Hitler’s Family, Case Study Example

Hitler’s family was socially pluralistic made up of several aspects. There was much prejudice towards the Jewish race, much dissention with regards to religion and man secrets within the family based on mental illness. The family was patriarchal where the authority was inherited through the masculine heritage and it remained the same after Hitler married for Hitler remained the dominant figure in his family. The family was very rigid but remained connected with each other. They listened to the master of the family which was Adolph and realized he had their best interests at heart. He had them programmed to obey his whims and fancies even down to committing suicide at the end of his reign when they realized his reign was coming to an end. Hitler was regularly beat as a child but that was quite common a form of discipline in those days. Adolph quit school at the age of 16 due to numerous lung infections that wore his health down. Adolph was refused entrance to a school of art in 1906 and his mother died after a series of operations in 1907. His father had died of haemorrhage in 1903. Adolph spent six years in Vienna living on a small orphan’s pension and nearly being desolate in the streets. During those years is when he developed his prejudices against the Jewish population because many of the places he slept whilst homeless were financed by the Jews. He admired many of the wealth of the Jews in Vienna. He left the area for Munich in attempt to escape the war in 1913 and was received by the Austrian government for escaping the war. “He was arrested and found too weak and unfit to bear arms.” (Adolph Hitler).

While serving only three years of his five year prison term for leaving his county to escape the military war without permission, Hitler wrote the very first volume of Mein Kampf which told his thoughts and ideas of what was to become the future of Germany and the German people. “He reserved the brunt of his vituperation for the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany’s defeat in the War. Jews were the German nation’s true enemy, he wrote.” (Adolph Hitler). “He further wrote “[The Jews’] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people,” he wrote. On the contrary, the German people were of the highest racial purity and those destined to be the master race according to Hitler. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to avoid intermarriage with subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs.” (Adolph Hitler).

Hitler and his family was Roman Catholic and they were practising Catholics. They were further influenced in school by Pan-Germanism and began to reject the Catholic Church and received the Sacrament of Confession only unwillingly. Many of Hitler’s religious views can be gathered by his private and public statements when he publically stated, “We do not want any other God than Germany itself.” (Adolph Hitler). After Hitler left home he did not practise his faith and often make public and private statement of negative nature about his faith.

“Hitler tried to cover up a family history of inbreeding and lunacy.” (Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II in the News). His cousin Aloisa Velt was supposedly locked in a mental asylum for over nine years which the family attempted to hide this situation for embarrassment to the family. His half-brother Alois Hitler, Jr. was a sociopath and the family forced him and another family member to live under another name to save the family embarrassment. Adolph used to play cops and robbers quite frequently and would often get spankings for coming home late. His sister Paula shared many of his Holocaustic beliefs but she found it very difficult to believe he was responsible for so many deaths of the Jews. “A member of Adolf Hitler’s own family was one of those killed in the Nazi campaign to wipe out the mentally ill, according to two historians. The woman, named as “Aloisia V”, was the great grandchild of Hitler’s great aunt – his second cousin, once removed. She was gassed to death on 6 December 1940, at a mental institution in Austria, historian Timothy Ryback said. Medical files show she suffered from schizophrenia, depression, delusions and other mental problems.” (Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II in the News).

Hitler’ ‘crazy’ mentality commenced when he was a young adult forced to live under restraint and under poor economic conditions amongst the rich and wealthy Jews. He began to hate the Jews and blame them for his less than cordial life. He wanted a perfect society in which he viewed the Jews a ‘less than’. His contempt and misdirected philosophy was based on a history of maladaptive philosophies based on mental illness prevalent in his history and hatred. He ruled with dictatorship mentality which made him extremely dangerous.

Works Cited

Adolph Hitler (1990) Retrieved December 7, 2009 from, http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.hitler.html

Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II in the News (2009) Retrieved December 7, 2009 from, http://hitlernews.cloudworth.com/family-of-adolf-hitler.php