Adolf Hitler

German politician Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, ruled Germany as its dictator from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the head of the Nazi Party, Hitler became powerful. He invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II in Europe during his rule. Hitler wanted to create a New Order and expel Jews from Germany. His belligerent foreign policy is seen as the main reason why Europe entered World War II.
He oversaw a significant rearmament program and invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. In the course of the Nazi era, six million Jews were murdered. In 1889, Adolf Hitler was born in Austria-Braunau Hungary's am Inn. He was the fourth of Alois Hitler's six children from his third marriage to Klara Pölzl. The idea that Alois's father was Jewish is rejected by historians.
He claims in Mein Kampf that he purposefully performed poorly in school. He moved away from Linz to pursue a career in fine art in Vienna, paying for it with orphan benefits and mother assistance. He became passionate about Lohengrin, his favorite opera, and grew to respect Martin Luther. Hitler's anti-genesis Semitism's and evolution are still up for debate. During World War One, Hitler worked as a messenger on the Western Front in France and Belgium.
He suffered injuries at the Battle of the Somme and a mustard gas attack left him blind in one eye. His ideology started to take shape as a result of his resentment at Germany's defeat in the war. In July 1919, Adolf Hitler was chosen to serve as the Verbindungsmann of an Aufklärungskommando of the Reichswehr. He was tasked with infiltrating the German Workers' Party and influencing other soldiers. The party's logo, a swastika in a white circle on a red background, was created by Hitler.
Hitler started drawing regular audiences for his venomous remarks in beer halls. He mastered the use of populist themes, such as making scapegoats. Hitler's thinking was greatly influenced by the Aufbau Vereinigung, a secretive association of early Nazis and exiled White Russians. In February 1920, the Nazi Party was founded with a 25-point platform. Its fervent anti-Semitism was its most significant feature.
Erich Ludendorff, a World War I general, assisted Hitler in 1923 during the "Beer Hall Putsch," an attempt at a coup. After the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, Hitler left Germany. In Mein Kampf, he outlined his goals for establishing a racial society in Germany. Hitler's first year in office, 1933, saw the sale of one million copies. Hitler took advantage of the Great Depression's political opening to advance his party.
Following the 1930 elections, a grand coalition was broken up and a minority ministry was installed in its place. Nazi ideology was boosted in part by the German referendum of 1929. In the 1930 election, the Nazi Party emerged from obscurity to garner 18.3% of the vote and 107 seats in parliament. Hitler deliberately targeted those impacted by inflation and the Depression with his political rhetoric. One of the pioneers of using air travel for political objectives was he.
Hitler became a powerful figure in German politics after being elected chancellor. A brief collaboration between Hugenberg's party and the Nazi Party was led by Hitler. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was set ablaze under Hitler's direction. The vote percentage for the Nazi Party rose to 43.9%, and the party won the most seats in the legislature. In the recently elected Reichstag, the Ermächtigungsgesetz was put to a vote by Hitler's administration.
With the title of Führer and Reichskanzler, Adolf Hitler assumed the role of head of state in Germany. Germany's government designated the Nazi Party to be the sole legitimate political force. During the Night of the Long Knives, which took place from June 30 to July 2, 1934, Hitler deposed the SA leadership. Soldiers' conventional loyalty oaths were changed after Hindenburg's death to declare loyalty to Hitler personally rather than to the position of commander-in-chief. Hitler increased his control over the military by using blackmail. General Wilhelm Keitel's Oberkommando der Wehrmacht took the role of the Ministry of War under his leadership.
He clearly based many of his laws on the Reichstag Fire Decree. Mefo banknotes, the creation of new currency, and asset seizures were used to pay for reconstruction and rearmament. Six million people were unemployed in 1932; one million were in 1936. Compared to the Weimar Republic, the 1930s saw a small decline in earnings. Prince Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow published a statement outlining his main foreign policy objectives in March 1914.
Germany left the World Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. Hitler said in January 1935 that the Wehrmacht would increase to 600,000 soldiers. Hitler's foreign policy eventually had a military focus. In 1938, Germany and Japan agreed to the Anti-Comintern Pact. Hitler broke the Sino-German alliance with the Republic of China in 1939.
