Born: 20 April 1889
Birthplace: Braunau am Inn, Austria
Died: 30 April 1945 (suicide)
Best Known As: The leader of Nazi Germany during World War II
Adolf Hitler's dictatorial rule of Germany, which led to the deaths of millions in World War II, has placed him among history's most hated villains. A decorated veteran of World War I, Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers' Party in 1919, later renaming it the National Socialist German Workers Party (which was shortened to the Nazi Party). By 1921 he was the leader of the group, and in 1923 led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the ruling German Weimar Republic. Sentenced to prison for his role, Hitler wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf, and emerged less than a year later as a populist spokesman for economically depressed and nationalistic Germans. Made chancellor in 1933, he suspended the constitution, forcibly suppressed all political opposition and brought the Nazis to power. He enforced policies with a brutal secret police (the Gestapo) and formed concentration camps for the organized murder of Jews, Gypsies and political opponents. Hitler's aggressive foreign policy precipitated World War II in 1939. Although he had remarkable early success in the war, by 1942 the tide had turned. Hitler apparently committed suicide in an air-raid shelter in Berlin in 1945, after the Allied forces had invaded Germany.
Hitler survived a 1944 assassination attempt led by Claus von Stauffenberg... One of Hitler's concentration camp victims was Anne Frank... Other WWII leaders include: Britain's Winston Churchill, America's Franklin Roosevelt, Italy's Benito Mussolini, the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, Japan's Hideki Tojo and France's Charles de Gaulle... One day before his death, Hitler finally married his longtime girlfriend Eva Braun; she committed suicide with him by swallowing cyanide on 30 April 1945. Hitler apparently swallowed cyanide and then shot himself.
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Home > Library > People > Political Biographies Adolf Hitler
(b. Braunau, Austria, 20 Apr. 1889; d. Berlin, 30 Apr. 1945) German; Chancellor of Germany 1933 – 45, leader of the German People 1934 – 45 World history might have been different had the selectors at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts admitted Adolf Hitler. The son of an over-strict provincial customs official, Hitler left grammar school aged 16 without graduating. After years as an aimless maverick, he tried his hand at painting. His failure to gain admission to the Academy further alienated him from those with formal qualifications. His rejection for compulsory military service in Austria added to his sense of failure and his contempt for the Austrian system. He volunteered for war service in 1914 and joined a Bavarian regiment.
Twice wounded, Hitler resented Germany's defeat, and explained it by reference to treachery. The traitors were the men of the left and the democrats who accepted the Versailles Treaty, forced on Germany by the Allies. In the chaos of post-war Munich he joined the German Workers' Party, a small right-wing group, as an army spy. It was not difficult for him to become its leader, changing its name to the German National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party.
In 1923 Hitler staged a putsch in Munich, influenced by Mussolini's March on Rome of 1922. The coup was crushed by armed police and Hitler spent nine months in Landsberg jail for his part in it. He was released as part of a general amnesty. In prison he wrote his political testament, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). Crudely written, the book was an exposition of Hitler's German nationalism based on blood, imperialism, hatred of Jews, Marxists, and pacifists, and belief in the need for a totalitarian state. It also contained a jumble of "socialist" proposals.
Hitler's activities gained him support in reactionary circles which helped him in 1926 to smash the left in the Nazi Party led by Gregor Strasser. Despite his efforts the NSDAP gained only 2.6 per cent in the Reichstag election of 1928. In 1930 Germany, in spite of Nazi, nationalist, and Communist opposition, agreed under the Young Plan to pay war reparations until 1988. This campaign brought the Nazis into touch with a much wider nationalist audience than before and the outbreak of the world slump in 1929 also helped. Unemployment soared, small investors lost their savings, the propertied classes feared revolution. In the 1930 election the Communist vote increased to 13.1 per cent, but the Nazi to 18.3 per cent. In the end, however, the Nazis gained power not by the ballot box but by the help they received from Von Papen and the reactionary circles close to President von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933. In the previous election (November 1932) the Nazis had attracted only 33.1 per cent. The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 was the signal for Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties, and thousands were placed in the newly established concentration camps. The election of 5 March gave the Nazis 44 per cent and with their nationalist allies they held an absolute majority of 52 per cent. A mixture of threats and persuasion saw parliament (except for the Social Democrats and the banned Communists) grant Hitler's government emergency powers for four years. The persecution of the Jews began. After the death of Hindenburg in 1934 Hitler took over as head of state whilst remaining head of government. On 30 June 1934 he wiped out potential opponents in his own party, including stormtroop leader Ernst Röhm.
