WEBVTT - Adolf Hitler: What makes a malevolent mind? 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:11.760 Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Adolf Hitler 0:00:12.000 --> 0:00:16.040 was a German politician, leader of the Nazi Party, dictator 0:00:16.079 --> 0:00:20.479 in Germany from nineteen thirty three to ninety, initiator of 0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:25.119 World War Two, perpetrator of the Holocaust, and widely considered 0:00:25.160 --> 0:00:34.640 one of the most evil leaders in all of history. 0:00:36.560 --> 0:00:40.360 Welcome to Personology. I'm Dr Gail Songs, and my guest 0:00:40.400 --> 0:00:45.520 today is Dr Benjamin Carter, author of the Death of Democracy, 0:00:45.800 --> 0:00:49.519 Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, 0:00:49.960 --> 0:00:53.440 and professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate 0:00:53.479 --> 0:00:59.240 Center of the City of New York. One of the 0:00:59.280 --> 0:01:03.120 most tyrannical monsters of the last century. Adolf Hitler was 0:01:03.200 --> 0:01:07.160 born in eighteen eighty nine to Aloise and Clara Hitler. 0:01:07.600 --> 0:01:10.640 His father, Aloise, was much older than his mother, and 0:01:10.680 --> 0:01:14.479 it was his third marriage. Aloise was an extremely severe man, 0:01:14.760 --> 0:01:18.600 but intelligent and ambitious, having been born into a lower 0:01:18.680 --> 0:01:21.959 social class and then raising himself up to the middle class. 0:01:28.640 --> 0:01:33.480 Alouise was a very authoritarian, tyrannical father that was not 0:01:34.080 --> 0:01:37.800 in any way unusual in late nineteenth century Austria or 0:01:37.840 --> 0:01:40.480 Germany or many other places. There does seem to have 0:01:40.520 --> 0:01:44.640 been a difference of degree. Though Aloise had a drinking problem, 0:01:44.720 --> 0:01:48.960 he was often very violent, very brutal, both towards Hitler's mother, Clara, 0:01:49.280 --> 0:01:52.680 and towards Hitler himself and occasionally his siblings. So we 0:01:52.760 --> 0:01:55.080 know that he was raised in this environment where he's 0:01:55.120 --> 0:01:58.120 dealing with this very, very difficult father and their relationship 0:01:58.200 --> 0:02:01.000 was never good. I think a key element here is 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:04.520 to understand that parents did hit their children, but Aloise 0:02:04.640 --> 0:02:08.760 really beat his son, and Paula, the younger sister, reports 0:02:08.800 --> 0:02:11.679 some severe beatings where he was almost left for dead. 0:02:11.880 --> 0:02:14.400 Let's talk about his relationship with his mother, because of 0:02:14.440 --> 0:02:17.320 course we don't know. A psychoanalyst said, the relationship with 0:02:17.480 --> 0:02:20.080 mom is hugely important. So he loved his father, and 0:02:20.120 --> 0:02:21.919 he hated his father, and he had difficult to get 0:02:21.919 --> 0:02:25.240 along with him, but he loved his mother. And his mother, 0:02:25.280 --> 0:02:28.680 who was younger, was a very attentive mother in the 0:02:28.720 --> 0:02:31.480 sense that children that were born to the marriage before 0:02:31.600 --> 0:02:34.600 out off died in infancy or really even at birth, 0:02:34.919 --> 0:02:38.160 and so he was the first surviving child in that sense. 0:02:38.360 --> 0:02:41.639 She had a kind of miserable life with this alcoholic, 0:02:41.720 --> 0:02:45.919 authoritative husband and also the loss of multiple children before 0:02:45.919 --> 0:02:48.040 out off, but she did focus a lot of attention 0:02:48.120 --> 0:02:51.959 on him, so she's reported as loving, but he didn't 0:02:52.000 --> 0:02:55.480 really get enough, not enough love, because she didn't protect 0:02:55.520 --> 0:02:58.200 him against the father. Yes, that's absolutely right. He wrote 0:02:58.240 --> 0:03:02.000 in Mindkom of his infamous partial autobiography, that he had 0:03:02.040 --> 0:03:04.919 respected his father and loved his mother. There's no doubt 0:03:05.000 --> 0:03:07.679 about his really close bonds of affection to his mother. 