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Black Pedagogy

Alois Hitler, the “Senior Customs Officer“, this form of address was highly prized all his life by the pedantic state official in the Austria in thrall to titles, was an authoritarian and irascible man, who took advantage of those deemed below him in rank.

Alois Hitler (formerly Schicklgruber, 1837-1903), customs officer. Adolf Hitler’s father.

And these were first and foremost his wife and children. His excessive punishments also included the family dog, which was then chastised even further when he urinated on the floor out of fear and held his legs in the air in submission. Alois is said to have used a whip covered in hippopotamus leather when punishing his eldest sons⁸. This whip was to play a major role in the career of the boy thus chastised.

It was the harshness against himself that the boy thus tortured drew as a lesson from these punishments and which he was later to demand unrelentingly from the entire German youth:

»But when this struggle is fought out between the parents, and is so every day, in forms which often really leave nothing to the imagination as regards inner brutalness then ultimately the results of such an object lesson, however slowly, will show themselves in the little ones. What their nature may be, when this reciprocal strife takes the form of brutal excesses of the father against the mother, leading to abuse in a drunken state, one who is not acquainted with such a milieu will find difficult to imagine. At six years the little boy, who is to be pitied, perceives things, at which even a grown up can only feel horror.«⁹

Harshness and brutality belonged to Hitler’s view of humanity. He was convinced that the human being was “by nature not a pack animal“ and was only made “to submit through the most brutal of laws … The civil state can only be maintained through iron brutality.”¹⁰