The Scorpion's Deadly Nest

"Jewry is unqualifiedly a racial association and not a religious association ..."

"Its influence will bring about the racial tuberculosis of the people."

"Antisemitism on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of pogroms. Rational antisemitism, however, must lead to a systematic legal position and elimination of the special privileges which Jews hold ... Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether."

"Only a government of national vitality is capable of doing both, and never a government of national impotence."

Adolf Hitler, Vienna, 1919

Adolf Hitler (front row, far left) served on the western front in World War I and during the course of the war was twice decorated for service, wounded, and temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack. He used his veteran status in later election campaigns.  National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

The architect of the Second World War and the state-sponsored killing machine that was the Holocaust was born in 1889 in an Austrian town on the border with Germany. His parents' household was authoritarian, his father a quick-tempered, strict Austrian customs official. It was Adolf Hitler's mother who indulged their son. But this man who brought the world to conflict and massive death counts inherited personality traits from his father. As a boy he was moody and dissatisfied, lazy and disinterested in studies, he left school at age 16, his ambition was to become a fine-arts painter.

He planned to attend the Vienna Academy of Art in 1907 but his application, based on samples of his painting, led him to fail the entrance examination. For the next five years he lived in Vienna, in men's hostels, shabbily dressed, attempting to eke out a living by selling sketches at local cafes and taverns. The few private art galleries who consented to buy some of his paintings for resale, were mostly owned by Jews.

By his own account of the beginning of his severe antisemitism it was while he still lived in Vienna before moving to Munich in 1913 at age 24. It was in his hometown that he first heard composer Richard Wagner's music, an influential cultural icon whose antisemitism impressed Hitler. While living in Vienna the Viennese versions of racism and antisemitism blamed Jews for all the tribulations faced by non-Jews. The popular mayor of Vienna proclaimed to Hitler's admiration: "Greater Vienna must not turn into Greater Jerusalem".

Vienna had been home to Jews since the middle of the 12th century although in 1512 the inner city was proclaimed off limits to Jews and they were ghettoized, then expelled in 1570 by Emperor Leopold 1, who once economic interests prevailed invited Jews to return, eventually to achieve full civil rights enabling Jews to own property in the city, and attend universities, all of which brought a wave of Jewish immigration to the city. By 1907 the tide had turned when Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia fleeing pogroms flooded Vienna and antisemitism became rampant.

The prevailing opinion was that all Jews were dangerously different from the non-Jewish population of Vienna. Yet this was a time when Hitler as a youth appeared to get on well with Jews. Mein Kampf on the other hand, sees Hitler highlight "The visual instruction of the Vienna streets performed invaluable services as I wandered blindly, then viewed the population with open eyes". He saw "an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought ... but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?"

In the first World War he volunteered for the German Army although the Austrian military found him physically unfit for military service. He served on the Western Front, in France and Belgium as a dispatch runner carrying orders on foot or by bicycle. Wounded in 1915, he served with distinction winning the Iron Cross First Class in 1918. He was recommended for this honour by a Jewish officer named Hugo Guttman. Yet Germany lost that war, and Hitler began to blame Jews for that outcome.

"There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either-or. I, for my part, decided to go into politics", he wrote in1924. The largest and most largely Jewish political party in the Weimar Republic was the Social Democrats. Right-wing Freikorps units consisting mostly of World War I veterans blamed Germany's defeat on Jews.