He formed an alliance with the more potent Japanese Empire. German recognition was given to Manchukuo, the Japanese-occupied state in Manchuria. Hitler and Konrad Henlein of the Sudeten German Party met in secret in Berlin in March 1938. The men came to agreement on a justification for taking military action against Czechoslovakia. In secret, Hitler thought it didn't matter; his true goal was to conquer the world.
Hitler was chosen as 1938's Man of the Year by Time magazine. He advocated for an economic offensive to raise German foreign exchange holdings in his "Export or Die" speech on January 30, 1939. He said that Poland's destruction was a necessary preliminary to defeating Britain, which he identified as the major enemy. Hitler's fear of passing away too soon was one factor in his haste to go to war. Before he got too old, he said, he had to take Germany to war.
After Poland's fall, there was a conflict known as the Sitzkrieg, or "Phoney War," according to modern journalists. When Hitler returned to Berlin from his tour of France in July 1940, following his stop in Paris, Kershaw claims that his popularity was at its height. Germany invaded France in May 1940 and also took control of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. On June 10, Italy allied with Hitler, and on June 22, France and Germany agreed to an armistice. Winston Churchill, the newly elected British leader, received peace offerings from Hitler.
He gave the order for numerous aerial assaults against the radar and air bases of the Royal Air Force. The Tripartite Pact was ratified in Berlin on September 27, 1940, by Hitler, Ciano, and Imperial Japan. In December 1941, Hitler formally declared war on the United States. Hitler designated himself the Oberkommando des Heeres' commander during this crisis. What should be done with the Jews in Russia, Himmler asked Hitler in December 1941. Hitler answered, "As Partisanen auszurotten."
Numerous German officers came to the conclusion that the country would be destroyed if Hitler's rule continued and that defeat was certain. Hitler almost avoided death when staff officer Heinz Brandt hid the bomb-containing briefcase under a large conference table, which largely absorbed the blow. Hitler made his final trek from the Führerbunker to the surface on April 20, 1945. He added that "all was lost," that he would remain in Berlin, and that he would subsequently commit suicide. Hitler eliminated Hermann Göring from all government positions in his last will and testament.
Adolf Hitler wed Eva Braun in the Führerbunker on April 28, 1945. He shot himself in the head on April 29, and Braun ate a cyanide capsule. They were killed, and their bodies were taken outdoors to a garden behind the Reich Chancellery. As the Red Army continued its shelling, they were doused in gasoline and set on fire. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were to be sent to West Siberia as part of Hitler's Generalplan Ost (Generalplan Ost), where they would either be slaughtered or used as slave labor.
Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich planned and carried out the genocide. The Schutzstaffel slaughtered at least eleven million non-combatants between 1939 and 1945, including up to 1,500,000 Romanis and around 6 million Jews. Nearly two million non-Jewish Poles died as a result of Hitler's policies, along with almost three million Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, people with physical and mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists, and unionists. Hitler never mentioned the killings in public and doesn't appear to have ever been to a concentration camp. Adolf Hitler had more control over his nation's war effort during World War II than any other national leader.
After 1938, his cabinet didn't meet, and he forbade his ministers from holding their own meetings. As the war swung against Germany, Hitler's leadership grew more and more detached from reality. Hitler was born to an anti-clerical father and a Catholic mother. Hitler never again went to Mass or received the sacraments after leaving his house. He believed that without organized religion, people would gravitate to mysticism, which he thought was backwards.
Hitler saw the church to be a significant force for political conservatism in society. He intended to undermine the power of Christian institutions within the Reich. He may have had irritable bowel syndrome, skin lesions, coronary sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, syphilis, or other ailments, according to historians. In 1942, Adolf Hitler developed an amphetamine addiction, and by the end of his life, he had Parkinson's disease. He had to have 200 wood splinters removed from his legs after the 20 July plan bomb explosion in 1944 caused perforated eardrums.
Estimates place the number of democidal deaths of civilians and prisoners of war at 19.3 million under the control of the Nazi dictatorship. Many European nations have made it illegal to support Nazism and deny the Holocaust, despite the fact that military activity in the European theater of World War II resulted in the deaths of 28.7 million soldiers and civilians.
