There’s been lots of comparisons between Donald trump and Adolf Hitler. Most of the comparisons that I’ve read, compare Hitler when he was leader of the Nazi movement and Trump during his presidency.
But they certainly didn’t start out with anywhere close to the same lifestyle….
When Hitler was young, his parents wanted him to go into the Austrian civil service like his father — but young Adolf had other ideas. He wanted to be a great artist, and he went off to Vienna to make his fortune.
He applied twice to the Academy of Art, but they wouldn’t accept him as a student. He liked drawing buildings, so they advised him to try the school of architecture instead. But — he hadn’t graduated from high school, and so he was refused entry to the school of architecture, too. The money from home ran out, and Hitler was on the street. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) he described his time in Vienna as a period of study — that wasn’t true.
Hitler did some house painting and other odd jobs occasionally, but most of the time he was flat broke. He stayed in a hostel for homeless men, and while he was there he developed his skill at public speaking.
At the hostel, he met an older “tramp” who found out that Hitler knew how to draw pictures of buildings and encouraged him to paint postcards of Viennese street scenes, which the older man would then take out and sell. They shared the profits from this “business venture.” The two set up their workspace in the hostel’s large dayroom but not a lot of work got done because Hitler could never resist an audience. The old man kept trying to persuade him to sit down and concentrate on the postcards, but Hitler kept jumping up to make passionate speeches against the Jews. His audience was the other bums or tramps who were sleeping off their hangover or sitting waiting for their free meals — but they would cheer him on as he worked himself up into incoherent ecstasies of nationalism. As time went on, he became a kind of bum celebrity.
Hitler moved to Munich just before the outbreak of World War I. There his life changed forever when he joined the German army and reached the rank of corporal and won an Iron Cross.
His success as a leader of the Nazi movement in later life relied mainly on the unique and passionate style of public speaking he had developed during those years in Vienna.
Charlie Chaplin always maintained that Hitler’s trademark mustache was copied from Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character, and that Hitler adopted it to make himself more popular with the masses.
Adolf Hitler learned, more than any other political leader, how to get through to the people who lived on the bottom rungs of society — and that’s where he found his first, and best. supporters.
So some similarities may exist between Trump and Hitler, but Trump hasn’t bragged about being a bum….. yet.
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