The Daily Alaska empire., 1938-03-29
By MORGAN M. BEATTY
 AP Feature Service Writer

If Barnum were alive and running wax works of famous living men, he probably would bill Adolf Hitler as the greatest human enigma of all time.
 That of course, would be a Barn um exaggeration, but it would be a showman's way of explaining the unpredictable man who is dictator over 75,OOO00O Germanic peoples.
 For whatever else one may think about Hitler he certainly is a puzzle-more so than other fa- nous dictators.
 Even the beginning of his life present contradictions, tempting | field for students of human char acter.
 The Hitler ancestral home is 1 Spittal, Austria, across the border l from Germany. The region is peo- pied with honest, illiterate peas ants, whose tragedy has long been poverty and inbreeding.
 Father Strong Willed | Hitlers father, AloiS, is pic ! tured by biographers as strong willcd cobbler who obtained 2 financial nest egg when he mar ried the first of three wives. Then he wangled an Austrian civil ser vice job, and started a family, moving from town to town along the border as a customs inspector. In a few years, the first Mrs. Hitler died, and Alois took a second wife. She lived only few months after the marriage.
 One day, the widowed Alois spied tall ,dark-eyed Clara Poelzl, young woman who had been a housemaid for the first Mrs. Hit Ter. Clara had left her rural home for Vienna in her teens. Now she was back, a mature woman.
 Although Alois Hitler was more than forty and fond of tavern eve nings, he pursued and married Clara Poelzl and their first child was Adolf Hitler He was born in ] 1889 in Braunau, another border town. Most accounts agree the elder Hitler thought Adolf some- thing of a weakling.
 Certainly Adolf was a sensitive child. and now that he has become a national leader, biographers have dug up gossip and incidents about his early life that seemed to fore shadow coming events.
 Constant Cry For Union
 One of the earliest pictures you get of Hitler is that of an intense lad standing on a oon-drencheo hillside, baWling a political speech to couple of fruit trees. School mates hidden nearby giggled theil njoyment-and told the story tC a curious world years later.
 Again you are told that Hitler's ! border birthplace was natura spot to develop any political sense he may have had, for along the border was heard the constant cry 1 for a union of all Germanic peo- ples-a dream Hitler himself has only now brought close to reality.
 The next thing you know, the lad Hitler is being expelled from school for smoking. That's odd for Hitler, the man, neither smokes nor drinks.
 Later Hitler attended Catholic monastery school and there devel- oped taste for music and art-es- pecially art. This rolled Alois who told Adolf he was to follow in his fathers footsteps in the civil ser vice. He punctuated the declara- tion with a spanking.
 The young Hitler obviously pre- ferred his mother. This favoritism seemed to develop in him into a reverential love for her, and 8 positive dislike of his father. Ger tain it is he fought shy in later life of alcohol and over-eating both liked, say biographers, by the elder Hitler.
 Pared Badly As Artist When Adolf was 13, his father died and the son continued his different progress, and leaning more heavily toward that art career. AL though his mother was slowly dying of cancer she determined Adolf should settle the course of his life in his own way. She helped him go to Vienna to study art when he was IT.
 In a year or so the young painter dubbed handsome Adolf" tried to enter the Vienna School of Fine Arts but was turned down twice. Then his mother died.
 For five years he lived from pillar to post, earning his bread as hack artist, house painter, paper hanger. "In the years 1909-10," he wrote, "I had so far improved my condition as not to have to earn my daily bread as an assistant worker. I was working indepen- dently as draughtsman and paint CT in water colors"
 l He was also dipping into history and economics, and attending po- litical meetings now and then Once, he says, he came across a l being in a long caftan. with black