From Innocence to Evil: What Drove Hitler and Stalin

By Csaba Hegyvary

They were two of the most evil dictators of all time. Each of them was responsible for the murders of millions of people, most often with unspeakable cruelty. Yet they had no hesitation or remorse. Why? What drove them to inflict the atrocities of torture and mass murder, while creating virtual secular religions to themselves? Were they born evil, or did something in their lives make them evil, dispassionate murderers? Discussion of their developmental years and adult lives gives strong evidence about "nature and nurture." The world would be different today if each of them had succeeded in their early ambitions: Hitler as an artist, Stalin as a priest and poet. What drove them through spiraling events of world wars to do what they did and become among the most feared people in history?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543997965

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©2020 Csaba Hegyvary, M.D. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-54399-795-8 eBook 978-1-54399-796-5

Acknowledgement

I am deeply grateful to my wife, Sue Thomas Hegyvary, PhD, who was always generous and tireless with encouragement and support, even as she corrected and edited this manuscript.

This book is a work of both of us.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my beloved grandchildren, Zoli and Alex and their cousins yet to be born. May they always be enthusiastic readers, writers, and students of culture and history.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1 The Unlikely Rise of Adolf Hitler

Hitler’s Family Tree

Did Young Hitler Have a Psychiatric Disorder?

Hitler’s Developmental Stages

Sliding into Anti-Semitism

Adrift in Vienna

Hitler’s Emerging Pathology

In the Hell of World War I

Collapse of Germany After World War I

Unrest and Instability Between Wars

Evolution of Nazi Ideology

Hitler the Man

Hitler and the Churches

Hitler in Peacetime

On the Road to War

Hitler and the Army

Hitler the Military Commander

The Holocaust

Why Did It Happen?

The German Resistance

The End

Hitler’s Legacy

Part 2 Soso to Koba to Stalin: The Emergence of Evil

Soso, the Childhood Stalin

Soso Becomes Koba

The Origin of Stalin’s Ideas

Transformation of Koba into Stalin

An Acquired Taste for Mass Murder

Stalin at the Peak of Power

Stalin and the Sciences

Stalin and the Arts and Letters

Stalin and the Churches

Stalin and His Family

The Cult of Personality

The Year of Change: 1934

The Terrible Years: (1936-1938)

The War Years

Stalin’s Death

What Did We Learn?

Selected References

Introduction

How did two innocent infants grow up to be the cold-blooded, cruel, and murderous dictators, Hitler and Stalin? Were they born evil, or did the course of their lives make them that way? Indeed, are dictators born or made?

These questions have occupied my interest most of my life, and not only for academic reasons. I am a Hungarian American retired psychiatrist, old enough to have lived under both dictators. Hitler ruined my childhood (and we were not even Jewish), Stalin my adolescence and young adulthood. History is an unfolding drama of the struggle between good and evil. That struggle never ends, only the battlefields are smaller or larger, and the villains change. But how did a single man, Hitler, a failed artist, a former homeless vagabond, rise to power and start the most horrible war known to mankind (so far)? How did another man rise from abject poverty in the backwaters of Georgia to become the ruler of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the largest empire since the time of Genghis Kahn? Where did their evil genius come from? Did their DNA contain a genetic marker for their dreadful lives, or were they formed and sculpted by their environment? Or most likely both? Indeed, at the time of this writing in 2019, scientific tools are just beginning to distinguish our genetic inheritance written in our DNA from environmental effects, our epigenetics: the old debate over nature versus nurture resurrected in new scientific terms.

In my decades-long readings, summarized in this book, I looked for answers to these questions and to a better understanding of the lugubrious 20th Century. Did it have to happen that way? The political and economic forces have been analyzed in books that would fill a good-sized library. In this book I am looking for the human factors that shaped the two chief villains, their small successes and disappointments, the loves and losses that make up human life. I use the methods of psychiatric analysis to investigate historical characters just as if they were ordinary people, to construe a psychological profile from the known facts of their lives. Profiles illustrate their development from childhood to adulthood and dictatorship, but not in strictly chronological order. Rather, threads in the lives of Hitler and Stalin are pulled through the text to pursue the central question: what made them who they were? What made them do what they did? Thus, seemingly trifling events might carry as much weight as the great turns of history. What Stendhal (The Black and the Red, and The Charterhouse of Parma) said about the novel applies here also: Give me the facts, the little real facts. Just as in a psychiatric interview, little details reveal the most about a person. Hitler and Stalin shaped many big events of history; the little events of their lives shaped them.