0:03:07.880 --> 0:03:10.400 Other people who knew him when he was young testified 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.760 to this. It is widely believed by scholars of Hitler 0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:17.360 that if he ever loved, really loved one human being, 0:03:17.520 --> 0:03:20.200 it was his mother. He was always very indirect in 0:03:20.240 --> 0:03:22.320 the way that he wrote about his childhood. He never 0:03:22.440 --> 0:03:25.800 wrote or spoke really directly harshly about his father, But 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:29.400 there is a fascinating kind of indirect reference. In Mind Comfort. 0:03:29.440 --> 0:03:33.160 He describes a working class family in Vienna where the 0:03:33.280 --> 0:03:36.760 father drinks and beasts the children, and a son turns 0:03:36.800 --> 0:03:40.400 to juvenile delinquency, and most scholars of Hitler think this 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:43.200 is actually a rather indirect reflection of personal experience, which 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:45.160 gives us a bit of a sketch of what the 0:03:45.200 --> 0:03:47.760 reality was like in the Hitler household and as a 0:03:47.840 --> 0:03:51.320 young boy he went to elementary school in the town. 0:03:51.600 --> 0:03:54.080 By all reports, he was actually a great student, a 0:03:54.200 --> 0:03:59.040 very accomplished elementary school student, and so people thought or Hitlers. 0:03:59.040 --> 0:04:00.920 His family thought that he was intelligent and his father 0:04:01.000 --> 0:04:04.280 had aspirations for him. His father, of course, had socially 0:04:04.360 --> 0:04:06.960 risen quite a long way from a poor peasant background 0:04:07.160 --> 0:04:10.680 up to being a customs official in the Austro Hungarian government. 0:04:10.680 --> 0:04:12.480 By the standards of that time and place, that was 0:04:12.520 --> 0:04:15.080 a highly prestigious job. To be in state service in 0:04:15.120 --> 0:04:17.280 Central Europe in those days was to have really the 0:04:17.279 --> 0:04:19.000 most honored kind of job that there was, So that 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:20.880 was a big deal that he got there. And of course, 0:04:20.920 --> 0:04:24.000 as typically happens in these kinds of family patterns, he 0:04:24.040 --> 0:04:26.400 wants his son to carry on the rise. So he 0:04:26.480 --> 0:04:29.480 has aspirations for his son to get a good education 0:04:29.920 --> 0:04:32.600 and to rise higher in the civil service. Now, this 0:04:32.680 --> 0:04:35.480 was something that Adolf Hitler was absolutely the farthest thing 0:04:35.800 --> 0:04:38.440 possible from anything he wanted to do. He had this 0:04:38.520 --> 0:04:41.839 vision of himself as a kind of great romantic Bohemian 0:04:41.960 --> 0:04:44.320 artist and a kind of Nietzschean mold, which was a 0:04:44.400 --> 0:04:46.760 very common way for young people to think about how 0:04:46.800 --> 0:04:49.760 they're sort of romantic future might expand in the late 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:52.600 nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. So that was another kind 0:04:52.600 --> 0:04:56.440 of arena of father's son conflict, and the conflict became 0:04:56.800 --> 0:04:59.159 were pronounced as he moved into what we call middle 0:04:59.160 --> 0:05:03.120 school and high schoo where he started performing very poorly 0:05:03.400 --> 0:05:05.800 in pretty much every subject. When they look at the 0:05:05.839 --> 0:05:09.080 rankings of the subjects, either he either did barely scraping 0:05:09.120 --> 0:05:11.760 by or he failed. He had to repeat grades. And 0:05:11.800 --> 0:05:14.480 about the only thing that he performed quote well and 0:05:14.839 --> 0:05:18.800 was essentially physical education and art and history. Actually he 0:05:18.839 --> 0:05:20.599 was always very interested in history, but yes, as he 0:05:20.640 --> 0:05:23.760 got older, he became a much more indifferent student. This too, 0:05:23.800 --> 0:05:26.920 i think reflects his kind of growing sense of himself 0:05:26.920 --> 0:05:29.520 as somebody a bit apart, somebody who's not going to 0:05:29.560 --> 0:05:32.600 advance through the kind of conventional channels, with the conventional 0:05:32.920 --> 0:05:35.760 education and the conventional aspiration that his father wants him 0:05:35.800 --> 0:05:38.680 to have. His father decides to quote retire, and he 0:05:38.720 --> 0:05:41.160 spends much of