Academy of fine arts vienna website

A PEASANT MOTHER.—Adolf Hitler is a master of men, but he is also the son of a woman. The woman is dead. But she is his living master. Hitler, dictator of the new Germany, is still an emotional slave to the dreams of his childhood, still chained by an immense bond to the woman who is the most important factor in his personal life—his mother.

Hitler’s mother, Clara Poelzl by name, was a peasant girl of great strength of character. The boy Adolf loved her with a fanatic devotion. He seemingly detested his father, Alois Hitler. Their surviving relatives bear witness to these early emotions. I recently spent a few days in the villages where Hitler’s cousins still live, listening to their stories. They are poor folk, and their plaster huts seem a million miles from the shining palaces of the Wilhelm-strasse, where Hitler rules.

Hitler was brought up in a bitterly unhappy home. He loved his mother and hated his father, and any modern psychologist will tell you what that means. The mother was a saint, the father a brute, as Hitler saw them, and he identified himself with the former i

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