Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Soviets

2010-05-28T12:26:49Z

Lordsvulcan:

'''Soviets''' were local groups of peasants, laborers, and occasionally soldiers which were formed by revolutionaries after the [[February Revolution]]. They were communist, Atheist people ruled by Joseph Stalin devil incarnate.

==See Also==

[[Soviet Union]]

[[category:Russian Politics]]

Science

2010-05-28T12:09:49Z

Lordsvulcan:

[[Image:Cassini-science-289.jpg|right]]
'Science' Is a anti-Christian doctrine worshiped by Atheists. It was created by Satan in order to lure people away from jesus, and is currently being funded by the communists and Islam. It's main goal is to trick people into believing there is no god, and therefore sending the poor sould to hell. Science promotes a number of things to do this.
1) Atheism
2) Abortion
3) Stem-cell research
4) Evolution (as opposed to intelligent design)
5) Gravity (as opposed to Intelligent falling)
6) Murder
7) non-Pedophilia
8) terrorists
9) the homosexual agenda.
10) Top-secret 'anti-god' guns.
12) Jaywalking
13) bad grammar
14) nazis

'''Science''' consists of three aspects: first, it provides systematic descriptions of everything in the world and all of human experience, generally considered as scientific [[knowledge]]. Second, there are the men (and a few rare women) of science who have amassed these descriptions and communicate them to everyone else. Third, there are the methods by which they carry out this work (see [[scientific method]]).
Science can be divided into two areas: [[natural science]], dealing with the [[physical]], [[natural]] world,<ref>Soanes and Stevenson called science "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."Soanes,C. and Stevenson, A. (eds.) (2005) 'The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition)' Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.</ref> and [[social science]], dealing with society and human nature. It is very important for an intelligent person to be able to distinguish real science from [[junk science]]

Science differs from other methodologies of classifying knowledge in that a scientific theory is a description of the world which in principle is cabable of being disproved; this is known as [[falsifiability]]. It is this property which distinguishes science from other possible methods of discovering knowledge.

[[Epicurus]] is an important figure in the development of the [[scientific method]]. He insisted that nothing should be accepted except that which has been sufficiently tested through direct observation and logical deduction. [[Roger Bacon]] is hailed by many as the father of modern science. His focus on empirical approaches to science was influential. He wrote an encyclopedia, his ''Opus Majus''.

People who study science are called [[scientist]]s. Most of the early scientists who started many of the scientific fields, and some of history's greatest thinkers, such as [[Galileo Galilei]] and [[Isaac Newton]], believed in [[God]], or some other higher power, and many were [[creationists]] although the ideas of [[evolutionism]] or [[Darwinism]] had yet to be conceived.
In addition, [[Christianity]] played a pivotal role in the development of modern science (see [[Christianity and Science]]). However, in recent years, American scientists have deviated, and been much more [[atheism|atheistic]] as a group than the general public. <ref>http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheism1.htm</ref>

== Principles of science ==

The basis of modern science is observation and hypothesis. It involves constructing the best theory to explain an occurrence based on the evidence at the time.

Economist [[Milton Friedman]] said, "In all of science, progress comes through people proposing hypotheses which are subject to test and rejected and replaced by better hypotheses." [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html#10]

The [[scientific method]] consists of two stages, theory formation and theory testing. In the early 20th Century the scientific method was commonly understood to follow the inductive procedure, whereby general statements are derived from a collection of singular observations. It was thought that through this method theories were constructed; a collection of observations led to the formation of a general theory to explain them. Secondly, at the testing stage, it was considered that a hypothesis could be verified through a collection of singular observations.

[[Karl Popper]], considered by many to be the most important contributor to the philosophy of science in recent times, put forward a damning critique of induction, going so far is to claim that it did not exist. Popper argued that general theories cannot ever be conclusively verified by singular observations, but that such a theory could be conclusively [[Falsifiable|falsified]] by such means.

