Hitler And Stalin example essay topic

Hitler and Stalin will probably go down in history as two of the greatest known evil leaders of the 20th Century. You might ask what could bring two men to become the menaces they were. What kind of upbringing would cause someone to turnout the way they did. This report will compare the two through there adolescence till the end of their teenage years. December 21, 1879 at Gori in Georgia, Joseph Stalin is born. Ten years later on April 20, 1889, Adolph Hitler is given birth to at Braunau on the River Inn.

This difference in age grew ever wider until death when Hitler died in 1945 at age 56 and Stalin lived to be 73 till 1953. Separated by 1,500 miles of land between Georgia and Upper Austria., an even greater distance separated their historical and social development. Yet these two men had common features in their backgrounds. Both were born just outside the borders of the countries they were to some day rule.

While Hitler was a German, he was born a subject of the Hadsburg Empire. German's had played the leading role for centuries, but with Bismark's formation of a German Empire based on Prussia, from which the Austrian Germans were excluded in 1860's. They found themselves forced to defend their historic claim against the growing demands for the Czechs equality and the equality of the other "subject peoples". This had an intense impact on Hitler's attitudes and led to his becoming a rabid German nationalist, however unlike most, he gained an anxiety-ridden, pessimistic outlook of a minority group within their own state.

Knowing of their great past, he saw their future threatened by the growing numbers and inferior races (Slavs, Polish, Russian Jews). Stalin's origins were also important, though they worked in different ways. The reappearance of figures from his Georgian past, such as Ordzhonikidze and Beria, his attitude toward whom was affected by the complex relationships and feuds of Georgian politics. Though his key decision was turning down his Georgian inheritance and identifying with the Georgians' Russian conquerors instead of the Russians' Georgian victims. The result was to produce a Great Russian chauvinist, who worked to overthrow the tsarist state but not to break up the Russian Empire.

Around the time of Stalin's birth Georgia was not the best place to be. They were at a miserable level of poverty, there was no industry, they had a 75% illiteracy rate and an increasing crime rate. Stalin, or Josif Djugashvilli as his birth name was, was born to peasants. Both of his parents were illiterate, semiliterate at best, and were born as serfs.

They were freed only in 1864. Upon release, his father moved to Gori to practice his trade as a cobbler, where he met and married Stalin's mother. After two deaths at birth, Stalin was finally born as their third attempt at a child. Upon contraction of smallpox at age five, Stalin almost dies, and his face left pockmarked. His left arm permanently injured as a result of a childhood accident. He lived in a single-roomed brick-built house with a lean-to garret above and a cellar, which was subsequently turned into a shrine and encased in a neoclassical temple with four marble columns.

His father was a rough, violent drunk who beat his wife and child, and found it hard to make a living. Stalin's best friend Iremashvilli, whom he knew throughout his educational years, said this about Stalin's father in his memoirs:" Undeserved and severe beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father was. Since all people in authority over others seemed to him to be like his father, there soon arose in him a vengeful feeling against all people standing above him. From childhood on, the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the aim to which everything was subordinated". 1 Other accounts confirm the beatings and Stalin's reaction to them. He resented his father and his treatment toward him, but never let it break his spirit.

Compensation came from his mother, who loved and supported him no matter what. She stood up to her husband and took care of herself and Josif when he moved some Forty miles away to Tiflis to take a job in a shoe factory. At some point she became a housekeeper-servant for an Orthodox priest, Father Charkviani, and took Josif with her. At age ten his father insisted on taking him to Tiflis to learn the cobbler's trade; however, his mother was determined that he should become a priest and eventually got him back and he completed his schooling.

Stalin was in the church choir, graduated with a special certificate of honor, and did so well on his entrance exam that he secured himself admission to the seminary as a boarder with all expenses paid. His mother's confidence in and ambition for him helped him to strive to live up to her expectations for him. From his father, however, he acquired a hardened hear and a hatred for authority. This combination proved to leave a powerful legacy.

