Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page B

belligerency, including psychological disorganization, remembered humiliation, contempt for traditional institutions and fantasies of violent revenge. Throughout his life he remained locked in a personal struggle with his previous brutalization, a trauma that ordering others to kill could temporarily assuage but never resolve. He claimed to be inhibited from using violence himself by his middle-class morality. Danzig politician Hermann Rauschning, who knew Hitler personally, sensed his unresolved belligerency and understood that it made him more dangerous than he might have been had he been personally violent:
    Everyone who knew Hitler during the early years of struggle knows that he has by nature an easily moved and unmistakably sentimental temperament, with a tendency towards emotionalism and romanticism. His convulsions of weeping in all emotional crises are by no means merely a matter of nerves. . . . For this very reason, there lies behind Hitler’s emphasis on brutality and ruthlessness the desolation of a forced and artificial inhumanity, not the amorality of the genuine brute, which has after all something of the power of a natural force. Nevertheless, in the harshness and unexampled cynicism of Hitler there is something more than the repressed effect of a hypersensitiveness which has handicapped its bearer. It is the urge to reprisal and vengeance, a truly Russian nihilistic feeling. [Emphases added.]
    Hitler’s childhood brutalization is incontrovertible, although his biographers have been curiously reluctant to acknowledge it. Their reluctance may stem from unwillingness to be seen “psychoanalyzing” so large and destructive a historical figure. Psychoanalysis may be left to the analysts, but reporting a subject’s well-authenticated social experiences is a biographer’s first responsibility.
    Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was an Austrian customs official who had worked his way up from the peasantry. Adolf’s mother Klara, twenty-three years younger than her husband, had been a servant in Alois’s house during his second wife’s last illness. The three children she bore Alois prior to Adolf had died of diphtheria within days of each other in the summer of 1887; Adolf was born on 20 April 1889. A fellow customs official and neighbors characterized Hitler’s father as harsh, “unsympathetic,” “inaccessible,” “hard to work with”; even one of Alois’s friends commented that “his wife had nothing to smile about.”
    Adolf’s older stepbrother Alois Jr., who left home at fourteen to escape his father’s violent subjugation, never forgot the severe beatings he received. His son William Patrick Hitler told American investigators that “Alois Sr. frequently beat [Alois Jr.] unmercifully with a hippopotamus whip. He demanded the utmost obedience . . . every transgression was another excuse for a whipping.” Alois Jr.’s first wife Brigid added that Adolf’s father had been a man of “a very violent temper” who “often beat the dog until the dog would . . . wet the floor. He often beat the children, and on occasion . . . his wife Klara.” Adolf’s younger sister Paula (born in 1896) told the biographer John Toland, “It was my brother Adolf who especially provoked my father to extreme harshness and who got his due measure of beatings every day.”
    Hitler himself bragged to one of his secretaries that after reading about Indian stoicism in the Wild West novels he consumed as a boy, he had “resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me. And when the time came — I still can remember my frightened mother standing outside the door—I silently counted the blows. My mother thought I had gone crazy when I beamed proudly and said, ‘Father hit me thirty-two times!’ ”To dinner guests in Berlin, Albert Speer reports, “Hitler repeatedly talked about his youth, emphasizing the strictness of his upbringing. ‘My father often dealt me hard blows. Moreover, I think that was