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Adolf Hitler
April 20, 1889 – April 30, 1945
Nazi dictator of Germany who dismantled its democracy, started World War II, and bears central responsibility for the Holocaust.
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Adolf Hitler was one of the most destructive figures in human history, the dictator whose Nazi regime started World War II and carried out the Holocaust. He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, in Austria. As a young man he dreamed of becoming an artist, but he was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and spent years in poverty, at times living in homeless shelters. In Vienna he absorbed the bitter antisemitism and extreme nationalism that were common there, ideas that would later become the poison at the heart of his politics. When World War I broke out he served in the German army, and he was still recovering from a gas attack when Germany surrendered in 1918. He never accepted the defeat, and he embraced the false and dangerous 'stab-in-the-back' myth, which blamed Germany's loss on Jews and other supposed traitors at home.
After the war Hitler joined a tiny fringe group that soon became the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party. He proved to be a gifted and ruthless public speaker, and he used propaganda and the promise of national revival to build a following. In 1923 he tried to seize power by force in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich and was sent to prison, where he wrote 'Mein Kampf,' a book setting out his hateful vision of a racially 'pure' Germany that would conquer new land in the east. Released after less than a year, he decided to pursue power through elections instead of another coup.
How Hitler came to power is one of the most important warnings in modern history, because Germany was a democracy, and he destroyed it from within. Through the 1920s the Nazis stayed a small party. But when the Great Depression threw millions of Germans out of work, desperate voters turned to extreme parties, and the Nazis surged. Crucially, Hitler did not seize power in a violent takeover: on January 30, 1933, he was legally appointed chancellor by Germany's aging president, backed by conservative politicians who wrongly believed they could control him. Within weeks he used a fire in the parliament building as an excuse to suspend civil liberties, and in March 1933 the Enabling Act let his government make laws without parliament. He banned all other parties, crushed his opponents, and after the president died in 1934 he made himself absolute dictator, taking the title Führer.
Hitler's Germany became a brutal police state, run through the secret police and the SS and saturated with propaganda. From the start his regime persecuted Jews, and the persecution grew steadily worse: the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938 destroyed synagogues and homes, and during the war the regime turned to outright extermination. The Nazis also targeted other groups they branded as enemies or 'unworthy,' including Roma people, people with disabilities (murdered in a secret 'euthanasia' program), political opponents, and gay men.
Hitler was determined to expand Germany by force. He remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and seized parts of Czechoslovakia while Britain and France tried to keep the peace through 'appeasement.' Then, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II in Europe. His armies overran much of the continent, and in 1941 he launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union. But the war turned against him: the Soviets pushed his forces back from the east, and the Western Allies landed in France on D-Day in 1944 and drove toward Germany from the west.
Hitler bears central responsibility for the Holocaust, the deliberate, state-organized murder of six million Jews. The killing was coordinated across the whole German government, as at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, and carried out in mass shootings and in death camps built for murder on an industrial scale. Alongside the Jewish victims, millions of others were killed, including Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, and political prisoners. The scale of the suffering is almost impossible to grasp, and it is why Hitler's name is remembered as a byword for evil.
As Allied armies closed in on Berlin in the spring of 1945, Hitler hid in an underground bunker beneath the city. On April 30, 1945, with Soviet troops only blocks away, he died by suicide rather than face capture. Germany surrendered days later, ending the war in Europe. The empire he had promised would last a thousand years had lasted just twelve, and left much of Europe in ruins.
We study Hitler's life not to honor him, but as a warning. His rise shows how fragile a democracy can be, and how economic despair, propaganda, scapegoating, and unchecked power can let a hateful movement take over even a modern, educated nation. Remembering this history, and the millions of victims of his regime, is one of the ways societies try to make sure that nothing like it ever happens again. You can learn about the people who suffered and resisted, like Anne Frank, in the Holocaust journey.