On April 30, 1945, German leader, Adolf Hitler reportedly took his own life in a death shaded with ignominy in an underground shelter at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. With the advent of the Allies reclaiming Europe and Poland in the hands of Stalin’s Red Army, Hitler was compelled to forgo his vision of a new-found empire by shooting himself and chewing down on a cyanide capsule to guarantee dead questions of his survival.
On his 56th birthday on April 20, 1945, Hitler had made his final appearance above the bunker to hand out the Iron Cross to Hitler Youth members before he committed suicide, with his wife, 10 days later.
The sole aim of this article is to bring out some interesting facts you may not know about Adolf Hitler. Plus, at the end of the article, we’ll give you an extra fact.
Adolf Hitler wasn’t originally German
Yea, that’s right. Adolf Hitler was Austrian. He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a town in the then Austria-Hungary empire, now Austria. However, at the age of three, Hitler’s family moved to Passau, Germany where he acquired the Bavarian dialect instead of the Austrian-German tongue. Hitler had five other siblings, although four of them died in infancy. After his father’s death in 1903, Adolf Hitler moved to Munich and in the early 1920s he officially became a German citizen. Source.
His father’s name wasn’t Hitler
Alois Hitler, Hitler’s father was an illegitimate child of his mother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber. When Alois was born in 1837, he initially bore his mother’s surname, Schicklgruber.
However, one Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois’ mother in 1842; and after Anna died in 1847, Alois changed from his mother’s surname to his stepfather’s by recording it as Hitler, a variant of Hiedler. Source.
Hitler was a failed Artist
Adolf Hitler failed the entrance examination of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, twice. First in 1907 and then in 1908. The academy said, although he had some talent for architecture, his human characters lacked detail. After the rejection of his first application, Hitler’s mother, Klara died after a battle with breast cancer. Adolf Hitler struggled to deal with his mother’s death but he did not lose interest in art but continued painting and spent the next four years on the streets of Vienna, selling his artwork to passers-by using his skills. Later on, Hitler’s party also collected significant and priceless pieces of art in a bid to protect them. Source.
Hitler had one testicle
According to medical documents, Adolf Hitler had only one testicle. Findings of Hitler’s medical examination by the German historian, Professor Peter Fleischmann, claims to have uncovered Hitler’s condition after the latter’s arrest in 1923.
The studies suggest that Adolf Hitler suffered from a birth condition known as “right-side cryptorchidism “- an undescended right testicle. The records were believed to have been lost but resurfaced at a 2010 auction in Bavaria. They were soon seized by the Bavarian Government before being studied at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Source.
Adolf Hitler wanted to be a Priest
As an eight-year-old, Hitler considered being a priest. He even took singing lessons and was also in the church choir. Although his father believed religion was a scam, Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic. Adolf Hitler was so fascinated by the ceremony and ritual of the Catholic Church, but as a teenager, he ended up rejecting religion altogether. Source.
Hitler was a Benz freak
While he was in jail in September 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a Mercedes-Benz dealer, Jakob Ferlin for a car loan. He wanted a Mercedes Limousine which cost 18,000 Reichsmarks at the time. It is not known whether he got the loan from Ferlin, but Hitler went to own a fleet of Mercedes-Benz cars in his later life. Source.
Hitler could not drive a car
Despite his love for cars, Hitler never learnt how to drive one. His lame excuse was that because he had been in prison for five years, a car accident would have returned him to jail. However, he spearheaded the development of the Volkswagen car. Source 1, 2.
Adolf Hitler feared cats
Along with Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler suffered from ailurophobia, that is, the fear of cats. Hitler also shared this phobia with Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, King Louis XIV of France, and American dancer, Isadora Duncan. Source.
Hitler admired Martin Luther
Adolf Hitler admired the Protestant Reformation of 16th-century German clergyman, Martin Luther. The Reformation was a religious division that attempted to reform the Catholic Church by criticising its practices such as the Pope’s authority over purgatory, the Catholic doctrine of the saints’ merits et cetera.
Although he was brought up as a Catholic, Hitler accused the Church of spilling more blood than any other religion. Hitler would go on to despise Christianity, especially the papacy. However, he admired Martin Luther. Source.
Adolf Hitler cheated death numerous times before he shot himself
When Hitler was four years old, a priest saved him from drowning. As a matter of fact, Adolf Hitler cheated death and assassination attempts on numerous occasions times. On October 15, 1918, during the twilight of the Great War, that is, the First World War, he was wounded and partially blinded by a mustard gas attack. On July 20, 1944, Hitler survived the July Plot, an assassination attempt on his life. A top military officer during a conference meeting at the Fuhrer’s Wolf’s Lair had planted a bomb under Hitler’s table and he survived with some injuries and some loss of hearing. Source.
Hitler was addicted to cocaine
In 1936, Adolf Hitler met a doctor called Theo Morell Morell who gave him vitamin injections. But as the war waned for Germany in 1941 against the Soviets, Hitler got sick for the first time. He couldn’t attend his military briefing, which was unprecedented, and Morell gave him an opiate that day, and a hormone injection. At once, Hitler immediately felt well and was able to attend the briefings telling the generals how the war and daily operations should continue. From that moment on, he asked the doctor to keep giving him the strong stuff and from 1941 to 1944 Hitler’s drug abuse increased significantly. Source.
Adolf Hitler was married for just 36 hours
On the night of April 28 through 29, Adolf Hitler and his long-time mistress, Eva Braun were married only hours before they both committed suicide. Hitler had met Braun while she was employed as an assistant to the former’s official photographer.
From a middle-class Catholic family, Eva Braun spent her time with Hitler skiing and swimming, out of public view. She had no visible influence on Hitler’s political career and she was loyal to the end, refusing to leave the bunker as she chewed the cyanide capsule to her death. Source.
Osama Bin Laden and Hitler’s death were announced on May 1
When Hitler was informed that Mussolini had been captured and executed by the Italian resistance movement on April 28, 1945, it increased his desire to commit suicide. On April 30, 1945, with the ever-encroaching Red Army, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the head, the right temple, and his death was announced over the German radio the following day at exactly 10:25 pm. Coincidentally, 66 years later, President Barack Obama of the United States would also announce the death of the alleged master-minder of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama Bin Laden on May Day, 2011. Source.
It’s good you read it to the end…now, here is the extra fact.
Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1939. Erik Gottfrid Christian Brandt, a Social Democratic member of the Swedish parliament recommended the award to Hitler. Brandt called him ‘a God-given fighter for peace’. He also referred to Hitler’s best-selling book Mein Kampf ‘as the best and most popular piece of literature in the world.’ Source.
Are there any other interesting facts about Adolf Hitler that you know of? Feel free to share in the comments below.
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