Adolf Hitler's biographers typically remark on the utterly undistinguished background of this most infamous of modern dictators. He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria, but was raised mainly in Linz, the son of a minor customs official. Alois Hitler, his father, was of illegitimate birth and used his mother's maiden name, Schickelgruber, until 1876, when he took the name Hitler. During World War II, the Allied mass media frequently made derisive use of Schickelgruber in place of the name Hitler.

Alois Hitler was, by all accounts, a dense and brutal father who criticized what he considered his son's dreamy and effeminate nature. An indifferent student, young Adolf Hitler left secondary school in 1905 without obtaining a graduation certificate. His ambition was to become an artist, but his drawings and watercolors, while competent, were passionless and unoriginal. They twice failed to gain him admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and his being thwarted in this way seems deeply to have hurt him. Nevertheless, after the death of his mother, who, in contrast to his father, had doted on him and whom he both idolized and idealized, Hitler went to Vienna, hoping, even without an academy education, to make a name for himself as an artist. He managed from 1907 to 1913 to eke out a living by painting advertisements, postcards, and the like, but his existence was marked by drift, its only hint of direction provided by a growing racial hatred focused primarily on Jews. Drawing on a long-standing central European heritage of anti-Semitism and on his own understanding of German-Nordic mythology (heightened by a passion for the powerfully mythologizing music of Richard Wagner), Hitler formulated a world view in which Jews were seen as a political and even genetic threat to the Germanic--or "Aryan"--race.

In 1913, Hitler moved from Vienna, Austria, to Munich, Germany, apparently to avoid conscription into the Austrian Army. Despite this effort, he was recalled to Austria in February 1914 for examination for military service, only to be rejected as unfit, his years of financial struggle having rendered him underweight and physically frail. Nevertheless, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 suddenly rejuvenated Hitler, who rushed to enlist in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment. Service in the war transformed the drifter into a rigid and militaristic nationalist. Although he never advanced beyond the rank of corporal, his service in combat was distinguished. He volunteered for the particularly hazardous duty of front-lines runner (messenger) and was decorated four times, receiving the Iron Cross 1st Class on August 4, 1918, a rare honor for an enlisted man. Hitler was seriously wounded in October 1916, and he was gassed toward the end of the war.

Although he did not advance into the officer corps, Hitler decided to remain with his regiment after the armistice, through April 1920. In the postwar army, he served as a uniformed political agent and joined the German Workers' Party in Munich in September 1919. Soon, his political ambitions eclipsed his military interests, and, beginning in April 1920, he went to work full time in the propaganda section of the German Workers' Party. It was a desperate and heady time for German politics. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, brought economic ruin and collective national humiliation. The chaos and hard times of postwar Germany made the nation ripe for a Communist revolution, which proved abortive. Hitler seized on the unrest around him and, by August 1920, was instrumental in transforming the German Workers' Party into the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party (NSDAP). Hitler forged an alliance with a former army staff officer and Freikorps activist, Ernst Rohm, which gained him sufficient support to be elected president of the Nazi Party in July 1921. . .

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