Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jews was not a single moment of revelation but a slow accumulation of ideology, environment, and personal grievance. From his childhood in Austria to his final days in Berlin, that hatred grew more intense. He constructed motives, accusations, and rationalizations in his own mind, and eventually convinced much of a nation that Jews had to be annihilated. Understanding why requires tracing the path of the man who became the Führer.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, in the province of Upper Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the fourth child of a middle-class family. His father, Alois Hitler, was a customs agent, and his mother, Klara Pölzl, was Alois's third wife. Adolf's parents were cousins, and they needed a papal dispensation to marry. At birth, he was baptized in St. Stephen's Church in the village where he grew up.
The name Adolf came from old High German words: "Adele," meaning nobility, and "wolf." Adolf therefore means "noble wolf." Hitler later used this origin to create his own nickname, Wolf. During World War II, several headquarters adopted the name, including the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia and Werwolf in Ukraine.
Hitler's childhood was hostile. He was brutally beaten. To avoid suffering, he chose to stop crying and to hide his vulnerability from his father. He performed well in elementary school, but in his first year of secondary school he was suspended and had to repeat the year. According to his teachers, he did not want to study. One exception was his history teacher, Leopold Poetsch, whose ideological discourse directly influenced Hitler's beliefs.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler revealed that his poor school performance was tied to his relationship with his father. Failing exams and ignoring teachers was his way of opposing Alois. The two argued for years about his future. His father wanted him to become a customs agent or civil servant. Hitler wanted to be a painter. He was obsessed with the arts and later described himself as a misunderstood artist.
On January 3, 1903, Alois Hitler died. The news changed Adolf's life. His school performance worsened, and he seemed to have no direction. At 16, he dropped out of secondary school without a diploma. Over time, he became a pangerman nationalist. He detested the ethnic diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and abhorred the Habsburg monarchy.
Years earlier, while still in school, Hitler admired a politician named Georg von Schönerer. Schönerer, along with Victor Adler, Robert Pattai, Heinrich Friedjung, and Engelbert Pernerstorfer, proposed the Linz Program of 1882. It called for the complete Germanization of the Austrian state, the ceding of Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia to Hungary, and German as the official language of Austria. The program failed, but Schönerer's colleagues abandoned him after he added a paragraph on the Aryan race proposing the exclusion of Jews and other minorities. Adler and Friedjung, who belonged to the Jewish community, would not tolerate it. Two years later, Schönerer publicly declared anti-Semitism the central pillar of the national idea.
Four years after his father's death, Hitler moved to Vienna with financial help from his family. He visited the Academy of Fine Arts to ask about admission requirements. After a few weeks, he took the test and was rejected for lacking talent. After a disastrous second attempt, the rector suggested he pursue architecture. Hitler had not graduated from high school, so that path was difficult.
During this period, Hitler received sad news. At the end of 1907, his mother Klara died of breast cancer. He was overcome with grief. The doctor who supervised her illness was Eduard Bloch, a physician of Jewish origin. Bloch was married to Lily Kafková, with whom he had two daughters, Emily and Gertrude. He prospered as a private physician but also treated the poorest patients at home, traveling in his own horse-drawn carriage and charging according to their circumstances. This earned him the nickname "the doctor of the poor."
Three years before Klara's death, Bloch had treated Hitler for an ailment initially thought to be pulmonary but later found to be a cold that turned into tonsillitis. From then on, the Hitler family went to Bloch whenever they needed medical attention. When Klara suffered from breast cancer, she was first operated on by a colleague, but the operation failed. Bloch came to her home and treated the wound with iodoform, an antiseptic that was the only treatment with any hope. The drug was extremely painful and had an unpleasant odor. The decision proved unsuccessful and caused poisoning that quickly became fatal. Bloch did his best to ease the pain with morphine injections, but nine months after the iodoform treatment, Klara died.
Adolf Hitler was deeply grateful to Bloch. The doctor had treated Klara sometimes for a few coins and sometimes for free. Hitler later sent him paintings and postcards he had drawn. When Hitler took power, he protected Bloch and his wife from many anti-Semitic policies. He believed that if all Jews were like Bloch, there would be no Jewish question. This is surprising, since by then Hitler was already preaching anti-Semitic ideology. Many historians have wondered why he saved Bloch's life even though Bloch had not cured his mother.