One might object and question how we can draw a psychological profile of the dead. The lives of Hitler and Stalin have been so thoroughly investigated and mined for the smallest details that I can safely say I know more about them than I know about some of my patients. The living might forget, might distort or misrepresent consciously or unconsciously, but the dead never lie. They are patient, honest, always on time for appointments (and they rarely sue).

This book is not about psychoanalysis, the methods and basic tenets of which are highly questionable and not solidly proven. Rather this analysis is based on the methods and diagnostic criteria of contemporary psychiatry, validated by population studies. Why diagnosis? Diagnosis is not only necessary to understand the present but also to predict the future. We are all individuals, unique one-time occurrences in the great flow of humanity, but we also belong to categories, groups in illness and health, determined by genetics, society, and culture. Diagnosis predicts the course of psychiatric conditions as well as the course of other illnesses.

Facts about the lives of these two men are well known; we just have to interpret them. Herein, I present those facts and interpretations, first about Hitler, then about Stalin, then with discussion of the central question: were they born to be the horrific dictators they were, or did their lives make them that way? We cannot know the thoughts of the living, even less of the dead, but we can interpret their actions.

I necessarily use psychiatric and psychological terminology to reach my conclusions. Although psychiatric interpretation and terminology are necessary ingredients of this book, they are used only sparingly and, I hope, clearly. Let me emphasize, as I shall do again and again, that diagnosis is not a release from responsibility. Diagnosis explains, but it does not acquit. Diagnosis is fundamental because diagnosis predicts future actions and symptoms. Diagnosis is prognosis. In this manner we can have emotional understanding, even empathy, for someone we despise. Empathy does not mean sympathy. But empathy is the key to comprehension.

This book originally was written in Hungarian and was published in Hungary in 2017. For over four decades, I gave many lectures to Hungarian American groups in the United States, both in Hungarian and in English. The book, particularly the Hungarian version, is largely based on those lectures. I have tried to retain the freshness and immediacy of spoken language as much as possible in this written form. I hope it enlivens the presentation. Boredom is not the hallmark of scholarship.

In the Hungarian version I made numerous references to Hungarian history and literature that I omitted as I translated, or better to say, rewrote this book. Those details would not be immediately comprehensible to the non-Hungarian reader and would require long explanations that are not essential to the book’s message.

This year, 2019, is the centennial of the closure of World War I, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. To paraphrase Santayana: in 1919, the 20th Century was the future, full of hope and aspiration. Despite better intentions, it opened mankind to a century far worse than the one it closed. In 2019 the 20th Century is the past, a frightening ghost of conflict, destruction, and suffering. Perhaps study of the chief villains of the 20th Century will teach us how to interpret the present and prevent a tragic future.

What will people think of us in 2119? Studying history is preparation for the future. No matter how difficult, understanding is the mother of prevention. Let us hope.

Part 1

The Unlikely Rise of Adolf Hitler

At the time of this writing (2019)

,

in the age of commercial DNA testing, searching for ancestors has become a fashionable and understandable curiosity. People hope to learn from the past, better understand the present, and perhaps illuminate the road to the future. Would anything about a murderous tyrant’s past have foretold his future, perhaps enough to change the course of history? In the case of Adolf Hitler, his family history reveals a complicated past, even without genetic records. Some aspects of Hitler’s life, in retrospect, appear ominous. However, no one aspect or event was adequate to allow the conclusion that, This is what made him that way. Instead several conditions cast long shadows on his whole life, shaping his self-concept, personality, and worldview.

