Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 at the Gasthof zum Pommer, an inn in Austria-Hungary. His father, Alois Hitler, was married to his half niece; Klara Polz. Hitler was the fourth child out of six, of which only Adolf and his sister Paula lived to adulthood.

As a child, Hitler, along with his mother, was often beaten by Alois. This resulted in a strong emotional attachment to his mother and a hatred towards his father. Hitler also did poorly in school to make a point to his father, who wanted him to become a Customs Official. Hitler wanted to be a painter instead. He tried to enter the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna twice but was denied.

On 21 December 1907, Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer. He inherited money from an aunt in 1910.

Hitler’s career as a painter failed soon after his second try to enroll in the academy. In 1909 he lived in a shelter for the homeless and in 1910 he lived ina shelter for poor working men.

In World War I he served in Belgium and France as a runner. Being a runner is the most dangerous job on the Western Front. Hitler received two iron crosses, one in 1914 (second class ) and in 1918 (first class). Hitler remained in the army after World War I and returned to Munich, where he attended the funeral march for the murdered Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner.

The Holocaust

The definition of the word “holocaust” has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people.

The killings took place in almost all of the Nazi controlled countries. Any person with 3 or 4 grandparents that were Jewish were killed unless they converted to another religion.

Many experiments were done on the people in the concentration camps, including lacing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries. People who survived the experiments were almost always killed soon after and disected.

In one experiment they sewed two four year old twins together at the back, the wounds became infected. The mother obtained some morphine and had her daughters killed.

By the end of the Holocaust, 5.9 million jews were killed, 2-3 Soviet prisoners of war, 200,000-250,000 disabled, 80,000-200,000 Freemasons, 5000-15,000 homosexuals, and 2,500-5000 Jehovah’s Witnesses