Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889 and served in the German army during the First World War. He joined the movement that became the Nazi Party, participated in the failed Munich putsch of 1923, and used his subsequent imprisonment to write Mein Kampf. His politics combined extreme nationalism, antisemitism, hostility to parliamentary democracy, and the demand for territorial expansion. ^{1, 2}

President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933, after the Depression had enlarged the Nazi movement and conservative politicians had negotiated to bring it into government. Electoral support, political violence, propaganda, and elite bargains all contributed to his accession. The regime then dismantled democratic restraints. The Enabling Act allowed the government to legislate without ordinary parliamentary approval; persecution and imprisonment eliminated organized opposition. ^{2, 1}

Hitler sought both to overturn the Versailles settlement and to build a German empire in Eastern Europe. Rearmament, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and cooperation with Fascist Italy challenged the existing international order. Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and obtained the Sudetenland through the Munich agreement, negotiated without Czechoslovak participation. Occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939 demonstrated that his objectives extended beyond incorporating populations he claimed as German. ³

The German–Soviet agreement of August 1939 combined a public nonaggression pact with secret arrangements for spheres of influence, including the division of Polish territory. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, prompting British and French declarations of war. German victories in Western Europe were followed by the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In December, Hitler’s government declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. ^{3, 1, 4}

Nazi racial policy developed from exclusion, dispossession, and organized violence into systematic mass murder. Hitler’s regime, its allies, and collaborators murdered six million European Jews in the Holocaust and killed millions of other victims. Conquest expanded the populations under German control, while occupation authorities, police, military units, and collaborating governments helped implement persecution and deportation. Diplomacy was part of this system: German representatives pressed other states to surrender Jews for deportation. ^{5, 3}

As Allied armies defeated Germany, Hitler remained in Berlin. He died by suicide on April 30, 1945, while Soviet forces advanced into the city. ^{1, 5}