Hitler's family came from a district of woods and hills in Lower Austria call Waldviertel. This is where the name Hitler first appeared in the fifteenth century, though spelled in a variety of different ways. His ancestors too were peasants, but not serfs. They tended to either be independent farmers or village craftsmen. His father, Alois, was the first to break the pattern by becoming a customs officer in the Hadsburg Imperial Customs Service, several steps up the social ladder. Unlike Stalin, Hitler's early years were not of hardship and poverty.

He was never poor or harshly treated. His father moved up in the ranks in the service and retired with the highest rank open to a civil servant with his education. He had a secure income and a very high social standing and when he passed away he left his widow and children well provided for. Hitler was born while his father was stationed at Braunau.

Such an occupation requires location rather often, and with such, Hitler had attended three different primary schools. He also served as a choirboy and was impressed by the solemnity and splendor of the service. Alois Hitler was far from a sympathetic man. He was selfish and authoritarian and showed little concern for the feelings of his younger wife and children. This however was the way most self-made men of his background and time were. He cared most of his hobby of beekeeping and his bees, dreaming of the day he could retire to a small plot of land and devote himself to them.

Adolf's mother, Klara, was 22 years younger than Alois and was Alois's second cousin. She had been his mistress and was pregnant by him at the time of his second wife's death. Klara was no happier than Alois' first two wives, but she was proud of her well kept home and wont the affection of her children and stepchildren alike. Adolf was the center of mother's attention till age five when his younger brother was born. Some might think this lead to jealousy, but there is no real evidence proving so. In fact, it was followed by the happiest year of his childhood at Passau.

Hitler was a bright student, though he showed resistance to regular work and signs of being self-willed. Upon entering secondary school in Linz, his grades plummeted. His only satisfactory mark was in drawing. He explained this as his want to become an artist and a rebellious act against his father's wishes for him to become a civil servant.

His father's death in 1903 had no impact on his behavior. Now in his teens, he would evade anything resembling real work in order to play war games and read Karl May's stories of North American Indians. Having been asked to leave Linz Real schule, his mother attempted to send him off to boarding school in Steyr. Reports form school showed that his willfulness and dis respectfulness continued on. In the summer of 1905 Hitler suffered from a lung infection. He used this as a way to persuade his mother to allow him to give up school and try to secure admission to the Vienna Academy of Arts.

Between 1905 and 1907, Hitler managed to put off taking the entrance exam at the academy and occupied himself with sketching, painting, and trying to pass himself off as a university student while being supported by his mother. This was the time when Hitler's self-image began to take shape. He saw himself as a heroic rebel, but with the characteristic of an artistic genius. He often grieved over what the world had lost when he was forced to turn to politics.

Like Stalin, Hitler owed much to his mother. She saw great potential in him and even offered to send him to Vienna for four weeks to pursue his dream of painting at the Academy of Arts. When he finally took his entrance exam in 1907 his first of two major shocks was received. He had been rejected, being told his drawing was unsatisfactory. He requested a meeting with the director who suggested that his talents lay architecture, not painting.

He soon convinced himself of this and decided to pursue it. Unfortunately he didn't have the school-leaving certificate to start on that course of professional training. Had he been serious, he could have easily secured this, but rather he didn't even bother to find out what was required. Without notifying his mother, he continued to stay in Vienna as if nothing had happened. His second major shock was the news that his mother was dying. Freud has said "a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success".

2 This may have been true for Stalin, but was certainly true of Hitler. Stalin had showed little appreciation for all of his mother's sacrifices once he had become involved in revolutionary activity. In fact, he shocked Georgian opinion by not attending her funeral in 1936. On the other hand, upon hearing of his mother's illness, Hitler immediately returned to Linz and devoted himself to nursing and looking after her.

Her death, on top of his failure came as the deepest shock to him. Such backgrounds can help understand what brought these men to become what they did. It shows that not one upbringing can account for someone's outcome. Whether you grow up in the slums or riding the lap of luxury, you shape your own destiny. While much more was necessary to bring them to do what they did, this was a definitely a starting point. Notes 1.

Quoted by Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary (New York: 1973), p. 73.2. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, vol. IV (London: 1952). Quoted by Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, p. 76.

Bibliography

Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: 1992).
Kershaw, Ian and Laurence Rees. War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin (France: 1999).
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph & Tragedy (New York: 1991).