Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:35 pm
Adolf Hitler never held a regular job and aside from his time in World War I, led a lazy lifestyle, from his brooding teenage days in Linz through years spent in idleness and poverty in Vienna. But after joining the German Workers' Party in 1919 at age thirty, Hitler immediately began a frenzied effort to make it succeed.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:32 pm
When Mein Kampf was first released in 1925 it sold poorly. People had been hoping for a juicy autobiography or a behind-the-scenes story of the Beer Hall Putsch. What they got were hundreds of pages of long, hard to follow sentences and wandering paragraphs composed by a self-educated man.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:31 pm
At 6:30 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 1889, he was born in the small Austrian village of Braunau Am Inn just across the border from German Bavaria.
Adolf Hitler would one day lead a movement that placed supreme importance on a person's family tree even making it a matter of life and death. However, his own family tree was quite mixed up and would be a lifelong source of embarrassment and concern to him.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:29 pm
In the muddy, lice infested, smelly trenches of World War I, Adolf Hitler found a new home fighting for the German Fatherland. After years of poverty, alone and uncertain, he now had a sense of belonging and purpose.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:28 pm
In the summer of 1919, Adolf Hitler was still in the army and was stationed in Munich where he had become an informer. Corporal Hitler had named soldiers in his barracks that supported the Marxist uprisings in Munich, resulting in their arrest and executions.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:27 pm
By early 1921, Adolf Hitler was becoming highly effective at speaking in front of ever larger crowds. In February, Hitler spoke before a crowd of nearly six thousand in Munich. To publicize the meeting, he sent out two truckloads of Party supporters to drive around with swastikas, cause a big commotion, and throw out leaflets, the first time this tactic was used by the Nazis.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:25 pm
They put this plan into action when they learned there was going to be a large gathering of businessmen in a Munich beer hall and the guests of honor were scheduled to be the Bavarian leaders they now wanted to kidnap.
On November 8, 1923, SA troops under the direction of Hermann Göring surrounded the place. At 8:30 p.m., Hitler and his storm troopers burst into the beer hall causing instant panic.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:24 pm
Hitler considered the traitors of 1918 to be the German politicians responsible for the so called 'stab in the back,' who prematurely ended World War I and established the German democratic republic. In Hitler's mind and among many Germans, their Army had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been undermined by political treachery at home.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:23 pm
A few days before Christmas, 1924, Adolf Hitler emerged a free man after nine months in prison, having learned from his mistakes. In addition to creating the book, Mein Kampf, Hitler had given considerable thought to the failed Nazi revolution (Beer Hall Putsch) of November 1923, and its implications for the future.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:22 pm
On October 29, the Wall Street stock market crashed with disastrous worldwide effects. First in America, then the rest of the world, companies went bankrupt, banks failed and people instantly lost their life savings.
Unemployment soon soared and poverty and starvation became real possibilities for everyone.
The people panicked. Governments seemed powerless against the worldwide economic collapse. Fear ruled. Governments stood on the brink. The Great Depression had begun.
Adolf Hitler knew his time had come.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:20 pm
The German people were tired of the political haggling in Berlin. They were tired of misery, tired of suffering, tired of weakness. These were desperate times and they were willing to listen to anyone, even Adolf Hitler. - Let's not let history repeat itself!
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:19 pm
Gone was the Charlie Chaplin image of Hitler as the laughable fanatic behind the Beer Hall Putsch. The beer hall revolutionary had been replaced by the skilled manipulator of the masses.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:18 pm
Money was flowing in from German industrialists who saw the Nazis as the wave of the future. They invested in Hitler in the hope of getting favors when he came to power. Their money was used to help pay the growing numbers of salaried Nazis and fuel Goebbel's propaganda machine.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:17 pm
Many in Germany saw the Nazis as the wave of the future. After the stunning success of the 1930 election, thousands of new members had poured into the party. Now, in the spring of 1932, with six million unemployed, chaos in Berlin, starvation and ruin, the threat of Marxism, and a very uncertain future - they turned to Hitler by the millions.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:14 pm
Around noon on January 30, 1933, a new chapter in German history began as a teary-eyed Adolf Hitler emerged from the presidential palace as Chancellor of the German Nation. Surrounded by admirers, he got into his car and was driven down the street lined with cheering citizens.
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Friday, Apr 16, 2010 9:13 pm
On September 12, dressed in civilian clothes, Hitler went to a meeting of the German Workers' Party in the back room of a Munich beer hall, with about twenty five people. He listened to a speech on economics by Gottfried Feder entitled, "How and by what means is capitalism to be eliminated?"
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