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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 1 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 2 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 3