| Bitterness and Hatred: Evil Personified Embittered, Hitler directed his rage against everyone: he blamed his teachers in Linz, those at the Academy who had rejected him, the wealthy and the poor- he spurned the idea of being cast together with society�s misfits. A German in spirit if not by birth, Hitler was disgusted by the mix he found in Vienna: Bohemians, Slavs, Turks, Serbs and especially the Jews, who made up ten percent of the city�s population. To make matters worse, violently anti-Semitic literature was widespread in Vienna. Unable to see the complexities of social problems, he preferred to lock onto a single, tangible root cause: the Jews. Hitler�s hatred of the Jews was a result of his deeply disturbed personality. His plans, his dreams � everything he aspired to be had been crushed by malevolent forces. In Vienna, those phantom forces assumed human form. �One day� I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black sidelocks. Is this a Jew? Was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and curiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?� Hitler, Mein Kampf In his view, the Jews were at the heart of the ruling Social Democratic Party that exploited the people; they were responsible for everything that plagued modern society: prostitution, pornography and crime. �Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?� Hitler, Mein Kampf �If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the spilling of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.� Hitler quoted in Hermann Rauschning's "The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks" In addition to political philosophy, Hitler learned the political tactics in Vienna. He observed how the Social Democratic Party consolidated its power. He attended rallies and listened to speeches. Through Hitler the Social Democrat�s tactics of 1910 would become the Nazi tactics of the 1930s. "Hitler's artistic approach was absolutely central to his success. Lenin's religious-type fanaticism would never have worked in Germany. The Germans were the best-educated nation in the world. To conquer their minds was very difficult. Their hearts, their sensibilities, were easier targets. Hitler's strength was that he shared with so many other Germans the devotion to national images new and old: misty forests breeding blond giants; smiling peasant villages under the shadow of ancestral castles; garden cities emerging from ghetto-like slums; riding Valkyries, burning Valhallas, new births and dawns in which shining, millennian structures would rise from the ashes of the past and stand for centuries. Hitler had in common with average German taste precisely those revered images which nearly a century of nationalist propaganda had implanted...(Germany) could not be raped. It had to be seduced." Paul Johnson, Modern Times "Either the world will be ruled according to the ideas of our modern democracy, or the world will be dominated according to the natural law of force; in the latter case the people of brute force will be victorious." Hitler, Mein Kampf |
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| Hitler greeting supporters at a parade |