A young Adolf Hitler sits outside a Vienna cafe painting a picture of the building across the
street. He is covered in dirt from the ground he slept on the previous night.
He is completely broke and homeless. Hatred fills his heart as he receives
rejection after rejection from art schools and patrons. No one wants him or his paintings,
it seems. In a few years, everything will change. The struggling artist
that is Adolf Hitler will transform into a monster, and his art is partially to blame.
Before uncovering the secret history of Hitler’s art, let's make something very clear. Adolf Hitler
was a terrible person, a genocidal maniac, and the driving force behind the most bloody
and brutal war in the 20th century. He has no redeeming qualities, and there is no excuse to
justify the atrocities he committed in World War II. We will be exploring his early life and art
career not to humanize the man but to understand his shortcomings and examine his art career.
Hitler was born out of wedlock on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria,
to his mother Maria Anna Schickelgruber. He was baptized Catholic, although he would denounce
all organized religions and only worship the State once he started his reign of terror.
His father, Alois Hitler, was a customs official, which is the career he wanted for his son.
However, Hitler had other plans, and they all hinged on the death of his father.
In 1898 Hitler’s family moved to Linz, Austria. It was here that Adolf Hitler was educated,
or at least took classes as he never finished school. By some accounts,
Adolf Hitler was a nightmare child who was constantly disruptive and wouldn’t follow
directions. He wasn’t very intelligent or at least didn’t care enough to try very hard in school.
This would eventually lead to him pursuing alternate paths through life.
Hitler and his father rarely saw eye to eye when discussing his future. All Hitler wanted
to do was paint and be an artist. His father was much more practical and forced his son to
go to secondary school so he could eventually work for the Habsburg civil service. Hitler
dragged his feet and did everything he could to just barely pass his classes in the hopes that
his father would realize he wasn’t suited for civil service. But then Hitler caught a break.
In 1903, Alois Hitler died, and his son was now free to quit school and pursue
his dream of becoming an artist. This would be a turning point in young Adolf’s life,
one that would end up with him developing his antisemitism ideology
and eventually becoming the nightmare leader of the Nazi Party.
In 1907, at the age of 18, Adolf Hitler grabbed his paintbrushes and headed to Vienna,
which was then the epicenter for the fine arts in Austria. It was here that Hitler firmly believed
he would develop his skills and become one of the greatest artists the world had ever known.
However, like with most things in his life, Hitler held delusions of grandeur.
He never doubted he would be a successful artist, but when he reached Vienna,
he would receive a swift slap in the face from reality.
Before he left Lintz, Hitler’s mother had become very sick.
She had breast cancer that was causing her immense pain and keeping her in bed for days at a time.
She rarely left the house, and it sapped almost all of her energy when she did.
Rather than staying and taking care of his dying mother, Hitler packed his bags and left her to
fend for herself. He even had the audacity to ask her for money to start his art career in Vienna.
Even a monster such as Hitler still had a loving mother. She wanted her son to pursue his dream,
so she gave him as much money as possible to help him rent an apartment, buy supplies,
and apply to art school in Vienna. She likely knew that she didn’t have much time left,
but making her son happy was more important than her own health, it seems.
On the other hand, Hitler was much more selfish and didn’t give leaving his sickly
mother a second thought. Instead, once he got to Vienna and realized how expensive city life was,
he asked his mother and other family members for even more money. Hitler had rented an
apartment with a childhood friend named August Kubizek. Much to Hitler’s dismay,
Kubizek was almost immediately accepted into one of Vienna’s music conservatories,
where he began studying to achieve his dream of becoming a conductor.
Unfortunately for Adolf, he had very little success when it came to achieving his goal
of becoming a famous artist. The year he moved to Vienna, he started the application for the Academy
of Fine Arts. It was a rigorous process that came in two stages. The first was providing a portfolio
with past works in it. The second consisted of two three-hour sessions of painting scenes
that were not disclosed to the applicants until the day of the entrance exam.
With around one hundred other applicants, Hitler made it past the first round of screening
and was asked to come to the school for the second part of the admissions process.
We can imagine that Hitler was somewhat ecstatic to be so close to reaching his goal
of becoming an artist. However, in his autobiography “Mein Kampf,”
he talks about the process as if he always knew he would get in. The fact that Hitler
had not really succeeded at anything so far in his life did not seem to deter him.
But this is in line with the future Fuhr’s delusional personality.
Growing up, he thought there was no way he wouldn’t become a world-renowned artist. Yet,
the admissions council did not see it that way. They were about to give Hitler news that would
change his life and the fate of Europe forever. It is interesting to think about what the world
would have looked like in the coming years if The Academy of Fine Arts had made a different
decision following Adolf Hitler’s completion of the second phase of his admissions process.