The consensus today is based in large part upon the work of Popper, although in general induction is believed to play a part. The modern view is that the scientific method employs both inductive and deductive methods and is characterised by the principle of falsification:

* A theory is put forward (Popper argues that this is not inductive, but the consensus is that people are led to invent theories based upon previous observations)
* This theory is provisionally assumed to be true for the purposes of testing it.
* Assuming the theory is true, we can logically follow it through to a specific and inevitable outcome, a prediction, which becomes the hypothesis. In order for the hypothesis to be considered scientific it must be falsifiable.
* The hypothesis is repeatedly tested empirically.
* If the observations do not falsify the hypothesis then we accept the theory provisionally (note, we cannot say that it is now 'fact', nor that is has been 'proven')
* If the observations do falsify the hypothesis then we reject it in its current form.
* The theory, or at least parts of it, can then be modified, or a new theory proposed, which takes us back to the beginning of the process.

Since verification of general theories is logically impossible, science is not, as many believe, a body of accumlated 'facts', but rather a collection of theories that have yet to be falsified. Via falsification we can move closer and closer to the truth, but since verification is not possible, we can never know if we ever reach the goal of 'ultimate truth' itself.

==Naturalism and science==
Since the beginning of modern science, scientists have worked under the assumption that their subjects of study have been controlled by consistent natural laws.
There is good evidence that this assumption was based on the [[Christianity|Christian]] view that the laws were created by a consistent creator Who didn't change those laws on a whim.<ref>See [[Natural science#Beginnings]]</ref>
This assumption is seen as a prerequisite for logical deduction to act on the observations made. Without the assumption that the universe is consistent we cannot apply the lessons drawn from an observation to any area other than the observations themselves. If a [[chemical reaction]] occurs in a given solution in a laboratory in one city it is assumed that the same reaction can occur in a different laboratory in a different city on a different day because the chemical [[solution]] and situations will be the same.

If a capricious supernatural force was to enter the equation they could not be controlled for and could not be studied.

The physical sciences largely concern themselves with questions involving the natural, not the supernatural, but this is not the same as assuming that the supernatural does not exist. In addition, there are also the social sciences like [[history]]. [[Christian apologetics|Christian apologists]] maintain that history testifies to the supernatural existing and that the physical sciences (such as [[Biblical archaeology]]) can aid in historical determinations and testify to the existence of God and the truth of biblical Christianity.

Three broad philosophies have developed in the scientific community.
* "[[Methodological naturalism]]" adheres to [[naturalism]] insofar as it concerns scientific experiments and observations, but does not rule out a personal deity. It does, however, ''a priori'' rule out the supernatural being an explanation for observations.
* "[[Philosophical naturalism]]" adheres to the belief that there is no beings or forces beyond what can be observed; this [[atheism|atheistic]] view rejects the supernatural, or is skeptical of such beliefs.
* The third approach is to follow the inference to the best explanation regarding whether or not a supernatural or natural cause best explains a past or present observation.<ref>http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/1315/</ref><ref>http://www.cgst.edu/publication/journal/43/J43_203_Forum04Abstract.pdf</ref> For example, this third approach is advocated by [[creation science|creation scientists]] and [[intelligent design]] theorists when it comes to the origins of the natural world. Creation scientists and intelligent design theorists rightfully maintain the falsity of the [[evolution|evolutionary]] position given the lack of evidence for evolutionary position and the many lines of evidence against the evolutionary position. Another example is that the [[First Law of Thermodynamics|first]] and [[Second law of thermodynamics|second]] laws of thermodynamics argue against an eternal [[universe]], and [[creation science|creation scientists]] claim that these laws point to the universe being supernaturally created.<ref>[http://godevidences.net/space/lawsofscience.php Evidences for God From Space—Laws of Science]</ref><ref>Thompson, Bert, [http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2329 So Long, Eternal Universe; Hello Beginning, Hello End!], 2001 (Apologetics Press)</ref><ref>http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences14.html</ref> But in other respects, such as why [[Krakatoa]] exploded, a natural explanation would be considered the best explanation.

