Some had dysfunctional families with drunken and abusive parents, others grew up virtually without their parents, and there were even rich children who rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy of their countries and traveled the world. The main leaders who coincided in World War II were several decades apart from each other and spent their childhoods in totally different situations, but they all went through experiences that marked them from their childhood.
If the start of World War II is taken as a point of reference, September 1939, the youngest of the leaders who faced each other in the conflict was the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, at the age of 38, followed by the Frenchman Charles De Gaulle (48 years old), Adolf Hitler (50 years old), the American Franklin D. Roosevelt (57 years old), Josef Stalin (60 years old) and, finally, the British Winston Churchill (64 years old).
There are almost three decades between the youngest and the oldest, but the first years of life of the six were very particular. “I cannot think of any other stronger need in childhood than the protection of the father”, said a famous phrase by Sigmund Freud, and in all of them the father figure played a fundamental role.
Twice British Prime Minister (1940-1945 and 1951-1955), was the son of an aristocratic family. And, as was customary in upper-class families in those Victorian times, his parents Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome Churchill were very active in social and political life, but emotionally distant, even careless with their two sons, Winston and Jack, six years younger. Randolph had been elected Member of Parliament (MP) a year before Winston's birth and his wife, a New Yorker, the daughter of a wealthy American businessman, was also active in an association promoting the interests of the Conservative Party.
With parents absent from his daily life, the little boy was always in the care of his nanny, Elizabeth Everest, whom he called "Woom," the closest thing he could pronounce to "woman." Churchill wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life: “I loved my mother very much, but from a distance. My nanny was my confidant. Mrs. Everest was the one who took care of me and attended to my every need. my many problems."
When he entered St George's School in Ascot, Berkshire, as a boarder at the age of seven - where he was not a good student - he further distanced himself from his parents. But he didn't miss them so much as he missed his nanny and his life in the palace.
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“I was miserable at the thought of being left alone among all these strangers in this big, fierce, formidable place. After all, I was only seven years old and had been so happy in my nursery with all my toys. He had such wonderful toys: a real steam engine, a magic lantern, and a collection of soldiers that numbered almost a thousand already. Now they were going to be just lessons," he recalled in his autobiography.
The leader who received an unusual Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 wrote an extensive biographical book about the long political career of his father - who always had health problems, and died at the age of 45, when Winston was 20 - in the that there is a lot of admiration but little affection. Expressions of endearment were reserved for Mrs. Everest. She died the same year as her father, and for her she commissioned the local florist to always keep fresh flowers on her grave.
Winston, who grew up in an environment with all the privileges but accustomed to disappointments, was later the statesman who maintained that success consisted in "advancing from failure to failure, without losing enthusiasm", and who offered the British people “blood, effort, tears and sweat”.
Three events marked the childhood of Josef Stalin, who led the Soviet Union for more than two decades, and shaped his character as a dictator. Born in the mountain village of Gori, Georgia, like other great despots, Stalin was a man who came from the "provinces" to the capital of the empire he came to rule (Hitler, for example, was born in Austria and Bonaparte in Corsica). ). His native language was Georgian and he only started learning Russian at the age of 9. But when he grew up he boasted that he no longer remembered Georgian, although he always had a strong accent and in the last years of his life he only spoke that language.
The dictator's childhood was also marked by poverty, illness, and a drunken, beating father. The son of a servant, Ekaterine Geladze, and a shoemaker, Besarion Jughashvili, he was the third child in the family, but his older siblings died a few months after his birth.
British biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore recalls in his book The Court of the Red Tsar ("The Court of the Red Tsar") that Stalin's father gradually sank into alcoholism. After beating her wife and Josef several times, the woman decided to leave her husband when the little boy was five years old. Thus, mother and son began a wandering life, in which Ekaterine worried about giving him a good school education and even always dreamed that her son would be an Orthodox priest one day.
The third factor that marked Stalin's childhood was illness. Photos of him as a boy show him something small: he contracted smallpox at the age of six and it left his face scarred for the rest of his life. In addition, due to a developmental problem, his left arm was shorter than his right. At the age of 12, he was seriously injured after being hit by a carriage. In a school photograph, he appears considerably smaller than his peers. In fact, as an adult he stood at 5'6", and his short stature always irritated him, so he would resort to platform shoes and other gadgets in an effort to appear taller.
How childhood disorders shaped the dictator's mind will never be known, but there was a deep contempt for life in him when he sarcastically repeated that “the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions It's a statistic."
Franklin Roosevelt was not a prince, but he lived as one. The only son of a wealthy family, both on the father's and mother's sides. He was born in a mansion in Hyde Park, New York, surrounded by gardens and many servants at his disposal. Already as a boy he learned to ride a horse, shoot, row, polo and tennis.