Although he had Hitler's help, Bloch could not practice medicine because Jewish doctors were prohibited from working. Bloch wrote to Hitler asking for help, and Hitler responded kindly. Thanks to the Führer's efforts, the doctor was able to sell his house at market price and emigrate to the United States.
In early 1908, after his mother's death, Hitler moved permanently to Vienna. Thanks to a generous inheritance from his mother, he lived comfortably for a few months without working. Unlike Linz, Vienna's population was predominantly German. Hitler liked the Austrian capital but disagreed with its multiethnic, multinational, and multi-religious culture. By the end of 1909, he had run out of money. He was evicted from his apartment and fell into deep poverty. He lived temporarily in a homeless shelter and attended soup kitchens. Later he moved to a men's residence. He earned a living shoveling snow, carrying suitcases at the train station, and working as a construction worker. In 1910, he began painting watercolors and postcards of Vienna, which a partner sold.
During Hitler's first two years in Vienna, the mayor was Karl Lueger, a politician Hitler observed with fascination. Lueger was born in Vienna in 1844. He began on the left wing of the Progressive Party and was elected mayor in 1875. In 1885, he cooperated with Schönerer in anti-Semitic campaigns for the Linz Program, and two years later he gave a violently anti-Semitic speech supporting Schönerer's bill against Jewish immigration from Russia and Romania. Lueger became extremely popular among the lower middle classes, largely because of his rustic and vulgar speeches, which included economic and religious anti-Semitic prejudices common at the time.
Lueger channeled social discontent by presenting both capitalism and Marxism as products of the Jewish mentality. In 1897, Franz Joseph confirmed Lueger as mayor of Vienna after having previously refused. In that role, Lueger implemented discriminatory practices against Jews, such as not hiring them in municipal services and limiting their places in high school and university. He also supported politicians who perpetuated the myth of the blood libel, which claimed that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian children during Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread. The myth arose in the seventh century, when anti-Semitism was rife in Europe, and the murder of an English child known as William of Norwich was attributed to local Jews.
Lueger was sometimes seen as pious or generous toward the Jewish community. He associated with Jewish members, including Ignaz Mandl, a Jewish lawyer who remained Hitler's friend and political adviser even after Hitler expelled him from the Democratic Party in 1889. Lueger also employed the part-Jewish deputy mayor Julius Porzer. He appeared in synagogues wearing the mayor's chain and visited Jewish homes, claiming that it was up to him to decide who was Jewish.
Lueger's influence was pivotal in Hitler's career. From Schönerer, Hitler learned that Jews could never be full German citizens. Through Lueger, he became aware that anti-Semitism and social reform could be successful. In Mein Kampf, Hitler called Lueger the greatest German mayor of all time. He claimed his political ideology was formed in Vienna, giving credit to both Lueger and local anti-Semitic newspapers.
Yet some doubts arise. Hitler had Jewish acquaintances and business associates. Everything indicates that he did not adopt a comprehensive anti-Semitic ideology until after leaving Vienna for Munich. August Kubizek, a conductor and friend of Hitler, said his deep anti-Semitism reached Vienna from Linz. He also said Hitler's accumulated hatred of all forces threatening the Germans concentrated primarily on the Jews, who played a prominent role in Vienna. Some sources say Hitler called Vienna "a pearl in my eyes." Other historians indicate he never managed to settle there because he hated its people.
In May 1913, Hitler escaped to Munich, within the German Empire, to avoid military service in Austria-Hungary. The idea of serving alongside Jews and Slavs terrified him. He was always drawn to the culture, strength, and prosperity of the German Empire. His situation was not encouraging. He had to wait a few months to collect his father's inheritance and wanted to enter the Munich Art Academy, but had little faith in finding a place.
On January 18, 1914, Austrian authorities located him and served him with a court summons demanding his return. He argued that he had left his native country because racial mixing in Vienna disgusted him. The Austrian police informed him that evading military service carried a heavy fine, but leaving Austria constituted desertion, which carried a prison sentence. Hitler traveled to Salzburg, where he was examined and declared unfit for military service.
