20th April: Adolph Hitler

This date in 1889 saw the birth of the infamous Adolph Hitler. A timely one, perhaps, given the recent comparisons of certain current world leaders to him. I'm not going to comment on that, merely relate the most interesting facts I could find about Hitler and leave you to draw your own conclusions. There are also some explanations as to why he turned out to be such a nasty person.

1. Hitler would have been called Adolf Schicklgruber had his father not decided, for unknown reasons, to change his name in 1877. The name Hitler means “small holder”. The meaning of Schicklgruber is less clear but it may have meant "ditch digger" or "grave digger". The name “Adolph” means “noble wolf.” Hitler knew that, and if he wanted to be incognito as a young man would use the name Herr Wolf. He named his headquarters “Wolf’s Lair” and also called his dog (a German shepherd, naturally) Wolf.
2. Hitler fought in World War I, during which he suffered a couple of injuries. A gas attack temporarily blinded him and damaged his vocal chords giving him a raspy voice. It's possible this is the reason for Hitler's trademark moustache, for the larger one he sported back then prevented his gas mask from sealing properly and he was ordered to shave it off. The toothbrush moustache was a compromise. It's thought that during his time as a soldier in WWI, Hitler had an affair with a 16 year old French girl and got her pregnant. Her son Jean-Marie Loret fought the Nazis in WWII. Incidentally, Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, also fought against him as a member of the US Navy.
3. Hitler was born in Austria, not Germany, at half past six in the evening on Easter Saturday 1889. As a youngster, he wanted to be a priest (thanks to a priest saving him from a freezing lake as a boy). As a child he took singing lessons and sang in the church choir. Later, he aspired to be an artist but was turned down twice by an art school in Vienna. He tried to make a living as an artist anyway, but wasn't very successful, and lived in homeless shelters for a while. There was also a delay between his renouncing Austrian citizenship and becoming German, which meant he was stateless and under threat of deportation for a while as well.
4. He may have gone down in history as the cruellest dictator ever, but he was totally against cruelty to animals. He was a vegetarian and when the Nazi party first came to power, they passed a number of animal protection laws, with Hitler saying, “In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.” He didn't drink or smoke, either, and his government led the first public anti-smoking campaign.
5. So Hitler was a clean living type of guy then? Not really. He was on all manner of drugs, all prescribed by his doctor. He took opiates, barbiturates, morphine, amphetamines ("Hitler speed" is still a nickname for Pervitin, a type of crystal meth) and cocaine. He took about 80 different drugs a day including 28 to combat his chronic flatulence. His doctor confessed to all this when captured and the Allies accused him of criminal negligence, although a theory was put forward that the doctor was a double agent who was trying to make Hitler dysfunctional by giving him a load of dodgy drugs. His drug use is one theory put forward to explain why Hitler was such a horrible person. Hitler was also said to be terrified of getting cancer and going to the dentist. He also had hepatitis, and some say, Parkinson's disease in later life which might have caused memory loss and affected his thinking and decision making.
6. Another of Hitler's vices was Chocolate - he would eat a kilogram of chocolate a day. He assumed his nemesis, Winston Churchill, shared his love of chocolate - and hatched a plot to kill Churchill with exploding chocolates. Small bombs were covered in chocolate and wrapped in Black and gold Paper. The plot, which sounds to me not unlike the ones hatched in the comedy show 'Allo 'Allo, was foiled by British agents.
7. Another theory put forward as to why Hitler was a horrible person was that he was sexually dysfunctional. Researchers have found evidence that he really did only have one ball and possibly a deformed penis as well. He would refuse to undress for medical examinations which supports that theory. It's also known that his doctor prescribed extracts from prostate glands and testicles of young bulls and testosterone for Hitler to take when he planned a night with Eva Braun.
8. Hitler was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 - as a joke. EGC Brandt, a member of the Swedish parliament nominated Adolf Hitler for the peace prize as a satirical criticism of the Swedish government. He was forced to withdraw the nomination. Hitler banned the Nobel Prize and created his own German National Prize for Art and Science. One recipient was Ferdinand Porsche. Hitler was also Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.
9. Copies of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and his artwork still sell copies today. Bavaria owns the rights and gives the money to charity, although charities won't always accept it, as it's widely seen as “blood money.”
10. There were 42 known assassination attempts on his life before he did everyone a favour and shot himself in his bunker. I came across an interesting fact about the bunker - the grandson of the woman who created Hitler's bunker created Saddam Hussein's bunker.

See details of all my books

Browse other topics I've covered in this blog - HERE.

Like my Facebook page for news of Topical Ten posts posts on my writing blog, a weekly writing quote and news of upcoming publications