Hitler’s Family Tree

Adolf Hitler’s family tree was gnarled and twisted in different suspicious directions. The Hitler family, originally called Huetler, later Hiedler, sometimes Heidler, originated in northern Austria in the Waldviertel region, between the Danube River and today’s Czech border. According to contemporary sources, people living in this area were mostly peasants, small landowners, serious hard-working men and women, introverted, dour, honest without much humor, and decent without being overbearing. In the early 1800s the family had a relatively rich member, a certain Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (sometimes mentioned as Huetler), who employed in his house a maid by the name of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. As sometimes happened, Maria became pregnant, when she was forty-two. On July 7, 1837, she gave birth to a little boy Alois. According to gossipmongers, the father was none other than Nepomuk himself.

The story could have ended there. But life rarely offers simple answers, and as a minor complication Nepomuk already had a wife. Nepomuk allegedly convinced his brother Georg to marry Maria and thereby give a name to the little boy. In Catholic Austria to have been born illegitimately was a stigma forever. Apparently Georg’s goodwill to marry Maria was enhanced by the exchange of money. Not to judge Georg too hastily, he was decent enough to adopt little Alois without changing the child’s original birth name, that is, his mother’s maiden name, Schicklgruber.

Alois lived most of his life as a Schicklgruber, though, importantly, he changed it later. After around age five (other sources mention ten), little Alois moved to the house of his uncle Nepomuk, and from then on he had little or no contact with his alleged Papa Georg. Some historians doubt this version of Hitler’s ancestry. Others (e.g., Fest) claim that Georg was the natural father of Alois. But circumstantial evidence suggests that Nepomuk was indeed the natural father. The story of little Alois’s curious childhood is not entirely academic. In Hitler’s nightmare world and according to the Nuremberg laws, every German had to prove that he/she did not have a Jewish ancestor; and Adolf Hitler, of all people, did not know the real identity of his grandfather. The uncertainty surrounding Alois’s origin -- that his son Adolf Hitler would become well aware of decades later -- opened the door to gossip and even wilder speculation.

According to the most interesting version, Alois’s father was Jewish, called Frankenberger. Allegedly in the Frankenberger house in Graz, Maria Schicklgruber worked as a maid. Maria became pregnant by the young son of the house, which was common not only in real life but also in the literature of those days. The head of the household Grandpa Frankenberger was a decent man, generous to a fault, supporting little Alois financially up to age eighteen. But how likely is this? Frankenberger’s alleged son was nineteen and Maria Schicklgruber forty-two when Alois was born, an unlikely liaison between the two.

This variation of his family history likely gave sleepless nights to Hitler. If this version were true, then Hitler would have been 25-percent Jewish, and according to the Nuremberg laws, he could not be a member of his own Nazi party, let alone his own government. It is certain that Hitler was aware of this almost century-old rumor. He probably thought, like everybody else, that where there is smoke, there is fire. Once he grabbed power, Hitler did everything to erase every trace of this gossip and any possible documents. No lesser person than Himmler himself researched the subject in 1942, though the results are not known. Three years later, during the time of the Nuremberg trials, Hans Frank, Hitler’s one time lawyer later the governor (Gauleiter), more precisely the butcher of Poland, in his memoirs referred to Hitler’s Jewish ancestry, a historical question mark, as a proven fact.

What did the apparently faithful cronies of Hitler want to prove with this research and these memoirs, half-fiction, half-truth? We can only speculate. Perhaps in their distorted minds they wanted to prove that Hitler was a hypocrite by persecuting those to whom he himself belonged. Or on the contrary perhaps they wanted to exonerate the Fuhrer by claiming with contorted logic that the 25 percent of Jewish blood clouded Hitler’s judgment and was responsible for all his faults, including starting World War II -- which Hitler himself always attributed to an international Jewish conspiracy. These hair-raising fantasies in the guise of logic are another testament to pervasive derangement in the high Nazi hierarchy. Later, many years after the Nuremberg trials, Frank’s son suggested in an unflattering book about his father that the notorious Nazi war criminal likely wanted to court favor from the judges, or at least to write his name in history as the man who unveiled Hitler’s dirty secret.

