Adolf Hitler's Cardinal Traits

1619 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Personality Of Adolf Hitler

Most of the world can remember and recognize the occurrences of World War II, when the Jewish population struggled to survive one of the most brutal leaders in world history. The topic has always been an interesting one for myself growing up, because it is hard to imagine how one person could be so destructive to human life, solely based on their preferences. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, initiated millions of deaths from 1934 until 1945 during World War II. The disturbing past events due to Hitler’s dictatorship has lead many questioning why would such a human want to completely wipe out an entire population. Why was there so much hatred in this man to want to make people suffer? I myself cannot help but wonder the deeper meaning …show more content…

He developed a trait theory emphasizing that each individual is unique and that the present was of importance towards personality rather than focusing on the past. Allport used a dictionary to make a list of 4,500 words that describe a person. He later divided this list into three categories of traits (hierarchies), cardinal, central, and secondary. Cardinal traits are rare, which dominate and shape an individual’s behavior. Adolf Hitler is one of the rare individuals who fit the category of cardinal traits due to his ruthless behavior towards people, especially the Jews. The next hierarchy is central traits, which are general characteristic and the basic building blocks that form our behaviors. Lastly, the secondary traits hierarchy, are only prevalent under certain circumstances. These traits explain why a person feels or behaves a certain way at a certain …show more content…

Hitler, which many could tell a person right off the bat, definitely did not subject under this category. Starting in his childhood, Adolf Hitler was seen as cold, cruel, and lacking emotion and sensitivity towards others. In his childhood there was a certain story where a landlady kicked out her husband for the night, the man pleaded with Hitler to intercede for him. However, Hitler refused and the man was forced to spend the night sleeping out on the street. The way he told the story later in his life showed him in an unpleasant light where he was malicious, cruel, and happy over another’s misery (Payne, 1973, p.

Show More
Related

  • Use Of Artifice In Empire Of Illusion By Chris Hedges

    629 Words  | 2 Pages

    At a time of loss, the German people needed a reason to rebuild their spirits. The Jews became a national target even though Hitler’s theory could not be proven. Even as a Jew, he accused the Jews people for Germany’s defeat in order to rally the people against a group of people Hitler despised. The story-telling of the Jews’ wickedness distracts the Germans from realizing the terror Holocaust. Millions of Jewish people died because Hitler said they caused the downfall of Germany. Innocent lives were taken. The death of millions mark the rise of Hitler. He sets the stage for the largest massacre in

    Read More

  • Hitler's Views on Homosexuality

    539 Words  | 2 Pages

    The historical analysis of the “History of Germany” reveals many hidden facts including the complex issues such as fighting against homosexuality, Hitler’s racial ideology and the ecclesiastical Christian Church movements that needed to be appropriately addressed and rectified. This analytical paper aims to analyze the History of Germany by assessing two articles that are; “Combating homosexuality as a political task” and “Who can resist temptation?” to analyze the situation of Germany through historical documents.

    Read More

  • Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

    1708 Words  | 4 Pages

    Synopsis – Hitler’s Willing Executioners is a work that may change our understanding of the Holocaust and of Germany during the Nazi period. Daniel Goldhagen has revisited a question that history has come to treat as settled, and his researches have led him to the inescapable conclusion that none of the established answers holds true. Drawing on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen presents new evidence to show that many beliefs about the killers are fallacies. They were not primarily SS men or Nazi Party members, but perfectly ordinary Germans from all walks of life, men who brutalized and murdered Jews both willingly and zealously. “They acted as they did because of a widespread, profound, unquestioned, and virulent anti-Semitism that led them to regard the Jews as a demonic enemy whose extermination was not only necessary but also just.”1 The author proposes to show that the phenomenon of German anti-Semitism was already deep-rooted and pervasive in German society before Hitler came to power, and that there was a widely shared view that the Jews ought to be eliminated in some way from German society. When Hitler chose mass extermination as the only final solution, he was easily able to enlist vast numbers of Germans to carry it out.

    Read More

  • Regina George: The Plastics In High School

    1411 Words  | 3 Pages

    The trait approach focuses on describing and quantifying individual differences. The approach tries to categorize people into groups based upon what traits they exhibit. According to the textbook, “The most important factors of personality ought to be found across different sources of data, and he [Cattell] developed a typology of data – including self-report, peer-report, and behavioral observations – that has become part of the foundation of the distinctions between S, I, L, and B data” (Funder, 2013, p. 222). As the essential--trait approach was being developed over the years, the amount of traits drastically changed over time. Multiple psychologists worked on this theory, all having different ideas and amounts of essential ...