In 1914, World War I began, a decisive milestone in Hitler's life. The event gave his life a new purpose and defined his vocation. That same year, he enlisted in the Bavarian army, which fought alongside the German army and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against France, England, and Russia. Despite being a foreign citizen, the authorities accepted him. On August 2, a 25-year-old Hitler attended a patriotic event in Munich's Odeonsplatz, a scene later discovered by his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and turned into a propaganda image for Nazi Germany.
Hitler joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He received limited and accelerated military training, and his unit was quickly sent to Belgium. They fought in the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914. This was Hitler's only experience of frontline battle. He was later promoted to Gefreiter, roughly equivalent to private first class in the United States Army, often erroneously translated as lance corporal. It was the only promotion he received, and he remained at that rank until the end of his service. He received various medals, including the Iron Cross, Second Class, in December 1914 and the Iron Cross, First Class, in August 1918.
In 1914, Hitler was appointed as a messenger, carrying messages to and from regimental headquarters. Over the next four years, the regiment fought in various battles in Belgium and France on the Western Front. During these engagements, Hitler was often several kilometers from the front. During the Battle of the Somme, he was wounded by a shell splinter in the upper thigh. He served on active duty for most of the war but spent part of his time on the home front. After the Somme, he spent two months recovering in a military hospital near Berlin. There he witnessed widespread starvation among German civilians in the winter of 1916, which continued into 1917. In September 1918, during his leave, he observed the collapse of morale on the German home front. These images never left his mind and influenced his decisions about food supplies during World War II.
A month later, Hitler was wounded in a mustard gas attack in Belgium and sent to the Pasewalk military hospital. While undergoing rehabilitation, he learned of the November 11 armistice, the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the German Revolution. The news was devastating. "Everything began to darken again before my eyes," he wrote. But he also showed pride. "I am not ashamed to say that, carried away by my enthusiasm, I knelt down and thanked heaven from the bottom of my heart for having allowed me to live at that time."
After the defeat, the stab-in-the-back theory became popular, and Hitler found it extremely convincing. In 1919, a parliamentary commission of inquiry questioned General Paul von Hindenburg, Supreme Commander of the German Army, about the causes of Germany's defeat. Hindenburg stated that Germany was defeated due to a lack of support from the government, which at the height of the war did not hesitate to initiate peace negotiations. He also mentioned that the German army was weakened by a revolutionary atmosphere within its own ranks and in the rest of the country. There he quoted a British general who had said the German army had been stabbed in the back.
Some say the term comes from an expression in Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung, presented in 1876, in which Hagen assassinates his enemy Siegfried from behind. The stab-in-the-back theory claims the German army was not defeated on the battlefield but by Social Democratic politicians, who allegedly signed the ceasefire to seize power. Although the army command made mistakes that left the German army unable to continue fighting, Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff spread this conspiracy story to avoid admitting their own errors.
At the same time, far-right nationalist and anti-Semitic groups considered the stab-in-the-back theory a consequence of an international Jewish conspiracy. Such legends were already circulating during the war, casting doubt on the patriotism of German Jews on the battlefield. For this reason, in 1916 the German government conducted a count of Jews in the army. The results showed similar numbers of Jews and non-Jews with equal frequency on the front lines, but the results were not made public. German and international historians unanimously reject the myth. They point out that the German army had run out of reserves and was overwhelmed by the entry of the United States into the war.
In 1933, when Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, they made this legend a fundamental part of their official history of the 1920s. They presented the Weimar Republic as the work of the "November criminals" who had stabbed the nation in the back to seize power. Nazi propaganda exploited the theory to describe the republic as a quagmire of corruption, degeneration, national humiliation, and ruthless persecution of the honest national opposition. It spoke of "fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and cultural Bolsheviks," finally swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler and the victory of the national revolution of 1933.
After World War I, Hitler walked the streets of Munich and sniffed out the ideal climate of anti-Semitism. The German city had become a hotbed of anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews were blamed for the actions of the Communist Bavarian Soviet Republic. In that context, a publication called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared, translated into German. It is a text written in 1903 that recounts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It formulates the idea of a secret group of Jews controlling the world, called the elders of Zion.
The Protocols were first published at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire in Znamya, meaning "the banner," a St. Petersburg newspaper owned by the anti-Semitic writer Pavel Krushevan. Several scholars are convinced Krushevan was the original author. When his newspaper published the text, he wrote a prologue and an afterword. The publisher confessed to having discovered a real document proving the existence of a global Jewish conspiracy. Krushevan claimed they were minutes from a meeting of the World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion.