his day in the pub because he's 0:05:41.200 --> 0:05:44.400 not actually very happy being retired, and so it is 0:05:44.440 --> 0:05:46.640 presumed that he had really an alcohol problem, and then 0:05:46.640 --> 0:05:49.320 he would come home and be angry and particularly angry 0:05:49.320 --> 0:05:52.039 at his son who was doing poorly, and yet out 0:05:52.080 --> 0:05:55.440 Off maintained this line. He sort of didn't dig in 0:05:55.720 --> 0:05:58.680 hard to know whether he was lazy, couldn't do, didn't 0:05:58.720 --> 0:06:01.440 want to do. This was his form of Protestation and 0:06:01.600 --> 0:06:05.040 you know, resistance towards his father. But he really didn't 0:06:05.040 --> 0:06:08.200 do much except draw, essentially, and he started to have 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:11.200 these aspirations of being an art student and being an artist, 0:06:11.320 --> 0:06:14.720 which made his father very unhappy. Also at the same time, right, 0:06:14.760 --> 0:06:17.719 he's entering puberty, and this is a time when most 0:06:17.800 --> 0:06:22.080 boys of that age are becoming sexually interested, meeting girls, 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.080 dating girls, and as they age, perhaps even you know, 0:06:25.160 --> 0:06:29.000 sleeping with girls, sleeping with prostitutes. And Hitler took the 0:06:29.240 --> 0:06:36.200 really opposite stance. He was seemed incredibly inhibited. He admired girls, 0:06:36.560 --> 0:06:40.520 or a girl from Afar. Actually there was a young woman, Stephanie, 0:06:40.640 --> 0:06:42.800 who his friend reports he had a crush on for 0:06:42.880 --> 0:06:46.680 three years, never spoke to her, became immensely jealous of 0:06:46.720 --> 0:06:49.560 anyone who did speak to her, but never spoke to her, 0:06:49.760 --> 0:06:53.039 and maintain this sort of puritanical stance right that one 0:06:53.080 --> 0:06:56.400 should not sexually partake. Yes, he seems to have been 0:06:56.560 --> 0:06:58.839 terrified at funereal disease. And as you mentioned, it was 0:06:58.880 --> 0:07:01.400 quite common for young men in that era to get 0:07:01.440 --> 0:07:03.600 their first sexual experience by going to a brothel. He 0:07:03.600 --> 0:07:06.400 absolutely wouldn't do that because of his terror of syphilis 0:07:06.520 --> 0:07:08.840 or something similar. And yes, he had a fixation on 0:07:08.920 --> 0:07:11.720 this young woman in his hometown named Stephanie, but never 0:07:11.760 --> 0:07:14.640 seems to have approached her. He does seem to have 0:07:14.760 --> 0:07:20.720 been very, very worried about his own physicality, his own body. 0:07:20.760 --> 0:07:23.560 Even later on, far into his adult life. He would 0:07:23.640 --> 0:07:26.160 never go to the beach or go swimming because he 0:07:26.200 --> 0:07:28.280 didn't want to be seen in swim trunks. He never 0:07:28.320 --> 0:07:30.760 wanted to be seen in anything but either full formal 0:07:30.920 --> 0:07:33.520 dress or a uniform. He was very conscious about sort 0:07:33.520 --> 0:07:35.840 of preserving a certain amount of dignity, and he didn't 0:07:35.880 --> 0:07:38.120 want his body showing at all. He didn't want to 0:07:38.120 --> 0:07:41.000 be seen playing any kind of sports where he might 0:07:41.200 --> 0:07:44.360 flub something. He was really sort of physically closed down 0:07:44.400 --> 0:07:46.320 in all kinds of ways when we try to understand 0:07:46.400 --> 0:07:49.880 what what is that about. Syphilis was a big problem 0:07:49.920 --> 0:07:53.360 in that era, and people suffered and people died of syphilis. 0:07:53.440 --> 0:07:57.000 He had an idea that his father might have had syphilis, 0:07:57.000 --> 0:07:59.000 and he also had an idea, even though this is 0:07:59.080 --> 0:08:01.120 very strange because it was understood at the time that 0:08:01.200 --> 0:08:04.880 syphilis was a contagious disease and not a hereditary disease. 