Hitler is widely credited with having created full employment and prosperity in Germany in the 1930s. But many of the measures he used had been started by previous administrations, and world trade was recovering from the slump, although the rearmament programme certainly helped. In foreign policy at first Hitler preached peace. A concordat was signed with the Vatican in 1933 and a friendship treaty with Poland in the same year. In 1935 he signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement but also reintroduced conscription. In 1936 he reoccupied the Rhineland in breach of the Versailles Treaty and supported the rebellion of Franco in Spain. In 1938 he took over Austria by threat of force and gained the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia by promising peace to Britain, France, and Italy. After he broke his promises by seizing the rest of Czechoslovakia in February 1939, Britain guaranteed Poland. Hitler's invasion of that country on 1 September 1939, his rear secured by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, led to Britain and France declaring war.
The defeat of Poland was followed by "lightning war" against Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, and France with Hitler virtually controlling Western Europe by June 1940. After failing to get Britain to negotiate peace, or to defeat it in the Battle of Britain, he turned his armies against the USSR in June 1941. This was a great mistake. His declaration of war on the USA in December 1941 was another. After gaining massive victories, the German armies were stopped outside Moscow in December 1941 and decisively defeated at Stalingrad in January 1943. The Africa Corps were forced to surrender in May 1943 due to Hitler's indifference to their fate. In Italy Hitler's ally Mussolini fell from power and in June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy. Meanwhile Germany's population centres were being devastated by Anglo-American air raids.
Hoping for a compromise peace a group of military plotters attempted to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. They had been appalled by German suffering at home and Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe. Hitler's mass extermination of the Jews and the Gypsies, and the death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, were just the two most extreme atrocities. These crimes made no economic, military, or political sense. After show trials Hitler ordered the slow strangulation of those plotters who fell into Gestapo hands.
On 19 March 1945 Hitler gave Albert Speer, his Armaments Minister, the order to destroy everything of value in Germany, even gas, water, and electric supplies. He believed the best Germans had died in the war and those who remained did not deserve to survive. Speer did not carry out the order. As Soviet troops had captured most of Berlin, and realizing the end was near, Hitler took his own life on 30 April 1945. His Third Reich surrendered a week later.
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Home > Library > Military > Military History Companion Chancellor Adolf Hitler
Hitler, Chancellor Adolf (1889-1945). Although Stalin and Mao-Tse-tung each killed more people, Hitler is in undisputed possession of the title of the most reviled man in a 20th century with more than its share of genocidal monsters. What heightens the appalled fascination is that he was in essence such an insignificant little man, driven by a need to compensate for his inadequacies. When the Soviets finally released the results of the autopsy performed on his half-incinerated corpse, it was revealed that the ribald words of the march ‘Colonel Bogey’ had been correct: he was monorchid. Additionally he had odd sexual quirks, had Oedipal feelings for his mother, and only felt comfortable showing love to animals and small children. His speech and writings are full of references to hygiene and cleansing with reference to the physical elimination (sic) of Jews and other ‘subhumans’.
He was an outsider in every possible way. Not a German but an Austrian, he was born in Braunau, the son of a minor customs official with a much younger wife. A failure at school, his artistic aspirations were punctured when he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. There he imbibed the social Darwinism of the likes of Houston Stuart Chamberlain and the anti-Semitism of Karl Lürger, the dynamic mayor of the city. An aimless and friendless young man, embittered with his lot, a photograph exists of him amidst a joyful crowd in Munich welcoming the outbreak of war in 1914. He immediately volunteered, served as a battalion runner, was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross, for bravery (which he wore on his political uniforms throughout the rest of his life), and was gassed in 1918.
Not only did his service at the front mark him, but it often gave him an edge over general staff officers that he was never shy of exploiting. Significantly, it was in a Bavarian infantry unit of his beloved, adopted German army that he served, rather than in the Austro-Hungarian military. Perhaps the war gave him a sense of identity; it certainly provided him with a family and a hierarchy, which he admired until the end. Never promoted beyond corporal, he had no training for leadership or high command, but nevertheless, arguably, spent the rest of his days reliving the period of his life he found most fulfilling: making war.
Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), a rambling outline of his inchoate political views, was written in gaol after his failed coup of 1923 and makes it clear that his war was a lifelong one, directed not just at external nations, but against the ‘doubters’ and ‘outcasts’ within Germany. The harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles provided a general background of self-pitying resentment which he was able to exploit, and the feeling that Germany must somehow regain its lost pre-eminence was widespread. This partly accounts for his rise to power and the tacit support the Reichswehr gave him. But he also, and this is very hard to explain but impossible to deny, had immense personal magnetism, which worked as effectively on individuals as it did on the large crowds he manipulated with carefully rehearsed gestures and choreographed responses from his strategically placed hard-core followers.
The Reichswehr still cultivated the attitudes of the old Prussian military, in which the importance of the oath of loyalty cannot be underestimated. Hitler knew this and used it, but even before he could do so, he bought the generals off with the prospects of rearmament and a chance to reverse the outcome of 1914-18. He also cold-bloodedly threw them the sop of the brown-shirted paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) that had won the streets from the communists and opened his way to power. In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (30 June 1934) he decapitated the SA using a new corps of bodyguards organized by the even more dysfunctional Heinrich Himmler, the black-clad SS. On 2 August, following the death of Hindenburg, the newly renamed Wehrmacht swore an oath of loyalty, not to the state but to Hitler personally. Thereafter, in the perception of many including such stars as Guderian, they were duty-bound to obey him.
The successful reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936), the Anschluss with Austria, and the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland (both 1938) were bluffs that could have been stopped by a moderate show of resolve by those affected. Much has been made of Chamberlain and Daladier selling out the Czechs at Munich, but the Czechs bore the main responsibility themselves. When Hitler visited the abandoned defences of the Sudetenland, his generals were appalled at their strength and told him they could not have taken them. ‘It's not the guns but the men behind them’, he replied, and this was the essence of his military leadership, very well expressed in the blitzkrieg, which depended on sowing panic for success. It worked again against Poland in September 1939. For the campaign resulting in the fall of France, Hitler took a more central role, backing a daring plan by Manstein, in preference to more orthodox general staff proposals. The Wehrmacht's rapid and conclusive victory over the French convinced Hitler and not a few of his generals that he was a military genius. What he saw as the inevitable showdown between the Slav-Communists and the Aryan-Nazis was best not postponed. Stalin had disembowelled his officer corps and projections for Soviet rearmament showed a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity. He knew it to be a gamble, and it is significant that the ‘final Solution’, the systematic extermination of the Untermenschen (subhumans), was not implemented until he had made this highest-of-stakes throw of the dice. The opening weeks of BARBAROSSA, perhaps fatally delayed by a sideshow in the Balkans, seemed to confirm the utter correctness of his instinct over the sober counsels of those few brave enough to urge caution upon him. Although it was the not-so-secret conceit of the German generals after WW II that left to their own devices they could have won the war, there were numerous occasions when Hitler's unschooled instinct was proved right and their less intuitive approach wrong. One such was the winter battle outside Moscow in 1941 and Kursk, spectacularly, another. Nor was his faith in fanaticism entirely misplaced: the Waffen SS slowly grew to become a parallel army and often performed better than the Wehrmacht, especially in backs-to-the-wall situations like the second battle of Kharkov.
In the absence of a quick victory, the latent power of the enemies he had challenged inexorably made itself felt and no amount of motivation or tactical brilliance could overcome the overwhelming Materialschlacht (battle of equipment) that crushed his armies on two fronts in 1944-5. Through it all and to the bitter end he continued to exert a strange fascination over his generals, as he did over the whole German people. It was not all mesmerism; his working methods were chaotic, keeping the officers of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) at his beck and call at all hours, and he frequently used his mastery of detail to make them feel uneasy about points which he had memorized but they had not. The failed attempt on his life by disaffected army officers on 20 July 1944 seems to have snapped whatever remaining links he had with reality and whatever restraints he still exercised over the sadism that drove him. Even if no other conflict in history deserves the title, the destruction of Hitler and his creed was surely a just war.
Bibliography
Rosenbaum, Ron, Explaining Hitler (London, 1999).
Stone, Norman, Hitler (London, 1991).
Weinberg, Gerhard L. Germany, Hitler and World War Two (Cambridge, 1996).
Welch, David, Hitler (London, 1998).
