More Hitler, unfortunately

War History Online has yet another article about Hitler:

1. Historians note that, more so than Stalin or Mao’s regimes, Hitler’s dictatorship stands as a paradigm of the twentieth century. It reflects unforeseen levels of state repression and violence, unparalleled manipulation of the media to control and mobilize the masses, acute dangers of über-nationalism, the destructive power of ideologies of racial superiority and racism, and a perverted use of modern technology and social engineering.
2. Historians note that Hitler’s regime is particularly chilling because it reveals how a modern, advanced, cultured society can rapidly sink into barbarity and genocide. In short, Hitler’s dictatorship reveals what we are capable of.
3. As it is their goal to do this for all people who have ever lived on the Earth, Mormons posthumously baptized and endowed Hitler in 1993. He was “sealed” to his parents on 12 March 1994. Both took place in England.
4. Hitler was Time's Man of the Year in 1938.
5. A recently opened clothing store in the Indian metropolis of Ahmedabad is named Hitler. A swastika dots the letter “i” in Hitler.
6. Hitler’s immediate legacy is dramatic and includes the Cold War, a divided Germany, the Iron Curtain, nuclear weapons, and moral trauma.
7. Hitler’s longest relationship was with Eva Braun (1912-1945). She tried to commit suicide twice in an attempt to garner more of Hitler’s attention. Hitler and Braun were married in 1945 and killed themselves 36 hours later. Braun was 33 years old. Hitler was 56.
8. Hitler was a gifted orator, but had a raspy voice as a consequence of a gas attack he suffered during World War One.
9. Hitler’s mustache has also been nicknamed the “toothbrush mustache”. When Hitler’s close associate Ernst Hanfstaengl told him that his short mustache was unfashionable, Hitler replied: “If it is not the fashion now, it will be because I wear it.”
10. Historians argue whether Hitler was a natural consequence of German history or an aberration of it.
11. In his last will and testament that he dictated to his secretary Traudl Junge (1920-2002), Hitler stated that “in spite of all set backs” the war “will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people’s will to live.”
12. In 2009, DNA tests revealed that the skull fragment long thought to have been Hitler’s is that of an unknown woman under forty. Scientists don’t believe the skull belongs to Evan Braun because she committed suicide by cyanide rather than with a gun.
13. Hitler’s unusual medical remedies included enemas and leeches.
14. The name Adolph means “noble wolf.” Hitler used the pseudonym Herr Wolf early in his career when he wanted to avoid recognition. He named his headquarters Wolf’s Lair and Wolf’s Headquarters and named his favorite German shepherd puppy Wolf.
15. Hitler never gained majority support in free elections. The most the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) garnered was 37.3% in July 1932. In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, the Nazis had only one-third of the seats in the Reichstag.
16. After becoming Chancellor of Germany, Hitler ordered a wave of assassinations and executions called the Blood Purge, aimed at rivals within the party. He justified these murders by saying that there would be no further upheavals in Germany for a thousand years once these rebels were killed, but the Reich lasted a little more than twelve years.
17. Hitler’s father’s name was originally Alois Schicklgruber but changed it to Alois Hitler in 1876, thirteen years before Adolf was born. He later said that nothing his father had done had pleased him so much as when he changed his name. It is unclear why he changed his name.
18. Hitler’s family had, for generations, been a peasant family, small holders in the Waldviertel, a poor area in the northwestern part of Lower Austria, bordering on Bohemia. The people there had a reputation for being hard-nosed, dour, and unwelcoming.
19. Hitler’s father, Alois, was born on 7 June 1837, in the village of Strones. He was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber (1792-1857) who was 42 years old when she gave birth. There is some speculation that Johann Georg Hiedler, a man whom Maria Anna married five years after Alois' birth, may have been his father.
20. Hitler’s father was married three times. First to a woman much older than himself, then to women who were young enough to be his daughters.
21. Klara Polzl (1860-1907) was Hitler’s mother and was the eldest of only three surviving children out of eleven. Officially, Hitler’s father, Alois, and his mother were second cousins and thus needed government permission to marry.
22. Hitler was born on 20 April 20, 1889, at half-past six in the evening on an Easter Saturday in Braunau am Inn, Austria.
23. The name Hitler means “small holder” and appears interchangeably with the names Hiedler, Hietler, Huttler, and Hutler.
24. It was significant to Hitler that he was born in a town on the very frontier of the Austrian and German empires. Very early in his life he felt loyal to the Germans and rejected the multinational Hapsburg Empire.
25. Both of Hitler’s parents died before he was nineteen. His mother died of breast cancer in 1907, when he was eighteen years old. His father died of pleural hemorrhage in 1903, when Hitler was fourteen years old.
26. Dr. Bloch, the Jewish physician who cared for Hitler’s mother, noted that in nearly fifty years of his career as a doctor, he had never seen a young man as broken with grief as Adolf Hitler was at the death of his mother. He had carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker.
27. Hitler’s father was an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, distant, masterful, and irritable father. Long after their marriage, Hitler’s mother Klara could not break the habit of calling him Uncle.
28. Hitler was a decorated veteran of World War One. He received the Iron Cross, Second Class in 1914. He received the Iron Cross, First Class in 1918. He also received the Black Wound Badge on 18 May 1918.
29. Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 when he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch, which was an attempt to overthrow the government. During his time in prison, he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
31. The purpose of Hitler’s domestic and foreign policies was to accumulate more living space, Lebensraum, for the German people.
32. Hitler’s racist and supremacist policies led to the murder of eleven million people, including six million Jews. Overall, between fifty and seventy million people died during World War Two.
33. Hitler believed that Germany lost World War One because the German army was “stabbed in the back” on the home front by Marxists (“November Criminals”) and its civilian leaders.
34. Hitler was the fourth of six children. His older siblings Gustav, Ida, and Otto, died in infancy. His younger brother, Edmund, would die of the measles in 1900 when Hitler was eleven. Only a sister, Paula, would survive to adulthood.
35. Contrary to his father’s wishes to become a civil servant, Hitler’s dream was to become an artist. He was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria twice, in 1907 and 1908.
36. Hitler lived briefly in a homeless shelter after his mother died and after his second rejection from art school.

Images courtesy of the Bundesarchiv

Rico says he wonders how many centuries it'll take before we lose our fascination with this schmuck... (And how the world might've been different if only he'd been accepted to art school...)