GERMANY: The Betrayer

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From his mother, the 20-year-old third wife of his 53-year-old father, Hitler inherited his psychotic blue-green eyes, and probably his tendency to tantrums and his anemic artistic talent. From his father, who had risen by a lifetime's effort from a peasant to a petty customs inspector, Hitler probably inherited a toughness of character that was not so much strength as a persistent stubbornness in overcoming weakness.

He was a somewhat strident boy, who early tried out the Fuhrerprinzip (leader principle) by bossing his schoolmates ("I became a little ringleader at that time"). One day he discovered an account of the Franco-Prussian War in two old popular magazines. "Before long that great heroic campaign had become my greatest spiritual experience."

The Fuhrerprinzip had no effect on Hitler's father, who wanted his son to become a petty official. Hitler wanted to become an artist. The long struggle between them was ended only by the death of his father. Then his mother sent him to art school. Two years later she died. Young Hitler packed his few clothes in a suitcase and struck out for Vienna.

It was a momentous trip for mankind. For in gay, cosmopolitan, highly civilized Vienna the young German nationalist from the Alps suffered for the first time three new urban experiences that profoundly influenced his future: the slum proletariat, Social Democratic trade unions, Jews.

His political education kept pace with his human observations. Hitler learned to know trade unions when he got a job as a bricklayer. "When I was told I had to join, I refused." The radical talk of his fellow workers disgusted him.

Terror and Force. Adolf tried to reason with his fellow bricklayers. "I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." He was learning fast. Hitler was given the choice of quitting the job or being tossed off the scaffold. He quit. He also took to reading Socialist literature and attending Socialist meetings to find out what it was all about. His researches led him to a conclusion that was to blossom later into the horrors of concentration camps like Maidenek, Buchenwald and Dachau.

Soon Hitler was reaching equally luminous conclusions about the Jews. He began to read the publications of Vienna's violently anti-Semitic Mayor Doktor Karl Lueger and his Christian Socialist Party. "One day when I was walking through the inner city, I suddenly came upon a being clad in a long caftan, with black curls. Is this also a Jew? was my first thought. . . . But the longer I stared at this strange face and scrutinized one feature after the other, the more my mind reshaped the first question into another form: Is this also a German?"

Soon young Hitler's researches had revealed to him that the Jew is the enemy of all mankind, but by special malice, the peculiar enemy of the Germans.

In 1912 Hitler moved from racially impure Vienna to Munich. There he continued to live a slum existence, eking out a bare living by peddling his watercolor paintings. There in June 1914, the news reached him that a Serbian nationalist had shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.