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[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|The [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racism|racist]] Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.]]

[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|The [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racism|racist]] Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.]]

'''Adolf Hitler''' was the Austrian-born Chancellor and President of [[Germany]] from January 30, 1933 until his death on April 30, 1945.  He was also the leader (German: ''Der Führer'') of the National Socialist German Workers Party (''National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'', or [[Nazi]] Party) which gained political power through threat, intimidation, and outright violence throughout Germany in the aftermath of the [[First World War]]. Adolf Hitler was an [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racist]].<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref> Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the [[Genocide|mass extermination]] of the [[Jews]], [[Gypsies]], and other peoples he considered “[[Racial Supremacy|inferior]]” throughout central and eastern [[Europe]] and were directly responsible for the outbreak of [[World War II]], which caused the deaths of untold millions on and off the battlefield and ended only after Hitler's [[suicide]] in his Berlin bunker.  

'''Adolf Hitler''' was the Austrian-born Chancellor and President of [[Germany]] from January 30, 1933 until his death on April 30, 1945.  He was also the leader (German: ''Der Führer'') of the [[National Socialist German Workers Party]] (''National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'', or [[Nazi]] Party) which gained political power through threat, intimidation, and outright violence throughout Germany in the aftermath of the [[First World War]]. Adolf Hitler was an [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racist]].<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref> Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the [[Genocide|mass extermination]] of the [[Jews]], [[Gypsies]], and other peoples he considered “[[Racial Supremacy|inferior]]” throughout central and eastern [[Europe]] and were directly responsible for the outbreak of [[World War II]], which caused the deaths of untold millions on and off the battlefield and ended only after Hitler's [[suicide]] in his Berlin bunker.  

==Early life==

==Early life==

<blockquote>We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant disdain for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with [[Eva Braun]], who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of [[Jews]], whose survival enraged him — each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers.</blockquote>

<blockquote>We think we know everything about the nefarious forces that shaped his destiny: his unhappy childhood, his frustrated adolescence; his artistic disappointments; his wound received on the front during World War I; his taste for spectacle, his constant disdain for social and military aristocracies; his relationship with [[Eva Braun]], who adored him; the cult of the very death he feared; his lack of scruples with regard to his former comrades of the SA, whom he had assassinated in 1934; his endless hatred of [[Jews]], whose survival enraged him — each and every phase of his official and private life has found its chroniclers, its biographers.</blockquote>

<blockquote>And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable paranoid find it within himself to impose gigantic hope as an immutable ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises, or if the winners in 1918 had not imposed on it conditions that represented a national humiliation against which the German patriotic fiber could only revolt? We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His Nationalist Socialist Party won a majority in the parliamentary elections. The aging [[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg]] had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the [[Third Reich]], which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years.</blockquote>

<blockquote>And yet. There are, in all these givens, elements that escape us. How did this unstable paranoid find it within himself to impose gigantic hope as an immutable ideal that motivated his nation almost until the end? Would he have come to power if Germany were not going through endless economic crises, or if the winners in 1918 had not imposed on it conditions that represented a national humiliation against which the German patriotic fiber could only revolt? We would be wrong to forget: Hitler came to power in January 1933 by the most legitimate means. His [[Nationalist Socialist Party]] won a majority in the parliamentary elections. The aging [[Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg]] had no choice but to allow him, at age 43, to form the new government, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. And the beginning of the [[Third Reich]], which, according to Hitler, would last 1,000 years.</blockquote>

<blockquote>From that moment on, events cascaded. The burning of the [[Reichstag]] came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear descended on the country and squeezed it in a vise. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight emigrated toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late.</blockquote>

<blockquote>From that moment on, events cascaded. The burning of the [[Reichstag]] came only a little before the openings of the first concentration camps, established for members of the opposition. Fear descended on the country and squeezed it in a vise. Great writers, musicians and painters went into exile to France and the U.S. Jews with foresight emigrated toward Palestine. The air of Hitler's Germany was becoming more and more suffocating. Those who preferred to wait, thinking that the Nazi regime would not last, could not last, would regret it later, when it was too late.</blockquote>