Adolf Hitler in World War II

Chapter One: Prologue In April 1889, an infant's cry mingled with the mist rising from the Danube in the town of Braunau. Adolf Hitler's first breath already carried the rough, mixed German and Czech inflections peculiar to the Austrian borderlands. No one could have imagined that this customs official's son would one day drench the map of Europe in blood. At the entrance to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, eighteen-year-old Hitler clutched his third rejection letter. The church spires in his sketchbook were sharper than those of the real buildings. The judges said he “didn't understand the human soul,” yet failed to see the obsession with “purity” burning in his eyes. Crumbs from the poorhouse fell onto the pages of The Germanic Myths. He filled the margins with charcoal symbols, as if deciphering some kind of destiny. Meanwhile, in a private school in China's Hunan Province, ten-year-old Zhou Mingyuan practiced copying The Art of War with a brush. The rice paddies outside the window were a vivid green. His teacher was explaining how to “subdue the enemy without fighting,” while he secretly drew a warship on the back of his textbook. He had seen one in a newspaper brought by a missionary. The flash of its guns reminded him of the starving refugees who had died at the entrance to his village during last year's famine. When gunshots rang out in Sarajevo in 1914, Hitler listed his eyesight as “good” on his Munich enlistment medical form, only to be blinded by mustard gas during a charge. Zhou Mingyuan, meanwhile, wore cloth shoes sewn by his mother and followed a crowd of refugees westward. The Yangtze flowed murkily beneath his feet, like a fate yet to be revealed. The two young men, separated by the breadth of Eurasia, in the folds of history