Triveni Journal
1927 | 11,233,916 words
Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....
ADOLF HITLER鈥橲 TEACHERStc "ADOLF HITLER鈥橲 TEACHERS"
鈥淥ur teachers were absolute tyrants.聽 They had no sympathy with youth.聽 Their core object was to stuff our minds and turn us into erudite apes like themselves.聽 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鈥�.
There was one teacher at the Linz who exercised a strong and, as it turned out a fateful influence on the young Adolf Hitler.聽 It was a History teacher 鈥� Dr. Leopald Poetsch. He was the only one of Hitler鈥檚 teachers who received a warm tribute in Mein Kamph.聽 Hitler readily admitted his debt to this man.
鈥淗e 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.聽 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 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鈥�.
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 鈥榶ou cannot imagine how much I owe to that old man鈥�. 鈥淚 had honoured my father but my mother I loved鈥�.
From: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.