The Rise and Fall of Hitler's Reich
Uploaded by Admin on Jan 22, 1999
Feeling that all was lost, Hitler shot himself on April 30, 1945. By orders formally given by him before his death, SS officers immersed Hitler's body in gasoline and burned it in the garden of the Chancellery. Soon after the suicide of Hitler, the German forces surrendered. The war was officially over; however, the world was only beginning to realize the extent of its horror. The rise and sudden fall of Hitler had a sensational effect on people and nations around the world.
On Easter Sunday April 20, 1889, at an inn called the Gasth of Zum Pommer, the wife of an Austrian Customs official gave birth to a son, Adolf Hitler. He was the fourth child to the parents of Alois and Klara Hitler of Austria. Hitler was a good student. He took singing lessons and sang in the church choir. When he hit an adolescent age, he began to rebel. When Hitler's dad acquired a top ranking job in the military, he wanted his son to work hard so that he might become a civil servant. Hitler wanted nothing of it. He wanted to become an artist like he always dreamed.
One of the teachers in his high school classified young Hitler as "notorious, cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and irascible. He has an obvious difficulty in fitting in at school." He did well enough to get by in some of his courses but had no time for subjects that did not interest him. Years later, his former school mates would remember how Adolf would taunt his teachers and draw sketches of them in his school notebooks. Forty years later, in the sessions at his headquarters which produced the record of his table talk, Hitler recalled several times the teachers of his school days with contempt. "They had no sympathy with youth. Their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him relentlessly".
Adolf saw no real reason to stay in high school. He left school at age sixteen without a leaving certificate. In September 1907, Hitler left home taking with him all the money left to him by his father, who had died a few years earlier. The money would be enough for tuition and board at the art school in Vienna. The Vienna School of Fine Arts had strict entrance requirements. After...