Adolf Hitler. Clemens von Lengsfeld

also had to lay Edmund, her youngest son, in his child’s coffin at the age of only six years.⁶

      That the little Adolf got caught up in an ongoing conflict between his parents, that is to say, caught between the fronts, was not something of which either he or his mother were conscious. She believed she had to support him to the best of her ability, whereby she rendered him unsuitable for the upbringing at that time based as it was on violence and intimidation. This was definitive for the times and is today known as “black pedagogy”⁷. He could perhaps have learned to put up with the brutality of this by bringing a certain obtuseness to bear some of the time, if he had not been continually seduced by the sweet opposite world. Very early on he was fated not to do anything right in his father’s eyes. The latter even suspected deceit and impudence, and punished him for it with even more unrelenting harshness.

       Black Pedagogy

      Alois Hitler, the “Senior Customs Officer“, this form of address was highly prized all his life by the pedantic state official in the Austria in thrall to titles, was an authoritarian and irascible man, who took advantage of those deemed below him in rank.

      Alois Hitler (formerly Schicklgruber, 1837-1903), customs officer. Adolf Hitler’s father.

      And these were first and foremost his wife and children. His excessive punishments also included the family dog, which was then chastised even further when he urinated on the floor out of fear and held his legs in the air in submission. Alois is said to have used a whip covered in hippopotamus leather when punishing his eldest sons⁸. This whip was to play a major role in the career of the boy thus chastised.

      It was the harshness against himself that the boy thus tortured drew as a lesson from these punishments and which he was later to demand unrelentingly from the entire German youth:

       »But when this struggle is fought out between the parents, and is so every day, in forms which often really leave nothing to the imagination as regards inner brutalness then ultimately the results of such an object lesson, however slowly, will show themselves in the little ones. What their nature may be, when this reciprocal strife takes the form of brutal excesses of the father against the mother, leading to abuse in a drunken state, one who is not acquainted with such a milieu will find difficult to imagine. At six years the little boy, who is to be pitied, perceives things, at which even a grown up can only feel horror.«⁹

      Harshness and brutality belonged to Hitler’s view of humanity. He was convinced that the human being was “by nature not a pack animal“ and was only made “to submit through the most brutal of laws … The civil state can only be maintained through iron brutality.”¹⁰

       Diversions, entanglements and laziness

      Hitler, who already radiated a certain self-confidence as a child, was initially validated by his good scholastic achievements in primary school: “The ridiculously easy lessons at school gave me so much free time that I saw more sun than the classroom.”¹¹ There is an out-of-focus photograph that shows the ten-year-old primary school pupil, as he stands with arms boldly folded in the middle of the top row of pupils, his chin slightly raised and his eyelids slightly pressed together, in a pose surprising for a boy of this age.

      Class photograph of the 4th. grade in Leonding. In the top row, centre, the ten-year-old Adolf Hitler.

      This pose is recognisable from the well-known photographs, which show him as a statesman and ambitious leader of a coming thousand-year Reich. But he was also a sensitive child who could identify people by their footfall. Furthermore, everything he saw just once was engraved in his photographic memory, which gave him a certain advantage over his milieu. Decades later the supreme commander of the army was to astound others with his ostensible knowledge of different types of weapons. In primary school he always harvested top marks all round, which however then changed drastically upon moving up to secondary school. For now began the time of poor harvests. Poor marks spoiled the pupil’s mood, above all in natural sciences, mathematics and French. And it got even worse, the inattentive and, in part, lazy pupil had to repeat the very first year of secondary school: a bitter blow for a child, who had been used to success up until then. Torn back and forth between the extremes of an extremely strict father and a mother, who continually spoiled him, he had never learned to work systematically. His then German teacher reported that, although the schoolboy Hitler undoubtedly had a gift, even if a one-sided one, his desire to work would however also quickly evaporate. In this case too, decades later Hitler would concoct a matching story, whereby he found convincing explanations for his failure as a scholar: “What I liked I learned, above all everything that in my view I would be needing later as a painter. What seemed to be pointless in this regard or did not attract me at all, I sabotaged completely.”¹²

      One can also speak of a selective perception of a boy. Namely, he only learned what interested him and what served his preconceptions and backed them up. Quite early on, in this attitude to learning and way of looking at the world, the rigid features of a thought process become apparent, a thought process that was only activated in relation to his own ego. Thus the schoolboy Adolf was already susceptible to clichés and prejudices from an early age. Later he would maintain that it was above all the history lessons at the Linz high school that shaped his view of the world and thinking. Hitler would later paint a sentimental portrait of his teacher there, a Dr. Leopold Pötsch, in his magnum opus. The latter’s method of teaching the material can be completely described as modern. Each time he addressed a problem of the day in order to consider this in the light of history and thus to illustrate its influence on the present. The teacher thus depicted with so much praise however later vehemently refused to accept responsibility for the endorsements and conclusions made by his pupil in their simplifications. He probably would have regarded it as more than a doubtful honour that he should be the very one who, with his method of teaching, was supposed to have contributed to forming a young revolutionary out of Hitler.

      The feared father died before Hitler’s fourteenth birthday in his 65th year. Time to discard the hated chains and control. In his mother he first of all found an ally for his plans to become an artist. Her later appeals for him to learn something sensible after all fell on deaf ears. Another class photograph shows him four years later in the same pose. Only the self-confident gaze is now missing and has given way to a certain discontent and suspicious sullenness. His mother, who had spent her whole life treating her husband with a solicitous subservience, was impotent vis-à-vis this rebellious youth, who was capable of having fits of rage similar to those of his father. His achievements at school continued to be poor, his promotion to the next school year once again in danger and he only managed to move up due to a re-sit. However, he was advised to change schools for the fourth year. Hitler now had to attend the high school in Steyr 80 kilometres away and was boarded with foster parents. Here too his school report was correspondingly mediocre: for mathematics, French and German he received a “sufficient”, in gymnastics however an “excellent”. The man, who later went on to confess that his lifelong dream was to become a great architect¹³, received only a meagre “sufficient” in his weakest subject, descriptive geometry. Once again he was required to re-sit and finally passed the school-leaving examination in 1905. However, to accede to his mother’s wishes now and attend the higher vocational school, which would lead to further qualifications, was a step too far for him. An illness, which Hitler would later dramatise as severe lung disease in „Mein Kampf”, was to relieve him finally of hated school. His then family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch, did not support Hitler’s story of a severe illness preventing him from continuing with school. In his records he noted only a case of tonsillitis accompanied by a flu-like infection. However, with his gift for playacting, the patient managed to exaggerate the symptoms for those around him impressively. After leaving school, he led the life of a ne’er-do-well at his mother’s expense, who was also financing the family in Linz,