Hitler Essay, Research Paper
He stands motionless with crossed arms and resting eyes focused straight ahead.
He is completely immobile, expressionless, and says absolutely nothing.
Surrounded by some fifteen thousand audience members filing into the great
auditorium to hear this man speak, the presence he commands brings order to the
environment almost immediately. There is little doubt that Adolf Hitler
projected a commanding presence. The aforementioned was merely a description of
events which took place prior to one of his famous speeches during the pre-war
Nazi years, when his party was only coming into power and Adolf Hitler, as a
personality, was making his presence known on the scene. This historical
backdrop of Germany in the 1930’s reveals a country knee-deep in economic
depression, and as would well be expected, the climate was ripe for a new
leader. Adolf Hitler made his presence known in the form of a Messiah rather
than a political leader, offering his countrymen not only economic but political
salvation as well as the kind of cultural magnificence which he truly believed
in, i.e. the Aryan race. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in the Austrian
town of Braunau am Inn, the son of Alois, a customs official, and Klara Hitler.
He was not a successful student, and his earlier years are said to have been
characterized by melancholy, aimlessness and racial hatred. It was in Vienna
where he developed what is considered to be a life-long obsession with the
danger that the world Jewery posed to the Aryan race. It was after Hitler
relocated to Munich in 1913 and served in the Bavarian 16th Regiment that he
distinguished himself for bravery and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. It
was during this time that Hitler had found a home and glorified the raw majesty
of life under fire, the beauty of comradeship and the nobility of the warrior.
His soldierly dreams of victory and fulfillment were shattered, however, by
Germany’s defeat. He became convinced that Germany had been stabbed in the back
by Jews and Marxists.1 Oratory and the printed word were much a part of Adolf
Hitler’s rise to save the "fatherland." It is my personal view that
Hitler acquired his oratory skills and acuity through his earlier experiences.