Adolf Hitler’s story: From Vienna bum to dictator – to death
Egoist Fuehrer raised double-cross art to its highest pitch of all history
By S. Burton Heath
In 20 years, to the exact day, Adolf Hitler talked and double-crossed his way from the Austro-Hungarian lent of a Bowery bum to dictator over one of the world’s great nations.
On August 2, 1914, when World War I started, Hitler was existing in the squalor and degradation to which laziness, egotism and the complete lack of any constructive talent had brought him.
On August 2, 1934, he declared himself complete dictator of the Reich, and made good his presumption.
Hitler has boasted that history will remember him long after it has forgotten all his predecessors. Probably that is true.
It will recall him as an egotist who raised the double-cross to an art which nobody else in the world’s history ever achieved.
Alois Hitler, illegitimately born Schickelgruber, but legitimized by one George Hiedler, described his son, Adolf, as “good for nothing.” The description was apt from the day of his birth, April 20, 1889, to the outbreak of the First World War.
Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna, in a sort of flophouse, from 1907 to 1913. His fellow roomers gave him crusts of bread and bits of horse sausage, which he supplemented at a free soup kitchen.
In 1913, he went to Munich, where he continued his low life until the Germans marched on France.
His war service was ordinary. He won the Iron Cross twice, was wounded twice and gassed once.
He got into politics by double-crossing the German Army. In July 1919, he was assigned by the Propaganda and Espionage Division, which used him as a snooper, to observe a “meeting” of the German Workers Party, consisting of six men devoted to pan-Germanism and certain quasi-socialistic dogma. He joined them, on the spot, and thereafter combined politics with his “military” duties.
Hitler’s platform of pan-Germanism, anti-Versailles, anti-Semitism appealed to enough persons to convince him that politics was his forte.
Then came the foundation for another piece of double-crossing. A pervert named Ernest Roehm had raised a large secret army. Hitler was made public spokesman. When the Allies forced that army underground, Hitler adopted it as the Gymnastics and Sports Division of the Nazi Party.
An ex-military flier named Hermann Goering lent Hitler money and joined the party. A year later, he was put in command of Roehm’s army, the brown-shirted SA.
Beer hall putsch put down
Nor was that all that Roehm contributed to Hitler’s rise. In 1923, the Nazis and other strongarm groups held a Congress of some 100,000 persons in Nuremberg and formed a German Combat Union. Roehm maneuvered so that within a month Hitler, who had wangled dictatorship over the numerically small Nazi Party because political head of the whole combat union.
On May Day, 1923, Hitler’s SA men stole weapons from the Reichswehr barracks, undeterred because Roehm had arranged that the guards would not resist. And in November, 600 SA men kidnapped the entire government of Bavaria in the celebrated beer hall putsch.
Here, again, double-crossing was the order of the occasion. Wilhelm Frick had ordered his police to close their eyes to Hitler’s gangster’s activities. The ample guard at the beer hall did nothing, though it outnumbered the SA contingent. It was only Gen. von Seekt’s orders to the Reichswehr, after the conspirators thought they had won, that put an end to the coup and sent Hitler to prison.
Throughout this turbulent period, Gen. Ludendorff was used as a tool by the rising Austrian gang chief. Hitler used him on the theory that, when the time came for violence, the Army never would fire on its hero.
From 1923 to 1933 was a period of growth in Hitler’s fortunes and those of his party. Both were supported by contributions from big industrialists who approved Hitler’s opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, his desire to gather all Germans of the world into a greater Germany, his anti-Communism.
And finally, there was the military caste. The Junkers thought they were using Hitler to promote their own ends and woke up, much too late, to discover that Hitler had done the using.
Then, in 1932, the conservative von Papen felt obliged to offer him a cabinet seat, which he left Munich to take, only to be brought back by Goering and Goebbels.
The day after he became chancellor. Hitler dissolved the Reichstag and set March 5 for new elections. On February 27, the Reichstag building burned. It is commonly believed that the fire was set by the Nazis. but the arson was blamed on Communists and was used by Hitler to get from old man Hindenburg a decree suspending all the basic freedoms.
Storm troopers arrested political opponents. Hitler swept the elections. On March 23, a rubber-stamp Reichstag made Hitler dictator over Germany.
In June 1934, he persuaded Roehm to give the SA a month’s furlough, after which he promised to incorporate the SA into the Reichswehr as soon as sick President Hindenburg should die.
