Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 until his death in 1945. [1] His regime dismantled German democracy, persecuted and murdered political opponents and minorities, and launched the invasion of Poland in 1939 that began the Second World War in Europe. [2] Under his direction the German state carried out the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six million Jews, alongside the killing of millions of other civilians; the war he started caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. [3]
Early life
Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 at Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary, the son of a customs official. He left school without qualifications and moved to Vienna, where he twice failed to enter the Academy of Fine Arts, lived in poverty, and absorbed the antisemitic and ethnic-nationalist politics circulating there. [1]
He moved to Munich in 1913 and served in the Bavarian army on the Western Front from 1914, where he was wounded and received the Iron Cross. He took Germany's defeat in 1918 as a betrayal central to his later politics. [2]
Rise of the Nazi Party
After the war Hitler joined the German Workers' Party in Munich, renamed the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party, becoming its leader by 1921 and building a following through oratory and paramilitary organisation. His attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 failed and he was convicted of treason; in prison he dictated Mein Kampf, setting out an ideology of racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and territorial expansion. [1]
The party grew rapidly in the economic collapse after 1929 to become the largest in the Reichstag. Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg in a conservative coalition intended to contain him. Within months the Reichstag fire decree and the Enabling Act suspended civil liberties and removed parliamentary constraints; opposition parties and trade unions were banned, and on Hindenburg's death in 1934 he combined the offices of chancellor and head of state. [2]
Dictatorship and persecution
The Nazi state was a one-party dictatorship enforced by the SS, the Gestapo, and a network of concentration camps. Antisemitic legislation, beginning with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripped German Jews of citizenship and civil rights, and the pogrom of November 1938, Kristallnacht, marked an escalation into open state violence. Disabled people, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political dissidents were also persecuted, and a programme of so-called euthanasia murdered tens of thousands of disabled patients. [3]
The Second World War and the Holocaust
Hitler rearmed Germany in breach of the Treaty of Versailles, remilitarised the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and dismembered Czechoslovakia; the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 brought British and French declarations of war. German forces occupied much of Europe by 1941, when Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, a campaign conceived as a war of annihilation and accompanied by mass shootings of Jews and Soviet civilians. [2]
From 1941 the regime moved to the industrialised murder of European Jewry in extermination camps in occupied Poland. Approximately six million Jews were killed, along with millions of Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Roma, and others. [3]
Defeat and aftermath
Soviet victories from 1943 and the Allied landings of 1944 steadily reduced German-held territory. Hitler rejected surrender and directed the war from a bunker beneath Berlin as Soviet forces entered the city. He killed himself on 30 April 1945; Germany surrendered unconditionally within days. [1]
Surviving leaders were tried at Nuremberg, in proceedings that established precedents for prosecuting crimes against humanity. Commemoration of the regime's crimes remains central to German public life. [4]