This piquant and, from a Nazi perspective, damning story preoccupied not only Hitler’s accomplices but also his family. The son of Hitler’s half-brother William Patrick Hitler (a British citizen, who was born in Liverpool and after the war changed his name to Stuart-Houston) tried to extort his beloved uncle Adolf by politely suggesting that he was ready to reveal the Jewish ancestry to the British press but, naturally, he would remain silent in exchange for a handsome stash of money. So confident was Patrick that he even aired this thinly veiled threat in Germany, but then had sense enough to abscond before the SS got hold of him. (The SS, the Schutzstaffel, was the political army of the Nazi party.)

What is the truth? In the life of a man who by the end did not know himself what was real and unreal, lie or truth, this is a difficult question. Historical evidence does not support the legend of the Jewish ancestors. In the early 19th Century nobody named Frankenberger lived in Graz, the capital of this Austrian province. However, several Schicklgrubers worked in Graz, not necessarily Maria, the mother of Alois. Very few Jews lived there anyway, since in the 15th Century all Jews were expelled from Styria. Jews were allowed to return there only after 1860. Although there is no specific Jewish gene, some genetic markers tend to occur more frequently in population groups, e.g., racial, ethnic, and even in some cases national groups. Genetic heritage does not determine behavior of human groups, only some physical characteristics such as skin color. Yet, misinterpretation on an almost mythological scale of these shared genetic characteristics of human groups formed the basis of Nazi ideology, and became the basis for historically unprecedented and unthinkable genocide.

Hitler himself struggled with the cloud of his non-Aryan ancestry. Legend has it that once he had the chance, he did everything possible to eradicate any trace of evidence. When in 1938, during the Anschluss, German troops entered Austria, Hitler ordered the evacuation of the little village of his grandparents, Dollersheim. Once the people left, the place was declared an artillery target. The diligent Wehrmacht shot the village to shreds; not even the cemetery escaped their wrath. This way not a trace was left of Hitler’s grandparents. Was this done to destroy evidence, or was it revenge on the grandparents? As recently as in 2019, it was suggested again that destruction of the village was proof of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry, as if it were an admission of guilt. But was it?

The argument is weak and tenuous. First, we do not know for sure whether Hitler himself ordered the cannonade that destroyed his grandparents’ cemetery. Second, destruction of bones of the dead does not erase gossip or propaganda against him. After all, nobody could prove or disprove his origin by examining ancestral remains. Third, the original story connecting Maria Schicklgruber to the Frankenberger family allegedly happened in Graz, far away from the humble village of Strones in district Dollersheim. There is no evidence that the legendary grandfather Frankenberger would have supported the young Alois. But there is abundant and unquestionable evidence that Nepomuk took care of the young Alois and in fact made him change his family name ultimately to Hitler. The most reasonable and measured conclusion is that we just don’t know, but Hitler’s Jewish ancestry is unlikely. It was propaganda against him and was not proven by historical records.

Members of Hitler’s extended family, several distant blood relatives of the Fuhrer, are still living in this part of Austria. Two, possibly three, closer relatives are living in the United States, on Long Island. They changed their names likely to Stuart-Houston. They are the grandchildren of Hitler’s half-brother, Alois Junior. These relatives have no children, though they deny that they chose the childless life to remove the Hitler gene forever from the earth.

About Hitler’s genes: do we really know anything about them? The bodily remains of Hitler are likely in Russian hands. After Hitler’s suicide his body was hastily burned in the yard of the chancellery, but some parts were recovered and allegedly taken by the Soviets for forensic examination. The body is guarded, and no outside sources have ever been allowed to examine it. Nonetheless, through his relatives living in the United States, it was allegedly possible to get some genetic material, even though surreptitiously. Belgian historian Marc Vermeeren and journalist Jean-Paul Mulders claimed to have received samples of saliva from Hitler relatives.