== Nazism ==
Nazism is a type of fascism that despises parliamentary government and liberal democracy. Pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist neopagan Völkisch movement served as the foundation for its extreme nationalism. The paramilitary Freikorps organizations that appeared after World War I had a significant influence on it. In an effort to redefine socialism in a nationalist context, the term "national socialism" was developed. The German Workers' Party, a pan-German nationalist and anti-Semitic organization, was established in 1919.
Hitler described the antisemitism and anti-communism at the core of his political thought in Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925–1926. The Nazi Party had paramilitary units called the Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel. During the Night of the Long Knives in the middle of 1934, Hitler cleansed the most socially and economically extreme members of the party. Millions of people were eventually killed during World War II in a genocide that came to be known as the Holocaust. In the 1920s, the name of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) was abbreviated from "Sozialist" to "Nazi".
The majority of researchers define Nazism in both theory and practice as a form of far-right politics, notwithstanding the NSDAP's brief attempt to reclaim the label "Nazi" after World War II. Nazism's supporters, including Adolf Hitler, disputed that it was either right- or left-wing. Instead, they presented Nazism as a syncretic movement in official documents. Hitler condensed "socialism" to the word "Socialism" in a speech he delivered to a group of Nazi officials in 1929. The far-right in Germany after World War I, which shared ideas such as anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Semitism, had an impact on the Nazis.
In opposition to the Weimar Republic, the Nazis joined forces with far-right monarchists, the German National People's Party, and others, including monarchist commanders in the German Army. The partnership disintegrated after the July 1932 elections when the DNVP lost a significant portion of its Reichstag seats. The conservative faction swiftly increased its power when, after 1929, the Nazi Party rose from relative obscurity to become a significant political force. Even Social Democrats and Communists were nicknamed as "Beefsteak Nazis" in the era just prior to the Nazi takeover of power because they were brown on the outside and crimson on the inside. Before the First World War, Hitler had a bohemian lifestyle that he continued until his ascent to power.
He thought that Jews originated communism to undermine nations by encouraging class conflict. He developed become an antisemitic German nationalist after Versailles. Hitler regarded the UK as Germany's natural ally and viewed the British Empire as a living example of Germanic dominance over "inferior" races. He encouraged the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to temporarily join forces in an anti-liberal front in order to defeat France. Several thinkers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries had a big impact on Adolf Hitler.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte had a huge ideological impact on the Nazis. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was a significant figure in völkisch philosophy prior to the rise of the Nazis. Völkisch nationalism criticized individualism, soulless materialism, and the secularization of urban industrial life. It promoted a "better" civilization founded on German "blood" and ethnic German "folk" culture. The Nazis asserted that Otto von Bismarck's administration's actions had an impact on their worldview.
Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a supporter of Pan-Germanism, and Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, had political influence over Hitler. He embraced the Heil salutation, the Führer title, and the paradigm of unquestionable party leadership for the Nazi cause. Theories that claim that Europeans are the offspring of Indo-Iranian settlers are the origin of the idea of the Aryan race. In the 19th century, ideas of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were fused. The theories of Arthur de Gobineau emphasized the existence of an insurmountable polarity between Jewish and Aryan cultures.
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a book by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, gained popularity in Germany. The idea that Jews were taking advantage of Germans financially became widespread in Germany. This resulted from the ascent of numerous wealthy Jews into influential positions. German völkisch nationalism started to take on antisemitic and racist overtones about this time, in the 1870s. According to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Jews in Germany constitute a "state inside a state" that imperils German unity.
He suggested establishing a Jewish state in Palestine to force Jews out of Europe. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were considered to be reliable by Adolf Hitler. The ideas of influential biologists of the 19th century, such as French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, may have influenced Nazism's racial policy beliefs. Eugenicists of the time were encouraged by Gregor Mendel's theory of inheritance and Ernst Haeckel's idealist interpretation of Lamarckism. The institutional racism in America served as an inspiration for Hitler and other Nazi legal theorists, who saw it as the standard to be followed.
The two main Nuremberg Legislation were directly inspired by American citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation laws. According to the Mendelian theory of heredity, genetic characteristics and traits were passed down from one generation to the next.
