The Rise of Evil: Nazi War Crimes
Before embarking on a political career in September 1919 at the age of thirty, Adolf Hitler had been a nonentity. With no formal qualifications, he had become an aimless drifter and failed artist before joining the army on the outbreak of war in August 1914. There he was not considered worthy of promotion because of 'a lack of leadership qualities', although his award of the Iron Cross First Class showed that he did not lack courage.
Yet during the next 26 years he succeeded in gaining and exercising supreme power in Germany and, in the process, arguably had more impact on the history of the world in the 20th century than any other political figure. The explanation for this remarkable transformation lies partly …show more content…
His experiences in Vienna sharpened the Pan German nationalism that he had absorbed in his school days, increasing his contempt for the Habsburg Empire. He also developed a strong hostility towards the Socialist movement, fuelled partly by its internationalism, but also by his unwillingness to identify with the working class and his determination to retain his self-image as a superior being despite his actual inferior social position.
Although Hitler absorbed the racist and anti-Semitic discourses that so shaped the Viennese political and intellectual climate and was to reproduce their arguments and clichés years later, at the time he does not appear to have been hostile to Jews, at any rate on a personal level, since many of his closest associates in the men's hostel, who helped him sell his pictures, were in fact …show more content…
For it was at this point that anti-Semitism emerged as the core of Hitler's 'world view'. Defeat, revolution, and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles (1919) had challenged Hitler's whole sense of worth and personal identity.
Like many Germans, but even more so since he had effectively chosen German identity, Hitler needed to find an explanation for this catastrophe. And the explanation being vigorously canvassed by the extreme Right in Munich, and one that was generating a strongly positive popular response, was that the Jews were to blame.
This explanation chimed with the anti-Semitic theories which Hitler had absorbed in Vienna but which, in the light of his day-to-day positive experiences with actual Jews had not made much impact. Now, in very different circumstances and reinforced by the arguments of right-wing intellectuals in Munich which Hitler now encountered, these theories began to make sense, indeed to provide the total explanation which he was