Hitler’s views ‘took root on failed farm’
Adolf Hitler dreamed of ‘‘blood and soil’’, a pure Aryan race living in rugged self-sufficiency on Germany’s farms. His views were profoundly shaped by his family’s brief and disastrous foray into agriculture during the dictator’s childhood, according to a historian who has written the first biography of Hitler’s father, Alois.
When Hitler was 6, his father ruined himself buying a 20-hectare farm in Hafeld, a hamlet in Upper Austria, only to abandon it 18 months later.
A rare trove of letters from Alois
Hitler obtained by Roman Sandgruber, a retired professor at Linz University, shows that not only did he sink his own savings into the project but also the 500 guilders (about NZ$23,000 in today’s money) from his son Adolf’s account.
Sandgruber believes that this brief time in the countryside was one of the most formative periods of young Adolf’s life. In Hitler’s Vater (Hitler’s Father), he argues that it left a lasting impression on Hitler’s world view, from his contempt for other human beings to his vegetarian diet, with a lifelong love of dumplings.
The 31 letters, discovered in an attic, were sent to Josef Radlegger, who sold Alois Hitler the farm in 1895. They provide rare details of the retired customs official, who was largely self-educated and wrote in a distinctive blend of foreign words, earthy Upper Austrian dialect and grandiose officialese.
‘‘He was an autodidact and mighty proud of it, which led him to look down quite contemptuously on everyone around him,’’ Sandgruber said of the elder Hitler.
‘‘That’s exactly the impression that comes up time and again with his son. Adolf, too, had dropped out of school and educated himself as an autodidact ... which led him to take the p... out of all the experts around him, starting with the generals, but also with judges, courts and engineers.
‘‘He saw himself as a genius and everyone else as pretty much hopelessly inferior. That is for me the most striking pattern in the father-son relationship.’’
Alois Hitler’s letters are largely a litany of complaints: a serving girl who was sacked because of her epilepsy; a farmhand who sat in a tavern instead of minding the horses; a field so badly ploughed that ‘‘it looks as though moles dug it up’’.
The farmhouse, known as the Rauscherhof, had no running water or electricity. The beds were so short that their occupants had to sleep half-sitting, half-lying. Meat was scarce, and the Hitler family largely subsisted on vegetables, sauerkraut and baked dumplings. Adolf was often beaten by his father.
Yet the boy appears to have been happy enough on the farm, and received top marks at the village school, where 134 pupils were taught in a single room.