0:08:04.920 --> 0:08:08.800 But nonetheless he had the idea syphilis maybe hereditary, and 0:08:08.840 --> 0:08:12.040 in fact has concerns that perhaps he got this from 0:08:12.080 --> 0:08:14.120 his father, even though there was no evidence that he 0:08:14.160 --> 0:08:17.000 ever had syphilis, not clear evidence that his father ever 0:08:17.040 --> 0:08:19.680 has syphi with but he is very concerned about this 0:08:19.800 --> 0:08:25.000 idea of being infected, of being degenerate. This is important 0:08:25.040 --> 0:08:27.880 because later we'll talk about the path that he took 0:08:27.960 --> 0:08:31.240 in terms of needing to cleanse the world as it were. 0:08:31.360 --> 0:08:35.200 That he has great concerns about degeneracy, and one of 0:08:35.240 --> 0:08:38.880 those is about syphilis or sexually transmitted disease, which seems 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:41.120 to roll over to sex in general, and that he 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:46.040 maintained this very inhibited way of behaving, particularly with women, 0:08:46.080 --> 0:08:49.000 which really lasts his entire life. We have no evidence 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:54.760 whether he ever actually consummated via sexual intercourse any relationship 0:08:54.800 --> 0:08:59.160 actually with a woman, though he had some romantic interactions 0:08:59.200 --> 0:09:02.440 with women, but we're not clear how much beyond that 0:09:02.520 --> 0:09:05.440 it actually went. Yeah, all of the reports that we 0:09:05.480 --> 0:09:09.560 have about his sex life, pretty much naturally, are sort 0:09:09.559 --> 0:09:12.760 of hearsay or speculation, and in many cases come from 0:09:12.760 --> 0:09:16.120 people who are inherently rather unreliable. I think it is 0:09:16.240 --> 0:09:19.440 generally believed that later on, when he was in power 0:09:19.559 --> 0:09:21.920 and his mistress was the woman Ava Brown, who he 0:09:21.920 --> 0:09:25.080 always kept secret from the German people at large. But 0:09:25.200 --> 0:09:27.080 I think it is generally believed they had a more 0:09:27.160 --> 0:09:30.000 or less normal sex life. But Hitler definitely had a 0:09:30.040 --> 0:09:32.280 certain fixation about purity of blood, and some of it, 0:09:32.320 --> 0:09:34.200 as you said, has to do with the possibility of 0:09:34.200 --> 0:09:36.680 his father having had syphilis. But the other big part 0:09:36.679 --> 0:09:40.440 of it is that he was terribly afraid that he 0:09:40.760 --> 0:09:43.640 himself might have some Jewish ancestry. And this is an 0:09:43.679 --> 0:09:47.320 interesting story because it has been pretty effectively debunked actually 0:09:47.400 --> 0:09:52.480 by modern historical research. The issue here is that his father, Alois, 0:09:52.600 --> 0:09:55.160 was born out of wedlock, and we don't know who 0:09:55.360 --> 0:09:58.400 his father was exactly. It was speculated for a long 0:09:58.480 --> 0:10:01.439 time that Hitler's grandmother might have been a domestic servant 0:10:01.600 --> 0:10:03.560 in the home of a Jewish family and might have 0:10:03.679 --> 0:10:06.640 had relations with perhaps an elder son or the father 0:10:06.720 --> 0:10:10.079 of that family, and that might have been Autolf's grandfather. 0:10:10.400 --> 0:10:14.840 That has been pretty effectively debunked as really not even possible. However, 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:18.800 the really important thing for sort of historical evolution is 0:10:18.800 --> 0:10:21.640 that it seems that Hitler really believed it, or at 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:23.760 least was very afraid that that was actually true. And 0:10:23.760 --> 0:10:26.720 there's a couple of interesting consequences the flow from this. 0:10:27.040 --> 0:10:29.280 Later on, when he was in power, when the Germans 0:10:29.520 --> 0:10:33.679 got control of Austria, in Hitler turned over the village 0:10:33.800 --> 0:10:36.320 where his grandmother had lived to the German army to 0:10:36.400 --> 0:10:39.000 serve as an artillery range. All the people who lived 0:10:39.000 --> 0:10:42.240 there were evacuated, and the German army obliterated the town 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:46.000 by practicing artillery fire, including the cemetery where his grandmother 0:10:46.080 --> 0:10:48.600 was buried, which, you know, to put it mildly, speaks 0:10:48.600 --> 0:10:51.840 of no very great reverence for his grandmother's grave. The 0:10:51.920 --> 0:10:55.720 other thing that's a little striking is that in as 0:10:55.800 --> 0:10:59.640 part of the famous Nuremberg Laws, which notoriously stripped Germans 0:10:59.720 --> 0:11:03.400 Jews of full