When Hitler sat for the painting-test portion of the admissions exam,
he and everyone else in the room was told that they would have to paint either
an iconic scene from history or something Biblical. This would be Hitler’s downfall.
As a young artist, he found painting landscapes and architecture satisfying,
so his human characters were always in the background or had little importance in the piece.
This was not what the admissions council was looking for. They critiqued Hitler’s work by
saying it contained too few heads and faces. And although the committee noted that Hitler’s
drawings of architecture showed promise, he would never make it in the fine arts due to
the fact that he showed a lack of emotions or empathy in the human figures in his paintings.
Think about that for a moment. Hitler could not draw humans
well or even show compassion for his own creations on the canvas.
Young Adolf Hitler saw beauty in the rigid structures of architecture but could care
less for the emotional aspects of human life. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered to paint
or even think about others’ feelings, even if they were characters that came out of his own mind.
In hindsight, the way he painted people in his works of art as an afterthought
and devoid of meaning in the picture's context aligned pretty closely with how
he would treat humans during World War II. At this point in his life,
Hitler was starting to develop hatred for certain groups of people, and a main factor for this
was the city he was living in. Vienna may have been a center for art and music in the region,
but something much more sinister was going on behind the scenes. Something that Adolf Hitler
would eventually seek out and embrace after being rejected from art school.
There was one member of the admissions council who was sympathetic to Hitler’s cause after he
was rejected. This professor suggested that since the architectural features were well
drawn in Hitler’s paintings, he should apply to the School of Architecture. There was only one
problem with this suggestion. In order to get into the School of Architecture, Hitler would
need a secondary school degree. Since he decided to drop out without finishing his education,
Hitler would have to go back to school, complete his degree, and then apply to
the School of Architecture, which seemed like too much work for the aspiring artist.
He ended up completely rejecting the professor's recommendation.
Hitler was confident that there had been a mistake and he would still be an artist. He applied to the
School of Fine Arts a second time and didn’t even make it past the first round of screenings. It was
reiterated by the admissions council that Adolf Hitler’s paintings were “utterly devoid of rhythm,
color, feeling, or spiritual imagination”. As you can imagine, Hitler did not take the
second rejection from the admissions council very well either. He didn’t tell his friends or
family about the rejection; instead, he carried on living the life of a broke artist in Vienna.
Even as his mother slowly died in Lintz, Hitler hid the fact that he had spent all of the money
she had lent him and was denied entrance into the Academy of Fine Arts, which was the main reason
why he had left her in the first place. Maria Anna Schickelgruber passed away in December of 1907,
just before her son received his second rejection letter from the admissions council.
Hitler didn’t really mention how the death of his mother impacted him in his autobiography.
In fact, it seems that the only thing it changed was that he now
needed another source of money. Again, like in his paintings,
Hitler seemed to care very little for people in the real world, even his own mother.
As Adolf Hitler grappled with the reality that he would never be accepted into the art school
of his choice, he started to form delusions of conspiracies against him. He thought
perhaps the admissions board was rigged, or maybe even Jews sat on the council itself.
Before coming to Vienna, Hitler had come across antisemitic ideas in Lintz,
but there would be a couple of key players from this part of
the country who would influence him to eventually become a genocidal maniac.
At this point, Adolf Hitler was demoralized. He had no purpose in life, he was completely broke,
and there seemed to be no hope of ever becoming a painter. However, Hitler had another opportunity
to turn his life around. He had been given the chance to work under graphic artist and
stage designer Alfred Roller. Roller was a set painter and designer for the Vienna Court Opera's
productions of Wagner. This would have been an incredible opportunity for a young artist,
but like many things in his life, Hitler made a bad decision.
Adolf Hitler was given a letter of introduction that would allow him to meet with Alfred Roller
at his home. The meeting could have launched his art career to new heights, but as he approached
the door, Hitler turned away without knocking. He would try two more times to muster the courage
to knock on Alfred Roller’s door but would never succeed. It is not clear why Hitler did not seize
this opportunity. Some scholars think he was just too afraid to face more rejection, while others
believe that Hitler’s ego was so big that he refused to work in the shadow of another artist.
Either way, Hitler's ambitions were falling apart. If he was going to make it as an artist,
he would need to start selling his own paintings.
Hitler never made ends meet as an artist in Vienna. The only reason he was able
to live in an apartment his first year in the city was because his mother and aunt
lent him a good size sum of money. But as soon as that dried up, Hitler was on the street.
He lived in homeless shelters and sometimes slept under bridges. It
was not the glamorous lifestyle of an artist that he was hoping for.
Eventually, he started selling postcards he painted of the city to tourists and picked up
a few jobs painting houses. But he still didn’t make enough to afford an apartment. He would
spend most of his money on basic necessities or art museums and opera show entrance fees.