The analysis of the Y chromosome of two people indicate that they, and therefore Hitler also, belong to the E1b1b haplogroup, which is predominant in northern Africa, from Morocco to Somalia, and in southern Europe in the Mediterranean basin, primarily in Albania, Greece, and Italy. This of course does not mean that Hitler was Albanian or Greek or ‘Berber.’ I have to say though that Hitler could have been proud of a Berber ancestry, since the Berbers I had the chance to meet in Western Sahara (part of Morocco) were intelligent, handsome, tall people -- a physical appearance Hitler yearned for and could have benefited from. If these DNA studies could be replicated (to my knowledge this did not happen), it would clearly indicate that Hitler did not belong to the Nordic race, no matter how much he wished to. The most common haplogroup among the Nordic nations is R1b and to a lesser extent, R1a. Geneticists speculate that population groups with the E1b1b haplogroup, i.e., Hitler’s relatives’ group, likely migrated along the Danube valley from the Balkans.

When Hitler appeared in German politics in 1921, the German people knew nothing about his questionable origins, and practical genetic examinations did not exist. Even if genetics did not exist, gossip did. People are particularly prone to gossiping and believing it in troubled times. Insinuations and sly remarks about Hitler’s Jewish background swirled throughout his troubled and troubling rise in the 1920s. Nothing was more appealing to his opponents than to prove that the great star orator was a fake. The gossip fell silent after 1933 when Hitler rose to power and the gossipers knew better than to risk freedom or life.

The self-appointed investigators of Hitler’s family background had another favorite theory, namely that he was Czech. This theory was spread mostly among high-ranking military officers. President Hindenburg himself apparently believed it. General Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of the Western campaign in 1940 and later in Russia, always spoke about Hitler, of course behind his back, as the Czech corporal. Strangely enough, at that time the Czech corporal was the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, so was Rundstedt’s superior. Hitler likely knew this gossip, and he went to great lengths to deride anything about Slavs.

I’ve wondered many times what would have happened if Hitler’s family had not changed the Schicklgruber name of his grandmother and father, and thus he would have been another Schicklgruber. There is nothing wrong about being called Schicklgruber, yet it is hard to imagine ecstatic crowds yelling, Heil Schicklgruber! One must admit that Heil Hitler rolls better off the tongue. Nomen est omen, a name is destiny, and sometime minor circumstances hurry to the aid of history.

The name Hitler first appeared in 1876 when Nepomuk died. Nepomuk bequeathed a large inheritance to Alois (who was of course his son; there goes the Frankenberger theory) with one stipulation, namely that Alois take up the name Hiedler. I don’t know whether Alois was familiar with the good King Henry IV who famously said before converting to Catholicism as a condition of entering Paris: "Paris vaut une messe" (Paris is worth a mass). In any case Alois happily obliged and changed his name. He did not like the sound of Hiedler and instead selected the name Hitler, which pleased his ears and apparently was a common name at the time. By his curious request Nepomuk, reaching out from the grave, brought together the two names Hitler and Adolf, the name of one of the bloodiest dictators in one of the bloodiest centuries.

What about Hitler’s parents? Do their lives give any insight into their son’s behavior? His father Alois -- we can now call him Alois Hitler -- was born in 1837 and died in 1903. As mentioned, since age four he was raised by his (most likely) natural father Nepomuk, whom he always called uncle. Alois Hitler originally trained to become a cobbler. At age thirteen, he left his village for Vienna, and at age eighteen, he applied for state service. At that time the Austrian government encouraged the rural youth to enter public service. So did Alois, who then worked for the Ministry of Finance as a customs officer and border guard. After long years of study, he finally passed all his examinations around 1885 or 1886. To his credit he did this all by his own effort. Thus he became a supervisor of finance officers in the border town of Braunau am Inn. His further progression in rank was hindered by the lack of education. The little town, as the name implies, is on the Inn River, which is the border between Austria and Bavaria. In the city of Braunau am Inn on April 20, 1889, was born the son of Alois, who was christened Adolf.

What kind of man was Alois in his adulthood? Photographs from his middle years show him as a stocky man of medium height. His appearance commands respect: he seems self-confident and self-absorbed in equal measure. Like most Austrian officials of the age, he sported the bizarre mustache of Emperor Franz Josef. With this imperial hirsute, Alois looked at the world like a gloomy, irritable schnauzer. Hard to know whether it was his choice; more likely all loyal Austrian officials felt duty-bound to look like the Kaiser.

