One June morning in 1919, a Bavarian professor stopped to watch a 30-year- old corporal haranguing a group of students. "I had the peculiar feeling," the professor recalled, "that the man was feeding on the excitement that he himself had whipped up. I saw a pale, thin face and hair hanging down the forehead in unmilitary fashion. He had a close-cropped mustache, and his strikingly large, pale blue eyes shone with a cold fanatical light."
In the next 25 years the world was to grow fatally familiar with that sight: the forelock vibrating, the voice agitated, the stare fixed on destiny. Adolf ; Hitler seldom looked back; history was saturated with national and personal grievance. The future was what counted.
He had reason to despise what had gone before. Hitler's father was an Austrian civil servant, born illegitimate as Alois Schicklgruber (Alois was 39 before he acknowledged his origins and took his presumed father's surname). Although Alois was nominally a Roman Catholic, he placed his faith in the whip. When the sixth of his eight children misbehaved, he was beaten unmercifully. Schicklgruber/Hitler died when Adolf was 13, a lively and artistic youth racked by the need for recognition and the appetite for vengeance.
By Adolf Hitler's lights, there was much to avenge. The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice refused to admit the apprentice painter. Very well, then, he would become an architect. But he was unqualified for further study. These rejections were aggravated by the death of Hitler's beloved mother Klara. The young man with no vices -- he neither drank nor smoked nor pursued women -- drifted in the city, living in flophouses, supporting himself by illustrating street scenes and postcards.
His self-education was wide but shallow. Vienna was peopled with brilliant artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire.
In early 1914 Adolf, his head spinning with unassimilated ideas, was rejected by the Austrian army as "unfit for combatant and auxiliary duties, too weak. Unable to bear arms." The Bavarian military had no such reservations. At the beginning of World War I, he was issued a uniform and sent to the front. Even there the trooper was set apart. He received no mail, shared no confidences, had no girlfriend. A fellow enlistee remembered "this white crow among us that didn't go along with us when we damned the war to hell." In France the white crow distinguished himself under fire. Thanks to the initiative of a Jewish officer, Corporal Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.