgot the ”downy softness” of
those years from sixteen to nineteen when as a ”mother’s darling” he enjoyed
the ”hollowness of a comfortable life.” Though the ailing widow found it
difficult to make ends meet on her meager income, young Adolf declined to help
out by getting a job. The idea of earning even his own living by any kind of
regular employment was repulsive to him and was to remain so throughout his
life.
What apparently made
those last years of approaching manhood so happy for Hitler was the freedom
from having to work, which gave him the freedom to brood, to dream, to spend
his days roaming the city streets or the countryside declaiming to his
companion what was wrong with the world and how to right it, and his evenings
curled up with a book or standing in the rear of the opera house in Linz or
Vienna listening enraptured to the mystic, pagan works of Richard Wagner.
A boyhood friend later
remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth who, though usually shy and
reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of hysterical anger against those who
disagreed with him. For four years he fancied himself deeply in love with a
handsome blond maiden named Stefanie, and though he often gazed at her
longingly as she strolled up and down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother
he never made the slightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so
many other objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies. ”These were
the happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream . . . ” (Mein Kampf,
p. 18.) In a letter dated August 4, 1933, six months after he became
Chancellor, Hitler wrote his boyhood friend, August Kubizek: ”I should be very
glad . . . to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of my
life.” (Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p. 273.) Indeed, in the countless
love poems which he wrote to her but never sent (one of them was entitled ”Hymn
to the Beloved”) and which he insisted on reading to his patient young friend, August
Kubizek, Walkuerie, clad in a dark-blue flowing velvet gown, riding a white
steed over the flowering meadows.
Although Hitler was
determined to become an artist, preferably a painter or at least an architect,
he was already obsessed with politics at the age of sixteen. By then he had
developed a violent hatred for the Hapsburg monarchy and all the non-German
races in the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire over which it ruled, and an
equally violent love for everything German. At sixteen he had become what he
was to remain till his dying breath: a fanatical German nationalist.
He appears to have had
little of the carefree spirit of youth despite all the loafing. The world’s
problems weighed down on him. Kubizek later recalled, ”He saw everywhere only
obstacles and hostility . . . He was always up against something and at odds
with the world . . . I never saw him take anything lightly. . . ”
It was at this period
that the young man who could not stand school became a voracious reader,
subscribing to the Library of Adult Education in Linz and joining the Museum
Society, whose books he borrowed in large numbers. His young friend remembered
him as always surrounded by books, of which his favorites were works on German
history and German mythology.
Since Linz was a
provincial town, it was not long before Vienna, the glittering baroque capital
of the empire, began to beckon a youth of such ambition and imagination. In
1906, just after his seventeenth birthday, Hitler set out with funds provided
by his mother and other relations to spend two months in the great metropolis.
Though it was later to become the scene of his bitterest years when, at times,
he literally lived in the gutter, Vienna on this first visit enthralled him. He
roamed the streets for days, filled with excitement at the sight of the
imposing buildings along the Ring and in a continual state of ecstasy at what
he saw in the museums, the opera house, the theaters.
He also inquired about
entering the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and a year later, in October 1907, he
was back in the capital to take the entrance examination as the first practical
step in fulfilling his dream of becoming a painter. He was eighteen and full of
high hopes, but they were dashed. An entry in the academy’s classification list
tells the story.
The following took the
test with insufficient results, or were not admitted . . . Adolf Hitler,
Braunau a. Inn, April 20, 1889, German, Catholic. Father civil servant. 4
classes in High School. Few Heads. Test drawing
unsatisfactory.
Hitler tried again the
following year and this time his drawings were so poor that he was not admitted
to the test. For the ambitious young man this was, as he later wrote, a bolt
from the blue. He had been absolutely convinced that he would be successful,
According to his own account in Mein Kampf, Hitler requested an explanation
from the rector of the academy.
That gentleman assured
me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for
painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of architecture; for
me, he said, the Academy’s School of Painting was out of the question, the
place for me was at the School of Architecture.35
The young Adolf was
inclined to agree but quickly realized to his sorrow that his failure to
graduate from high school might well block his entry into the architectural
school.
In the meantime his
mother was dying of cancer of the breast and he returned to Linz. Since Adolf’s
departure from school Klara Hitler and her relatives had supported the young
man for three years, and they could see nothing to show for it. On December 21,
1908, as the town began to assume its festive Christmas garb, Adolf Hitler’s
mother died, and two days later she was buried at Leonding beside her husband.
To the nineteen-year-old youth it was a dreadful blow . . . I had honored my
father, but my mother
I had loved . . . [Her]
death put a sudden end to all my high flown plans . . . Poverty and hard reality
compelled me to take a quick decision . . . I was faced with the problem of
somehow making my own living. Somehow! He had no trade. He had always disdained
manual labor. He had never tried to earn a cent. But he was undaunted. Bidding
his relatives farewell, he declared that he would never return until he had
made good. With a suitcase full of clothes and underwear in my hand and an
indomitable will in my heart, I set out for Vienna. I too hoped to wrest from
fate what my father had accomplished fifty years before; I too hoped to become
”something” – but in no case a civil servant.
Taken from "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shrirer pp. 9-15
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