citizenship and made sexual relations between Jews 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:06.520 and non Jews of criminal offense forbid marriage between Jews 0:11:06.520 --> 0:11:09.199 and non Jews. One other little thing that those laws 0:11:09.240 --> 0:11:13.720 did was prohibit a non Jewish woman from working as 0:11:13.720 --> 0:11:17.200 a domestic servant in a Jewish household until a woman 0:11:17.280 --> 0:11:19.600 had reached the age of forty five. So the fact 0:11:19.600 --> 0:11:23.640 that that gets inserted into this law speaks again probably 0:11:23.720 --> 0:11:27.199 at least inferentially to this fear that Hitler had, that 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:29.640 that's actually where his father had come from. So we 0:11:29.679 --> 0:11:32.120 can start to look at these threads which really started 0:11:32.200 --> 0:11:35.840 very early on of his own feelings about potentially being 0:11:36.080 --> 0:11:39.640 infected in some way or degenerate in some way, and 0:11:39.720 --> 0:11:43.280 of course the thoughts about being Jewish. Even at that 0:11:43.320 --> 0:11:45.839 time in the culture, there was a tremendous amount of 0:11:45.840 --> 0:11:49.480 anti Semitism. Yeah, European anti semitism is of course a 0:11:49.559 --> 0:11:51.920 huge and complex theme, and one of the ironies of 0:11:52.000 --> 0:11:55.640 history is that in Germany before the First World War, 0:11:55.920 --> 0:11:58.320 in any way that we can sort of measure, this 0:11:58.440 --> 0:12:02.520 anti Semitism was probably less prevalent than in some other countries, 0:12:02.559 --> 0:12:06.520 notably the Russian Empire, also possibly even France. In Austria 0:12:06.559 --> 0:12:09.400 it probably was more prevalent, and Hitler's certainly picked up 0:12:09.440 --> 0:12:12.640 some of that, some of the increasingly virulent anti semitism 0:12:12.640 --> 0:12:15.040 of pre World War One Vienna. So that's definitely something 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:17.240 that was in the air. However, the other intriguing thing 0:12:17.480 --> 0:12:20.000 is that from all evidence that we have of Hitler 0:12:20.080 --> 0:12:21.880 prior to the end of World War One, so in 0:12:21.920 --> 0:12:24.160 the first thirty years more or less of his life, 0:12:24.200 --> 0:12:27.920 there is no evidence of his having made anti Semitic 0:12:27.960 --> 0:12:32.079 statements or having anti Semitic views. If anything, quite the contrary. 0:12:32.480 --> 0:12:35.679 He had Jewish friends and associates in his younger days, 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:39.840 he had a live respect for Jewish culture, Jewish artists, 0:12:39.840 --> 0:12:42.679 and which he expressed, and so there's not only is 0:12:42.720 --> 0:12:45.320 there no evidence of any real anti Semitism on his part, 0:12:45.880 --> 0:12:48.920 there's even a little evidence rather to the contrary. Now, 0:12:48.960 --> 0:12:52.079 he spun that story himself differently. Later in his autobiography 0:12:52.160 --> 0:12:55.240 Mind comp he described a process whereby he became anti 0:12:55.240 --> 0:12:58.160 Semitic living in Vienna in nineteen o seven and eight. 0:12:58.600 --> 0:13:02.600 That is considered by Skull there's to be expost facto construction. 0:13:02.640 --> 0:13:04.960 There's really no evidence of that at the time. So 0:13:05.040 --> 0:13:09.080 important other formation issues in his young life. So he's 0:13:09.080 --> 0:13:13.679 already actually starting to express some difficulty and conflict around aggression. 0:13:13.840 --> 0:13:17.240 He unlike many people that we later think, oh, this 0:13:17.280 --> 0:13:19.720 person actually was a sociopath from the get go, he 0:13:19.760 --> 0:13:22.720 doesn't do things like kill animals or pluck the wings 0:13:22.760 --> 0:13:27.160 off insects, etcetera. But he does have tremendous temper tantrums, 0:13:27.200 --> 0:13:30.440 tantrums that last through his adolescence, which is unusual. And 0:13:30.480 --> 0:13:34.439 so he struggles with that emotional control and these emotional outbursts. 