Zietelman, Rainer, Hitler: The Policies of Seduction, trans. Helmut Boger (London 1999)
— Hugh Bicheno
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Home > Library > Military > US Military History Companion Adolf Hitler
(1889–1945), German leader, Führer (leader) of the Nazi empire
Born in Austria, Hitler fought in the German Army as a corporal in World War I. Self‐styled Führer (leader) of the Nazi Party (NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers' Party) after 1921, he was briefly imprisoned by the Weimar Republic following a failed coup d’état in Munich in 1923, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1924). The book sketched out Hitler's belief that the noble “Aryan” or Germanic race was engaged in a life‐and‐death battle with other inferior races, of which the Jews were the most insidious and dangerous. It called for the creation of a racially pure Reich (empire), ruled by a dictatorship, which would impose the German “master race” over the rest of “subhumanity.” In the wake of the Great Depression, the NSDAP became the largest party in Germany in 1932. Appointed Reich chancellor in 1933, Hitler soon assumed dictatorial powers, dismantled all other political parties, introduced conscription, and promulgated the racial “Nuremberg Laws” of 1935. Meeting little international or domestic opposition, Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland, annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland, purged the leadership of the German Army, and set loose a widespread anti‐Jewish pogrom in 1938.
Having signed a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, conquered Western Europe in spring 1940, occupied southeastern Europe, and attacked Russia in the summer of 1941. The fighting was accompanied by untold atrocities against enemy soldiers and civilians, and the Nazi regime simultaneously implemented the “Final Solution,” the genocide of European Jewry. Yet the reverses of the so‐called Third Reich multiplied with the Soviet counteroffensive and the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941, the German debacles at Stalingrad and El Alamein the following winter, the Allied invasion of Italy in summer 1943, and the invasion of Normandy, France, in June 1944. A failed assassination attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944 led to a widespread purge of the plotters; but as American and Soviet troops met on the Elbe River on 25 April 1945 and the Red Army entered Berlin, he committed suicide on 30 April, only days before Germany capitulated on 7–9 May 1945.
Historians debate the extent to which Hitler forged Germany's fate during his twelve‐year dictatorship. Some, like Eberhard Jäckel, argue that his totalitarian regime held Germany under complete control, and that Hitler personally had set his goals and decided as early as the 1920s on the means to achieve those goals. Others, such as Martin Broszat, assert that Hitler had far less control over events, that his regime was based on a chaotic struggle of power between competing agencies, and that his policies were largely the function of circumstances rather than careful, farsighted planning. Nevertheless, most historians agree that Hitler strove to achieve two major goals: the winning of additional “living space” for the German people, mainly in the East; and the destruction of the Jews. There is little doubt that he was obsessed with questions of race and social Darwinian “struggle for existence.” What is still unclear is how much of the population shared his ideas, and whether the main engine for the implementation of the war of expansion and extermination that Germany unleashed in 1939 was only his personal obsession or the outcome of much more widespread prejudices, phobias, and aspirations at least among the German political, economic, and military elites.
There is also some debate on Hitler's role in the conduct of military operations. Though German generals subsequently claimed they were only following Hitler's orders and that he had a detrimental effect on operations, evidence shows that they shared his urge for conquest and subjugation, and utilized his popularity among the soldiers to boost the troops' morale and motivate them in fighting. This applies also to the popular view that Hitler was a raving madman who somehow seized control of a civilized nation that could liberate itself from his hold only with the assistance of others. As historians such as Ian Kershaw have shown, the “Hitler myth” was a potent political force during much of the regime. Whether or not Hitler was insane, for a long time he seems to have been supported by much of the population of Germany.
[See also Holocaust, U.S. War Effort and the; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]
Bibliography
Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, 1974.
Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, trans. John W. Hiden, 1981.
Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold, 1981.
Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, 1987.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris, 1999
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Home > Library > Military > US Military Dictionary Adolf Hitler
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945) leader (der Führer) of the Nazi party (from 1921) and dictator of Germany (1933-45) whose expansionist policies and racist views led to World War II. His early Mein Kampf (1924) outlined his vision of a racially pure Reich whose master Aryan, or Germanic, race would rule inferior races, of which the Jews were the most insidious—extermination was to be the “ final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Early victories over Poland (1939) and Western Europe (1940) were soon followed by reversals (Stalingrad, 1942; the invasions of Italy, 1943, and Normandy, 1944), but Hitler and his generals persisted. Hitler isolated himself from the realities and preserved a fantasy world of eventual victory, refusing to allow his armies to surrender. He survived an assassination attempt in 1944 but committed suicide in Berlin a few days before Germany surrendered.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
Biography
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Home > Library > People > Biographies Adolf Hitler
The German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) led the extreme nationalist and racist Nazi party and served as chancellor-president of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Probably the most effective and powerful demagogue of the 20th century, his leadership led to the extermination of approximately 6 million Jews.
Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement belong among the many irrationally nationalistic, racist, and fundamentally nihilist political mass movements that sprang from the ground of political, economic, and social desperation following World War I and the deeply upsetting economic dislocations of the interwar period. Taking their name from the first such movement to gain power - Mussolini's fascism in Italy (1922) - fascist-type movements reached the peak of their popular appeal and political power in the widespread panic and mass psychosis that spread to all levels of the traditional industrial and semi-industrial societies of Europe with the world depression of the 1930s. Always deeply chauvinistic, antiliberal and antirational, and violently anti-Semitic, these movements varied in form from the outright atheistic and industrialist German national socialism to the lesser-known mystical-religious and peasant-oriented movements of eastern Europe.
Early Life
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in the small Austrian town of Braunau on the Inn River along the Bavarian-German border, son of an Austrian customs official of moderate means. His early youth in Linz on the Danube seems to have been under the repressive influence of an authoritarian and, after retirement in 1895, increasingly short-tempered and domineering father until the latter's death in 1903. After an initially fine performance in elementary school, Adolf soon became rebellious and began failing in the Realschule (college preparatory school). Following transfer to another school, he finally left formal education altogether in 1905 and, refusing to bow to the discipline of a regular job, began his long years of dilettante, aimless existence, reading, painting, wandering in the woods, and dreaming of becoming a famous artist. In 1907, when his mother died, he moved to Vienna in an attempt to enroll in the famed Academy of Fine Arts. His failure to gain admission that year and the next led him into a period of deep depression and seclusion from his friends. Wandering through the streets of Vienna, he lived on a modest orphan's pension and the money he could earn by painting and selling picture postcards. It was during this time of his vagabond existence among the rootless, displaced elements of the old Hapsburg capital, that he first became fascinated by the immense potential of mass political manipulation. He was particularly impressed by the successes of the anti-Semitic, nationalist Christian-Socialist party of Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger and his efficient machine of propaganda and mass organization. Under Lueger's influence and that of former Catholic monk and race theorist Lanz von Liebenfels, Hitler first developed the fanatical anti-Semitism and racial mythology that were to remain central to his own "ideology" and that of the Nazi party.
In May 1913, apparently in an attempt to avoid induction into the Austrian military service after he had failed to register for conscription, Hitler slipped across the German border to Munich, only to be arrested and turned over to the Austrian police. He was able to persuade the authorities not to detain him for draft evasion and duly presented himself for the draft physical examination, which he failed to pass. He returned to Munich, and after the outbreak of World War I a year later, he volunteered for action in the German army. During the war he fought on Germany's Western front with distinction but gained no promotion beyond the rank of corporal. Injured twice, he won several awards for bravery, among them the highly respected Iron Cross First Class. Although isolated in his troop, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed his success on the front and continued to look back fondly upon his war experience.
Early Nazi Years
The end of the war suddenly left Hitler without a place or goal and drove him to join the many disillusioned veterans who continued to fight in the streets of Germany. In the spring of 1919 he found employment as a political officer in the army in Munich with the help of an adventurer-soldier by the name of Ernst Roehm - later head of Hitler's storm troopers (SA). In this capacity Hitler attended a meeting of the so-called German Workers' party, a nationalist, anti-Semitic, and socialist group, in September 1919. He quickly distinguished himself as this party's most popular and impressive speaker and propagandist, helped to increase its membership dramatically to some 6, 000 by 1921, and in April that year became Führer (leader) of the now-renamed National Socialist German Workers' party (NSDAP), the official name of the Nazi party.
The worsening economic conditions of the two following years, which included a runaway inflation that wiped out the savings of great numbers of middle-income citizens, massive unemployment, and finally foreign occupation of the economically crucial Ruhr Valley, contributed to the continued rapid growth of the party. By the end of 1923 Hitler could count on a following of some 56, 000 members and many more sympathizers and regarded himself as a significant force in Bavarian and German politics. Inspired by Mussolini's "March on Rome, " he hoped to use the crisis conditions accompanying the end of the Ruhr occupation in the fall of 1923 to stage his own coup against the Berlin government. For this purpose he staged the well-known Nazi Beer Hall Putsch of Nov. 8/9, 1923, by which he hoped - in coalition with right-wingers around World War I general Erich Ludendorff - to force the conservative-nationalist Bavarian government of Gustav von Kahr to cooperate with him in a rightist "March on Berlin." The attempt failed, however. Hitler was tried for treason and given the rather mild sentence of a year's imprisonment in the old fort of Landsberg.
