Adolf Hitler

byname Der Führer (German: “The Leader”), (born April 20, 1889, Braunau am Inn,
Austria—died April 30, 1945, Berlin, Germany), leader of the Nazi Party (from
1920/21) and chancellor (Kanzler) and Führer of Germany (1933–45). He was
chancellor from January 30, 1933, and, after President Paul von Hindenburg’s death,
assumed the twin titles of Führer and chancellor (August 2, 1934).

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler reviewing troops on the Eastern Front, 1939.
Heinrich Hoffmann, Munich

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Hitler’s father, Alois (born 1837), was illegitimate. For a time he bore his
mother’s name, Schicklgruber, but by 1876 he had established his family claim to
the surname Hitler. Adolf never used any other surname.

Early Life
After his father’s retirement from the state customs service, Adolf Hitler spent
most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. It remained his
favourite city throughout his life, and he expressed his wish to be buried there.
Alois Hitler died in 1903 but left an adequate pension and savings to support his
wife and children. Although Hitler feared and disliked his father, he was a devoted
son to his mother, who died after much suffering in 1907. With a mixed record as a
student, Hitler never advanced beyond a secondary education. After leaving school,
he visited Vienna, then returned to Linz, where he dreamed of becoming an artist.
Later, he used the small allowance he continued to draw to maintain himself in
Vienna. He wished to study art, for which he had some faculties, but he twice
failed to secure entry to the Academy of Fine Arts. For some years he lived a
lonely and isolated life, earning a precarious livelihood by painting postcards and
advertisements and drifting from one municipal hostel to another. Hitler already
showed traits that characterized his later life: loneliness and secretiveness, a
bohemian mode of everyday existence, and hatred of cosmopolitanism and of the
multinational character of Vienna.

In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich. Screened for Austrian military service in February
1914, he was classified as unfit because of inadequate physical vigour; but when
World War I broke out, he petitioned Bavarian King Louis III to be allowed to
serve, and one day after submitting that request, he was notified that he would be
permitted to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. After some eight
weeks of training, Hitler was deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, where he
participated in the First Battle of Ypres. He served throughout the war, was
wounded in October 1916, and was gassed two years later near Ypres. He was
hospitalized when the conflict ended. During the war, he was continuously in the
front line as a headquarters runner; his bravery in action was rewarded with the
Iron Cross, Second Class, in December 1914, and the Iron Cross, First Class (a rare
decoration for a corporal), in August 1918. He greeted the war with enthusiasm, as
a great relief from the frustration and aimlessness of civilian life. He found
discipline and comradeship satisfying and was confirmed in his belief in the heroic
virtues of war.

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Adolf Hitler
QUICK FACTS
Adolf Hitler
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BORN
April 20, 1889
Braunau, Austria
DIED
April 30, 1945 (aged 56)
Berlin, Germany
TITLE / OFFICE
Führer, Germany (1934-1945)
Chancellor, Germany (1933-1945)
POLITICAL AFFILIATION
Nazi Party
NOTABLE WORKS
“Mein Kampf”
ROLE IN
World War II
World War I
Holocaust
The Blitz
Operation Barbarossa
Nazism
First Battle Of Ypres
Beer Hall Putsch
Munich Agreement
T4 Program
AWARDS AND HONORS
Iron Cross (1918)
Iron Cross (1914)
FOUNDER OF
SS
SA
Hitler Youth
NOTABLE FAMILY MEMBERS
Spouse Eva Braun
DID YOU KNOW?
The KGB claims that they destroyed Hitler's remains and scattered his ashes so that
his grave would not become a shrine for his supporters.
When tested, the skull fragment that Russia held which supposedly belonged to
Hitler was definitively found to belong to a female.
The execution and humiliation of Mussolini and his mistress after fascist Italy
fell are said to have contributed to Hitler's decision to commit suicide along with
his wife.

Rise To Power
Discharged from the hospital amid the social chaos that followed Germany’s defeat,
Hitler took up political work in Munich in May–June 1919. As an army political
agent, he joined the small German Workers’ Party in Munich (September 1919). In
1920 he was put in charge of the party’s propaganda and left the army to devote
himself to improving his position within the party, which in that year was renamed
the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi). Conditions were ripe
for the development of such a party. Resentment at the loss of the war and the
severity of the peace terms added to the economic woes and brought widespread
discontent. This was especially sharp in Bavaria, due to its traditional separatism
and the region’s popular dislike of the republican government in Berlin. In March
1920 a coup d’état by a few army officers attempted in vain to establish a right-
wing government.