By all accounts Alois was a conscientious, reliable, and hard-working official, accurate, always on time. He demanded the same from his underlings. He wanted discipline, not friendship. He was not the backslapping type and expected his underlings to address him not by his name but by his title: Koenigliche und Kaiserliche (Royal and Imperial). European society at the turn of the century suffered of a major case of snobbery and preoccupation with titles. This stiff and pretentious bearing later lost its dignity when Alois started to drink. In retrospect it would be hard to say whether he was alcoholic, but one thing is sure: he emptied too many cups, always bottoms-up.

Alois was married three times. His first wife, Anna, was fifty years old at the time of marriage, much older than Alois, but wealthy by local standards, and money attracts love. But not for Alois, who did not waste much love on his first wife. He was having affairs so Anna filed for legal separation. Shortly afterward, she became disabled, and three years later she died. Before her death Alois was already in a relationship with the woman who became his second wife, Franziska Fanni Matzelsberger, nineteen years old at the time, nearly twenty years younger than Alois and already pregnant. Fanni had two children, Alois Junior and Angela but then died young, at twenty-three, of a lung disease, likely tuberculosis, a disease rampant then, particularly in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. (In Hungary it was so widespread that it was called the Hungarian disease.) When the poor young woman was approaching death, Alois asked for help from his extended family because he had to take care not only of his dying wife but also two small children. Help arrived in the person of Klara Poelzl, who was Nepomuk’s granddaughter and thus a niece of Alois himself. Klara came from a huge family of eleven children, and she had helped Alois earlier during his first marriage. Klara was as poor as a church mouse. Since early in life she had known grief and sorrow, as eight of her ten siblings died young. We know nothing reliable about the social and financial position of her family, only that one surviving sister suffered of a severe lifelong psychiatric disorder.

Klara had arrived in Alois’s household for the first time when she was only sixteen years old, but Anna sent her home. Because of her young age and Alois’ respected social position, she had addressed him as uncle. Even before Alois’s second wife Fanni died, Klara, soon to be his third wife, became pregnant by Alois. History repeated itself: to prevent the child from the stigma of illegitimacy, Alois wanted to marry Klara, what he considered as the only honorable choice. Since they were close blood relatives, for the marriage he asked for and received dispensation on a humanitarian basis from the Vatican. The age difference in this third marriage was quite significant: Klara was twenty-four years old, Alois, forty-seven. Because of both the age difference and also the huge difference in social status between men and women so characteristic of the age, even after the marriage Klara continued to address her husband as Uncle Alois, until Alois ordered her to stop it so the neighbors would not smell a rat.

Klara’s fate was harsh in the marriage, not the happiness she deserved but never received. Those who knew her described her as simple, well-meaning, a devoutly religious Catholic, an exceptionally decent and honorable woman who worked hard to take care of her children and who idolized her strict and often severe husband. The marriage was difficult from the very beginning, since Klara had to take care of two children from Alois’s previous marriage, a boy and a girl. She lived up to the task, and soon she had her own first child. Of the two stepchildren, the boy, Alois Junior, was an exceptionally stubborn and unpleasant child, and later as a young man indulged in crime. Larceny, bigamy, and breaking the law landed him many times in jail. The girl, Angela, learned from and took after Klara, behaved well, and never caused any trouble to the family.

As mentioned, Klara was pregnant before the marriage, and in a few tragic years three of her children died in infancy, one shortly after birth of hydrocephalus, the other two children of diphtheria. It is heartbreaking to imagine what this good, simple soul, a religious young woman, must have gone through, losing one child after the other. Her lifelong struggle with depression likely started at this time. Her fourth and finally surviving son was born on April 20, 1889, and received the first name Adolf. In the German language territory of the time Adolf was a frequent name for a man, though after 1945 it understandably lost its popularity. Adolf’s birthplace, a humble apartment house, still existed until recently. The respectable burgers of Braunau am Inn didn’t quite know what to do with it, and debates raged: should they demolish it, or renovate it in its original form, perhaps with a new façade? The locals rightly feared that the house could become a pilgrimage site. Recently they decided to turn it into a police station, which, they hope, would discourage unwanted visitors.