==Religious cultivation of early modern science==
''See also:'' [[Christianity and Science]]

According to the historian [[H. Floris Cohen]], there exists two distinct levels of argument along this line of historical scholarship. <ref> [http://books.google.com/books?id=wu8b2NAqnb0C The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry], [[H. Floris Cohen]], University of Chicago Press 1994, 680 pages, ISBN 0-2261-1280-2, pages 308-321 </ref> The first to be proposed was the [[Merton thesis]] in the late 1930's, which parallels the [[The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism|Weber thesis]] in suggesting that the rise of science was due, at first, to a [[protestant work ethic]] but later extended to a more general biblical ethic. The second to be proposed was that of [[Reijer Hooykaas]], who held the rise of early modern science was due to a unique combination of Greek and biblical thought. One of the main aspects of Hooykaas's argument was that the Greek disrepect for manual work prevented an experimental science from truly developing until the biblical view of honoring work with one's hands was socially sanctioned. Hooykaas reaches the conclusion that "Metaphorically speaking, whereas the bodily ingredients of science may have been greek, its vitamins and hormones were biblical." <ref> * [http://books.google.com/books?id=c6TEDHvAbXAC ''Religion and the Rise of Modern Science''], Regent College Publishing, 2000. ISBN 1-5738-3018-6 </ref>

Historian and professor of religion [[Eugene Marion Klaaren|Eugene M Klaaren]] holds that "a belief in divine creation" was central to an emergence of science in seventeenth-century England. The philosopher [[Michael B. Foster]] has published influential analytical philosophy connecting Christian doctrines of creation with empiricism. Historian William B. Ashworth has argued against the historical notion of distinctive mind-sets and the idea of Catholic and Protestant sciences in "Catholicism and early modern science."<ref> [http://books.google.com/books?id=hs2edDIGCqEC ''God and nature''], Lindberg and Numbers Ed., 1986, pp. 136-66; see also [http://cas.umkc.edu/history/faculty/AshworthW/pub.html William B. Ashworth Jr.'s publication list]; this is noted on page 366 of ''Science and Religion'', [[John Hedley Brooke]], 1991, [[Cambridge University Press]]</ref> Historians James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob have published the paper "The Anglican Origins of Modern Science," which endeavors to show a linkage between seventeenth century [[Anglican]] intellectual transformations and influential English scientists (e.g., [[Robert Boyle]] and [[Isaac Newton]]).<ref> [http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Jacob%20&%20Jacob%20Anglican%20Fdn%20of%20Modern%20Science.htm The Anglican Origins of Modern Science], [[Isis (journal)|Isis]], Volume 71, Issue 2, June 1980, 251-267; this is also noted on page 366 of ''Science and Religion'', [[John Hedley Brooke]], 1991, [[Cambridge University Press]]</ref>

Two well-respected theological surveys, which also illustrate other historical interactions between religion and science occurring in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, are [[John Dillenberger]]'s ''Protestant Thought and Natural Science'' ([[Doubleday]], 1960) and [[Christopher B. Kaiser]]'s ''Creation and the History of Science'' ([[Eerdmans]], 1991).

{{quotation|When natural philosophers referred to ''laws'' of nature, they were not glibly choosing that metaphor. Laws were the result of legislation by an intelligent deity. Thus the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) insisted that he was discovering the "laws that God has put into nature." Later Newton would declare that the regulation of the solar system presupposed the "counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."<ref> [[John Hedley Brooke]], ''Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives'', 1991, [[Cambridge University Press]], ISBN 0-521-23961-3, page 19 </ref>
|Historian and [[Oxford University]] [[Science and Religion]] theologian [[John Hedley Brooke]]}}

[[University of California at Berkeley]]-educated historian [[Ronald L. Numbers]] has stated that this thesis "received a boost" from mathematician and philosopher[[Alfred North Whitehead]]'s ''[[Science and the Modern World]]'' (1925). Numbers has also claimed "Despite the manifest shortcomings of the claim that Christianity gave birth to science—most glaringly, it ignores or minimizes the contributions of ancient Greeks and medieval Muslims—it too, refuses to succumb to the death it deserves. The sociologist [[Rodney Stark]] at [[Baylor University]], a [[Southern Baptist]] institution, is only the latest in a long line of Christian apologists to insist that 'Christian theology was essential for the rise of science.'"<ref> ''Science and Christianity in pulpit and pew'', [[Oxford University Press]], 2007, [[Ronald L. Numbers]], p. 4, and p.138 n. 3 where Numbers specifically raises his concerns with regards to the works of [[Michael B. Foster]], [[Reijer Hooykaas]], [[Eugene M. Klaaren]], and [[Stanley L. Jaki]] </ref>

