Office of Strategic Services HITLER IS NO FOOL
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)
(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)
...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)
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)
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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Hitler Source Book
Hitler Is No Fool
by Karl Billinger
(Part 1 of 2)
by Karl Billinger