OK, maybe we're being too hard on Princip. After all, we might not have had World War II if a particular art school had relaxed their admissions standards a little.

For instance, what do you think of this painting?


Sort of OK, right? You probably wouldn't hang it on your wall, but at least it does look professional.

Would you accept the painter to your art academy? If you said no, then you're just like the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who rejected a little someone named Adolf Hitler.


The Ridiculous Coincidence

In 1905, a young Adolf left his tiny Austrian hometown and moved to Vienna, all starry-eyed and with dreams of becoming a great artist. Unfortunately for the world, the academy rejected him. Twice.


A few months after his second rejection, his mother died, cutting off his financial support. With no direction and no career to pursue, young Adolf was forced to move to the crappy Vienna slums, which were full of all sorts of filthy minorities, including Czechs, Croatians, Italians and, worst of all, Jews.

Hitler claimed that it was in Vienna when he became an anti-Semite. Specifically, it was one Orthodox Jew that he saw one day and simply couldn't shake from his mind. If only he had been somewhere else during these years, like, say, among a bunch of liberal artist types at the dormitory of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

After spending several years in Vienna among all the disgusting non-Germans, Hitler decided to move to Munich. A year later, someone decided to go for a sandwich and WWI broke out. Without anything better to do, he joined the army, quickly rising through the ranks until he ended up a member of the German military police, tasked with infiltrating a little group known as the National Socialist German Workers Party.

If only there had been something else occupying his time, like painting naked chicks at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. And totally not thinking about how much he hated Jews.

And How Did it Change The World?


It was a little more than a decade after he joined the Nazi party that he got elected Chancellor and became the modern face of evil. We'll never know what would have happened had he gone to art school. Hell, maybe if he stayed in Austria, he would have gotten drafted into the Austrian army instead of the German one. There, some random Russian could have killed him in one of Austria-Hungary's many, many defeats during WWI.