James watt brief biography of adolf hitler

James Watt (1736–1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer and chemist – he is famous for developing the first steam engine with a wide range of uses.

Without Watt, the industrial revolution would have been slower to occur.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived and Stauffenberg was executed. Also includes the social activists of the era, such as Charles Dickens.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is unquestionably the central figure in the story of the Holocaust.  It was the combination of his virulent hatred of Jews and his success in creating a political movement that was able to seize control of Germany that made the campaign to exterminate the Jews possible. 

Hitler’s origins:  Hitler was born in a small town in Austria in 1889.  He was the son of a local customs official and his much younger third wife.  Hitler’s father was an illegitimate child and it is uncertain who his father was, but there is no evidence for the legend that this unidentified grandfather was Jewish.  Hitler’s father was harsh and distant.

Watt’s invention enabled it to be used for propelling steam trains amd machines in factories. From a young age, Hitler exhibited a strong interest in German nationalism. These included a copying machine and an improved production method for chlorine, a bleaching agent. As the Führer (“leader”) of the Nazi Party, Hitler promised to revive the German economy and get rid of the Jews and other “undesirables” from the Nazi movement.

It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler’s rise it became Germany’s best-selling book after the Bible. He soon had a working model and by 1775 had received a patent called: “A New Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines.”

Over the next few years, his work on the steam engine was disrupted as he needed to take employment working as a land surveyor.

The Nazis also began their campaign of persecution against Jewish people and other minorities, leading to the Holocaust. He had a closer relationship with his mother, and her death from cancer when he was 17 was traumatic for him.

Hitler had a normal education.  As a young man, he showed no special talents.  He wanted to study art, and moved to Vienna after his mother’s death in hope of being accepted to art school, but was turned down for lack of talent. 

Sources of Hitler’s anti-semitism:  Because we have very little reliable information about Hitler’s early life, it is hard to determine exactly when he became a confirmed anti-semite.  His own account, in his book Mein Kampf, is not entirely accurate:  by the time he wrote it, he wanted to make it appear that he had adopted anti-semitic ideas quite early in his life.  Prejudice against Jews was widespread in the early 20^th century, but there is no evidence that Hitler’s family was particularly anti-semitic.  Discussions of Hitler’s antisemitism focus on three periods in his life:

• The Vienna years (1909-1913):  Hitler later claimed this was when he developed his antisemitic outlook.  Vienna had a large Jewish minority (about 10% of the population when Hitler lived there).  It was also a hotbed of ethnic conflict, as members of all the different populations of the Austrian Empire (Czechs, Poles, Croats, Hungarians) migrated to the rapidly growing capital.  Hitler observed the success of the city’s popular mayor, Lueger, who was regularly re-elected on a virulently anti-semitic program.  He also probably read some of the widely circulated racist and anti-semitic literature that was easily available in the city.  Many of these pamphlets also claimed that Jews were the main architects of modern capitalism, and that they lived off the sweat of honest non-Jewish workers.  On the other hand, Hitler was a regular visitor in at least one Jewish family’s home, and his efforts to support himself by selling paintings were made possible primarily by Jewish art dealers.  In other words, Hitler had not yet made anti-semitism the center of his life during this period, despite his later claims.
• The war years and the defeat of Germany (1914-1919):  although he was an Austrian citizen, Hitler volunteered to serve in the German Army at the start of World War I.  He served through all four years of the conflict, although he rose only to the rank of corporal.  He identified completely with the German cause, and was deeply disturbed by the defeat of 1918.  Like many disappointed soldiers, he believed that the army had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors.  Although German Jews had loyally supported their country during the war, they were more likely than other Germans to welcome the new, democratic Weimar Republic established after the defeat.  This led to accusations that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat.  In addition, the war had led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik or Communist regime there, devoted to the overthrow of capitalism.  In 1919, there was a short-lived attempt to create a Communist government in Germany as well.  Enemies of the Communists pointed to the role of a few Jews in this movement and labeled Communism a Jewish conspiracy.  Modern scholars, particularly Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, tend to see these years, rather than the Vienna period, as the time when Hitler’s ideas about Jews really became fixed.  This focuses attention on the impact of the war, rather than the ethnic hatreds in pre-war Austria.
• The first years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1923):  After the war, Hitler lived in Munich, a city overrun with bitter ex-soldiers and others angry at the new democratic government in Berlin.  He began to associate with some of the many groups formed to agitate against all the evils affecting Germany:  capitalism, Communism, the unpopular Treaty of Versailles, democracy, and the Jews.  By September 1919, Hitler had clearly come to see the Jews as the organizing force behind these problems.  He also began to speak of Germany’s need to conquer additional territory—Lebensraum or “living space”—for itself, at the expense of the “Jewish Bolsheviks” in Russia.  There was nothing original about his ideas.  He did begin to make a name for himself, however, because of his unusual speaking ability.  By 1920, he had become one of the most popular agitational speakers in Munich.  He took over one of the many small ultra-right-wing groups, the German Workers’ Party (later renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis for short) and built it up into a larger group, although its support was still mostly limited to Munich and surrounding areas.  Anti-semitism was a regular part of Hitler’s message throughout this period.  By 1923, he thought anger against the Weimar Republic was widespread enough to make the overthrow of the government possible; he wanted to set up a right-wing government, but did not yet imagine himself as its leader.  This Beer Hall Putsch (Nov.

  Although he never had the funds to study at university properly, he showed an inherent capacity to teach himself. (he related power to the equivalent number of horses needed to pull an application). Therefore, his reputation as the inventor of the steam engine is deserved. The combined effect of Watt’s improvements was an approximate five-fold increase in the power and efficiency of the steam engine.

  The steam would condense there and it wouldn’t cool the engine-cylinder. Many rumors have circulated over the years, from Hitler’s alleged use of genetic engineering to create a race of super soldiers to his use of occult rituals and the occult to gain knowledge and power. He learnt German and Italian so that he could study more scientific manuals.

  It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of “Mein Kampf.” The first English translations of “The Zweites Buch” did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title “Hitler's Secret Book.”

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic “purity,” Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called “Aryan race” at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

"Mein Kampf" also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by “inferior” Slavic peoples—including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party.