Speaking of Hitler’s childhood, I shall refer to him by his first name Adolf. Even the bloodiest dictator is born an innocent infant, and to call him Hitler the child would invoke the dreaded image of the Fuhrer. As the Hungarian author Madach asks in his famous drama The Tragedy of Man: Is not every newborn a Messiah, a morning star risen for his family who only later turns into an arrogant nuisance? Adolf was also this innocent infant, a promise he so betrayed.

A rare childhood photo of Adolf shows a frail little boy looking at us with large, perhaps sad eyes. His hair was dark, bordering on black; his eyes were blue. He inherited the color of his hair from his father, the color of his eyes from his mother. He was sickly early in life, and poor Klara had every reason to believe that she would lose this child also. We know from his later family doctors that Adolf was born with two congenital abnormalities: hypospadias and cryptorchidism. In hypospadias the urethra does not develop normally, and does not open at the tip but usually on the lower aspect of the penis. In the case of cryptorchidism one or both testes do not descend from the abdominal cavity into the testicular sac. This is the most frequent congenital abnormality in boys. As mentioned earlier, after his suicide Hitler’s partially charred body was recovered by the Soviets, and pathologists performed a forensic autopsy on it. This autopsy allegedly showed that the left testicle was missing. One could rightly doubt the objectivity of any report by Soviets, but repeated observations by Hitler’s physicians during the war confirmed this finding.

A German urologist confirmed this diagnosis before the beginning of the war and it became shared knowledge in professional circles. Unfortunately, the name of this physician and any related records are not available. Most likely the SS destroyed those records. As a circumstantial piece of evidence many of Hitler’s cronies observed and confirmed that Hitler was particularly shy about his body, and virtually nobody ever saw him naked. In addition Hitler did not allow his physicians to perform a complete physical examination on him. His later sexual escapades also gave rise to some bizarre stories.

Hitler’s biographers, particularly those who had a psychoanalytic bent, were always looking for some major, dramatic event in Hitler’s childhood that would have influenced him and determined the development of his personality. They searched in vain. There was no such event that could have accounted for the later course of his life. The little Adolf suffered all the major childhood diseases and recovered from all of them. One dramatic accident occurred in January 1894, when Adolf was playing with other little boys at the Danube in Passau. He slipped, fell into the icy river, and nearly drowned. A somewhat older playmate Johann Kuehberger saved Adolf’s life. Kuehberger later became a Catholic priest who clearly recalled and retold this accident. The Fuhrer claimed amnesia and never mentioned his brush with drowning. Perhaps it did not fit the myth of the omnipotent Fuhrer.

Klara, a deeply religious woman, regularly took her children to mass, though usually without Alois who did not wear out too many church pews. Little Adolf liked to go to church, apparently enjoying the pomp, the music, and surprisingly the sermons. Likely he understood little, but nonetheless upon returning home he stood up on a stool and started to preach for quite a long time. This well-documented anecdote foreshadows the future orator and certainly indicates a surprisingly precocious urge for public speaking, within the limits of his knowledge. Apparently he had a pleasant voice and good hearing, which assured him a place in the church choir. Later as a young man living in Vienna in abject poverty, when he did not have money for an opera ticket, he went from church to church on Sundays to hear the music, though evidently the sermons did not have any profound impact on him.

His childhood church belonged to the Benedictine order. Historians hunting for symbols discovered that the church had the swastika on its front. In the late 1800s that was hardly an ominous sign, quite the contrary. The swastika is an ancient religious symbol dating back to Sanskrit times. (In Tibet in a monastery that the Chinese did not destroy with other Buddhist shrines, I was surprised to see such a swastika on the wall of a centuries-old cloister.) The Nazis most certainly did not find their emblem in this church, but allegedly volunteers from the Baltic states during World War I marched under this symbol on their flags. I doubt that little Adolf even noticed, let alone understood the swastika on the church.