Roehm killed in blood purge
Then Hitler and Goebbels, with a picked SS group, killed Roehm and most of his closest friends while Goering, back in Berlin, purged other enemies and settled a few personal grudges with the pistol and the headsman’s help.
By 1938, Hitler felt strong enough to violate the Locarno Pact by marching into the demilitarized Rhineland. Commanding officers carried sealed orders which, if the French had objected with show of force, would have directed the Nazis to match back home again. But the French did nothing.
Hitler and Mussolini created the Rome-Berlin Axis on January 13, 1937.
Japan joined in November.
German troops marched into Austria in March – and that nation was annexed to the Reich.
Neither France nor England liked the way Hitler was stepping out. But he got Chamberlain and Daladier together with Mussolini and himself at Munich, and on September 30, the Anglo-French negotiators signed a pact authorizing Hitler to take the Sudetenland.
In each of these steps for new territory, Hitler double-crossed the nation concerned, the Anglo-French allies and the world at large. In each he used the fifth-column technique.
Hitler had signed a 10-year non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, and the sanctity and importance of this he had reaffirmed publicly January 30, 1939.
On August 25, 1939, he signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin of Russia. Two days later, Poland concluded a defensive alliance with Great Britain, one week thereafter, German planes began bombing Polish cities and German troops crossed the frontier.
Everything went according to plan. Russia stepped in the back door September 17. Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them the next day, and by September 29, Poland as a nation no longer existed.
But Hitler had driven England and France too far. They had declared war. Too weak really to help Poland, they stalled along behind the Maginot Line.
In April, he took over Denmark and Norway – again with fifth-column assistance. In May, he invaded Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
On June 14, Paris fell. On June 17, Petain asked for an armistice for France, and on June 25, hostilities ceased. The British evacuated their men from Dunkirk and left their armament.
Mussolini, who came into the war just as France was ready to capitulate, polished off much of North Africa for the Axis, but came to grief when he tried to sneak-attack little Greece near the end of 1940.
In April 1941, Hitler forces knocked off Yugoslavia, drove the British from Greece and subjugated that brave little nation, took Crete from the air in a completely novel type of campaign, and regained in North Africa much of what the Italians had lost to the British.
Then Hitler made a second great mistake. (The first, by general consensus, was putting off too long the invasion of Great Britain.) He pulled another double-cross – this time on Stalin.
At 3 a.m. of June 22, German troops crossed the dividing line in Poland and attacked Russia.
By December 14, Moscow had been under siege for two months, and only optimists even hoped that the Reds could survive. On December 15, the German invaders began to withdraw.
From then on, Hitler’s star began to fade.
Technically the United States did not enter the war until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. Actually, her entire weight except for actual shooting was on the side of the Allies at least from September 3, 1940, when President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill agreed that, in return for leases on certain defensive bases, this country should turn 50 overage destroyers over to the British for use against submarines.
On March 11, 1941, Mr. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill.
He escapes bomb plot
Then, in December, the United States entered the war.
Hitler began fading even faster from official gatherings as his armies began withdrawing from the stolen reaches of his “European Fortress.”
A bomb planted by German officers on July 20, 1944, hastened his withdrawal from the spotlight. This attempt on Hitler’s life left him bruised and burned, killed one of his aides and wounded 12 others.
Wrathfully, Hitler converted the plot into a purge of the German Army. Eight Junker officers were hanged August 8, 1944.
Then, on January 1, 1945, in a New Year’s message, he promised the German nation new weapons, new troops and a bright future. None materialized.
On February 16, Hitler decreed martial law in German areas threatened by advancing Allied armies. He threatened Germans who shirked their duty with court martial and death.
On March 9, when U.S. troops were expanding their Remagen bridgehead on Germany’s side of the Rhine, Hitler was reported to have visited the Oder River front facing the Russians.
Two days later, Hitler spoke by proxy to his people in observance of “Heroes Day” ceremonies at the War Memorial in Berlin.
On March 16, official British quarters confirmed rumors that an emissary of the German government had made peace overtures in Stockholm.
The gist of these feelers was that Hitler would quit if the Allies would recognize him as Germany’s post-war ruler.
Early in April, Hitler was reported again in complete command of the German armies.
Unsubstantiated reports on April 11 quoted some circles as saying that Hitler was dying, that Nazi Party leaders were split and that, Heinrich Himmler had succeeded Hitler as Germany’s dictator.
Yesterday came the final report: Hitler died in Berlin even as it was being cleared of all German troops by triumphant Russian invading forces.
