rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

BIRTH OF THE THIRD REICH 23Though refraining from actual participation in Austrian party politics, youngHitler already was beginning to practice his oratory on the audiences which hefound in Vienna’s flophouses, soup kitchens and on its street corners. It wasto develop into a talent (as this author, who later was to listen to scores of hismost important speeches, can testify) more formidable than any other in theGermany between the wars, and it was to contribute in a large measure to hisastounding success.And finally in Hitler’s Vienna experience there were the Jews. In Linz, hesays, there had been few Jews. ”At home I do not remember having heardthe word during my father’s lifetime.” At high school there was a Jewish boy –”but we didn’t give the matter any thought . . . I even took them [the Jews] forGermans.” 56According to Hitler’s boyhood friend, this is not the truth. ”When I firstmet Adolf Hitler,” says August Kubizek, recalling their days together in Linz,”his anti-Semitism was already pronounced . . . Hitler was already a confirmedanti-Semite when he went to Vienna. And although his experiences in Viennamight have deepened this feeling, they certainly did not give birth to it.” 57”Then,” says Hitler, ”I came to Vienna.”Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions . . . oppressed bythe hardship of my own lot, I gained at first no insight into the innerstratification of the people in this gigantic city. Notwithstandingthat Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousandJews among its two million inhabitants,I did not see them . . . The Jew was still characterized for me bynothing but his religion, and therefore on grounds of human toleranceI maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case asin others. Consequently the tone of the Viennese anti-Semitic pressseemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. 58One day, Hitler recounts, he went strolling through the Inner City. ”I suddenlyencountered an apparition in a black caftan and black side-locks. Is thisa Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like thatin Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I staredat this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first questionassumed a new form: Is this a German?” 59Hitler’s answer may be readily guessed. He claims, though, that beforeanswering he decided ”to try to relieve my doubts by books.” He buried himselfin anti-Semitic literature, which had a large sale in Vienna at the time. Thenhe took to the streets to observe the ”phenomenon” more closely. ”Wherever Iwent,” he says, ”I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply theybecame distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity . . . Later I oftengrew sick to the stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.” 60Next, he says, he discovered the ”moral stain on this ’chosen people’ . . .Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, withoutat least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess,you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light– a kike!” The Jews were largely responsible, he says he found, for prostitutionand the white-slave traffic. ”When for the first time,” he relates, ”I recognized