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler, 1930s.
Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Munich was a gathering place for dissatisfied former servicemen and members of the
Freikorps, which had been organized in 1918–19 from units of the German army that
were unwilling to return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the
republic. Many of these joined the Nazi Party. Foremost among them was Ernst Röhm,
a staff member of the district army command, who had joined the German Workers’
Party before Hitler and who was of great help in furthering Hitler’s rise within
the party. It was he who recruited the “strong arm” squads used by Hitler to
protect party meetings, to attack socialists and communists, and to exploit
violence for the impression of strength it gave. In 1921 these squads were formally
organized under Röhm into a private party army, the SA (Sturmabteilung). Röhm was
also able to secure protection from the Bavarian government, which depended on the
local army command for the maintenance of order and which tacitly accepted some of
his terrorist tactics.

Conditions were favourable for the growth of the small party, and Hitler was
sufficiently astute to take full advantage of them. When he joined the party, he
found it ineffective, committed to a program of nationalist and socialist ideas but
uncertain of its aims and divided in its leadership. He accepted its program but
regarded it as a means to an end. His propaganda and his personal ambition caused
friction with the other leaders of the party. Hitler countered their attempts to
curb him by threatening resignation, and because the future of the party depended
on his power to organize publicity and to acquire funds, his opponents relented. In
July 1921 he became their leader with almost unlimited powers. From the first he
set out to create a mass movement, whose mystique and power would be sufficient to
bind its members in loyalty to him. He engaged in unrelenting propaganda through
the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (“Popular Observer,” acquired in
1920), and through meetings whose audiences soon grew from a handful to thousands.
With his charismatic personality and dynamic leadership, he attracted a devoted
cadre of Nazi leaders, men whose names today live in infamy—Johann Dietrich Eckart
(who acted as a mentor for Hitler), Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring,
and Julius Streicher.

Learn about the economic crises faced by the Weimar Republic after World War I and
the role of chancellor Gustav Stresemann to revive Germany's economy
Learn about the economic crises faced by the Weimar Republic after World War I and
the role of chancellor Gustav Stresemann to revive Germany's economy
Overview of the crises facing the Weimar Republic after World War I.
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The climax of this rapid growth of the Nazi Party in Bavaria came in an attempt to
seize power in the Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch of November 1923, when Hitler and
General Erich Ludendorff tried to take advantage of the prevailing confusion and
opposition to the Weimar Republic to force the leaders of the Bavarian government
and the local army commander to proclaim a national revolution. In the melee that
resulted, the police and the army fired at the advancing marchers, killing a few of
them. Hitler was injured, and four policemen were killed. Placed on trial for
treason, he characteristically took advantage of the immense publicity afforded to
him. He also drew a vital lesson from the Putsch—that the movement must achieve
power by legal means. He was sentenced to prison for five years but served only
nine months, and those in relative comfort at Landsberg castle. Hitler used the
time to dictate the first volume of Mein Kampf, his political autobiography as well
as a compendium of his multitudinous ideas.

Hitler’s ideas included inequality among races, nations, and individuals as part of
an unchangeable natural order that exalted the “Aryan race” as the creative element
of mankind. According to Hitler, the natural unit of mankind was the Volk (“the
people”), of which the German people was the greatest. Moreover, he believed that
the state existed to serve the Volk—a mission that to him the Weimar German
Republic betrayed. All morality and truth were judged by this criterion: whether it
was in accordance with the interest and preservation of the Volk. Parliamentary
democratic government stood doubly condemned. It assumed the equality of
individuals that for Hitler did not exist and supposed that what was in the
interests of the Volk could be decided by parliamentary procedures. Instead, Hitler
argued that the unity of the Volk would find its incarnation in the Führer, endowed
with perfect authority. Below the Führer the party was drawn from the Volk and was
in turn its safeguard.

