Hitler: A Short Biography

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A. N. WILSON

A Short Biography

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Given the high mortality rate of his siblings, and the fact that both parents were dead by the time he was eighteen, it was not surprising that Hitler was a hypochondriac who always feared illness and imagined his own life would be a short one.

By the time he was living with his widowed mother, the family had settled in the somewhat dingy provincial town of Linz. There was real tension in the town between the German nationalist population – numbering about 60,000 – and the Czechs. Alois Hitler was a passionate German nationalist. Adolf absorbed and inherited these feelings: they may be said to have determined his entire foreign policy, and all the expansionism of 1936–9 which brought the world to the war. What he did not inherit, as has already been said, was any of his father’s desire to work hard and better himself.

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