It was during this prison term that many of Hitler's basic ideas of political strategy and tactics matured. Here he outlined his major plans and beliefs in Mein Kampf, which he dictated to his loyal confidant Rudolf Hess. He planned the reorganization of his party, which had been outlawed and which, with the return of prosperity, had lost much of its appeal. After his release Hitler reconstituted the party around a group of loyal followers who were to remain the cadre of the Nazi movement and state. Progress was slow in the prosperous 1920s, however, and on the eve of the Depression, the NSDAP still was able to attract only some 2.5 percent of the electoral vote.
Rise to Power
With the outbreak of world depression, the fortunes of Hitler's movement rose rapidly. In the elections of September 1930 the Nazis polled almost 6.5 million votes and increased their parliamentary representation from 12 to 107. In the presidential elections of the spring of 1932, Hitler ran an impressive second to the popular World War I hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, and in July he outpolled all other parties with some 14 million votes and 230 seats in the Reichstag (parliament). Although the party lost 2 million of its voters in another election, in November 1932, President Hindenburg on Jan. 30, 1933, reluctantly called Hitler to the chancellorship to head a coalition government of Nazis, conservative German nationalists, and several prominent independents.
Consolidation of Power
The first 2 years in office were almost wholly dedicated to the consolidation of power. With several prominent Nazis in key positions (Hermann Göring, as minister of interior in Prussia, and Wilhelm Frick, as minister of interior of the central government, controlled the police forces) and his military ally Werner von Blomberg in the Defense Ministry, he quickly gained practical control. He persuaded the aging president and the Reichstag to invest him with emergency powers suspending the constitution in the so-called Enabling Act of Feb. 28, 1933. Under this act and with the help of a mysterious fire in the Reichstag building, he rapidly eliminated his political rivals and brought all levels of government and major political institutions under his control. By means of the Roehm purge of the summer of 1934 he assured himself of the loyalty of the army by the subordination of the Nazi storm troopers and the murder of its chief together with the liquidation of major rivals within the army. The death of President Hindenburg in August 1934 cleared the way for the abolition of the presidential title by plebiscite. Hitler became officially Führer of Germany and thereby head of state as well as commander in chief of the armed forces. Joseph Goebbels's extensive propaganda machine and Heinrich Himmler's police system simultaneously perfected totalitarian control of Germany, as demonstrated most impressively in the great Nazi mass rally of 1934 in Nuremberg, where millions marched in unison and saluted Hitler's theatrical appeals.
Preparation for War
Once internal control was assured, Hitler began mobilizing Germany's resources for military conquest and racial domination of the land masses of central and eastern Europe. He put Germany's 6 million unemployed to work on a vast rearmament and building program, coupled with a propaganda campaign to prepare the nation for war. Germany's mythical enemy, world Jewry - which was associated with all internal and external obstacles in the way of total power - was systematically and ruthlessly attacked in anti-Semitic mass propaganda, with economic sanctions, and in the end by the "final solution" of physical destruction of Jewish men, women, and children in Himmler's concentration camps.
Foreign relations were similarly directed toward preparation for war: the improvement of Germany's military position, the acquisition of strong allies or the establishment of convenient neutrals, and the division of Germany's enemies. Playing on the weaknesses of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the general fear of war, this policy was initially most successful in the face of appeasement-minded governments in England and France. After an unsuccessful coup attempt in Austria in 1934, Hitler gained Mussolini's alliance and dependence as a result of Italy's Ethiopian war in 1935, illegally marched into the Rhineland in 1936 (demilitarized at Versailles), and successfully intervened - in cooperation with Mussolini - in the Spanish Civil War. Under the popular banner of national self-determination, he annexed Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia with the concurrence of the West in 1938 (Munich Agreement), only to occupy all of Czechoslovakia early in 1939. Finally, through threats and promises of territory, he was able to gain the benevolent neutrality of the Soviet Union for the coming war (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, August 1939). Alliances with Italy (Pact of Steel) and Japan followed.
The War
On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler began World War II - which he hoped would lead to his control of most of the Eurasian heartland - with the lightning invasion of Poland, which he immediately followed with the liquidation of Jews and the Polish intelligentsia, the enslavement of the local "subhuman" population, and the beginnings of a German colonization. Following the declaration of war by France and England, he temporarily turned his military machine west, where the lightning, mobile attacks of the German forces quickly triumphed. In April 1940 Denmark surrendered, and Norway was taken by an amphibious operation. In May-June the rapidly advancing tank forces defeated France and the Low Countries.
