In The Home Of My Parents

I was fortunate to be born in the little town Braunau-on-the-Inn.

It is situated just on the frontier between those two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means should be employed.

German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not on any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever.

No, no. Even if the union were a matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the economic standpoint, still it ought to take place.

People of the same blood should be in the same REICH.

The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they have brought all their children together in the one State.

When the territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the people’s need to acquire foreign territory.

The plough is then the sword. The tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.

And so this little frontier town to me was the symbol of a great task.

Over 100 years ago, this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German history.

At the time of our Fatherland’s deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well.

He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for the affair.

Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent.

It was a director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under Herr Severing’s regime (Note 1).

In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian State, my parents were domiciled towards the end of the last century.

My father was a conscientious civil servant.

My mother was a housewife.

A few years later, my father had to leave that frontier town which I had come to love so much and move to the Inn valley, at Passau, in Germany itself.

In those days, it was usual for Austrian civil servants to be transferred periodically from one post to another.

Not long after coming to Passau my father was transferred to Linz.

Hitler’s Father

While there, he retired finally to live on his pension.

He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home.

When he was barely 13 years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from ’experience,’ he went to Vienna to learn a trade there.

This was in the fiftieth year of the last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown, with three gulden in his pocket.

By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the contrary.

The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for ‘something higher.’

As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment.

But now that the big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State official as the highest of all.

With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through.

He became a civil servant.

He was about 23 years old when he succeeded in making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was ‘somebody.’

He had gained his end.

But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.

When he was 56, he gave up his active career.

It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own.

I spent a lot of time scampering about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing up with the roughest of the boys, which made my mother anxious.

All this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed.

I think that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop and take shape during my strenuous arguments with my comrades.

I had become a juvenile ringleader. I learned well at school but was rather difficult to manage.

But my juvenile disputes with my father did not lead him to appreciate my oratorical gifts.

This contradiction in my character made him feel somewhat anxious.

This made me look for a better vocation.

I saw some of my father’s publications on military subjects.

One of these was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71 of two volumes of an illustrated periodicalfrom those years.

These became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to take first place in my mind.

And from that time onwards, I became more enthusiastic about war or military affairs.