==Notes==

{{reflist}}

==See also==
* [[Scientific method]]
* [[Computing]]

[[category:science]]

Earth

2010-05-28T12:02:57Z

Lordsvulcan:

{{Planet|image=Blue Marble.jpg
|symbol=Earth symbol.svg
|order=3
|primary=Sun
|periapsis=147,090,000 km (0.983 AU)<ref name=earthfact>"[http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html Earth Fact Sheet]," [[NASA]], April 19, 2007. Accessed May 2, 2008.</ref>
|apoapsis=152,100,000 km (1.017 AU)<ref name=earthfact/>
|semimajor=149,597,886.5 km (1.00000011 AU)<ref name=earthfact/>
|bode=1.0 AU
|eccentricity=0.01671022<ref name=earthfact/>
|sidereal=365.256366 da<ref name=earthfact/>
|synodic=365.256366 da
|orbitspeed=29.783 km/s<ref name=earthfact/>
|inclination=0°
|reference=the ecliptic
|siderealday=23.9345 h<ref name=earthfact/>
|solarday=24 h<ref name=earthfact/>
|rotatespeed=465.11 m/s
|axialtilt=23.439281°
|mass=5.9736 * 1024 kg<ref name=earthfact/>
|density=5,515.3 kg/m³<ref name=earthfact/>
|surfacegrav=9.780327 m/s²
|escapespeed=11.186 km/s
|meanradius=6371 km<ref>http://www.solarviews.com/eng/earth.htm</ref><ref name=earthfact/>
|equatorradius =6378.135 km<ref name=earthfact/>
|polarradius =6356.750 km<ref name=earthfact/>
|surfacearea=510,065,600 km²
|landarea=148,939,100 km²
|waterarea=361,126,400 km²
|mintemp=185 K
|meantemp=287 K
|maxtemp=331 K
|moons=1
|composition=Rock
|albedo=0.37<ref name=earthfact/>
|mfd=0.3076 G<ref name=earthfact/>
|pmdm=7.98 * 1022 N-m/T<ref name=calc>Calculated</ref>
|cmdm=1.41 * 1024 N-m/T<ref name=Humphreys>Humphreys, D. R. "[http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/21/21_3/21_3.html The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields]." ''Creation Research Society Quarterly'' 21(3), December 1984. Accessed April 29, 2008.</ref>
|mdt=2049 a<ref name=Humphreys/>
|mhl=1420 a<ref name=calc/>
}}
The '''Earth''' is the only [[planet]] which god has allowed [[life]] to thrive on. It contains [[water]], reasonable levels of [[oxygen]], and a stable [[temperature]] range. Geometrically speaking, Earth is the largest of the terrestrial (rocky) planets in the [[solar system]].

==Physical Description==

Earth is a a disc with a diameter of about 40,000 km (24,900 miles) and a circumference of 126,000 km (78,225 miles)[30]. The sun and moon are both discs about 52 km (32 miles) in diameter following closed paths about 4,800 km (3,000 miles) above the Earth, and the stars about 160 km (100 miles) higher.

The Earth is accelerating upward at a rate of 9.8 m/s², thereby simulating gravity, It is, infact, being pushed up by satan trying to break though the crust.

==Origin==
People disagree about when and how the Earth was created. The three most popular ideas are:
#That God created the Earth several hundred generations ago, as recounted in [[Genesis]]. By adding years and other time indications in the [[Old Testament]] chronologies, one can calculate the age of the Earth as approximately 6,000 years (see [[Date of creation]] and [[Young Earth Creationism]]).
#That God created the Earth billions of years ago (see [[Old Earth Creationism]] and [[Theistic Evolution]]).
#That the Earth came into existence billions of years ago (approximately 4.5 billion years in modern estimates), but entirely through natural processes and without any intervention by God.