The first publications included 24 chapters and mentioned that these elders planned to control world politics, the economy, financial markets, the media, and education. They also claimed Jews intended to destroy Christianity and the rest of the world's religions, and that Jews would benefit from keeping the world in a state of war. As supposed proof, Krushevan cited the emerging Zionist movement, which advocated for an independent Jewish state in the ancient Jewish homeland. Some claimed the Protocols were the minutes of the First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, a claim since proven false.
In 1905, the Protocols were published as an appendix to a book about the coming of the Antichrist. The book was written by Sergei Nilus, an anti-Semitic Russian mystic who claimed Jews were agents of satanic forces seeking to destroy the world. Meanwhile, Hitler rejoiced in his gradually fulfilled wish that both Germany and the entire world would see Jews the same way he did.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Protocols began to circulate more frequently. That same year, the Russian tsar abdicated amid a popular uprising. Protesters demanded food due to increasing poverty. After a few months, the Bolshevik Party, later known as the Communist Party, staged a coup. Systematic fear of communist revolutions spreading throughout Europe reinforced one of the main anti-Semitic conspiracy theories contained in the Protocols: that Jews were responsible for communism and for plotting the revolution. This false accusation is known as Judeo-Bolshevism.
In 1919, the Protocols were translated into German. During the 1920s, various versions appeared in the United States, primarily in New York and Boston. Copies were sent to London and Japan in the original language. In 1921, it was translated into Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian. Two years later into Polish, and in 1925 it was available in Syria in Arabic.
With the Protocols came new books promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Among the best known was The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem by Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, which was translated into 16 languages, including German. Over the years, details of the text were modified to address current situations. Media outlets such as The New York Times, journalist Herman Bernstein of the New York Herald, and British diplomatic journalist Lucien Wolf published texts denying the Protocols and accusing them of being false. But the defamation had already been done, and much of European and North American society agreed with various elements.
During the 1920s, Hitler read the Protocols thanks to Alfred Rosenberg, a prominent Nazi Party thinker and author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, in which he developed Nazi racial theories. With these theories, Hitler confirmed his feelings and understood that, despite not having written these publications, his beliefs were reaching many people. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed the Protocols reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and set forth its ultimate aims.
Upon coming to power in 1933, Hitler did not directly refer to the Protocols in his public speeches, but he occasionally repeated many of the lies contained in the publication, including the claim linked to Judeo-Bolshevism. In the run-up to and during World War II, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, believed he could exploit the Protocols to demonize Jews. Yet years earlier, Goebbels had written in his diary, "I believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery. I believe in the intrinsic, but not in the factual truth of the Protocols." In short, Goebbels believed the publication was valuable enough to further the Nazi government's anti-Semitic agenda.
Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, published numerous articles during the 1930s based on ideas contained in the Protocols. The Nazi Party's central publishing house published 22 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1938. During World War II, the Nazis distributed large numbers of editions in every country they occupied. Even after the murder of millions of Jews as part of the Final Solution, German authorities published editions in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian in 1943. They also did so in France, Belgium, and Poland.
During the summer of 1919, Hitler joined the information office of the Bavarian military administration. There he gathered information on political parties in Munich and provided anti-communist political education to the troops. At the same time, he attended a course in anti-communist propaganda, spending long hours listening to lectures on history and politics that profoundly influenced his thinking. In August of that year, Hitler gave his first anti-Semitic political speeches to soldiers. He quickly discovered his talent as a public speaker and began to hone it.
His supervisor was impressed by his communication skills and asked him to respond in writing to a student's question about the Jewish question as a race. Hitler valued the trust placed in him and sought to write a perfect text repeating lies about Jews based on economic, nationalist, and racial anti-Semitism. He also emphasized the urgent need for a nationalist government that would achieve once and for all the complete expulsion of the Jewish people residing in Germany.
In September, he attended a meeting of the German Workers' Party, known by its acronym DAP, where he gave an impromptu speech that greatly impressed the party leaders, who offered him membership. Hitler accepted, and on October 16, 1919, he gave his first official speech in a beer hall. His oratorical skills led him to rise rapidly within the DAP, collaborating constantly with the leaders to draft the party's political program, which Hitler announced at a large public rally on February 24, 1920, at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Shortly thereafter, the DAP became the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, known in English as the Nazi Party.