0:13:34.840 --> 0:13:38.200 And we also see the beginnings of paranoia. So he 0:13:38.320 --> 0:13:42.640 already sort of frames his world often as who is 0:13:42.640 --> 0:13:44.920 against me? I believe that people are against me, And 0:13:44.960 --> 0:13:46.960 in fact his father was one of the primary people, 0:13:47.120 --> 0:13:50.559 but other people in his mind become, let's say, against him. 0:13:50.800 --> 0:13:54.880 And then he has essentially these two major losses. So 0:13:55.000 --> 0:13:58.160 his parents not only die young, but die when he 0:13:58.280 --> 0:14:00.679 is young. So his father first dies and he's fourteen, 0:14:01.080 --> 0:14:04.640 of what we presume is probably complications of alcoholism essentially, 0:14:04.800 --> 0:14:07.559 and then shortly thereafter a couple of years later, his 0:14:07.640 --> 0:14:11.800 mother develops breast cancer and she dies, which he really 0:14:11.840 --> 0:14:15.560 describes as the greatest loss, maybe of his whole life later, 0:14:15.600 --> 0:14:19.840 even in retrospect that he is completely mournful and distressed 0:14:19.840 --> 0:14:23.080 about this. But there's an important element too, and who 0:14:23.160 --> 0:14:26.120 took care of his mother? Yeah, the doctor who treated 0:14:26.160 --> 0:14:29.880 his mother was a local doctor named Dr Bloch and 0:14:29.960 --> 0:14:33.840 Dr Bloch was Jewish, and this actually is another interesting 0:14:33.880 --> 0:14:36.640 little strand in, you know, the evidence that we have 0:14:36.760 --> 0:14:40.560 of the development of Hitler's anti Semitism, because he was very, 0:14:40.760 --> 0:14:43.880 very respectful to Dr Block and very grateful for the 0:14:43.880 --> 0:14:46.680 treatment that Dr Block had given his mother. Bloch said 0:14:46.800 --> 0:14:49.440 later he had never seen a young man who loved 0:14:49.480 --> 0:14:51.240 his mother so much and was so devoted to her. 0:14:51.280 --> 0:14:53.320 Hitler took really good care of his mother when she 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:55.480 was sick. He was at her bedside all the time. 0:14:55.560 --> 0:14:57.400 He was a good son in that regard, and the 0:14:57.480 --> 0:15:00.720 relationship with Dr Bloch was an interesting one because he 0:15:00.960 --> 0:15:04.000 retained a kind of gratitude and reverence for the doctor 0:15:04.320 --> 0:15:09.080 for decades after, to the point that in when again 0:15:09.160 --> 0:15:11.920 Hitler had gotten control of Austria, he made a point 0:15:11.960 --> 0:15:14.800 of sending a squad of soldiers to Dr blosh house 0:15:14.840 --> 0:15:17.480 to protect him, to keep him safe from other Nazi marauders, 0:15:17.520 --> 0:15:20.080 who were of course inflicting terrible violence on Jews at 0:15:20.120 --> 0:15:22.680 that moment. He made sure Dr Blosh was kept safe, 0:15:23.000 --> 0:15:25.880 and he went so far as to facilitate Dr bloss 0:15:25.920 --> 0:15:27.800 immigration to the United States at a time when it 0:15:27.840 --> 0:15:30.400 was getting very very difficult for Jewish people to leave 0:15:30.440 --> 0:15:32.600 Central Europe, and Dr Bloch made it to the United 0:15:32.600 --> 0:15:35.680 States and survived. Hitler probably the only Jewish person whom 0:15:35.720 --> 0:15:38.040 Hitler would dream of helping in that way, and so 0:15:38.160 --> 0:15:41.000 that was a rather odd relationship, but an odd insight 0:15:41.080 --> 0:15:46.160 into the way his anti Semitism developed. Let's take a 0:15:46.240 --> 0:15:51.520 quick break here, we'll be back in a moment. After 0:15:51.560 --> 0:15:53.760 the death of his mother, he essentially leads kind of 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:57.520 a wandering, failed life. He fails on two occasions to 0:15:57.520 --> 0:16:00.120 get into art school, which is actually quite devastating. He 0:16:00.200 --> 0:16:04.600 lives in hostels and men's homes. He financially can barely 0:16:04.840 --> 0:16:07.960 or not make it. He literally paints postcards to try 0:16:08.000 --> 0:16:11.280 to sell to make money to eat. We would kind 0:16:11.280 --> 0:16:14.280 of today define him essentially as a loser up until 0:16:14.400 --> 0:16:18.160 about the age of thirty that he really is completely unaccomplished. 