Johann Plenge discussed the emergence of a "National Socialism" in Germany during World War I. State socialism that denied the "concept of infinite freedom" was known as national socialism. Nazism has some of Plenge's concepts as its foundation. "Prussian socialism" as it was conceived by Spengler had an impact on both Nazism and the Conservative Revolutionary movement. He thought that the biological and "spiritual" fecundity of the West had reached an end.
Fascism was a major influence on Nazism, and Spengler absorbed the anti-English viewpoints expressed by Plenge and Sombart during World War I. Hitler was impressed by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini's takeover of Rome in the March on Rome in 1922. The "Third Reich," a new state that would unite all classes under authoritarian authority, was envisioned by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Hitler claimed that the achievement of Fascism's ascent to power in Italy owed Nazism an obligation of gratitude. Some Nazis disapproved of Italian fascism and claimed it was too conservative or capitalist.
Hitler's worldview was part of the National Socialism movement, which was more of a charismatic movement than an ideological or systematic one. Nazism promoted ideas based on the idea that an Aryan master race existed and was superior to all other races. A procedural virtue ethics-based morality could be used to define the Nazis. They took the role of intuitions based on common sense with an ideological list of instructions and values. German irredentist claims to Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the area that is now the Czech Republic, and the Polish Corridor were all supported by the German Nazi Party.
The Nazi Party has openly supported the expansion of Germany into areas occupied by the Soviet Union since the 1920s. Germany's borders were intended to be substantially expanded east of the Ural Mountains as part of the Lebensraum policy. Hitler intended to expel the "surplus" Russian population that resided west of the Urals. Tooze contends that it is incorrect to believe that the dictatorship was presented with a "guns or butter" decision. The First World War led to the Nazis' fixation with food production.
Although the blockade of Germany by the Allies during and after World War I did not result in an actual famine, an estimated 600,000 people did die from chronic starvation. Goebbels claimed that the occupation of Lebensraum was meant to be the first step towards the ultimate aim of Nazi ideology. Nazism considered the so-called Aryan race to be the supreme race in the world. The Nazis wanted to annihilate Jews, Romani, Slavs, and those with mental and physical disabilities. Political opponents, black people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals were among the other groups labeled "degenerate" and "asocial."
According to Jakob Graf, the original Aryans sprang from Nordic invaders who set the stage for the formation of Aryan civilisation in Ancient India. He claimed that the Italics, who were linked to the Celts and another Nordic group, were the ones who built the Roman Empire. The goal of creating a master race led Nazi Germany to want to "purify" the German people. Hitler's belief that Sparta was the first völkisch state provided the ideological foundation for euthanasia. Additionally, sterilisation was required for those with long-term drinking and other types of social deviance.
Ashkenazi and Sephardi, the two main lineages of the Jewish people, were established as a result of the widespread conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in the eighth century, according to Günther. He asserted that persons of Near Eastern racial background were disliked by Europeans for racial reasons. They perceived them as having potentially harmful Jewish and Asian, i.e. Mongol, influences. A small proportion of Slavs who the Nazis believed to be descended from German settlers were given an exception. Hitler argued that ethnic cleansing of Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering at their hands.
As its organizing concept, rivalry and struggle were central to national socialist politics. In order to achieve "the efficient prosecution of the fight," the Nazis promoted the concept of a national-racial "people's community." Nazism rejected the idea of a class struggle and extolled both German businesspeople and German laborers as vital to the Volksgemeinschaft. German business executives assisted the Nazis in gaining power and profited greatly from the Nazi state once it had been formed. Middle class support was necessary for the Nazi Party to develop into a significant national political force starting in 1928.
Every worker was expected to be at least semi-skilled, according to Nazi standards. The 1930s and 1940s were a time of social mobility for many working-class families. Because the government feared a rise in wage-price inflation, worker earnings did not increase significantly under Nazi control. After the difficult Great Depression years, possibilities for employment were welcomed by the workforce. In the end, the Nazis had to choose between their rearmament program—which would unavoidably demand workers to make material sacrifices—and the need to keep the working class's trust.
A public life and a pervasive sense of duty were preferred to a materialistic and private existence by the Nazis' New Man. Hermann Beck contends that while some middle-class people dismissed this as empty rhetoric, the majority supported the Nazis. Women should be kept out of politics and restricted to the "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" realms, according to Nazi ideology. Many women enthusiastically supported the regime, but formed their own internal hierarchies. Proto-natalist programs in Nazi Germany offered favourable loans and grants to newlyweds and encouraged them to give birth.