At the end of 1920, Hitler left the Bavarian army and moved into a small rented room near the city center. From that moment on, he devoted himself entirely to politics. He began to receive increasing amounts of money, either from benefits within the Nazi Party or from his political speeches. In mid-1921, Hitler established himself as the leader of the Nazi Party.
In 1919, ten months after the end of World War I, Hitler sent a manuscript in response to a conversation with Adolf Gemlich, a colleague at the Munich Military Intelligence Office. Gemlich's responsibilities included creating propaganda for the German military, giving the document the nickname the Gemlich letter. Before writing it, Hitler spoke with Captain Ulrich Mayr, who suggested Hitler speak with Gemlich to help popularize the idea that Jews were responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I.
According to Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, it is Hitler's first political writing in which he sets out his plans for the Jews. There is hardly a document more relevant to understanding World War II. It lays out the reasons for waging that war from the perspective of the man behind it. Among some of the paragraphs, Hitler mentions that anti-Semitism is easily characterized as an emotional phenomenon, but that this is incorrect. Anti-Semitism as a political movement cannot and should not be defined by emotional impulses but by the recognition of facts.
In his letter, Hitler takes for granted and declares that Judaism is absolutely a race and not a religious association. He calls Jews accumulators of wealth seeking to conquer the world through money. He states that the danger Judaism represents for the German people is expressed in the undeniable aversion of large sections of the people. The cause of this aversion arises primarily from personal contact and the personal impression left by Jews as individuals, which is almost always unfavorable.
With manifest hatred, he adds, "Every man pursues a greater goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy. For Jews, these are only a means to an end, a way to satisfy their desire for gold and domination." Anti-Semitism fueled by purely emotional motives will always find expression in the form of pogroms, he continues. But anti-Semitism based on reason must lead to combat and the systematic suspension of Jewish privileges. Its ultimate goal, however, should be the uncompromising elimination of Jews.
He emphasizes that if a powerful government were to govern the German Empire, the Jewish threat could be managed by denying their rights, but that its ultimate goal must be the unswerving removal of all Jews. Still far from power, Hitler clearly demonstrated his ambitions and convictions. According to Hier, Hitler outlines an ideology that demands a ruthless government with the courage to completely eliminate them. What is clear is that even at a very young age and still largely unknown in German politics, he believed this fight could not be waged with gangs or sporadic acts but with a government organization behind it.
Without a doubt, and despite the convictions of the rest of the members of the Third Reich, this letter reveals that the genesis of anti-Semitic thought as emblematic of the Second World War came from the mind of Adolf Hitler. However, specialists indicate that despite how revealing the Gemlich letter is, it is impossible to infer what strategy the government would adopt to carry out the eradication of the Jews. They also mention that the German word used to refer to this is Entfernung, which means distance or removal. In the post-World War I context, this term could refer to segregation or expulsion from German territory, not to a mass slaughter as it ended up being.
After the end of the First World War, 50 countries prepared to sign the Treaty of Versailles. This agreement was signed in 1919 between the victors of World War I and Germany. It established that Germany had been largely responsible for the development of the war and therefore imposed severe conditions. These included mandatory disarmament, monetary compensation to those affected as payment for war reparations, and the loss of large swaths of territory. The Germans received the news of the treaty with great displeasure, as they considered the consequences unaffordable. The United States refused to sign, convinced that these harsh and restrictive conditions would only lead to worse consequences.
In a speech given on April 13, 1923, in Munich, Hitler spoke of the Treaty of Versailles. "The treaty was made to bring 20 million Germans to their deaths and ruin the German nation," he said. In that same speech, he also mentioned that the expulsion of the Jews of German blood would lead to atrocities against the Jewish people.
One of the questions that arise concerns the Balfour Declaration, which experts claim was promoted by the Treaty of Versailles. It is a letter sent by British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, leader of the British Jewish community. This text was included in 1922 by the League of Nations in the British Mandate for Palestine, by which the United Kingdom was formally entrusted with the administration of these territories.