The major goal of Hitler's conquest lay in the East, however, and already in the middle of 1940 German war production was preparing for an eastern campaign. The Air Battle of Britain, which Hitler had hoped would permit either German invasion or (this continued to be his dream) an alliance with "Germanic" England, was broken off, and Germany's naval operations collapsed for lack of reinforcements and matériel.
On June 22, 1941, the German army advanced on Russia in the so-called Operation Barbarossa, which Hitler regarded as Germany's final struggle for existence and "living space" (Lebensraum) and for the creation of the "new order" of German racial domination. After initial rapid advances, the German troops were stopped by the severe Russian winter, however, and failed to reach any of their three major goals: Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The following year's advances were again slower than expected, and with the first major setback at Stalingrad (1943) the long retreat from Russia began. A year later, the Western Allies, too, started advancing on Germany.
German Defeat
With the waning fortunes of the German war effort, Hitler withdrew almost entirely from the public; his orders became increasingly erratic and pedantic; and recalling his earlier triumphs over the generals, he refused to listen to advice from his military counselors. He dreamed of miracle bombs and suspected treason everywhere. Under the slogan of "total victory or total ruin, " the entire German nation from young boys to old men, often barely equipped or trained, was mobilized and sent to the front. After an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a group of former leading politicians and military men on July 20, 1944, the regime of terror further tightened.
In the last days of the Third Reich, with the Russian troops in the suburbs of Berlin, Hitler entered into a last stage of desperation in his underground bunker in Berlin. He ordered Germany destroyed since it was not worthy of him; he expelled his trusted lieutenants Himmler and Göring from the party; and made a last, theatrical appeal to the German nation. Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, leaving the last bits of unconquered German territory to the administration of non-Nazi Adm. Karl Doenitz.
Further Reading
Hitler's own writings start with Mein Kampf; of its many translations, that of Ralph Mannheim (1943) is preferred. Hitler's Secret Book (1961), with an introduction by Telford Taylor, is a second book on foreign policy written by Hitler in 1928 but not published during the Nazi years. The most important book of speeches is Norman H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (2 vols., 1942). Records of Hitler's conversations are in Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (1940); H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler's Secret Conversations (1953); and François Genoud, ed., The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1961). Of the numerous biographies of Hitler, Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952; rev. ed. 1962), is outstanding, and it is also the best general book on Nazi Germany. A shorter recent biography by a German historian is Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler: A Short Biography (1961). Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power (1944), is the classic biography written during the Nazi years, which contains important insights for the period up to 1934. The young Hitler was described by friends and associates: Kurt G. W. Ludecke, I Knew Hitler (1937); Franz Jetzinger, Hitler's Youth (trans. 1958); and, the most recent and comprehensive, Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood, and Youth (1967). An account by an associate of Hitler in Munich after World War I is Ernst Hanfstaengel, Unheard Witness (1957).
A number of books deal with various aspects of Hitler's personality and his conduct of the war. James H. McRandle, The Track of the Wolf: Essays on National Socialism and Its Leader, Adolf Hitler (1965), and George H. Stein, ed., Hitler (1968), both deal with Hitler's character and the political consequences of his personality. See also Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970). Hitler's relationship with favored associates is examined in Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, translated by Michael Bullock (1970). Hitler's conduct of the war generally is the subject of Felix Gilbert, ed., Hitler Directs His War (1951), and H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Blitzkrieg to Defeat (1964); and Hitler's invasion of Russia is related in Paul Carell, Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943, translated by E. Osers (1965), and Leonard Cooper, Many Roads to Moscow: Three Historic Invasions (1968). A Russian journalist's interpretation of the circumstances surrounding Hitler's death is Lev Aleksandrovich Bezymenskii, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives (1968). Recommended for general historical background are Hannah
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; rev. ed. 1967); William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), highly readable and fair-minded if not always reliable in detail; Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, vol. 3 (1964); Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (1965); Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789 (1968); and Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism (trans. 1970).
