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Hitler Source Book
Hitler Is No Fool
by Karl Billinger
(Part 1 of 2)


[Page 1]

HITLER IS NO FOOL
by Karl Billinger

In his book Hitler has laid the groundwork for the mystification of his life. In picturing his parental home, his family, and his youth-- in describing his venture into life, his service during and after the War, there is hardly a single clear statement of fact. Each is blurred intentionally, much has been proved beyond doubt to be imaginary. The omission of circumstances and experiences which in any other man's life would be irrelevant takes on a special significance.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 14)

...He wanted to become a painter. The conflict between the tyrannical father and the willful son pervaded the boy's early youth. When hardly eleven years old, so he says, he decided to thwart his father's plans by means of passive resistance.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 14)

.."Two years later," he writes, "my mother's death brought these beautiful plans to an abrupt end." The "two years later" can refer only to the time of his father's death. Thus the reader gets the impression that Adolf Hitler was an orphan at the age of fifteen, alone in the world, without solicitous brothers and sisters.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 15)

In the first place there is Hitler's father, whose influence on the boy's development was undoubtedly great. Alois Hitler was the illegitimate child of a peasant girl, whose family name, Schicklgruber, he bore until he was forty, when he married Klara Poelzl, Adolf's mother. The name of Klara Poelzl's mother had been Hitler, and there seems to be some foundation for the assumption that Alois Schicklgruber, on his mother-in-law's insistence, changed his name to Hitler.

Klara Poelzl was Alois Schicklgruber's third wife. The first marriage had ended in divorce. Hitler's eldest half-brother, Alois, was born of this marriage. After Adolf's phenomenal success Alois, waiter by trade, settled in Berlin and opened a cafe-restaurant at the Wittenberg Platz. He now invites the passing burgher with the intimate and _gemutlich_ sign "ALOIS."

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 15-16)

[Page 2]

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 15-16 cont. )

One month after the death of his first wife Hitler's father married a second time. Two months later a daughter was born to him, Angela, who afterwards was to take care of Hitler's household in Munich and in Berchtesgaden. The father's second marriage ended a year later with the death of the second wife. Ten months thereafter Alois Schicklgruber, now forty, married a third time - this time a girl of seventeen, Adolf Hitler's mother-to-be. Two other children of this marriage are living: a boy, Edmund, and a daughter, Paula. Little is known about either of them.

At the age of fifty-six Hitler's father retired, unusually early for a State official. Three times he changed his residence, before he finally settled down near Linz.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 15-16)

...But to be able to preside over a bourgeois Germany, the Fuehrer must be the child of a respectable family. Poor but clean.

It becomes a little difficult to fit this father--forever migrating, with an inclination for alcohol, married three times, himself an illegitimate child and father of a daughter born two months after his marriage--into the Third Reich's conception of "blood and soil" aristocracy. Hence his picture is heavily retouched.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 17)

His drawing' were returned as unsatisfactory. "I was so sure of success that the news of my not being accepted came like a bolt out of the blue," he writes. But he closes the matter with a remark typical for him. The Director of the Academy assured him that the drawings he had shown, although bad as far as painting goes, revealed surprising architectural talent. "That I had attended neither a School of Architecture nor had any instruction in architecture amazed my examiners."

Thus the defeat which the would-be painter had suffered is discreetly transformed into professional recognition of his natural abilities as an architect. And Adolf, who had just left the Academy building "in the greatest depression," was convinced in a very short time that he "would some day become an architect."

Still, entrance to the Architectural School of the Academy in Vienna required a completed formal preparatory training which Hitler did not have. "What I had missed in school out of stubbornness, was now to take its bitter revenge."

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 17)

[Page 3]

...It closes with a dramatic declaration of thanks to fateful necessity "for tearing me away from the hollowness of a smug life, and for pushing Mother's boy out of his soft nest and giving him Dame Care for a foster-mother; for throwing the reluctant one into the world of misery and poverty, thus allowing him to meet those for whom he was later to fight."

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 18)

The interrupted school period, the lost years of his youth, the collapse of his favorite plan, have left deep marks on Hitler's character. Even at the height of his power the shades of his earlier failures must haunt him. In his book, he breaks out with resentment: "So-called 'Intelligence' looks down with infinite condescension upon anyone who has not been dragged through the obligatory schools and thus had the necessary knowledge pumped into him."

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 18)

The Fuehrer never forgets a defeat. Woe to the institutions in which he has failed! And woe to the country in which for years he suffered the greatest personal humiliation!

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 19)

...The descriptions of his youth are tinged with pain and envy at being excluded from the glory and power of the Bismarckian Reich.

Why is it that Austria did not fight in this war (against the French)? Why not Father and all the others too? Are we not Germans like the rest of them? Don't we all belong together? This problem began for the first time to torment my little brain. With suppressed envy I had to listen to the answer to my cautious question-- that not every German possesses the good fortune to belong to the Reich of Bismarck. I could not understand this.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 19-20)

...Contempt for Austria and adoration for Imperial Germany were among the reasons which moved him to leave Vienna for Munich.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 20)

[Page 4]

It is by no means a coincidence that among the Fuehrer's closest associates in the most responsible positions there are numerous foreign-born Germans.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 20)

As strange as it may seen at first glance, the abyss existing between this social class, which is by no means well situated, and the workers, is often deeper than one would think. The reason for this-- shall I say--enmity lies in the fear of a social group, which has but a short time ago risen from the ranks of the workers, that it may sink back into the old, scorned class, or at least that it may still be regarded as belonging to it.

The fear of the lower middle class, threatened with being .dispossessed and pushed into the ranks of the workers, was later to become Hitler's powerful ally.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 21)

But it was not alone the physical hardship of the work that depressed him. The feeling that he had lost caste weighed even more heavily upon the official's son. He detested the "moral coarseness" of his fellow-workers and the low level of their spiritual culture."

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 21)

"I argued, each day better informed about their own knowledge than my opponents themselves." A nineteen-year-old against an entire crew of Reds! The scene vividly reminds us of the National Socialist legend which tells how Hitler during the War captured, single-handed. an entire platoon of Frenchmen. The Military rewarded his alleged heroism with the Iron Cross, first class. (The records seem to have been lost.) But the unappreciative workers rewarded him finally by chasing him from the building.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 23)

How long Adolf Hitler worked as a labourer can be determined rather accurately. He left his parental home after the death of his mother in December, 1908. It is unlikely that he came to Vienna until the beginning of 1909. He tells us that in the year 1909-10 his fortunes changed. He no longer had to eke out an existence as a day labourer; but worked "then as a minor draftsman and aquarellist." A companion of these times has told that this period began in August, 1909.

(Hitler-Billinger-p. 24)


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