He really did “help” shape hitler into the man he was, the reason hitler had ideals of a powerful unified Germanic state was because his father was a proud Austrian patriot who held office.
I find the origin of his antisemitic beliefs fascinating because there are so many points in his life that are thought to be potential origin points. There are some personal claims from when he was a younger man by people that knew him that he was like that already but they aren't super heavy on proof of authenticity. There's the fact the nationalist socialist party was blaming them for the lose of world war 1, claiming they refused to support the war effort and claiming that was the sole reason for them losing the war, mixed with adolf coming back from war to a county that did not appreciate him or his fallen friends. Then there's the fact that antisemitic belief was just a moderately common ideal in the area he grew up. And yet, since it happened so long ago in a time with far less general records and very few living people to ask about it now, we can't conclusively say when he started agreeing with it all.
I often wondered to but I've decided it wasn't a point in history. In Mein Kampf Hitler basically formulated a fascist ideology based on a lot of popular topics at the time together with a methodology for gaining power and then set out to make it a reality.
The problem with trying to understand anything in those times is that we all grew up post war with things like democracy and human rights. Ideas and concepts that were still on the sociological drawing board that we take for granted today make the distance in worldview almost ungraspable.
I think basically people were seduced by the idea that we could somehow "get rid of all the bad people" without realising that would make us bad people.
The problem with trying to understand anything in those times is that we all grew up post war with things like democracy and human rights. Ideas and concepts that were still on the sociological drawing board that we take for granted today make the distance in worldview almost ungraspable.
I think basically people were seduced by the idea that we could somehow "get rid of all the bad people" without realising that would make us bad people.