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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was the charismatic,
forceful leader of Germany who led his
nation to bloody ruin. In a failed bid for
world conquest, his Third Reich overran
more land in Europe, Asia, and North
Africa than any European leader and led
to the deaths of 35 million people. For
many survivors of World War II, he
remains the personification of evil.
severe economic penalties as restitution.
These penalties occasioned much
hardship on the German people and
increased their resentment toward the
democratic German government for
signing such an agreement. Like many
disenchanted veterans, Hitler joined the
German Worker's Party, which he later
helped expand into the National Socialist
German Workers' Party, better known as
the Nazis. Hitler proved himself a master
of oratory and political intrigue and
became intent upon seizing the national
political agenda. However, when his
attempted coup against the Bavarian
government (later known as the beer hall
putsch) was crushed by police and
military units on November 8-9, 1923,
Hitler was sentenced to five years in
Landsberg Prison. He only served nine
months before a general amnesty was
proclaimed, and he used the interval to
outline his political philosophy in the
book Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In it,
he openly flaunted his anti-Semitism, as
well as Germany's dire necessity for
territorial expansion in the east.
However, the book was never taken
seriously by critics, and its warning
signs went unheeded.
Hitler was born at Brannau, Austria on
April 20, 1889, the son of a German
customs clerk and an Austrian peasant
woman. An indifferent, sullen student,
he dropped out of high school to work as
an aspiring artist but failed to gain
entrance into the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts. The onset of World War I
finally gave him an outlet to vent his
anger, and he left Austria to enlist in the
16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment. For
four years, Hitler functioned in the
dangerous role as a messenger, and he
received four decorations for bravery,
including the prestigious Iron Cross,
First Class. At one point, he sustained
serious injuries in a gas attack and spent
several months recuperating. Hitler
finally mustered out of the German
Army in 1919 with a rank of corporal.
The experience of imprisonment
garnered Hitler political respectability,
and he resolved to overthrow the
established Weimar Republic by
working within the system. His great
eloquence and nationalist fervor, as well
as the country's general economic unrest,
led to increasing Nazi representation at
all levels of government through
elections held during the 1920s. Hitler's
goals received a tremendous boost
during the global depression of 1929 as
more and more Germans turned to him
The German surrender that ended World
War I in November 1918 led to the 1919
Treaty of Versailles, which imposed
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for leadership in this national economic
crisis. By 1932, the Nazis had achieved
political control of the government when
they became the majority party. Hitler's
promises of jobs, security, and a
resurrected Germany continued to
resonate with the electorate, and in 1933,
he came to power by being appointed
chancellor by President Paul von
Hindenburg. When Hindenburg died the
following year, Hitler combined the
offices of chancellor and president to
become the "uncontested leader" (Der
Fuhrer) of the German nation.
allow him to annex the Sudetenland (an
area of western Czechoslovakia
containing mostly ethnic Germans).
Hitler, however, decided after the
conference to annex all of
Czechoslovakia, embarrassing Britain
and France and making all of Europe
increasingly wary of his expansionist
ambitions. He then stunned the world by
signing a nonaggression pact with Soviet
Union leader Joseph Stalin, which
ensured the stability of Germany's
vulnerable eastern border. The lack of
decisive leadership and resistance to his
plans evidenced by the Western
democracies did little to discourage
Hitler, who by the end of the 1930s was
finally ready to gain new territories by
force.
Once in power, Hitler ruthlessly
suppressed civil rights, murdered his
political opponents within the Nazi Party
during the infamous Night of the Long
Knives on June 30, 1934, and began to
reinvigorate the emaciated German
economy. He accomplished an economic
revival for the country by expanding the
military industrial sector in clear
violation of the Versailles Treaty. As a
military leader, Hitler was well versed in
military tactics and had a working grasp
of military technology. He took a special
interest in developing fast tanks and
airplanes that would eventually form the
basis for the extremely mobile
"blitzkrieg" warfare of World War II.
