So Adolf Hitler did not
pursue his ambition to enter the School of Architecture - he realized that
his failure years ago to graduate from high school might well block his
entry. Within a year he was living in homeless shelters and eating at
charity soup-kitchens.
He spent his time reading anti-Semitic tabloids and
pamphlets available at the newsstands and at local coffee shops. He
had declined to take regular employment and took occasional menial jobs
and sold some of his paintings or advertising posters whenever he could to
provide sustenance.
Hitler didn't get much out of it - but in 1999 two paintings and a line
drawing by Hitler, completed between 1911 and 1914, were sold at auction
for a total of $131,000. In 2005 four sketches and two Christmas cards
signed by the Nazi dictator were sold in Montreal to a single buyer for an
undisclosed sum. A media report citing witnesses who said the items were
sold for $26,800 could not be confirmed.
 
A young Adolf Hitler
- and his own sketch
By Hitler’s own accounting, he painted between one and three watercolors
a day during his Vienna years. If one assumes he painted only one painting
a day, and only three days a week, then the minimum number he would have
painted would be six hundred, which is close to Hitler's own recollection over
a thousand.
According to William L. Shirer Hitler copied his scetches and
paintings from older works: pictures of Vienna, usually of some well-known
landmark as St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Opera House, The Burgtheater, the
Palace of Schoenbrunn or the Roman ruins in Schoenbrunn Park.
Shirer tells
that hundreds of these pitiful pieces were sold by Hitler to dealers who
used them to fill empty picture frames on display. And Hitler often drew
posters for shopkeepers advertising such products as Teddy's
Perspiration Powder.
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