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Home > Library > Reference > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia Adolf Hitler
(born April 20, 1889, Braunau am Inn, Austria — died April 30, 1945, Berlin, Ger.) Dictator of Nazi Germany (1933 – 45). As a soldier in the German army in World War I, he was wounded and gassed. In 1920 he became head of propaganda for the renamed National Socialists (Nazi Party) and in 1921 party leader. He set out to create a mass movement, using unrelenting propaganda. The party's rapid growth climaxed in the Beer Hall Putsch (1923), for which he served nine months in prison; there he started to write his virulent autobiography, Mein Kampf. Believing that "races" were unequal and that this was part of the natural order, he exalted the "Aryan race" while propounding anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and extreme German nationalism. The economic slump of 1929 facilitated Hitler's rise to power. In the Reichstag elections of 1930 the Nazis became the country's second largest party and in 1932 the largest. Hitler ran for president in 1932 and lost but entered into intrigues to gain power, and in 1933 Paul von Hindenburg invited him to be chancellor. Adopting the title of Führer ("Leader"), Hitler gained dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act and suppressed opposition with assistance from Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. Hitler also began to enact anti-Jewish measures, which culminated in the Holocaust. His aggressive foreign policy led to the signing of the Munich Agreement with France, Britain, and Italy, which permitted German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. He became allied with Benito Mussolini in the Rome-Berlin Axis. The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (1939) enabled him to invade Poland, precipitating World War II. As defeat grew imminent in 1945, he married Eva Braun in an underground bunker in Berlin, and the next day they committed suicide.
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Home > Library > Arts > German Literature Companion Adolf Hitler
Hitler, Adolf (Braunau, Austria, 1889-1945, Berlin), the self-styled Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945, was the son of an Austrian customs official, and grew up in Linz. He hankered after a career as an artist, but was refused admission to the Vienna Art Academy. He began to take an interest in politics about 1909, instructing himself by indiscriminate reading. In 1913 he moved to Munich, and in August 1914 he volunteered for service in the Bavarian army. He served throughout the war, was twice wounded, and received both classes of Iron Cross. In September 1919 he entered the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in Munich, and quickly proved himself an able and persuasive speaker, denouncing the Revolution of November 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles (see Versailles, Treaty of). In 1921 he became chairman of the party, which had changed its name in 1920 to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Hitler rapidly influenced middle-class and military elements in Bavaria, and mounted a coup d'état on 9 November 1923 (see Hitlerputsch), which failed totally and for a time lost the party its conservative support. Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and was released within a year from Landsberg Fortress.
In Landsberg Hitler wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf (2 vols., 1925-6). The NSDAP was revived in 1925. After his release Hitler sought to obtain power by constitutional means. His programme was a nationalistic one of German revival and expansion, coupled with virulent anti-Semitism. He established himself firmly as party leader, and set in motion the myth of the Führer. The economic crisis of 1929 gave him renewed opportunity to gain members among the unemployed, and allies among the right-wing parties (see Harzburger Front). With the parliamentary crisis of 1930 the prestige of Hitler and his party gained momentum, and NSDAP representation in the Reichstag increased. In 1932, after two years of demagogic oratory and street violence, Hitler unsuccessfully sought election as president. Although the party also suffered an electoral setback in that year, the impasse into which the Republic had drifted facilitated negotiations for Hitler's inclusion in a new government. On 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg acquiesced in Hitler's appointment as chancellor (Reichskanzler) in a cabinet consisting largely of conservatives.
By vigorous terrorism and astute political moves Hitler disposed of his conservative allies and made the NSDAP the instrument of rule in Germany. In addition to the persecution of former political opponents and of the Jews, he eliminated by planned assassination the leaders of the SA. On Hindenburg's death he assumed the presidential powers, becoming head of the armed forces (see Reichswehr). He defied the military provisions of the Treaty of Versailles by the introduction of conscription in 1935 and the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. In 1936 he also made an alliance with Mussolini's Italy. Up to a certain point Hitler displayed a truer view of the realities of power politics than his advisers and generals, gauging accurately the slow or timid reactions of foreign powers. Taking one step at a time, and on each occasion declaring that it was his last, he secured Austria and the borderlands of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) in 1938, and Czechoslovakia itself and Memel in 1939, and he turned the settlement with Chamberlain (Sept. 1938) to his advantage.
Hitler was unable to annex Poland without a European war (see Weltkriege, II). He took an active part in military planning, and his early campaigns (Blitzkriege) were strikingly successful, strengthening his megalomania and delusions of infallibility. In 1941 he assumed direct command of the armed forces, but from the autumn of 1942 his manic inflexibility provoked and exacerbated a series of military disasters, including the catastrophe of Stalingrad. On 20 July 1944 an attempt to assassinate him failed (see Resistance Movements, 2). He continued to attempt to hold all conquests, wasting his military assets in so doing. With Germany invaded from east and west, and Berlin partly in Soviet hands, Hitler went through a marriage ceremony with Eva Braun, his mistress for twelve years, and committed suicide with her on 30 April 1945. A MS. by Hitler dealing with foreign policy and written in 1928 was published in 1961, Hitlers zweites Buch.
