Kids Who Would Be King

ADOLF HITLER

Born into a near-incestuous union of cousins near Linz, Austria, little Adolf dream of becoming a painter and loved the opera. Unfortunately, his cultural aspirations were crushed by his parents' more practical plans. They wanted their boy to become a civ il service bureaucrat, just like his father. When Dad died, Adolf celebrated by vowing never to work. Young Hitler was unsuited for school, where his grades were poor and he had only one friend. He loved his mother and wept uncontrollably when she died of overwork and tuberculosis. Though his childhood was rocky, Hitler eventually found a place for himself in nearby Germany, where he fulfilled his father's goal of a lifetime of public service.

STALIN

Iosif Vissarionouich Djugashuili grew up from humble origins in the village of Gori, Georgia, to become Joseph Stalin, a living god and the most accomplished mass murderer in history. Today his childhood home is a museum. His secret: rebellion against his parents. Stalin's father, a shoemaker, set his boy on the path to greatness by providing a childhood of drunken beatings with sticks and belts, but died too soon to see his son become a man. Stalin's mother saved to send her son to the seminary, where he broke his mother's heart by being thrown out and becoming a revolutionary. In school, Stalin attracted a circle of faceless toadies while antagonizing all of the better students, foreshadowing the course of his adult life. During the 1930's, fearing for his mother's safety, Stalin sent KGB troops to protect her. Mrs. Djugashvili fainted when the soldiers appeared at her door, but when she came to, she realized she had misjudged her son.

MAO

Eldest son of a wealthy pig farmer in Hunan, China, little Mao Zedong failed his parent's ambitions by forsaking a life on the land. As a boy, Mao studied as he plowed, and quarreled with a father who scorned book learning. A star student, Mao was popular in his rural schools, and enjoyed the Confucian classics. Mao left the farm in his teens to move to Beijing,

where his failure to enter the university taught him that his father was right. An older, wiser Mao banned Confucius, tortured Chinese intellectuals, and occasionally returned to his childhood home where he could lord things over relatives while living li ke his father, but on a grander scale.

JEFF

Jeffrey Dahmer proved that any American kid can rise about childhood roots to achieve fame. Little Jeffrey knew a life of parental neglect and loneliness in white-trash Ohio. Since his parents had little or no time to share, Jeffrey embarked upon flights of fantasy with the mutilated corpses of neighborhood animals. By his teens, he had graduated to using human beings in his experiments. These imaginative excursions helped Dahmer cope with his classic American childhood of isolated parents and schools wit hout friends. No doubt Dahmer's childhood fantasies help him to cope with adult life as a household name. Father Lionel Dahmer's reaction upon learning of his son's achievements: "How did this happen?" (Pat Anders)

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