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The Holocaust refers to the genocide of various ethnic, religious, national, and secular groups during World War II. Led by Adolf Hitler, the German Nazis started this annihilation in 1941 and continued it until 1945.
The Nazis focused on exterminating the Jews in a plan called the �Final Solution of the Jewish Question.? As the Final Solution started to gain support, concentration camps originally established for German political prisoners were converted into death camps, and new extermination camps were also built. At these camps, prisoners were either immediately executed in gas chambers or were used for slave labor in factories or industrial enterprises located within the camps.
By the end of this plan, an estimated over six million Jews were murdered; about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population (Viault 490-491). Some 1.5 million of these victims were children. Other groups deemed "undesirable", like Poles, Slavs, gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, and homosexuals, were also persecuted and murdered, and taking these other groups all into account, the total death toll rises considerably. Estimates minus the Jewish population range from five million to up to 26 million. (Wikipedia)
As one can tell just by the estimates of the number of victims, the Holocaust was one of the world's greatest, most wide-scale tragedies. As many as 32 million people were killed by the time it ended. The things the Nazis have done to the Jews (the discrimination, experiments, massacres, etc.) are still considered unthinkably inhuman, even to this day.
At that time, anti-Semitism and hostility toward the Jews had already been prevalent for quite a while. However, a single man, Adolf Hitler, first started to actually put this hatred into action, creating various anti-Semitic fronts (Larkin 94-95). As people look back at the tragedies of World War II, many people wonder why Hitler started it all. Why did he do it? What had struck him inside to kill millions and millions of people? What had happened to him to make him that way? To answer these questions, we will have to look at Hitler's earlier life.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 at Braunau am Inn, a small town in Austria-Hungary. He was the fourth of the six children born to Alois Hitler (1837~1903), a customs official, and Klara Polzl, Alois' third wife. However, of these six children only Adolf and his sister Paula reached adulthood.
Alois Hitler, Adolf's father, was illegitimate; he was born to unmarried parents. For a while, he used his mother's surname which was Schicklgruber. However, in 1876, Alois started using the surname of Johann Georg Hiedler, his supposed father. Later, though Adolf never used the name �Schicklgruber,?his political enemies accused him of not being a �Hitler?but a �Schicklgruber?and therefore being of Jewish descent.
Due to Alois Hitler's job as a customs official, the Hitler family had to move around frequently, from Braunau, Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and to Linz. After Alois' retirement, the family settled in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, where Adolf Hitler grew up. When he was a child, Hitler was an intelligent but moody boy. Young Adolf was said to be bright student, but he had a poor school record and had to repeat. His teachers remarked that Adolf had "no desire to work."(Britannica)
Later, Hitler explains that his unwillingness to study was a sort of rebellion against his father. His father wanted Adolf to be a customs officer like himself while Adolf wanted to be a painter. Hitler's hatred toward his father increased, and later in his biography "Mein Kampf" he depicted his father as a sadistic tyrant, although in truth he was probably just nothing more than a normal, strict Austrian father. Alois died in 1903 but left an adequate pension and savings to support his wife and children.
In contrast to his relationship with his father, Adolf was very devoted to his indulgent mother. However, Klara Polzl also died soon in 1908 by cancer. Even after her death, he continued to draw a regular allowance from his inheritance.
From his relationships with his parents, we can see that Adolf, since his childhood, had trouble establishing normal human relations. His hatred toward his father depicts his inability to cope well with other people, while his reliance on his mother depicts his need for comfort and social acceptance. By observing these characteristics, we can guess that Adolf was a socially insecure person since he was very young.
From 1905, Hitler went to Vienna to pursue his dream as a painter. He had some artistic talent and often drew pictures of houses and grand buildings. Unfortunately, he was rejected twice by the Academy of Arts in Vienna for "lack of talent." Hitler highly resented this and started to form a loathing toward the bourgeois and the Jews, the two dominating classes of the academy (FAQfarm). After that, Hitler did not try to find another job or seek another profession. He worked as a struggling painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists.
Hitler's hate for Jews intensified at this point. Anti-Semitism was deeply ingrained in the Austrian Catholic culture where Hitler matured. Vienna had a large Jewsih community, including many Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe. Hitler was influenced by the pseudoscientific and neo-religious writings of the race ideologist and anti-Semite Lanz von Liebenfels and arguments from politicians such as Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna and Georg Ritter von Sch?erer, leader of the Pan-Germanistic movement .
Hitler soon started to believe in the superiority of the "Aryan race", which formed the basis of his political views. He soon started claiming that the Jews were natural enemies of "Aryans" and were responsible for Germany's economic problems and were also in some way responsible for his poverty and his failure to achieve the success he believed he deserved (Wikipedia). For 30 more years, Hitler conitnued to loathe the Jews and his hatred toward them intensified over time. These 30 years of hating and loathing eventually resulted in the Holocaust.
As can be seen through Hitler's childhood, Hitler was not always the evil murderer we think he was. He was an artist, a painter, a dreamer. He used to be a fairly ordinary person. But his inability to establish ordinary human relationships; a growing intolerance and hatred both of the established bourgeois world and of non-German people, especially the Jews; a tendency toward passionate, denunciatory outbursts; a readiness to live in a world of fantasy and so to escape his poverty and failure; these were all factors in Hitler that brought this dreamer down.
Though his hatred sprouted from what others might consider quite meager events, for a person so fragile and insecure has Hilter, these events were to greatly develop his hatred toward the Jews. Also, the anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Hitler had matured had fueled this hatred even more. These two factors combined mainly compelled Hitler to launch one of the biggest tragedies in human history. Still, we can not blame him entirely for his bizarre hatred. Hitler was just a result of his environment; a product of something that was probably sadly inevitable.
Hitler is still thought of as the evil murderer of millions of innocent people. But we will have to remember that he was not always evil; but actually a tame, ordinary person. Though it may be sad and sick at the same time, when we look through his past, we will have to admit that Hitler was only the product of his past, environment and insecure character.
< References >
* �Hitler?Britannica Vol. 20. 15. ed
* Fest, Joachim. Hitler. New York: Harvest Books, 2002
* Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
* J?kel, Eberhard. Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981
* Kitchen, Martin. Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
* Larkin, Andrew. Hitler and the Nazis. London: Oxford University Press, 1994
* Turk, Eleanor L. The History of Germany. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999
* Viault, Birdsall S. Modern European History. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1990
* Rhonheimer, Martin. �The Holocaust: What Was Not Said?First Things Nov. 2003: 18-28
* Brown, Daniel A. �To Auschwitz and Back?Sojourners Magazine July-Aug. 1995: 59-63
* �Adolf Hitler?Wikipedia. 11 April 2005. Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. 12 April 2005
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler >
* B?ow, Louis. �The Holocaust FAQ?The Holocaust: Crimes, Heroes, and Villains. 2001.
12 April 2005. < http://www.auschwitz.dk/bullseye/new_page_3.htm >
* �Why did Hitler hate Jews so much??Online posting. 2004. FAQfarm. 12 April 2005.
< http://www.faqfarm.com/Q/Why_did_Hitler_hate_Jews_so_much >
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