    Read More

  • Ethnicitarianism In The Mein Kompf

    1425 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. However, did The Nazis party ever unravel the true intent behind Hitler’s desires to extinguish the inferior race? This question is one of the most difficult to answer. While Hitler made several references to killing Jews, both in his

    Read More

  • Hitler and His Power

    411 Words  | 1 Pages

    Support for the Nazi party was due to the growing belief that it was a

    Read More

  • The Horror of Genocide

    1005 Words  | 3 Pages

    Personally, when I first heard the term genocide, the first picture that came up to my mind was the picture of the German dictator Hitler. Hitler hated Jews and saw them as the reason behind every disaster in the world. In his biography on Hitler, Schramm wrote that there is a theory explaining the reasons behind Hitler’s hatred towards Jews, he said t...

    Read More

  • hitler

    671 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hitler saw that most of Germany didn’t fit this picture at all, so he decided to solve it in one of the most awful ways possible. The mass murder, or Holocaust of over six million Jews, and long with the innocent Blacks, Gays, Gypsies, and both physically and mentally Handicapped. He mostly targeted the Jewish because in World War II, the Jewish was the main reason why Germany lost in World War II. This mass murder lasted over years and years of murder, forced lab...

    Read More

  • Who Should Be Blamed for the Holocaust?

    756 Words  | 2 Pages

    “ Hitler used propaganda and manufacturing enemies such as Jews and five million other people to prepare the country for war.” (Jewish Virtual Library), This piece of evidence shows Hitler’s attempt of genocide toward the Jewish race a...

    Read More

  • Politics and its affect on the olympics

    1561 Words  | 4 Pages

    In 1934, the death of President Hindenburg of Germany removed the last remaining obstacle for Adolf Hitler to assume power. Soon thereafter, he declared himself President and Fuehrer, which means “supreme leader”. That was just the beginning of what would almost 12 years of Jewish persecution in Germany, mainly because of Hitler’s hatred towards the Jews. It is difficult to doubt that Hitler genuinely feared and hated Jews. His whole existence was driven by an obsessive loathing of them (Hart-Davis 14).

    Read More

  • Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche

    1140 Words  | 3 Pages

    During the Holocaust, around six million Jews were murdered due to Hitler’s plan to rid Germany of “heterogeneous people” in Germany, as stated in the novel, Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche. Shortly following a period of suffering, Hitler began leading Germany in 1930 to start the period of his rule, the Third Reich. Over time, his power and support from the country increased until he had full control over his people. Starting from saying “Heil Hitler!” the people of the German empire were cleverly forced into following Hitler through terror and threat. He had a group of leaders, the SS, who were Nazis that willingly took any task given, including the mass murder of millions of Jews due to his belief that they were enemies to Germany. German citizens were talked into participating or believing in the most extreme of things, like violent pogroms, deportations, attacks, and executions. Through the novel’s perspicacity of the Third Reich, readers can see how Hitler’s reign was a controversial time period summed up by courage, extremity, and most important of all, loyalty.

    Read More

  • Adolf Hitler: The Symptoms Of Sociopathy In The Holocaust

    1110 Words  | 3 Pages

    A demented madman once said, “I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.” Those words reflect an individual willing to manipulate or threaten anyone to accomplish their own personal goals. Those are the words of Adolf Hitler who called forth the annihilation of those he deemed to lack racial purity through the Holocaust. His lack of empathy and the ability to differentiate between right and wrong, motivation based on self pleasure, and rationalization of his actions serve as tell tale signs of his current state of mind at that time. Clearly, Adolf Hitler was a sociopath.

    Read More

  • The Trait Theory of Personality

    2125 Words  | 5 Pages

    It was this insight that led Allport to develop his own theory of personality (Ewen, 2003, p. 260). According to Ewen (2003), in 1936 Allport used just one dictionary to discover more than four thousand trait descriptive words.... ... middle of paper ... ...

    Read More

  • The Characteristics Of Adolf Hitler

    1529 Words  | 4 Pages

    I believe that there are three main character traits that define a good leader; their ability to move a nation with their speeches, their ability to think about and plan for the future of their people and nation, and their ability to be able to command the nation 's forces correctly. All good and well defining character traits that I believe that Adolf Hitler possessed when he came to power in Germany during January 1933.

    Read More

  • The Living Hell

    1299 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of the worst moments in the history of our world is when Adolf Hitler came to power. His terrifying reign in Germany during and shortly after the second world war brought on nothing else but misery, grief, and a community which had now been greatly reduced. Hitler was known for his passionate dislike of Jewish people, (anti-Semitism). In vicious, inhumane ways, Hitler proceeded to torture, experiment on, and exterminate Jews. It was not only Jews however which Hitler wanted to eliminate; he also pursued gypsies and homosexuals. This tyrant used "living space" and the desire for a "good" nation of pure Germans as an excuse to satisfy his cruel beliefs and issues with these people. Throughout the course of the war, Hitler sent Jews to concentration camps. These camps where either labour camps, or death camps. Jews received "special" treatment, and where acknowledged as different from the rest of the society. But Hitler had no mercy; he had it established that the Jews would all be annihilated.

    Read More

More about Adolf Hitler's Cardinal Traits

Open Document