Young Hitler

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the most stupendous experience of my life. That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world that he opened his newly healed eyes on was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled. Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the criminals who had signed the armistice, against the socialists who he accused of stabbing the army in the back, and, most violently, against the Jews - a direct threat to the master race of his imagination - on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany's woes. But this was not all about the war; the seeds of that hatred lay in Hitler's youth.