Adolf Hitler

**Adolf Hitler** (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was the Führer and Chancellor of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, succeeding Paul von Hindenburg/Kurt von Schleicher and preceding Karl Donitz. Hitler was a World War I veteran, born in Austria, whose ideas of anti-Semitism and nationalism allowed for his Nazi Party to democratically win elections in the Weimar Republic in 1933, and he served as the dictator of Nazi Germany for twelve years. Under his rule, Germany persecuted Jews, Slavs, gays, political dissidents, and other groups marked "undesirable" by the government and murdered 6,000,000 Jews and 5,000,000 others (mostly Poles and Russians) in the Holocaust from 1942 to 1945, and he also led Germany during World War II, during which he aggressively expanded his empire to include several countries from France and Norway to Estonia, central Russia, and the Ukraine. His alliance with dictators Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hideki Tojo of Japan, the Axis Powers, was unable to defeat the Allied Powers of the United Kingdom, United States, France, Soviet Union, and other countries, and he killed himself on 30 April 1945 during the Battle of Berlin as the Red Army surrounded him in Germany's capital.

## Biography

### Early life

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria-Hungary. When he was three, he moved with his family to Passau, German Empire, and Hitler served with a Bavarian infantry regiment during World War I, being wounded in the thigh by an enemy shell at the Battle of the Somme before being blinded by mustard gas. He was hailed for bravery by his superior officers, and Hitler was even awarded the Iron Cross, Germany's highest award for bravery. It came as a shock to Hitler that the German Empire had decided to surrender to the Allied Powers on 11 November 1918.

### Nazi leader

Hitler claimed that Jews, civilian leaders, and Marxists were responsible for Germany's surrender, and he joined Anton Drexler's German Workers' Party (DAP) and the Thule Society, being the 55th member of the DAP. He developed views of anti-Semitism and German nationalism, and his strong views and leadership allowed for him to become the leader of the German Workers' Party after Drexler was deposed due to his controversial decision to merge the DAP with the German Socialist Party. Hitler was a popular person who promised to make Germany great again, and despite his failure to launch a coup d'état in Bavaria in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler remained a strong leader. While in prison, he wrote *Mein Kampf*, an autobiography that was his most famous work. In 1925, the Nazi Party was legalized and Hitler was released from prison, and he threatened to win elections in 1933. Fearful of a Nazi takeover, President Paul von Hindenburg agreed to share power with Hitler. Hitler became the new Chancellor of Germany as well as its Führer, replacing the Weimar Republic with Nazi Germany, ruled by his Nazi Party. Hindenburg was the *de jure* head of state, and Hitler did everything he could to avoid angering him (lest he use the Reichswehr military to put down Hitler's Sturmabteilung supporters), but the Reichstag fire of 1933 led to Hindenburg giving Hitler and parliament complete control over politics in Germany.

### Rise of Germany

Hitler's government had a campaign of propaganda and political repression, promoting anti-Semitism and anti-communism. He blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in the First World War and accused them of being greedy cowards who were involved in a conspiracy to take over the world, bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union's idol Karl Marx was Jewish and a communist. Hitler imprisoned political rivals in concentration camps and purged his government of threats to his rule in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives", and he sought to exert Germany's strength by taking over German lands such as the German-inhabited Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and Austria before annexing all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. In addition, he sent the Condor Legion to help Nationalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Germany became a world power that was feared by the United Kingdom and the Allied Powers. Hitler allied with fascists like Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo and formed the Axis Powers, an alliance of like-minded dictatorships that included Italy, Japan, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Thailand.

### World War II

On 1 September 1939, Hitler changed history by ordering an invasion of Poland, an ally of the British Commonwealth and France. World War II broke out, and by 1940, all the Commonwealth nations were at war with Germany, which called in Italy to fight alongside it in June 1940. Hitler left command of his armies to Walther von Brauchitsch from 1939-1941 and allowed his great generals and well-equipped armies to conquer most of Europe, controlling France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, the Baltics, Poland, the Balkans, Ukraine, Belarus, and central Russia by the end of 1941. Hitler took personal command of his army after the failure of Operation Barbarossa to easily defeat the USSR, becoming the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. His lack of military experience led to Germany suffering reverses from the summer of 1942 onwards, and he focused mostly on political problems at the time, with his Field Marshals taking command of the armies. Hitler ordered the Holocaust in 1942, demanding the extermination of Jews, Slavs, gays, Romani, handicapped people, mentally-ill people, and political dissidents. 11,000,000 people were killed in the Holocaust, with many being sent to their deaths in extermination camps or concentration camps.

### Downfall

Hitler's poor leadership of Germany led to the German Resistance growing in numbers, and on 20 July 1944 Claus von Stauffenberg and a conspiracy of German officers attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb at his Rastenburg complex in East Prussia. Hitler was not killed, and the conspirators were rounded up and executed at Plotzensee prison. However, he was unable to control Germany as the war was being lost, with the Western Allies advancing through France into Germany while the Soviets liberated Poland and moved towards Berlin. Hitler was encircled at his bunker in Berlin with his mistress Eva Braun, whom he married after a 14-year relationship. On 30 April 1945, ten days after his 56th birthday, Hitler bit on a cyanide capsule and shot himself in the mouth; Braun also killed herself. He had left instructions to burn his body rather than let it be put on display by the Soviets, and his fellow Nazis doused his body in petrol and cremated Hitler and his new wife together, with the Nazi officials saluting their burning corpses before fleeing from artillery fire. Hitler's death was the final blow to Nazi Germany, which had been doomed since the encirclement of Berlin was completed, but his ideologies of anti-Semitism and Nazism survived well after his death as a part of the Neo-Nazi and alt-right movements.