Then things changed slightly for Hitler. He met a man who was able to sell some of his artwork.
The irony here is that this man was Jewish. Samuel Morgenstern was an Austrian businessman
who dabbled in the art scene. For whatever reason, Morgenstern liked Hitler’s paintings and managed
to sell several of them. In fact, many of Hitler’s early paintings were sold to Jewish buyers.
At the time, it didn’t seem that Hitler was racist enough to refuse the money from Jewish people for
his art, but that would change by the time he rose to power as the head of the Nazi Party.
Hitler was now making some money as a painter. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to get him
off the streets and a room in a hostel. During his time in Vienna, his art became
more and more influenced by Austrian and German painters. Hitler even said Rudolf Von Alt was
the greatest teacher he ever had. There are many similarities between von Alt’s work and Hitler’s,
especially in their style of painting architecture and landscapes. However, von Alt had less of a
problem drawing realistic people than Hitler did. Adolf Hitler later described his other influences
as being from Greco Roman classicism, the Italian Renaissance, and Neoclassicism.
The biggest influence on Hitler’s life and what he would eventually turn into was the
city of Vienna and the key players in it. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote, "For hours, I could stand in
front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the parliament; the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me
like an enchantment out of the 'Thousand and One Nights.'” The beauty of the city enamored Hitler,
but there was a darker side to things that would eventually lead him down a dark path.
There were two main movements that influenced Hitler while he was struggling to be an artist
in Vienna. Both had racist ideologies and blamed others for the problems of society.
Georg von Schönerer was the leader of the Pan-Germanism movement in the city. This
group of people believed that all German-speaking people should be unified under a single nation
called the Greater Germanic Reich. You can probably tell which part of Hitler’s ideology
this influenced as he would later do this very thing in World War II and call it the Third Reich.
The second person who influenced Hitler in Vienna was the mayor of the city, Karl
Lueger. It is Lueger who promoted the antisemitism principles that Adolf Hitler would adopt in life.
Lueger explained how it was Jewish business owners—and Jewish people in general—who were
making life hard for the German middle and lower classes. When Hitler started his rise to power in
the Nazi Party, he used the doctrines and tactics of both Schönerer and Lueger to rise to the top. A
combination of both of these men was just what Hitler needed to secure his position as the
head of the Party and spread his antisemitic belief system to the people of Germany.
Basically, Hitler didn’t do anything new to help him gain power; he just used what
he had learned from the men he idolized in Vienna during his time as an artist there.
For someone who ended up loving war so much, Hitler never registered for the military in Lintz
like all citizens were required to do. In 1913 this decision caught up with him as the police
started looking to arrest him. He needed to get out of the city fast. Hitler had not given up on
his artistic dream, but Vienna was getting too dangerous. He had some connections in Munich,
so he packed what few personal possessions he had, and in May of 1913, got out of Vienna.
Once in Munich, Hitler encountered slightly more success as an artist.
He continued selling small watercolors and oil paintings of architectural features
and landmarks in the city. A few wealthy patrons also commissioned Hitler to paint
landscapes for them as well. Things were starting to look up for Adolf Hitler’s art career. Then,
suddenly, it all came to a screeching halt. World War I had begun, and although this
would give Hitler a new calling, his art would be put on hold for the time being.
When World War I broke out, Hitler finally decided to fulfill his military duty.
The embarrassing thing was that when he enlisted and took his fitness exam,
he failed. He was deemed unsuitable for combat and support duty because he was too weak and incapable
of firing weapons. Hitler doesn’t really mention this in his autobiography, probably because it
would have been too embarrassing, but like with art school, he just didn’t have the right stuff.
In August of 1914, the German Army became desperate for infantrymen,
and Hitler was able to finally enlist. While serving in World War I, he brought paper and
canvas along with him to continue drawing and painting even as the war raged on around him.
Even though Hitler volunteered to fight, he appeared to be more interested
in continuing his art career than his actual duty. During this time,
Adolf Hitler did his final paintings, which were made up of farmhouses, landscapes,
and other images he saw during the war. After World War I ended, Hitler put down his brushes
and replaced them with antisemitic rhetoric, fear-mongering, and his nationalist agenda.
Interestingly, once Adolf Hitler came to power as leader of the Nazi Party and Fuhr of Germany,
he did something unexpected with his painting career. For whatever reason,
Hitler wanted to erase any trace of what he had done as a young artist from the face of the Earth.
He was so serious about locating and destroying all of his own paintings that he created a
special task force and gave them whatever resources they needed to get the job done.
A man named Schulte Stratthaus was appointed by Hitler in 1936 to locate,
buy, or steal any works of art created by him. Stratthaus took his mission very seriously
and located hundreds of works of art that Hitler had made. He destroyed them all.