Although historians have found no sentinel event that would have caused Adolf’s later behaviors, there is nothing good to say about his father Alois. He was an unpleasant and merciless tyrant with few signs of love or empathy. He did not care for his family, rarely spoke to his wife or children, freely indulged in affairs, or attended to his hobby, beekeeping. If crossed he was abusive; he regularly beat his children. According to Hitler’s biographers, Alois used a whip made of hippopotamus hide. What kind of hide the whip was made of hardly matters, the beating likely left more scars on the mind than on the body. It is true, though, that contemporary educational theories did not condemn physical punishment; they recommended it: Spare the rod and spoil the child. Consequently the schools or the family home sometimes resembled more a penal colony than a loving nest. Hitler’s family house was no different. Alois preferentially disciplined his older son, Alois Junior, who apparently displayed signs of oppositional defiant disorder. Alois beat Alois Junior once so severely that he was convinced that the child had died. This is far beyond what anyone could call discipline. Not surprisingly, Alois Junior ran away at age fourteen, and the family lost track of him. Father Alois swore never to leave a penny for his prodigal son. Alois Junior led a troubled life, but once he tired of crime he stayed on the straight and narrow, and opened a small restaurant in Berlin that was open until the end of World War II. He never joined his brother’s Nazi party, though after the war he made a little money by signing the portrait of his infamous brother. In childhood the two boys had no emotional bonding.

After that escape, young Adolf’s life became harder, since from then on he was the son in the family, and was expected to take up his father’s profession in the service of the almighty state. Alois prepared his son for this glorious future with brutal discipline. As no surprise after his father’s actions, Adolf did not have the slightest taste for this career. At least Adolf was not alone; after Adolf, Klara had two more children, a boy Edmund who died young of measles (poor Klara’s plight again), and a girl Paula who grew up but all her life suffered the curse of being a Hitler. She never joined her famous brother’s Nazi party; she secretly despised him, and the great historic name brought her undeserved suffering. Even in adulthood, Adolf referred to Paula as a dumme ganse (dumb goose) a common insult in German. It is also true though that, throughout the 1930s and even World War II until 1945, Hitler supported Paula with modest sums since the poor woman lost one job after the other because of her name. She lived out her later years under the pseudonym Wolff, which was Adolf’s childhood nickname. After World War II she moved from Austria to Germany where she died in obscurity, under her assumed name, supported by handouts of a few officers from her famous brother’s entourage. She was buried with her infamous name on the tombstone, but the stone was later removed. Allegedly following German custom somebody else was buried beside her with a new tombstone, granting her the ultimate haven.

In his infamous Mein Kampf, Hitler practically never mentioned his father and did not mention his half-brother Alois Junior at all. In addition to the beatings, Papa Alois committed another major sin against his son: he regularly humiliated little Adolf in public and within the family. For example, he never called Adolf by his name, just whistled for him as if calling a dog. Though the beatings were not as savage as in the case of Alois Junior, after a while little Adolf also decided to run away: he built a raft and was ready to sail down the Danube. The plan failed because Alois discovered the boatbuilding operations and thoroughly thrashed his son.

Psychoanalyst Theodore L. Dorpat, in his excellent biography of Hitler (Wounded Monster), attributed major significance to this childhood abuse, which in his opinion shaped and determined the evolution of Hitler’s personality. In his opinion Hitler suffered of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that was further amplified by experiences during World War I. Although this is an attractive theory, it appears exaggerated. Hitler did not show one of the characteristic symptoms of PTSD, namely, involuntary reexperiencing of the traumatic event. Hitler did not avoid the family home, or later in the war the battlefield, even when he had every opportunity to do so. Just the opposite. According to his only friend, Kubizek (we will get acquainted with him later), Hitler always spoke about his father with surprising respect. In their humble apartment, Adolf and his mother built a virtual altar in his father’s memory. But he did not follow any of his father’s instructions or recommendations, surprisingly enough, in political matters either. The aging Alois was liberal, left wing; he never denied these inclinations, and nothing was further from the grown-up Adolf than his father’s liberalism. It is fair to say that father Alois would never have joined his son’s Nazi party. Alois was also an inveterate philanderer; Adolf did not follow his father’s footsteps in this respect either.

As far as PTSD is concerned, even after traumatic wartime events, it is present in only about 15 percent of soldiers, and in some the trauma may actually increase emotional resilience. In Hitler’s case this second outcome seems more likely, as we shall see in the