Unresolved Mysteries of The 20th Century

Sicebise Msengana

The demise of Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest mysteries of the 20^th century. He was born in 20 April 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary. He later moved to Germany in 1913.  In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the predecessor of the Nazi Party, and was appointed as its leader in 1921.

“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. -- to Josef Heil, 1922 quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution pg. 17

 

In 1923, he attempted to seize governmental power in a failed coup in Munich and was imprisoned with a sentence of five years. In jail, he wrote the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), which included anti-Semitism.

 After his release he gain popularity since he promoted anticommunism, anti-Semitism and pushed for strong German pride. In 1932, the Nazi Party had the most seats in the German parliament (Reichstag) but did not have the majority seats. As a result, the Nazi party and other parties weren’t able to form a majority parliamentary coalition in support of a candidate for chancellor. Former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative leaders had to persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933. The Enabling Act of 1933 gave Hitler powers to transform the Weimar republic into Nazi Germany, one party authoritarian regime. His bold economic projects resulted in rapid economic growth in Germany, almost every sector in the country. Hitler’s racialized beliefs motivated his leadership style and conduct. He believe in racial theories of race hierarchies and saw Germans as the superior race. The disabled, weak, Jews, Slav, Africans and Gypsies were regarded as inferior people. Hence, he had eugenics plans.

“At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.” -- translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18

 Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race and Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people in Eastern Europe led him to pursue an aggressive foreign policy and large scale rearmament.

 “National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.”

These events directly led to World War II, in 1 September 1939, after the invasion of Poland. Britain and France declared war against Germany. France fell in 1940, but Britain resisted the invasion. By 1941, Germany occupied most of Europe and North Africa. Although Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with the USSR leader, Joseph Stalin, he made a grave mistake of ordering an invasion of the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941. Soviet soldiers implemented a scorch earth policy as they retreated to Moscow. After 1941 the tide turned for the German forces and European Axis powers, the Allied powers fought back and defeated German forces. In 1945, Berlin fell to Soviet soldiers. He married his longtime lover, Eva Braun and committed suicide in 30 April 1945.

Hitler's leadership and racial theories, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of about 6 million Jews and millions of other victims whom he and Nazi followers deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) or socially undesirable. 

Hitler’s death remains a mystery because the Red Army only found remains of the burnt corpses. No DNA testing on the bodies to determine if they were really Hitler’s and Eva Braun. Coupled with the fact that thousands of Nazi officials escaped to South America and many Nazi scientists were invited to the USA, during the later stages of the development of the atomic bomb. It is hard to believe that the most wanted criminal in the world would disappear just like that. There are usually more questions than answers in resolving this matter.