0:16:18.400 --> 0:16:21.640 And it is really when World War One breaks out 0:16:21.720 --> 0:16:25.480 that he develops a role for himself. The outbreak of 0:16:25.520 --> 0:16:28.560 World War One clearly is the kind of providential turning 0:16:28.600 --> 0:16:31.120 point in his life, which he himself said he had 0:16:31.160 --> 0:16:34.080 failed twice to get admitted to the Vienna Academy of Arts. 0:16:34.160 --> 0:16:36.920 The take that the professors there had on his artwork 0:16:37.000 --> 0:16:39.960 was that it was rather skillful in terms of its draftsmanship, 0:16:40.120 --> 0:16:42.560 but it was sterile. And if you see his paintings, 0:16:42.600 --> 0:16:44.560 it's true. It has been pointed out that he could 0:16:44.640 --> 0:16:47.560 paint or draw buildings really quite well, but not people, 0:16:47.640 --> 0:16:50.320 which is maybe a bit revealing. So he drifted for 0:16:50.360 --> 0:16:53.160 a few years. He lived in Vienna, painting postcards mainly 0:16:53.200 --> 0:16:55.880 for tourists for a few years. He moved to Munich, 0:16:55.920 --> 0:16:59.080 Germany in nineteen thirteen, effectively as a draft dodger, because 0:16:59.120 --> 0:17:01.360 he did not want to or in the army of 0:17:01.400 --> 0:17:04.840 the Austro Hungarian Empire, because he's strongly disapproved of the 0:17:04.880 --> 0:17:07.560 ethnic and racial diversity of that empire. He wanted to 0:17:07.560 --> 0:17:10.120 be in a German country, so he fled to Germany 0:17:10.160 --> 0:17:11.520 and he was living the same kind of life in 0:17:11.600 --> 0:17:14.320 Munich in nineteen thirteen, and then, of course, in August 0:17:14.119 --> 0:17:17.560 nineteen fourteen, there comes the war. There's a famous photograph 0:17:17.720 --> 0:17:20.479 that shows Hitler with an ecstatic look of joy on 0:17:20.600 --> 0:17:23.760 his face in a crowd of people in Munich Odeon's 0:17:23.760 --> 0:17:26.639 Plats as war is being declared. This is the greatest 0:17:26.640 --> 0:17:28.200 thing that's ever happened to him, he said in mind 0:17:28.200 --> 0:17:30.400 con I fell down on my knees and gave thanks 0:17:30.480 --> 0:17:32.520 that I could be alive in this hour. And he 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:35.960 volunteered right away for the Bavarian Army, which was administratively 0:17:36.000 --> 0:17:38.639 separate from the main German army, and went through a 0:17:38.720 --> 0:17:40.919 very quick training was at the front already in the 0:17:40.920 --> 0:17:44.119 fall of nineteen fourteen. At the front, he manages to 0:17:44.160 --> 0:17:46.160 do something that actually is quite a feat and let's 0:17:46.160 --> 0:17:48.639 not get killed. History might have been very different in 0:17:48.680 --> 0:17:51.640 a good way had he been killed. But he manages 0:17:51.720 --> 0:17:53.879 to be one of the few that does not get shot, 0:17:54.160 --> 0:17:56.280 and to some degree that may have been partially of 0:17:56.280 --> 0:17:58.960 his own doing, and that he manages to get assignments 0:17:58.960 --> 0:18:02.000 that have more to do with hurrying information back and forth. 0:18:02.119 --> 0:18:05.440 But he occasionally does have some very dangerous and risky 0:18:05.520 --> 0:18:08.639 maneuvering to do, and he does seem to pride himself 0:18:08.640 --> 0:18:11.439 on having been very brave and not being afraid to 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:14.160 do whatever he was asked to do. But ultimately he 0:18:14.280 --> 0:18:18.520 has a mustard gas injury and this causes him nothing permanent, 0:18:18.520 --> 0:18:22.760 a conjunctivitis what we call bluff rightis, but you know, painful. 0:18:23.000 --> 0:18:26.200 He sent to the hospital, he's treated, he gets better. 0:18:26.600 --> 0:18:29.720 But then something fascinating happens while he's in the hospital. 0:18:29.920 --> 0:18:35.640 Germany surrenders, and Hitler has a really devastating reaction to this. 0:18:35.640 --> 0:18:38.480 This is the other and possibly the most important turning 0:18:38.480 --> 0:18:41.040 point in his life, because although he liked being in 0:18:41.080 --> 0:18:45.120 the army, his wartime record is strange. On paper, on 0:18:45.119 --> 0:18:47.600 one level, looks quite good. He was awarded the Iron 0:18:47.680 --> 0:18:50.720 Cross first as well as second class. An Iron Cross 0:18:50.800 --> 0:18:53.160 first class was as high an award as someone at 0:18:53.200 --> 0:18:57.080 his rank could earn, so that speaks to a certain courage. However, 0:18:57.440 --> 0:18:59.840 it has been pointed out by the story and Thomas 0:19:00.000 --> 0:19:02.560 ab who has written really effectively about this, that because 0:19:02.600 --> 0:19:04.800 of the job he had as a regimental courier, not 0:19:04.880 --> 0:19:07.760 as a rifleman in the front line trench, officers tended 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:10.440 to give awards to soldiers they knew, and they knew 0:19:10.520 --> 0:19:13.400 the regimental couriers because they're at the base with the officers, 0:19:13.440 --> 0:19:15.480 not like the men who were in the front line trench. 