How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. He called himself Führer (Leader). Hitler believed that Germans were born to rule over the other people. This led to World War II. He also believed that there was no place in society for Jewish people. This idea led to the Holocaust, when millions of Jews were killed.
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn on the Austrian-German border. His father was a customs official. Hitler found school easy and got good grades with little effort. He also discovered he had considerable talent for drawing, especially sketching buildings. He had the ability to look at a building, memorize the architectural details, and accurately reproduce it on paper, entirely from memory.
Some researchers believe that Hitler’s violent urges from his childhood trauma. His mother had married a man 23 years her elder whom she called “uncle Alois”, her three small children died in the course of a few years surrounding Adolf’s birth, leading to extreme pampering of Adolf by his mother. He was regularly beaten and ridiculed by his father. Once when Adolf tried to escape from home he was almost beaten to death. Adolf hated his father throughout his life and there are reports of him having nightmares about his father in late life. When Nazi Germany had occupied Austria, Hitler had the village where his father grew up destroyed.
Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler
The area of Austria where Hitler grew up is close to the German border. Many Austrians along the border considered themselves to be German-Austrians. Although they were subjects of the Austrian Hapsburg Monarchy, they expressed loyalty to the German Imperial House and its Kaiser. In defiance of the Austrian Monarchy, Adolf Hitler and his young friends liked to use the German greeting, “Heil,” and sing the German anthem “Deutschland Über Alles,” instead of the Austrian Imperial anthem.
Hitler left school at 16 with no qualifications and struggled to make a living as a painter in Vienna. This was where many of his extreme political and racial ideas originated. When World War 1 began in 1914, he joined the Bavarian army. In battle, he proved to be a brave soldier and he was promoted to the rank of corporal and awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for his efforts. In 1918, just before the war ended, he was caught in a cloud of gas released by English soldiers and was overcome. He survived, but was unable to see for several months until his eyes recovered.
After the end of World War 1 Hitler moved to Munich, Germany. While there, he joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1919 and worked full time in their political operations. His hard work paid off when he was elected as the party chairman in 1921. Hitler proved to be a natural speaker and his obsession with the nationalist movement allowed him to convince many German citizens to support the party’s platform. His name became well known throughout Munich and his speeches were attended by many. As time progressed, he began injecting his opinions on the insuperiority of other races into his speeches and blaming these people for Germany’s lack of power.
Hitler in Paris
In November of 1923, he attempted to remove his opponents from the power. However, he was arrested by the police and sentenced to five years for state treason in the Landsberg prison. With all of the free time in prison, Hitler decided to write a novel on his political beliefs and life, naming it “Mein Kampf”.
When a political amnesty was declared by the government, he was released after only nine months in prison and he rejoined his friends in what was now known as the Nazi party. By 1930, the party had 107 seats in the German parliament and Hitler had an immense amount of influence over the people of Germany. His party placed increasing pressure on the leader of Germany, President Hindenberg, and Hitler was eventually named chancellor of Germany in January of 1933.
Hitler's Bunker
Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 began World War II. After military successes in Denmark, Norway and Western Europe, but after failing to subdue Britain in 1941, Hitler made a serious error of judgement when he decided to invade the Soviet Union. On July 20, 1944, group German officers led by colonel Graf von Stauffenberg conspired to assassinate Hitler with a bomb, but failed.
Things were looking bad for Hitler in 1945. Germany was fighting on two fronts against Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and its forces were quickly being destroyed.
The war on the eastern front drained Germany’s resources and in June 1944, the British and Americans landed in France. With Soviet troops poised to take the German capital, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945. He was aged 56.
