Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was the founder and leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. An Austrian-born failed art student and World War I corporal, he discovered a talent for mass oratory in Munich's post-war political underworld and built the Nazi movement on a synthesis of virulent antisemitism, pan-German nationalism, anti-Marxism, and the promise to reverse the 'shame of Versailles.' After the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he rebuilt the party legally, exploiting the Depression to gain 37% of the vote in 1932 and leveraging conservative miscalculation into the chancellorship in January 1933. Within months he had destroyed the Weimar Republic and established a personal dictatorship. His regime systematically stripped Jews of rights (Nuremberg Laws, 1935), reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. The Holocaust — the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others — was the direct expression of the racial ideology articulated in Mein Kampf. He committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 as Soviet troops closed in.
- Lived: 1889 CE – 1945 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: dictator, head of state, commander-in-chief