0:19:15.560 --> 0:19:18.679 So that's partially explains Hitler's decoration. The other thing is 0:19:18.880 --> 0:19:21.360 he never got promoted beyond the rank of the equivalent 0:19:21.440 --> 0:19:24.040 in u S terms would be private first class are 0:19:24.080 --> 0:19:26.240 in German and this is really strange. I mean, the 0:19:26.240 --> 0:19:28.359 two things that are really strange about his wartime service, 0:19:28.440 --> 0:19:30.119 as he said, is that he didn't get killed. He 0:19:30.200 --> 0:19:32.439 was at the front basically for the entire war and 0:19:32.480 --> 0:19:35.000 didn't get killed, which is a statistical fluke of the 0:19:35.080 --> 0:19:38.280 highest order given World War One casualties. But also in 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:40.800 any army in World War One, anyone who was serving 0:19:40.840 --> 0:19:43.679 at the front in nineteen fourteen, by nineteen eighteen was 0:19:43.720 --> 0:19:46.720 either dead or an officer, because the promotion, especially with 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:49.080 the casualties, was quite rapid, and so the fact that 0:19:49.160 --> 0:19:51.320 Hitler ended up only as a private first class is 0:19:51.440 --> 0:19:54.560 very strange. Much later, testifying after World War Two, one 0:19:54.600 --> 0:19:57.119 of his officers said, this is one of my favorite 0:19:57.160 --> 0:20:00.280 Hitler facts. We didn't promote him because we thought he 0:20:00.359 --> 0:20:03.320 lacked the leadership qualities to be a sergeant. This is 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:05.960 a remarkable reflection on Hitler. So in a certain sense, 0:20:06.040 --> 0:20:08.920 he's maintaining that kind of loser pattern that he had 0:20:09.000 --> 0:20:12.760 before the war. That's what changes with the armistice and 0:20:12.880 --> 0:20:15.040 with the German surrender of the Fall of nineteen eighteen. 0:20:15.240 --> 0:20:18.359 This hits him like a proverbial ton of bricks. And 0:20:18.400 --> 0:20:19.880 this is one of the things he says in mind 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:22.639 conf which I think we can probably believe, when he 0:20:22.680 --> 0:20:25.600 describes the anguish that he had when he learned of 0:20:25.680 --> 0:20:28.880 the armistice, and he actually wrote there that he had 0:20:28.920 --> 0:20:31.840 not wept since the death of his mother in nineteen 0:20:31.840 --> 0:20:35.200 o seven, but now he wept again. So he's drawing 0:20:35.240 --> 0:20:38.560 up parallel probably between these two most painful moments of 0:20:38.600 --> 0:20:40.600 his life. In the defeat of Germany hits him in 0:20:40.640 --> 0:20:43.119 the same way that his mother's death had done, and 0:20:43.160 --> 0:20:46.600 not only did he weep, but psychologically what's fascinating is 0:20:47.000 --> 0:20:51.359 that after his eye situation was completely healed, upon hearing 0:20:51.359 --> 0:20:55.000 this news and having this emotional reaction, he says that 0:20:55.040 --> 0:20:58.439 he's blind again, and he has several days of quote blindness, 0:20:58.640 --> 0:21:01.360 which of course have no medical explanation and are believed 0:21:01.359 --> 0:21:05.920 to be what is called in psychiatry a conversion reaction. Basically, 0:21:05.960 --> 0:21:10.200 this is psychological blindness, which is a symptom experience because 0:21:10.240 --> 0:21:14.560 of being so emotionally overwhelmed. And the nature of this 0:21:14.680 --> 0:21:19.200 emotional overwhelming is important. It's not just that he's sad 0:21:19.240 --> 0:21:22.520 and upset, it is that he is completely humiliated, that 0:21:22.560 --> 0:21:27.000 he feels totally shamed by the surrender of Germany, and 0:21:27.119 --> 0:21:30.920 in a way that is overwhelmingly intolerable. So the physical 0:21:30.960 --> 0:21:33.960