The letter read: "Dear Lord Rothschild, I have great pleasure in forwarding to you on behalf of His Majesty's government the following declaration of support for the aspirations of the Zionist Jews, which has been forwarded to and approved by the cabinet. His Majesty's government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the attainment of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. I shall be grateful if you will bring this declaration to the attention of the Zionist Federation."
During the first few years, 100,000 Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine. Given his knowledge of the Balfour Declaration, the question arises why Hitler did not expel the Jews of Europe. It is true that this idea as a solution to the Jewish question was initially discussed in Nazi circles but was ultimately rejected for various reasons, primarily ideological beliefs and geopolitical resistance. First, Hitler's plans did not include relocation but genocide. Considering the Jews the root cause of the problems not only in Germany but in all of Europe, his goal was to eliminate them, not displace them.
On the other hand, Arab resistance was undeniable. Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, was strongly opposed to Jewish immigration, fearing it would lead to the creation of a Jewish state. He met with various Nazi officials to try to stop Jewish migration and agreed with the future Führer's plans for Judaism. For these reasons, Hitler did not even consider using the territory to his advantage, instead opting to please the Mufti by eliminating the Jewish people.
The first four years after the creation of the Weimar Republic, the nation that replaced the German Empire, were marked by severe economic problems. World War I had left the country devastated and starving. By 1923, the Nazi Party had more than 50,000 members eager for further action against the democratic republic. That is why, on the night of November 8, Hitler launched an attempted coup, also known as the Beer Hall Putsch, at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich.
Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the Bavarian prime minister, was there attending a rally to which he had not invited Hitler, who was deeply offended. Several troops from assault units loyal to the National Socialist movement were waiting there. The moment the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler, Hitler's personal bodyguard detachment, arrived, the Nazi leader fired shots at the ceiling with his pistol, broke up the meeting, and declared that the national revolution had begun. He quickly ordered Kahr, along with two members of the Bavarian triumvirate, von Lossow and von Seisser, into an adjoining room. Once they were positioned away from the bustle of the beer hall, he intimidated them at gunpoint. The Bavarian leaders agreed, went to the main hall, and before a packed crowd announced the key appointments to the new government.
However, Kahr took advantage of a lapse in attention by Hitler and his disorganized henchmen. He denounced the overthrow and ordered military and police units to arrest Hitler and his men. After a trial, Hitler was sentenced to five years in a minimum-security prison in Landsberg am Lech for high treason. Despite the coup's failure, Hitler took advantage of the experience to spread Nazi propaganda. Until that point, he had not enjoyed great popularity among Germans, but the news was immediately picked up by local and international press. Of his total sentence, Hitler served only eight months, which he used to begin writing his first book, Mein Kampf, or My Struggle.
With this literary work, he hoped not only to earn money but also to serve as a propaganda platform to air his views and attack those who had betrayed him and the entire country. Originally, the book was titled "Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice: A Reckoning." He decided to shorten it to My Struggle. The first volume was published in 1925 and the second the following year. The owner of the publishing house was unhappy with the book, but this did not interest Hitler much. He knew it was aimed at those convinced to follow his ideology.
Although it was a bestseller from the start, very few people managed to read it completely, not only because of its 800-page length but also because of its difficult vocabulary. In 1934, with Hitler's rise to power, sales exploded. One million copies sold in one year at a price of between 7 and 12 marks, depending on the edition. This represented a rather high sum for the wages of the time. Over time, copies were given away to disabled or amputated people, university graduates, and newlyweds on their wedding days.
The book began with the sentence: "In compliance with the ruling of the Munich People's Court, I was to begin my confinement in the Landsberg prison on the Lech River on April 1, 1924." It then explained the book's objective. "The progress of the great movements in the world has generally been due to great orators. However, it is essential that the fundamental aspects of the doctrine be expounded." In this way, Hitler was selling one of his greatest skills.
Among its long pages are various paragraphs in which he denigrated and vilified Jews, creating a brutal conspiracy about the meaning of Judaism at the time. Some of the exact phrases demonstrate his most abominable hatred. "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and force with numerical mass and its dead weight. Thus, it denies the value of personality in man, questions the importance of nationality and race, and thereby removes from humanity the premise of its existence and culture."
"As the foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any intellectually conceivable order for man. And just as in the largest of all recognizable organisms, the result of the application of such a law could only be chaos on Earth. It could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet. If with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew triumphs over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity, and this planet as thousands of years ago will move through the ether devoid of men. That is why today I believe that I am acting according to the will of the Almighty Creator. Defending myself from the Jew, I fight for the work of the Lord."
