Early Life and Career
Sepp Dietrich was born in Hawangen, near Memmingen in Bavaria, Germany on 28 May 1892, son of Pelagius Dietrich and his wife Kreszentia. He worked as a butcher and hotel servant. In 1911 he joined the Bavarian Army for a short time. Volunteering at the beginning of the First World War, he served with the artillery, as a paymaster sergeant and later in the first German tank troops.
After the war, Dietrich served briefly in a Freikorps Oberland against the Bavarian Soviet Republic, May 1919. Thereafter, he migrated from one job to another, including waiter, policeman, foreman, farm labourer, petrol station attendant and customs officer. He joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1928 and became commander of Hitler's Schutzstaffel (SS) bodyguard. His NSDAP number was 89,015 and his SS number was 1,117. Dietrich had been introduced to Nazism by Christian Weber, who was his employer at the Tankstelle-Blau-Bock filling station in Munich. He accompanied Hitler on his tours around Germany. Later Hitler arranged other jobs, including various SS posts, and let him live in the Reich Chancellery.
Read more about this topic: Josef Dietrich
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)