Hate begets hate. At the end of World War I, everyone hated Germany.

Unfortunately, the wrong man happened to be around at just the right time to capitalize on that hate.

Adolf Hitler (actually spelled Heidler) was born in Austria, 1889, in a tavern on the river Inn. He was born to an adulterous father and a doting mother. Throughout his youth he is continually described by teachers as,

in no way untalented, but simply lazy.

Watt, xiv

He is a smart boy, but ends up repeating grades, moving schools, and generally languishing due to his lack of motivation. After his father dies when Adolf is 13, he begins pursuing art as a career. Life is good for a while, living under the loving eye of a mother who treated him very well (a stark contrast to his father, according to him). Mere months after turning eighteen, Adolf is denied entry into art school and loses his mother.

If he wasn’t literally Hitler, I might feel bad.

He spends the following years burning through a dwindling inheritance; but once he’s out, it’s the streets or bust for our intrepid genocidal maniac. After spending about a year sleeping in and out of homeless shelters and camping on park benches, Hitler has had enough. He moved into a hostel for working men in the spring of 1910, and it is through the people he met there that he entered the world of politics.

When Hitler was still getting an education, he picked up some very pro-Germany nationalist ideas from a history teacher by the name of Dr. Pötsch. It’s here that perhaps the seeds of some of his defining ideas began to germinate, but in his late teens, the ideas bloomed.

Then, the war began. Hitler joined the army at the height of the pro-war fever that spread across Europe like a plague.

As a soldier Hitler seems to have been as unlike the traditional Tommy as can be imagined . The camaraderie, the, to him totally unfamiliar, sense of membership of a community which the regiment and the army provided, and the purpose of war combined with the isolation and responsibility of his particular job to give him a sense of fulfillment, security and order, in short a reason for existence, which had been totally lacking to him before.

Watt, xix

Many of his admirations for militarism and order came undoubtedly from his time spent in the army. He was named a hero and given multiple medals for valor and “cold-blooded courage” (Watt, xix). He was injured close to the end of the war, and was distraught when he learned of Germany’s unconditional surrender. It is here where the roots of his anti-Semitism and ferocious nationalism began to take hold.

He attended political meetings and observed political parties at work. They fascinated him. It was here that he started the political part that would define him: the National Socialist Party, or, the Nazis.

Germany at the time was going through a brutal recession. Economic downturn and job loss is a dangerous combination for any society, much less one as violent and bitter as the Germans after World War I. The harsh reparations and territory loss left the German people feeling betrayed by their Government. The people wanted something different, something subversive.

One man was all too happy to fill those shoes.

Hitler and his growing Nazi party had been spending the past four years causing trouble. They hated Jews, Gypsies, the disabled; basically anyone they could easily scapegoat all of Germany’s problems onto. The two forces: the dissatisfied Germany and the rapidly rising Hitler, collided at just the right time for a terrible change to occur. Ostensibly, the German government did not support Hitler, but the people did. Hitler knew this, and capitalized on his popularity through fiery speeches and brazen acts. Hitler was reaching for power, but perhaps he was getting too close to the sun.

It was from one of his brazen oversteppings of German law that Hitler, for lack of a better phrase, ‘fucked around and found out’. After attempting to overthrow the Government in the infamous Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison.

It was here that he would write Mein Kampf, one of the most important and influential books of the last hundred years…