15 Year Old Austrian Seminarian Details His Sighting Of Adlof Hitler

From Nazi Germany to Naples a perilous road
By Joe Richman

July 13, 2008

An excerpt.

Erwin Possinger was born in Austria. He was just a child when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis began their rise to power. With blond hair, blue eyes and Arian blood, he exemplified qualities of the Nazis’ “Master Race,” and was told that there was a bright and promising future ahead of him.

It was 1939 when Possinger attended a Jesuit Seminary, outside of Vienna. There was a mixture of excitement and trepidation in the air, because Hitler was to address the crowd. “This was the first time I saw Hitler,” Possinger recalled with some disdain. “He was evil personified. He stood rigid in a (convertible) Mercedes. He had a stone-like scowl on his face and his right arm jutted out in the Nazi salute.”

Possinger was just 15 and recalled the dichotomy between Hitler’s frightening appearance and his message of hope. Possinger remembers with a sad irony that most of the people he knew, including himself, were brainwashed into believing that Hitler and his Nazi regime seemed to be a positive force, because, at that early stage, no one knew the reality of what was going to happen. “My first hints of the future came at the Seminary,” Possinger recalled.

“There was fear in the air. Some of the Jesuits were scared to death. Then the Nazis shut it (the school) down, and in a strange way, I was glad. I was terribly homesick. My father had died some years before and I missed my mother and my sister. I went back home and begged my mother not to send me away again. She never did.”

Possinger remembers that, at this time, there was no war, no aggression against other countries, no forced labor, no concentration camps and no awareness of the genocide that was to come. Then Hitler invaded Poland and his real motives started to become clear. “Hitler wanted power, control and world domination. He wanted a world devoid of those whom he determined were weak, socially unacceptable and racially inferior. He was a charismatic leader,” said Possinger.

Read the full article (here)