Stratthaus spent years tracking down the paintings and only stopped when World War II broke out,
and the Nazis needed every available soldier to fight in the war.
This meant that by the time World War II came to an end and Hitler shot himself in a Berlin bunker,
only a handful of his pieces were still in existence. Much of his work was actually secured
by the U.S. Army, who collected them and hid them away in storage. There was never any intention
of creating an exhibit out of them or letting the painting see the light of day ever again.
However, the same can’t be said about the pieces of Adolf Hitler’s artwork that found their way
to private collectors. A group of 18 watercolor pieces was sold by Peter Jahn, a collector of
Hitler’s early work decades after the war, for around $50,000 a piece. More recently,
a painting of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria done by Hitler sold for approximately $113,000.
In Germany, it is illegal to sell anything that has Nazi symbolism on it
related to Hitler. However, if Adolf Hitler’s signature is on an object,
and there are no Nazi symbols, then it is okay to sell and display. In 2015
fourteen works of art created by Hitler were sold for $450,000 at a Nuremberg auction house.
So, the question is: was Adolf Hitler a successful artist since his pieces are now selling for
relatively large sums of money? The answer from many art historians and collectors is absolutely
not. The reason these pieces are selling for so much money is because they were created
by one of the most infamous and hated men who have ever lived. If the paintings were
created by anyone else, they would either be collecting dust somewhere or destroyed long ago.
Most art historians agree with the consensus of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna that rejected
Hitler twice. His early works show that he had some talent for painting architecture,
but the pieces themselves don’t show any emotion or take any risks.
Heinz-Joachim Maeder, who works as a spokesperson for the Kloss auction house in Berlin, said:
“If you walk down the Seine and see 100 artists, 80 will be better than Hitler.”
Maybe if Hitler had been allowed to study at the Academy of Fine Arts,
he could have refined his skills and worked on painting humans in a way that evoked some kind of
emotion. But, he was never given the opportunity. It is crazy to think about how different the world
could have turned out if Adolf Hitler was just a slightly better artist and had become successful.
Perhaps the millions of lives lost during World War II could have all been saved.
There is also another surprising aspect of Hitler’s art that rarely gets talked about;
something that foreshadowed the carnage that was to come.
Although Hitler struggled to incorporate all of the elements needed to make his artwork stand out,
he did employ some artistic techniques into his rise to power. By layering different colors in
the form of antisemitism and national pride on the canvas that would become the Third Reich,
Hitler was able to paint a picture in the minds of the German people. His experience
in Vienna set the foundation for him to meet people with strong and terrible dogmas
that he then incorporated into the Nazi movement.
Even when in power, the rigid and emotionless techniques he
used in his painting became part of his main agenda. He would not let the human condition
get in his way or veer from his path to creating a Nazi Empire. Hitler even said that after he
won the war, he would retire and spend the rest of his days painting. It seems he never
gave up on his dream of becoming an artist, even as he destroyed the world around him.
However, there is one art design that Hitler created that is probably more
famous and recognizable than any painting in the world.
Hitler describes his masterpiece in Mein Kampf when he says: “I myself, meanwhile, after
innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a
black swastika in the middle. After long trials, I also found a definite proportion between the size
of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”
That’s right, Adolf Hitler was the artist who designed the Nazi flag. It is one of
the most identifiable symbols in the world, and obviously not for good reasons. So, if Hitler’s
goal was to make something that everyone would recognize and connect with him, he succeeded.
The swastika that Hitler used in his design was a bastardization of a symbol from the
ancient civilizations of the Near East and India. German archaeologist Heinrich
Schliemann found a similar symbol in the ruins of the ancient city of Troy
and on old Germanic pottery. He assumed incorrectly that the two symbols meant Ariyan
people had an empire that spread across the world. This absolutely inaccurate conclusion led to many
Ariyan nationalist parties to adopt the symbol at the time, including Hitler’s Nazi Party. Again,
the symbol is not Ariyan in nature and never was. It was just misappropriated from other cultures.
Hitler used the colors black, white, and red in his design to represent the old flag of Imperial
Germany. This symbolized a time when Germany was powerful and wealthy, which resonated with many
people who were struggling to recover after the sanctions placed on the country after World War I.
Looking back on Hitler’s art career, we can safely say he was never going to be
a great painter. His inability to express emotions through his artwork and the lack
of innate talent made him a decent postcard maker and house painter,
but only a mediocre artist. His most recognizable work of art is the Nazi flag,
which is now only used by an infinitesimally small number of people, who, like Hitler,
are monsters. Adolf Hitler failed at winning World War II, failed as a leader, and failed an artist.
Now watch “Why Hitler's Nephew Was His Worst Enemy.”
Or check out “Last 24 Hours of Hitler's Life.”