Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by legal means in January 1933 and had destroyed the republic within six months. Born in 1889 in Austria to a customs official and his much younger third wife, he failed to get into the Vienna academy of fine arts twice, lived in men's hostels selling painted postcards, and absorbed the antisemitic politics of the city. He volunteered for a Bavarian regiment in 1914, served four years as a runner, won the Iron Cross First Class on a Jewish officer's recommendation, and was gassed in October 1918. Defeat and the revolution supplied the whole of his politics: the stab in the back, the November criminals, and a conspiracy theory in which Jews were responsible for capitalism and communism simultaneously. He was sent by the army to observe a small nationalist party in Munich in 1919 and took it over. The putsch of November 1923 failed, and the trial and the nine months in Landsberg gave him a national platform and Mein Kampf. The party had 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928 and 37 per cent in July 1932, which is a fact about the Depression as much as about him. He was made chancellor by conservatives who believed he could be controlled, and used the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act to end the constitution. The war he began in 1939 killed some sixty million people, and the state he built murdered six million Jews. He shot himself in a bunker on 30 April 1945.

• Lived: 1889 CE – 1945 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: dictator, head_of_state, commander_in_chief

Related

• Beer Hall Putsch
• Hitler Appointed Chancellor
• Enabling Act — Legal Seizure of Power
• Nuremberg Laws
• German Invasion of Poland — War Begins
• Operation Barbarossa — Invasion of the USSR
• Fall of Berlin