ADOLF HITLER’S TEACHERS
William L. Shirer
“Our teachers
were absolute tyrants. They had no
sympathy with youth. Their core object
was to stuff our minds and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest in
generality, they persecuted him relentlessly and the only model pupils whom I
have ever got to know have all been failures in after life”.
There was one
teacher at the Linz who exercised a strong and, as it turned out a fateful
influence on the young Adolf Hitler. It
was a History teacher – Dr. Leopald Poetsch.
He was the only one of Hitler’s teachers who received a warm tribute in
Mein Kamph. Hitler readily admitted his
debt to this man.
“He was
perhaps decisive for my whole after life that good fortune gave me a good
history teacher who understood, as few others did, the principle of retaining
the essential and forgetting the non-essential. In my teacher Dr. Leopald
Poetsch of the high school in Linz, this requirement was fulfilled in a truly
ideal manner. An old gentleman, kind
but at the same time firm, he was able not only to hold our attention by his
dazzling eloquence but to carry us away with him. Even today I think back with
genuine emotion on the gray-haired man who, by the fire of his words, sometimes
made us forget the present, who, as if by magic, transported us into times past
and, out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into
vivid reality. There we sat often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved
to tears. He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us,
frequently appealing to our sense of honour.
This teacher
made history my favourite subject and indeed, though he had no such intention,
it was then that I became a young revolutionary”.
Later after
35 years when he met him as Chancellor, he talked to him alone for an hour, and
later confided to the members of his party ‘you cannot imagine how much I owe
to that old man’. “I had honoured my father but my mother I loved”.
From: The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich by William L. Shirer.