Free B006OAL1QM EBOK by Heinrich Fraenkel, Roger Manvell Page A

son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, but his name had been legalised to that of his father, Hitler, some twelve years before Adolf, his third child by his third wife, a cousin, had been born. He was a Customs officer, a difficult man given to marrying only when children had already been born or conceived by the women with whom he was associated. But like Goebbels' father, who belonged to the same class as Hitler's, he was ambitious for his son's education. Adolf was sent to a secondary school where he did reasonably well as a scholar. But at the age of eleven he was already determined to be an artist, a career to which his father (a man of sixty) was stubbornly opposed. Hitler met this opposition by refusing to work at school, and his education suffered accordingly. By the time he left school his father had died, and his indulgent mother let him study art in Munich. He failed in his ambition to enter the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. When Goebbels met Hitler it was a case of the man who had failed as a writer meeting the man who had failed as a painter; a great deal of this early frustration stayed alive in them both to exacerbate their political temperaments. But, like Goebbels, Hitler when young learnt to love music, particularly the operas of Wagner, and to identify himself with romantic and nationalistic imagery. When his mother died in 1908 he was left, while still short of twenty, without any means of support. He went to Vienna where he was only too soon to adopt the life of a vagrant, sleeping in the open or lodging in a doss- house, his only friend a tramp called Hanisch with whom he eventually had a legal dispute over the money they earned together. Hitler and Hanisch formed a labouring team to do odd jobs. At times they sold the postcards which Hitler painted. For four years Hitler earned what money he could drawing architectural pictures, posters and advertisements. His passion was politics. He preferred talk to manual work, and he read a great deal on every subject from history to the occult. He was already violently anti-Semitic, anti-radical and anti-democratic, and even in the doss-house he was resentful to the point of hysteria of any opposition to his views. He loathed Vienna, and eventually moved on to Munich, where he led the same kind of lonely, vituperative, self-destructive life that had made him socially impossible in Vienna. On 1st August 1914 he stood in the great crowd that had assembled in the Odeonsplatz to greet the declaration of war. Heinrich Hoffmann, who was later to become Hitler's personal photographer, happened to be present and photographed the scene. Years later they examined the print and eventually found the Führer's ardent and excited face peering upwards in anticipation of the new life before him in the Army.
    This was the man to whom Goebbels was to dedicate his life. Meanwhile, during 1925-26, he was to come to Hitler's notice and win his favour. They were to discover each other.
    In 1920 Hitler had changed the name of his Party to the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (N.S.D.A.P.). He designed the swastika banner, incorporating this ancient symbol of the sun which was used by early civilisations in many parts of the world. In 1921 he became Chairman of the Party and in the same year he formed the semi-military Sturm-Abteilungen (the S.A., or Storm Troopers) under the guise of a sports and athletic association. One of those associated with this movement was Rudolf Hess. By 1923 Bavaria had become a hotbed of nationalistic feeling and militarism, and one of the Party men entrusted with the work of organising this nationalist movement was a former officer of the Imperial German Army, Captain Rohm. At the same time Flight-Captain Hermann Göring was put in charge of the Storm Troopers.
    Bavaria itself was politically in a state of revolt against the Reich Government in Berlin, and in the famous putsch of November 1923 Hitler and the National Socialists, in association with