In September 1939, German forces
attacked Poland. That act that
precipitated World War II, as Britain and
France quickly declared war on
Germany in defense of their Polish ally.
The newly-developed blitzkrieg tactics
worked brilliantly, and Poland was
crushed in a matter of weeks. Despite the
declaration of war, however, France and
England took no offensive action on
their own. Hitler used the impasse to
shift his forces westward, and by June
1940, France had been conquered, and
English troops chased off the continent
from their beachhead landing at
Dunkirk, in northern France. Owing to
the ineptitude of Luftwaffe commander
Hermann Goering, however, Germany
lost the Battle of Britain (the German
Air Force's attack to weaken Britain
before a land invasion by the German
Army), and an invasion of England had
to be postponed.
As Germany grew stronger militarily,
Hitler grew bolder on the international
stage. He also routinely disregarded
sound military advice from his senior
generals, whose perceived timidity he
regarded with open contempt. In 1936,
he marched troops into the Rhineland,
restoring it to Germany, and also formed
an alliance with Benito Mussolini's
fascist Italy. Two years later, Hitler
annexed Austria to Germany. At the
Munich Conference of September 1938,
Hitler convinced Britain and France to
Hitler turned his attention to other parts
of Europe. Greece and Yugoslavia were
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subdued, along with most of North
Africa, before Hitler committed his
single biggest mistake of the war. In
June 1941, German forces launched an
all-out offensive against the Soviet
Union, in open disregard of the
nonaggression pact. Initial Russian
casualties were colossal, and the Soviet
Army was driven back deep into
Russia's interior. When Hitler refused to
allow his men to retreat from Russia for
the winter, the Soviets counter-attacked
at Moscow, inflicting the first real
German defeat on land.
million Jews and 4 million others who
Hitler considered undesirable for one
reason or another) perished in Hitler's
"final solution," also known as the
Holocaust. This deed is generally
acknowledged as one of the blackest
moments in human history.
By 1944, several attempts had been
made on Hitler's life, including one by
Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who
exploded a bomb Hitler's East Prussian
headquarters. The German Third Reich's
days were clearly numbered, but Hitler
embarked on several desperate gambits
to stave off defeat. He directed
construction of numerous "super
weapons," including jet fighters,
pilotless bombs, and guided missiles, in
a spectacular but futile attempt to turn
the tide of the war back to Germany's
favor. After surviving a July 1944
assassination attempt, he squandered
Germany's final military reserves in the
ill-fated Battle of the Bulge in December
of that year but failed to defeat the
western Allies. By April 1945, the
vengeful Soviet Army had all but
surrounded Berlin, and Hitler was a
virtual captive in his command bunker.
He had always declared that Germany
would fight "until five past midnight,"
but on April 30, 1945, Hitler and his
longtime mistress, Eva Braun,
committed suicide rather than face
capture. Thus the vaunted Third Reich,
which the Nazis boasted would last
1,000 years, collapsed in utter ruin after
only 12 years.
Hitler was so enraged that he sacked
most of his leading generals, remained
contemptuous of the rest, and appointed
himself as commander in chief of the
armed forces. For the next four years,
Germany waged a losing war in the east
against superior numbers of Russian
forces, and in late 1941, Hitler
compounded his mistakes by declaring
war on the United States after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941. As a sign of his
growing degeneration, he began relying
more on astrology than the opinions of
his senior military leadership generals
when making major decisions.
In addition to waging a war of
aggression, Hitler embarked on one of
the greatest crimes against humanity
ever committed. Having espoused the
notion of a racially pure (or Aryan)
nation, he turned his hatred of Jews into
a national policy of mass extermination
through creation of numerous death
camps. Jews, Gypsies, and dissenting
Christians were deported from occupied
countries, used as forced laborers, and
then dispatched by gas chambers or
cremetoria when unable to work further.
Thus an estimated 10 million people (6
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