New Light on Hitler’s Youth
Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.
The ancestry and early years of Adolf Hitler have for long been overlaid by the picture Hitler himself presented of them in Mein Kampf, and by a lack of detailed research with which this picture could be corrected. This lack has now been supplied, as far as it now seems possible, by the publication of Dr. Franz Jetzinger’s Hitler’s Jugend, Phantasien, Lügen und die Wahrheit. The author, an Austrian Social Democrat, sometime Deputy to the Austrian Parliament and Official Librarian to the Linz provincial government, has long been known as a collector of Hitleriana.
The picture he gives of himself in this book is of a disappointed and angry man, both because of the failure of Hitler’s opponents to deflate Hitler’s reputation at a time when it could still have been done by the kind of research he has undertaken, and because of what he believes to have been the illegitimate misuse of his materials by a leading German review and by two of Hitler’s former friends, with whom he was in contact for their own stores of their knowledge of Hitler.
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