The Young Life Of Adolf Hitler

6 Pages 1460 Words

Adolf Hitler’s young life and experiences would one day lead to the destruction he caused as the leader of the Nazi party. His movement would place great importance on a person’s family tree, even making it a matter of life and death. However, the supreme irony is that Hitler’s own grandfather was most likely Jewish. He would never, in truth, know who his grandfather was.
Hitler’s father’s uncle had convinced Alois to change his name form Schicklgruber to Hiedler, to continue the family name. However, when it came time to write the name, it went down as Hitler. In 1885, Alois Hitler married the pregnant Klara Polzl. After four miscarriages, Hitler was born in 1889, in the small Austrian village of Branau Am Inn just across from the German Border.
At age seven, the family moved to Lambach, an old town containing an old Catholic Benedictine monastery. The ancient monastery was decorated with carved stones and woodwork that contained swastikas. Adolf attended school there and saw them every day. Adolf did well in this school and singing in the choir during high mass left a very deep impression. One day, Hitler found books in his father’s collection having to do with the military. These included a picture book on the War of 1870-71 between the Germans and the French, he later admits that this book became an obsession. “It was not long before that great historic struggle had become my greatest spiritual experience. From then on, I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any connected with war or, for that matter, with soldering.” Hitler stated in Mein Kampf. Playing cowboys and Indians gave way to battle re-enactments. However, when his little brother died at age six, Adolf, the boy who loved war play and ‘pretend’ death now had to confront death for the first time. It appears to have shaken him badly. To make matters worse, the boy was buried in the cemetery behind his house, to ...