Heinrich Himmler's Lebensborn program aimed to increase the birth rate of "Aryan" children through extramarital relations between women classified as racially pure and their male equals. Women were punished more severely for having sexual relations with foreign forced labourers.
The League of German Girls was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid race defilement, which was treated with particular importance for young females. Heydrich issued a decree on 20 February 1942 that sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the death penalty. After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS who zealously suppressed homosexuality. The Nazi regime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s. Homosexuals were viewed as failing in their duty to procreate and reproduce for the Aryan nation.
Hitler denounced the Old Testament as "Satan's Bible" and claimed that Jesus was both an Aryan and an antisemite. The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to their association with the Centre Party. Priests and nuns came into the focus of the Gestapo and SS during World War II. Catholic resistance groups like those around Roman Karl Scholz were persecuted uncompromisingly. Historian Michael Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was "self-consciously pagan and primitive".
The Nazis came to power in the midst of Great Depression, when unemployment was close to 30%. Various work programs designed to establish full-employment for the German population were instituted. Hitler's public works projects, job-procurement program and subsidised home repair program reduced unemployment by as much as 40% in one year. Hitler promised measures to increase employment, protect the German currency, and promote recovery from the Great Depression. Hitler's priority was rearmament and the buildup of the German military in preparation for an eventual war.
Germany increased its military spending faster than any other state in peacetime. The Nazis entered into a partnership with German business from as early as February 1933. Owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce. Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished, but Hitler's beliefs made him retain business competition and private property as economic engines. The Nazis were hostile to the idea of social welfare in principle, upholding instead the social Darwinist concept that the weak and feeble should perish.
They condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic as well as private charity, accusing them of supporting people regarded as racially inferior and weak. For Hitler, the acquisition of land and soil was requisite in moulding the German economy. Between 1933 and 1939, military expenditures were upwards of 82 billion Reichsmarks and represented 23 per cent of Germany's gross national product as the Nazis mobilised their people and economy for war. In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated his desire to "make war upon the Marxist principle that all men are equal". He believed that "the notion of equality was a sin against nature".
Nazism upheld the "natural inequality of men," including inequality between races and also within each race. The Communist Party of Germany was the largest Communist Party in the world outside of the Soviet Union, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. Anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Francoist Spain and the Vichy regime in France. Hitler believed that free trade would lead to global domination by the British Empire and the United States, which he believed were controlled by Jewish bankers. He hoped for a time that Britain could be swayed into an alliance with Germany on the basis of a shared economic rivalry with the U.S.
Hitler argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade. Some have described Nazi Germany as an example of corporatism, authoritarian capitalism, or totalitarian capitalism. In practice, the Nazis merely opposed one type of capitalism, namely 19th-century free-market capitalism. Within the Nazi Party, Ernst Röhm's paramilitary wing, the SA, was associated with anti-capitalist beliefs. The SA regarded Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 as a "first revolution" against the left.
Some voices within the ranks argued for a 'second revolution' against the right. Nazism as a totalitarian system promulgated "clear" solutions to the historical problems faced by Germany. It did not seek a return of Germany to the pre-Weimar monarchy, but instead looked further back to a mythic halcyon Germany. In this view Nazism is a mass movement of the middle class which was in opposition to workers in socialism. Nazism, like all fascist movements, aimed to create a new type of man from whom would spring a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order.
It was not a double-faced Janus whose aspects were equally attentive to the past and the future. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler decided that the way for the Nazi Party to achieve power was not through insurrection, but through legal and quasi-legal means. This did not sit well with the brown-shirted stormtroopers of the SA, especially those in Berlin, who chafed under their restrictions. After the Nazis' "Seizure of Power" in 1933, Röhm and the Brown Shirts pressed for a continuation of the "National Socialist revolution". Hitler, primarily for tactical reasons, was not willing to do this. He was instead focused on rebuilding the military and reorienting the economy.
After World War II, overt expressions of support for Nazi ideas were prohibited in Germany and other European countries. However, movements which self-identify as National Socialist continue on the fringes of politics in many western societies. Many deliberately adopt the symbols and symbols of Nazi Germany.