Adolf Hitler: The Cause Of The Holocaust

Adolf Hitler is an extremely well known man due to him being the cause of the Holocaust. However, Adolf was not always a murderous man. He was born on April 20, 1889 in Austria-Hungary. He had six other siblings, although only him and his sister Paula lived to be adults. During his childhood him and his family were abused by their father Alois Hitler. He later died in 1903 when Adolf was only thirteen years old. Adolf was never good at school and dropped out at sixteen so he could apply to Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and become a painter. He applied twice with hopes of becoming famous for his water colors, but both his applications were rejected. His mother, Klara Polzl, died in 1908 due to breast cancer when Adolf was nineteen years old. In

1914 when World War I started, Hitler moved to Munich, Germany and lived off his father’s pension. He volunteered for the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment where “he won two Iron Cross Medals for his performance in battle” (Witherbee 1). Afterwards he applied to be in the German war and was accepted. During his time, he wrote a letter addressing his feelings toward Germany. Towards the end he prophesied that “Austria will suffer the fate I have always predicted” (Simms 322).
For a while Hitler worked in Traunstein at an old prisoner-of-war camp. He spied on a meeting held by a small organization called Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“German Workers Party”). Anion Drexler, the leader, noticed Adolf when he spoke up during the meeting. Hitler became its seventh member in 1919. Hitler began as the group’s organizer, but then became the spokesman when he “was able to draw almost two thousand people to a DAP event” (Witherbee 1). The name of the organization was changed to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Workers Party”), better known as Nazi. Hitler created the swastika which the group used as a good luck symbol. It also indicated their belief of a superior German blood line. He dominated the the group's activities which later caused resentment among the rest of the members. They tried to decrease his power, but did not succeed and Hitler took total control of the party by 1921. In November of 1923 the party kidnapped German Bavaria government officials and marched through Munich with a group of Sturmabteilung men. The groups were stopped by police and Hitler was captured. He was sentenced to a five year sentence for treason, but only served six months.
During his sentence, with the help of Rudolf Hess, he wrote “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”). In his book he spoke some about his family life, which he lied about. He claims he had a good family with a loving, very caring mother, and a respectable father. He also wrote about a mental struggle he once dealt with. It ended when he came to realize “Jews were the source of ‘denigration of all things German’” (Mann 12) and he started looking into anti-Semitic books. Hitler described how he was intrigued by Schonerer’s idea of Jewry. His views were “based on a true appreciation on the racial problems and not on theories of religion” (Mann 16).
After all of this, he met Eva Braun, a seventeen year old girl whom he started a secret relationship with. He even had an affair during their relationship with his own niece. Later, after trying to rebuild the party, in the 1929 elections the party won 6.4 million votes. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933. A month later on February 27 a fire was set and destroyed the Reichstag. Hitler’s party was to blame, but they were able to use the event and arrest communist deputies. The Enabling Act gave Hitler and his cabinet absolute authority over the government for four years and he later claimed “the Nazis as the only legal political party in Germany” (Witherbee 1). He also ordered the construction of the first concentration camps around this time. Now that Hitler was in total control, he made all German military leaders make an oath of loyalty to him. His party controlled majority of German life, limiting job movement, threatening church leaders, systematizing workers’ free time, etc. He also “stripped German Jews of all the rights and protections of citizenship. . . encouraging discrimination and paving the way for their extermination” (Witherbee 1).
World War II began on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.

Germany was still fighting Britain in the spring of 1941 when Hitler made the decision to invade the Soviet Union using Operation Barbarossa. The operation was at first successful, however it was stalled by a harsh winter storm. During the year of 1941, Hitler’s military leaders did not agree with everything their Fuhrer was doing. He ordered them to massacre, brutalize, and exterminate certain races. His view of the German conquest dominated the military decisions that were made, forcing troops to stay in battle because they were not allowed to lose to an inferior race. This all led to Hitler ordering Jews to be tortured and forced into labor. During this time, the German territories were occupied by 63 percent of Jews. Hitler called the mass killings of this race “The Final Solution.” Millions of people, majority of them Jewish, were sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz. They were starved, beaten, and gassed. Some had attempted suicide, “Sachsenburg, another Saxon camp, witnessed at least 35 suicide attempts” (Goeschel 631). In another concentration camp, Buchenwald, “many inmates ran into the barbed wire or exposed themselves to the guards firing at them” (Goeschel 633). The mistreatment of the prisoners “was condoned, and that the Nazis. . . preferred to let them die a result of factors they could describe as “natural” such as poor health, physical weakness or breaches in discipline “justify

punishment” (Abel 153). Hitler continued this until the Soviet Union lost around 18 million people which include seven million citizens. He wanted to exterminate the Slavic populations because they could not be used for labor. In Hitler’s paranoid mind, he thought that the disabled, mentally ill, Roma, and Catholics were traitorous and needed to be exterminated as well. This was the biggest and most grueling part of the war known as The Holocaust or “Sacrifice.”
In 1944 around the time of the D-Day invasion, Hitler’s military leaders lost all faith in him. He ordered many of them to be killed because he suspected they were disloyal, increasing the death toll of their own soldiers on the ground. They resented Hitler so much that there was a series of assassination attempts. One included a bomb being planted in Hitler’s headquarters. They failed, but this led to an investigation and all that were accused were executed, except the most popular General Erwin Rommel who committed suicide.
On April 28, 1945, Soviet troops were now approaching Berlin and Hitler was down in his bunker to prepare for his imminent death.

The following day he married longtime girlfriend Eva Braun. On April 30, 1945 Hitler, Eva, and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, locked themselves in the bunker. Hitler gave his dog poison pills and gave some to his secretaries. He then went into a private room with Eva where he shot himself in the head while she died of poison. Goebbels burned their bodies and took poison himself, but only after giving it to his six children who were also in the bunker. Their bodies were found on May 2, 1945 and five days later Germany surrendered ending the

war.