His father James, who had Franklin at age 54, had contributed financially to the campaign of President Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897), and was a regular visitor to the White House. On one of those visits, he brought his five-year-old son Franklin, and President Cleveland, who had surely had a difficult day, made a comment to the little boy that turned out to be a failed premonition: “My little man, I am going to make you a strange request. ...may you never be president of the United States."
The mistake was bigger than expected because Franklin not only became president in 1933, but was the only US president elected to four consecutive terms.
From the strong and authoritarian character of his mother, Sara Delano, some of his most controversial decisions could have arisen, such as the creation in 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, of ten concentration camps for 120,000 Japanese-Americans, considered suspects because of their nationality.
His biographers attribute to the influence of his father, elderly and absent but passionate about philanthropic tasks, the human values that marked Roosevelt's management, from the New Deal as a response to the worst economic crisis in the country to his Solidarity with Jews fleeing Nazism.
In his memoir, the former Soviet chancellor in the United States, Andrei Gromyko recalls that Roosevelt did not use profanity. "Whenever he could have done a nasty word, he would resort to humor instead."
The relatively recent discovery, in 2005, of the diaries of Paula Hitler (1896-1960), Adolf's younger sister, and half-siblings Alois (1882-1956) and Angela (1883-1949) shed light on the childhood of one of America's most sinister dictators, and a dysfunctional middle-class family with a beating father.
Although the father died when Adolf was 13 years old, the beatings of this customs official marked the entire family, and Alois Jr. remembered them in his memoirs.
“Once, fearing that my father could no longer control himself in his unbridled rage, she [Adolf's mother] decided to stop the beating. She went up to the attic, she covered Adolf who was lying on the floor, but she couldn't avoid my father's final blow. And she received it without making a sound,” Alois Jr. recalled in his memoirs.
In her book He Was My Boss, the dictator's secretary, Christa Schroeder, also cited an anecdote that Hitler himself proudly told her about his childhood. After reading a book by classic YA author Karl May, in which he said a brave man would show no signs of pain, little Adolf decided not to make a sound as he was beaten by his father.
In addition, he dedicated himself to counting the lashes he received. "Adolf proudly told his mother, 'Dad hit me 32 times and I didn't cry,'" Schroeder recalled.
When he launched his proclamation of resistance and confidence in victory from the BBC microphones in London on June 18, 1940, As the Nazi army advanced on France, Charles de Gaulle was imbued with convictions that rose above what reality showed: a powerful regime that extended its rule throughout Europe. "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance will not go out," he proclaimed.
Charles, who spent his childhood in Paris, was the third of five children of Jeanne Maillot, who belonged to a family of the industrial bourgeoisie, and Henri de Gaulle, a professor of literature and history. In his book Mémoires de guerre, Charles praised his mother, "that she had for the country an uncompromising passion equal to her religious piety."
His father's influence was reflected in the fondness that the future head of the French Resistance and president (1959-1969) had for history and literature.
Marie-Agnès, the sister a year older than Charles, thus remembered family life. “My brothers and I only keep good memories of our childhood: we weren't very spoiled, but we were happy because we were surrounded by the affection of our parents and the two of them got along very well. Peace reigned at home."
Whether because of the confidence that his height gave him (he was 1.96 meters tall, and was nicknamed “the big asparagus”), or because of the ideals in which he was raised, as a boy Charles had a premonition about an outstanding future for he. Fueled by memories of the 1870 war, at the age of 14 he wrote a text entitled Campaign of Germany, in which he fantasized describing himself as "General De Gaulle", and imagined himself at the head of an army of 200,000 men, responsible for saving the city of Nancy, in the east of the country, supposedly threatened by a German attack.
It does not seem like a privilege to be separated from parents at ten weeks of age to be raised by a high-ranking military leader, but, at After all, nothing was going to be normal in the life of the boy who was considered a descendant of the goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu.
In 1901, two and a half months after Hirohito's birth in Tokyo Palace during his grandfather's reign, his father Crown Prince Yoshihito, 21, and Princess Sadako, 17, gave up the young son so that he was raised by Admiral Sumiyoshi Kawamura, who had the responsibility of training the son of the gods who became emperor in 1926.
As part of the defeat in the Second War, Hirohito had to renounce his expansionist aspirations and affirm that he was not actually a descendant of gods but a human being. But his formative years were stronger and he continued to believe in his divine origin.
In December 1945, he told his vice grand chamberlain Michio Kinoshita: “It is permissible to say that the idea that the Japanese are descendants of the gods is a false conception; but it is absolutely inadmissible to call fanciful the idea that the Emperor is a descendant of the gods."
The Americans did not really believe in the divinity of the emperor, but they granted him the privilege of being the only leader of the three Axis powers -Germany, Italy and Japan- who was not tried for war crimes, so as not to increase tensions with Japanese subjects.