The dominant political figure of German history in the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, was born in a lower middle class family in the provincial Austrian town of Braunau am Inn on 20 April 1889. In 1907 Hitler applied to enter the Vienna Academy of Art but his application was rejected. After the death of his mother Klara, Hitler decided to move to Vienna. He drifted from job to job, often selling sketches or painting scenes of Old Vienna and it was a period that he himself later called the most miserable period of his life. Many of Hitler’s views of the world were shaped by his experiences on the streets of Vienna and it is probable that his violent anti-Semitism dates from this time.

In 1924 Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for his part in the Munich Putsch. During this time in prison Hitler began work on his book entitled Mein Kamph (My Struggle). The book outlines some of Hitler’s political ideas and his views on race and Germany’s future role in world affairs.

Hitler had a racist view of world history and the dominant theme running through Mein Kamph was his concept of race. In Hitler’s view, civilization and nations decline when the fail to maintain the purity of the race. “Mixing blood and lowering of racial quality” according to Hitler is the “sole cause for the decline of all culture, for humans do not perish from lost wars but from the loss of that power of resistance that is characteristic only of pure blood”*. The fundamental duty of the government in Hitler’s mind was to preserve the racial purity of state for only this way can the superior race maintains it dominance over inferior races.

To Hitler, the Aryan (an earlier Indo-European race from which the Germans were descended) was the master race and the other races were inferior. To Hitler the Jew represented the absolute contrast to the Aryan. The Aryans were the creators of