Hitler Born: The Dictator Who Plunged the World into War

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town on the border with Germany. His father Alois was a customs official with a volatile temper; his mother Klara was a quiet, devoutly Catholic woman who doted on the boy. Hitler applied twice to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and was rejected both times. The admissions committee noted that his architectural sketches showed some talent but that his figure drawing was weak. He wanted to be a painter. He spent the next several years living in men's hostels and homeless shelters in Vienna, selling hand-painted postcards and watercolors of city landmarks to tourists. These years exposed him to the virulent antisemitism that permeated Viennese politics, particularly the rhetoric of Mayor Karl Lueger and the pan-German nationalist movement. He moved to Munich in 1913, served in the German Army during World War I as a corporal and message runner, was wounded twice and gassed once, and was in a military hospital recovering from a mustard gas attack when Germany surrendered in November 1918. He described the news as the most devastating moment of his life and adopted the widespread "stab in the back" myth that blamed the surrender on Jews, socialists, and civilian politicians. He joined the German Workers' Party in 1919, transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and attempted a coup in Munich in 1923 that failed and landed him in Landsberg Prison. He wrote Mein Kampf during his nine months of imprisonment, laying out his racial ideology and expansionist vision with a clarity that few took seriously at the time. By the time the world understood what the book described, the Holocaust had consumed six million Jewish lives and the war he launched had killed between 70 and 85 million people.