The German Question, Part One Hundred Four

"The Rise of Hitler and The Nazis" Part One/A

The Nazi era is extremely important to the "German Question;" that is, "who is a German?" The importance certainly doesn't stop there, as this overall time period is one of the most important and tragic in all history. I've covered some aspects of the Weimar Republic, but I've chosen to cover the rise of Hitler and the Nazis as a separate part of this series, although readers should remember that the rise of the Nazis took place during the 1920s and early 1930s when the Weimar Republic was the governing system of Germany. I'll start with the very basics.

Adolf Hitler is so notorious, people the world over pretty much know who you are talking about if you mention either just his first name or certainly his family name. Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn* (Braunau on the Inn [River]) in northwestern Austria. Now...I hope I've taught followers of this series that while Austria and Germany are now separate countries, they share a common history until fairly recent times, and that, in fact, Austria was the leading state of the Old German Empire, providing emperors ("Kaiser") for centuries. I've heard some Americans say things like, "If Hitler was born in Austria, why did he speak German?" Hellooooooooo!!!

Anyway, Braunau, during its history, was sometimes a part of Austria, and sometimes part of Bavaria (indeed, Bavaria/Germany lies right across the Inn River). It has been part of Austria since agreements made after the defeat of Napoleon in the second decade of the 1800s; thus Hitler, born in 1889, was an Austrian citizen, although at that time the overall nation was termed "Austria-Hungary." The family moved around during Hitler's childhood, even living on the German side of the border for a period.** The Hitler family was Roman Catholic, as were the overwhelming majority of Austrians and Bavarians, and the young Hitler sang in his church choir. Hitler did not get along with his father, but by all accounts he loved his mother, and he kept a picture of her with him throughout his life, even during the last days in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

* Pronounced like "brown-ow" (and indeed "braun" is the German word for "brown"), with the last part pronounced like the "ow" of "how."

** While I'm not certain of this, I would think the Austro-German border of those times, especially in that area, would not have been heavily guarded, and it must be remembered that many Austrians saw themselves as "Germans" too, in spite of the formal split in 1866. I would think the closer to the German border one would have gotten, the more "German nationalism" would have prevailed. Linguistically, the dialect is the same, "Bavarian," although since the end of World War Two, now often termed "Austro-Bavarian." Again, just a guess, but I seriously doubt there were any troops deployed on either side of the border, only customs officials, one of whom was Hitler's father, Alois. I have excerpted this, with some limited editing, from this series, "Part 86:"
"With the end of the war (World War One), Austria was again....Austria; not Austria-Hungary, not the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nor the Austrian Empire; just plain old Austria, well... not "plain old," rather "The Republic of German Austria." With the various ethnic and nationality groups gone their own ways, the German population remained in the territory which once dominated German affairs and produced German Kaisers (emperors) for centuries. The new entity took the name "The Republic of German Austria." The boundaries were not the same as today, although the core area was the same.... "German Austria" chose to be part of "the German Republic;" that is, the new German government established at the end of the war and known more so in the public mind as "the Weimar Republic".... To confirm the decision made by Austria's new representatives, a series of plebiscites, more commonly called referendums in the United States, were to be held throughout "the Republic of German Austria." Early regional referendums showed overwhelming support for unification with Germany, with 98% to 99% voting for the proposal (much of the early voting was in western Austria)."

WORD HISTORY:
Hide-This is the verb form, meaning "to conceal” (the noun form was covered in the previous article in this series). As with the noun, meaning "skin," the verb traces back to Indo European "(s)keut," with the basic notion of "cover, covering." This gave Old Germanic the verb form "hudjanan, with the "u" being pronounced "long," and this seems to have become just "hudjan" in the West Germanic version (English is a West Germanic language). This gave Old English "hydan," with the general meaning "to conceal," but with the interesting secondary meanings, "bury a dead person," and also "to preserve." (Remember, the general meaning goes back to "cover," and thus the "burying" part becomes more obvious. Further, if you cover something, you hope to "preserve" it by protecting it.) Later it was spelled "hiden," before the modern spelling. Low German has both "hūden" and "verhüden" (to hide, conceal), but apparently verb forms in the other Germanic languages have died out.