Hitler, Adolf

Hitler, Adolf (b. 20 Apr. 1889, d. 30 Apr. 1945). German dictator Born in the Austrian town of Braunau, as the son of a customs official who had been conceived out of wedlock, he left middle school without qualifications in 1905 and subsequently failed twice to get into a Viennese art school for lack of ability. During these years of unfulfilment he probably developed his racial ideas as well as his hatred of Jews and Eastern Europeans, whom he gave the responsibility for his personal misery and whom he came to regard collectively as his greatest enemy. He went to Munich to evade the draft into the Austrian army in 1913, but upon the outbreak of World War I he volunteered into a Bavarian regiment. He failed to rise in rank beyond corporal, but was awarded the Iron Cross for military bravery.

Directionless once again after 1918, he joined the Nazi Party as its fifty-fifth member in 1919 and became its leader in 1921. Amidst a host of other nationalist groups which operated in Munich, Hitler's party soon became one of the most prominent. Following the abortive Hitler Putsch he used his nine months (1924) in prison to write a book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle, published in two volumes, 1925, 1926) in which he laid out his central ideology, which had two key characteristics. The first was his racial ideology, especially his belief in the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ (German) race, which led to the goal of expanding its ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) at the expense of the Slavs to the east, whom he considered ‘inferior’. A precondition of this was the revision of the Versailles Treaty and the revival of Germany as an economic, political, and military world power. A second, and related, characteristic was the aim to create a ‘national community’ in Germany which would break down all barriers of class, though in accordance with the racial ideology this could only be achieved through the ‘removal’ of Jews and other minorities (of sexual orientation, race, religion, etc.). Although these ideals were clearly extreme in the contemporary climate, they nevertheless fed into the prejudices that were rapidly developing in Weimar Germany.

After his release from prison he resolved to gain power by legal means. Eventually, this attempt to gain ‘respectability’, together with the youthful and promising image with which the party under the influence of its propaganda leader, Goebbels, chose to present itself, paid off. In the elections that were held in 1930 during the Great Depression, the Nazi Party was catapulted from the political fringe to the second largest party nationwide. As the general sense of crisis deepened, Hitler's popularity increased, and on 30 January 1933 he was finally appointed Chancellor at the head of a government which contained only three members of the Nazi Party (out of ten ministers).

Within four months, through the Reichstag fire and the subsequent persecution of Communist Party and SPD members, and with the help of the Enabling Act, Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers. His position was strengthened by the Röhm Putsch on the SA, which ensured the cooperation of the military, and the death of Hindenburg in 1934, which enabled him officially to take over as Führer of the country. He virtually eliminated unemployment through a massive rearmament programme and, at the first signs that his popularity was declining, he began the expansionist policies which would spark off World War II. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was followed by the Anschluss, as well as the annexations of the Sudetenland and the Czech lands, all of which he was able to carry out with impunity. As a result of these military and diplomatic successes, Hitler was encouraged to overplay his hand in the summer of 1939.

After concluding the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Hitler attacked attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. In his quest to gain further ‘living space’ in the east, on 22 June 1941 he launched the Barbarossa campaign against the Soviet Union. On 19 December 1941, the former corporal took charge of the military planning of the war himself, while at the same time he became increasingly paranoid and reclusive. The start of the ‘total war’ in 1941 coincided with the attempt to realize Hitler's second aim in Mein Kampf, the start of the ‘final solution’ in Germany and the occupied territories, i.e. the deportation of Jews prior to their mass murder in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Although in the absence of a written order for the ‘final solution’ the exact timing is still highly controversial, it is clear that the ‘final solution’ was part of the radicalisation of war. With the conquest of Poland, the number of Jews living under German control had risen sixfold. As some German troops systematically rounded up Jews in conquered villages and shot them in mass graves, in the autumn of 1941 Jews in Poland and elsewhere were forced to move into Ghettos, from where they would be transported to the concentration and extermination camps.

In the end, Germany's military mistakes, its inferior equipment, and the strong resurgence of the Red Army proved decisive in the Barbarossa campaign, and Hitler's own mistakes added to this. Military withdrawal was hastened by the German inability to prevent D-Day, so that German troops were fighting a three-front war in the East, South and West. His reign ended with the total military, economic, and moral collapse of Germany. Remarkably, so charismatic was his rule that right up to the bitter end, most Germans remained loyal. Rather than facing the consequences, he decided to commit suicide with his companion Eva Braun, whom he had finally married only hours earlier.

social Darwinism