The greatest enemy of Nazism was not, in Hitler’s view, liberal democracy in
Germany, which was already on the verge of collapse. It was the rival
Weltanschauung, Marxism (which for him embraced social democracy as well as
communism), with its insistence on internationalism and economic conflict. Beyond
Marxism he believed the greatest enemy of all to be the Jew, who was for Hitler the
incarnation of evil. There is debate among historians as to when anti-Semitism
became Hitler’s deepest and strongest conviction. As early as 1919 he wrote,
“Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final
objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he described
the Jew as the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a
menace.”

During Hitler’s absence in prison, the Nazi Party languished as the result of
internal dissension. After his release, Hitler faced difficulties that had not
existed before 1923. Economic stability had been achieved by a currency reform and
the Dawes Plan had scaled back Germany’s World War I reparations. The republic
seemed to have become more respectable. Hitler was forbidden to make speeches,
first in Bavaria, then in many other German states (these prohibitions remained in
force until 1927–28). Nevertheless, the party grew slowly in numbers, and in 1926
Hitler successfully established his position within it against Gregor Strasser,
whose followers were primarily in northern Germany.

The advent of the Depression in 1929, however, led to a new period of political
instability. In 1930 Hitler made an alliance with the Nationalist Alfred Hugenberg
in a campaign against the Young Plan, a second renegotiation of Germany’s war
reparation payments. With the help of Hugenberg’s newspapers, Hitler was able for
the first time to reach a nationwide audience. The alliance also enabled him to
seek support from many of the magnates of business and industry who controlled
political funds and were anxious to use them to establish a strong right-wing,
antisocialist government. The subsidies Hitler received from the industrialists
placed his party on a secure financial footing and enabled him to make effective
his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed, based on the
proclamation of his faith that Germany would awaken from its sufferings to reassert
its natural greatness. Hitler’s dealings with Hugenberg and the industrialists
exemplify his skill in using those who sought to use him. But his most important
achievement was the establishment of a truly national party (with its voters and
followers drawn from different classes and religious groups), unique in Germany at
the time.

Watch Adolf Hitler's campaign for chancellor and Joseph Goebbels's role in
promoting his propaganda and terror
Watch Adolf Hitler's campaign for chancellor and Joseph Goebbels's role in
promoting his propaganda and terror
Adolf Hitler's campaign for chancellor is aided by Joseph Goebbels's promotion of
propaganda and terror.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz
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Know about Hitler's rise to power as Head of Government
Know about Hitler's rise to power as Head of Government
Overview of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz
See all videos for this article
Unremitting propaganda, set against the failure of the government to improve
conditions during the Depression, produced a steadily mounting electoral strength
for the Nazis. The party became the second largest in the country, rising from 2.6
percent of the vote in the national election of 1928 to more than 18 percent in
September 1930. In 1932 Hitler opposed Hindenburg in the presidential election,
capturing 36.8 percent of the votes on the second ballot. Finding himself in a
strong position by virtue of his unprecedented mass following, he entered into a
series of intrigues with conservatives such as Franz von Papen, Otto Meissner, and
President Hindenburg’s son, Oskar. The fear of communism and the rejection of the
Social Democrats bound them together. In spite of a decline in the Nazi Party’s
votes in November 1932, Hitler insisted that the chancellorship was the only office
he would accept. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg offered him the chancellorship of
Germany. His cabinet included few Nazis at that point.

Hitler, Adolf
Hitler, Adolf
Adolf Hitler in Brunswick, Germany, 1931.
Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Hitler’s Life And Habits
Hitler’s personal life had grown more relaxed and stable with the added comfort
that accompanied political success. After his release from prison, he often went to
live on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. His income at this time was derived
from party funds and from writing for nationalist newspapers. He was largely
indifferent to clothes and food but did not eat meat and gave up drinking beer (and
all other alcohols). His rather irregular working schedule prevailed. He usually
rose late, sometimes dawdled at his desk, and retired late at night.

At Berchtesgaden, his half sister Angela Raubal and her two daughters accompanied
him. Hitler became devoted to one of them, Geli, and it seems that his possessive
jealousy drove her to suicide in September 1931. For weeks Hitler was inconsolable.
Some time later Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich, became his mistress.
Hitler rarely allowed her to appear in public with him. He would not consider
marriage on the grounds that it would hamper his career. Braun was a simple young
woman with few intellectual gifts. Her great virtue in Hitler’s eyes was her
unquestioning loyalty, and in recognition of this he legally married her at the end
of his life.

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