"To what extent the existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is demonstrated in an incomparable way by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery. The Frankfurter Zeitung laments and cries. The best proof of its authenticity is that once this book becomes the common property of a people, the Jewish threat can be considered destroyed. Since the Jew is not the attacked, but the attacker, not only does the attacker pose as his enemy, but also those who resist him. But the means by which he seeks to break these reckless but upright souls is not honest warfare, but lies and slander."
"Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one should be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as a symbol of all evil takes the living form of the Jew. The ignorance of the broad masses about the inner nature of the Jew, the lack of instinct and narrow-mindedness of our upper classes make the people an easy victim of this Jewish campaign of lies. While out of innate cowardice, the upper classes reject a man whom a Jew attacks with lies and slander. The great masses out of stupidity or naivety believe everything."
"State authorities either hide in silence or, as is often the case, to put an end to the Jewish press campaign, they persecute those unjustly attacked, which in the eyes of such an official appears as the preservation of state authority and the safeguarding of public order. Jewish dominance in the state seems so secure that it can now not only call itself Jewish again, but it relentlessly admits its national and political designs. The end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jews, but also the end of this parasite on the nations. After the death of its victim, the vampire sooner or later also dies."
Despite its success, the book drew heavy criticism from various newspapers. They accused it of presenting hollow formulas, more or less pathetic nonsense, and of being full of trivialities. Journalist Stefan Zweig mentioned he had certain doubts about the author's mental integrity. In an article, Sven Felix Kellerhoff, author of My Struggle: The History of the Book That Marked the 20th Century, opined that it is a chaotic and highly repetitive book. The enormous number of digressions and ramblings undermines its structure.
In general, the only things clear are two fundamental aspects: his radical anti-Semitism with fantasies of annihilation, and his sense of being called to secure the future of the German people by conquering living space in the east, which would be achieved through the long sought but unrealistic understanding with Great Britain. Some historians agree that Hitler drew inspiration from diverse sources and that his ideas were not at all original except for the way he combined everything he had read, particularly the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The International Jew. They also accuse him of making demonstrable errors regarding supposedly autobiographical sections, since he chose to embellish parts of his story to achieve certain effects in his audience.
Despite Hitler's hatred of Jews, he managed to befriend a girl of Jewish origin. She was even nicknamed the Führer's daughter. Her name was Bernhardine Nienau, better known as Bernile Nienau. She was born on April 20, 1926, in Dortmund, Germany. Her father was the physician Bernhard Nienau, who died shortly before her birth, and her mother was the nurse Karoline, whose surname was Morgenstern. The Nuremberg Laws, which determined a person's racial origin, concluded that Bernile was one-quarter Jewish.
In 1928, they moved to Munich, and although she was subject to some discrimination, she managed to retain her Reich citizenship. In the spring of 1933, while Hitler and his henchmen were building concentration camps to house and exterminate Jews, the six-year-old Bernile and her mother stood at the head of the stream of visitors to Obersalzberg, where Hitler lived in his residence. Hitler marveled at Bernile's bright blue eyes and blonde hair. Because of her supposedly Aryan face, he singled her out for a closer visit. Curiously, by this time Hitler was already aware that Bernile's grandmother and mother were Jewish.
They maintained a friendship that lasted about six years. Bernile used to call him Uncle Adolf, while he addressed her as darling. They shared the same birthday, April 20, so they celebrated their birthdays together. Among the 17 letters that survived the war is one Bernile wrote to Adolf Hitler and Wilhelm Brückner, his chief adviser. "Munich, September 27, 1936. Dear Uncle Brückner, I have a lot to tell you today. During the holidays, we were on the Obersalzberg, and I was allowed to see my dear uncle Hitler twice. Unfortunately, you never made it up. I'm already busy with my Christmas knitting. I'm knitting some socks for Uncle Hitler again because I asked him if he had any left last year. He said yes. This year I can knit with finer wool. Mother only helps me with the heel. They'll be very warm and since he always travels so much, it's important that his feet don't get cold. Mother also sends you her regards and lots of love and kisses from your Bernile."
