William Shirer

was only during the 1930s that enterprising journalists in Vienna, delving into the parish archives, discovered the facts about Hitler’s ancestry and, disregarding old Johann Georg Hiedler’s belated attempt to do right by a bastard son, tried to fasten on the Nazi leader the name of Adolf Schicklgruber.

When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were abnormal…. We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! … I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages—though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.—August 29, 1942.22

Our teachers were absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth; their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom I have ever got to know have all been failures in after-life.—September 7, 1942.23

It was perhaps decisive for my whole later life that good fortune gave me a history teacher who understood, as few others did, this principle …—of retaining the essential and forgetting the nonessential … In my teacher. Dr. Leopold Poetsch of the high school in Linz, this requirement was fulfilled in a truly ideal manner. An old gentleman, kind but at the same time firm, he was able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence but to carry us away with him. Even today I think back with genuine emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his words, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by magic, transported us into times past and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears … He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor.

This teacher made history my favorite subject.

And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a young revolutionary.26

That gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy’s School of Painting was out of the question, the place for me was at the School of Architecture.35

To me Vienna, the city which to so many is the epitome of innocent pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my life.

Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but dismal thoughts. For me the name of this Phaeacial city represents five years of hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger.38

By “reading,” to be sure, I mean perhaps something different than the average member of our so-called “intelligentsia.”

I know people who “read” enormously … yet whom I would not describe as “well-read.” True, they possess a mass of “knowledge,” but their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in … On the other hand, a man who possesses the art of correct reading will … instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing … The art of reading, as of learning, is this: … to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.* … Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose … Viewed in this light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and valuable.

Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitution and the white-slave traffic. “When for the first time,” he relates, “I recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.”61

Mein Kampf is sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouth Jews seducing innocent Christian girls and thus adulterating their blood.

In the spring of 1913, Hitler left Vienna for good and went to live in Germany, where his heart, he says, had always been. He was twenty-four and to everyone except himself he must have seemed a total failure. He had not become a painter, nor an architect. He had become nothing, so far as anyone could see, but a vagabond—an eccentric, bookish one, to be sure. He had no friends, no family, no job, no home. He had, however, one thing: an unquenchable confidence in himself and a deep, burning sense of mission.