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Mein Kampf And The Formation Of Hitlers Ideas Essay

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Mein Kampf And The Formation Of Hitlers Ideas

The dominant political figure of German history in the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, was born in a lower middle class family in the provincial Austrian town of Braunau am Inn on 20 April 1889. In 1907 Hitler applied to enter the Vienna Academy of Art but his application was rejected. After the death of his mother Klara, Hitler decided to move to Vienna. He drifted from job to job, often selling sketches or painting scenes of Old Vienna and it was a period that he himself later called the most miserable period of his life. Many of Hitler’s views of the world were shaped by his experiences on the streets of Vienna and it is probable that his violent anti-Semitism dates from this time. …show more content…

A central theme of Hitler’s thinking was the concept of struggle. In the nineteenth century the naturalist Charles Darwin had explained how in the world of nature when the environment changed some of the species with favourable variations survived better that others. Darwin called this “natural selection”.

Social Darwinism was a concept that emerged later in the nineteenth century suggesting that what applied to nature could also apply to human society – that the strong prevail over the weak, that superior races prevail over inferior races. This concept with its theme of struggle and survival of the fittest appealed to Hitler. “Struggle” wrote Hitler “is the father of all things…He who wants to live must fight and who does not want to fight in this world where external struggle is the law of life has no right to exist”*.

In Mein Kamph Hitler offered some insight into his thinking on exercise of power and in particular the important role of propaganda, his contempt of parliamentary democracy and the Weimar Republic. Hitler also wrote of the need for a national revival and the quest for living space. Hitler linked his hatred of communism with his hatred of Jews. In Hitler’s mind Russia was the centre

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