Adolf Hitler is a lot like a YouTube commenter in that the mere mention of his name conjures up the image of an angry man screaming racial slurs at the top of his voice. We often don’t think of Hitler as a young man, or heavens forbid, a child, because when we do, we find out weird things about the man, like his penchant for pranks.
Now because this is the internet and things often get misconstrued, we are absolutely not endorsing anything Hitler did in his lifetime with this article. We just wanted to share a little known fact about Hitler’s life to contrast the endless swathes of information detailing the atrocities he had a hand in. Because it’s important to remember that Hitler wasn’t a cartoonishly evil, one dimensional super-villain, he was a person with a past just like any of us.
Now according to people who knew Hitler in his youth, he was a “nervous, awkward boy” more concerned with drawing and playing pranks than he was with school work. Which, if you think about it, kind of makes him sound like that one kid we all knew in school who drew penises on everything, if you can’t picture that kid, you were that kid and you’re also Hitler. We’re sorry.
Amongst the various pranks he would play, young Hitler once, as described above, made a group of girls in his class laugh during a religious service by pretending to groom a large moustache whenever they looked over at him. Other pranks committed by the the pint-sized fuhrer included releasing hundreds of cockroaches into a random class and rearranging all of the desks in one of his classrooms just to see how the teacher would react. Spoiler, not very well.
The weird thing is, Hitler’s penchant for playing practical jokes didn’t die with his childhood, even when he was leading the German military and overseeing the fucking holocaust, according to reports from his bodyguards and close personal friends, he loved to laugh and joke with people. For example, after once learning that his right-hand man, Hermann Göring liked to sleep while wearing his medals neatly pinned to his pyjamas, Hitler made a medal out of silver foil and presented it to him for bravery. He’d also reportedly crack jokes with his men while they all laughed awkwardly. Hitler was basically Michael Scott from The Office with a less likeable personality and a slightly better suit.
We’re not saying that Hitler wasn’t an evil asshole, because he totally was, what we’re trying to say is that one time, as a child, he pretended to have a comically huge moustache just to make somebody laugh. He still sounds like a dickhead though.
