BY M. GÄRTNER
Pictures of naked men from behind drawn by Adolf Hitler are set to go under the hammer
Up till now, the artist behind the 12 pencil drawings had been unknown.
But with a young Hitler identified as the man who drew them, the pictures are expected to fetch at least €6,700 each.
They were submitted by the future Nazi leader to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna – and were promptly rejected.
How did Hitler become an aspiring painter?
In his youth, he felt destined to become an artist and in 1907 sent sample drawings to the famous Academy in Vienna.
But he was knocked back, with the professors certifying him “perfectly unsuited to being a painter”.
For Hitler, who had already dropped out of school in Linz, the refusal meant disaster and he was forced to live in a shelter for the homeless whilst trying to earn money by selling postcards he had painted. Eventually, he moved to Munich in 1913.
The question remains – would the world have been saved the horrors of the Nazi regime, the Second World War and the Holocaust if Hitler had been accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts?
Ralf Georg Reuth, BILD writer and Hitler biographer, said: “Nobody can say that with certainty. But Hitler used the rejection by the Vienna Academy his whole life”.
Bild.com