On April 19, 1938, Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler's adjutant, described Hitler's indifference to the girl's parentage as a purely human attitude toward the child. However, when Martin Bormann learned of what had happened, he banned both Bernile and her mother from the residence. Heinrich Hoffmann attempted to publish photographs of Hitler with Bernile, but Bormann strictly forbade him, which he then informed Hitler of. Although books containing these photographs sold well, Hoffmann was unable to continue photographing her. Bormann took this personally and ordered all books featuring Bernile to be destroyed. In a book published after the war, Hoffmann wrote, "There are people who have a real talent for ruining my joy." In May 1938, the Nazi high-ranking officials ordered Karoline and Bernile not to appear at the residence again. On October 5, 1943, at the age of 17, Bernile died in Schwabing Hospital from spinal poliomyelitis.
Among the hundreds of adjectives that can define Adolf Hitler, his racist and anti-Semitic zeal predominates and motivated his other qualities. Generally speaking, racists believe that innate and inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. This doctrine asserts that blood defines national and ethnic identity. Within this line of thinking, a human being has value not because of their individuality or their own characteristics, but solely because of their belonging to a supposed collective racial nation.
The Nazis perceived the entire history of humanity as a biologically determined struggle between people of different races. At the same time, they attributed a dangerous racially based Jewish intellectualism to political movements such as Marxism, communism, pacifism, and internationalism. In 1931, the SS established a Race and Settlement Office responsible for conducting all kinds of racial investigations that could determine the suitability of potential marriage partners for SS membership.
In 1935, after the Nazis came to power, they quickly passed the notorious Nuremberg Race Laws, which codified a supposedly biological definition of Jewishness. According to their own theories, only Germans and some other northern Europeans were Aryans, belonging to a superior race. On the other hand, the Nazis, motivated by their racism, considered the mentally and physically ill to be imperfections of the genetic makeup they called the master race, and that their reproduction represented a biological danger to the purity of the supposedly Aryan race.
During the last half of 1939, after meticulous collection and planning, German doctors began a series of murders of disabled residents of various institutions throughout Germany. They called this operation euthanasia. In line with these practices, during World War II dozens of Nazi doctors conducted fraudulent experiments aimed at identifying physical evidence of Aryan superiority and non-Aryan inferiority. After murdering hundreds of thousands of non-Aryan prisoners, the Nazis failed to find any evidence to support their baseless theories about racial differences among human beings. This indicated that it was an ideological issue, not a scientific one.
As is well known, during their years in power, the Nazis implemented racial laws and policies that deprived not only Jews of their rights but also black people, Roma, homosexuals, and others. Nazi leaders sought to carry out ethnic cleansing. This policy included the murder and annihilation of the so-called enemy races, which included genocide and the destruction of the leadership of the Slavic peoples. Nazi racism produced murders on an unprecedented scale.
Hitler's hatred of Jews was based on these theories. In short, Hitler and the rest of the anti-Semites held Jews responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I. They accused them of being responsible for Germany's economic problems and high unemployment. They were convinced that Jews were determined to dominate German culture and all local businesses. They believed Jews were either too rich, depriving other Germans of wealth, or too poor to the point of becoming criminals. They were blamed for the lack of morality in modern society. Loyal to their religion, they were seen as enemies of Christians and disinterested in the German state. They were called the creators of Bolshevism and capitalism, which is why they were supposedly determined to attack Germany's borders. But the main reason that encompassed all these was that they were considered racially inferior to those belonging to the Aryan race.
Hitler had a firm obsession with the supposed Aryan race, and his pursuit of the disappearance of Judaism led to the murder of approximately six million men, women, and children. Hitler's anti-Semitism ultimately led to what became known as the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of those who did not belong to the Aryan race. At the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Nazi leaders formalized the Final Solution to annihilate the entire Jewish people.
In detail, nearly 2,700,000 Jews died in various extermination centers such as Auschwitz, Birkenau, Chelmno, and Sobibór, among others. Some two million Jews were annihilated in executions and various massacres in more than 1,500 cities, towns, and villages. Between 800,000 and one million Jews were murdered in various ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps. Finally, at least 250,000 Jews were murdered in other acts of violence, including anti-Semitic riots, individual executions, partisan killings, and forced marches, trains, and ships. The Holocaust was undoubtedly one of the greatest atrocities in human history, if not the greatest.