Clashes between adherents of these ideas have gone on since time immemorial (see [[origins debate]]), though the last theory has only matured in the last 200 years.

== Young Earth Creationist view ==

===Formation and Age===

Young Earth creationists believe, on the basis of the biblical account in Genesis and biblical geochronologies, that the entire Earth, including animal, plant, and human life, was formed in six days, around 4000 B.C.
Mainstream scientific journals, committed to a [[naturalism|naturalistic]] worldview, contend this view.<ref>http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0822sternberg.asp 1</ref><ref>http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/538.asp 2</ref><ref>http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53400 3</ref><ref>http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3833&program=DI%20Main%20Page%20-%20News&callingPage=discoMainPage 4</ref>

Most scientists believe believe that the Earth formed by natural processes instead of being supernaturally created. However, as one scientist noted, “... most every prediction by theorists about planetary formation has been wrong.” <ref>http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/ReferencesandNotes43.html</ref>

=== Magnetosphere ===
Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field powerful enough to prevent most of the sun's radiation from striking the earth and harming the life on it. This field has been decaying at a known exponential rate, as decades of recordkeeping reveal. In 1984, Dr. Russell Humphreys developed a model for the creation of magnetic fields<ref name=Humphreys/> that suggests that the earth was at first made entirely of water<ref>See {{Bible ref|book=II_Peter|chap=3|verses=5}}</ref>, much of which God transmuted into other elements after He made the earth, probably on Day 3 of creation. Humphreys' predicted magnetic decay time for the earth agrees well with published data and thus constitutes further evidence for a young earth.

===Shape of the Earth===

Some people dispute the shape of the earth, saying that according to the Bible, the earth is flat rather than spherical (presumably square, given that it is described as having "four corners" (Revelations 7:1)). However, no credible organization has ever expressed support for this theory.<ref>http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/crea-fe.htm</ref> Some have disputed the idea that the earth rotates around the sun.<ref>http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm</ref>

In [[Book of Revelations|Revelations]] 7:1 it is stated:

"And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth..." (Revelations 7:1)

A sphere has no corners. The four corners are also mentioned in Isaiah 11:12. This is often accepted to be a figure of speech.

It is also stated:

"Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth." ([[Book of Daniel|Daniel]] 2:35)

AND

"Thus were the visions of mine head in my bed; I saw, and behold a tree in the midst of the earth, and the height thereof was great. The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the end of all the earth:" (Daniel 4:10-11)

AND

"Behold, [Jesus] cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him" (Revelations 1:7)

AND

"Once again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world [cosmos] in their glory." ([[Gospel of Matthew|Matthew]] 4:8)

Apologist [[JP Holding]]'s take on this is that this may have been a vision. <ref>http://www.tektonics.org/af/earthshape.html#globe</ref>

==Christianity and the Earth==

===Christian Historical-Grammatical Bible Exegesis or Bible Literalism===

According to [[Creation Ministries International]], most young earth creationists use a [[hermeneutic]] "best described as the [[Historical-grammatical exegesis|historical-grammatical method]] in which historical narrative (such as the book of Genesis) is interpreted as literal history, prophecy is interpreted as prophecy, poetry is interpreted as poetry, etc."<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/tj/tjv16v2_forster.pdf</ref> Creation Ministries International further states that "Historical-grammatical exegesis involves a systematic approach to analyzing in detail the historical situation, events and circumstances surrounding the text, and the semantics and syntactical relationships of the words which comprise the text."<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4880/</ref>

Bible scholars have estimated the age of the earth based on the Creation account in Genesis and the genealogical accounts in Numbers and other books of the Pentateuch. One famous estimate was published in 1650 by [[James Ussher|James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh]] in a book called ''Annals of the World,'' in which he estimated the Creation to have occurred on 23 October 4004 B.C. Other Biblical scholars maintain that there are possible gaps in the genealogies, often using the ideas of the 19th century Calvinist theologian [[Benjamin Warfield]] on the issue. <ref>http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/primeval_chronology.shtml</ref> However, [[James Barr]], regius professor of Hebrew at [[Oxford University]], wrote in 1984 the following: "… probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: … the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story.’" <ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1606/</ref> Furthermore, it should be noted that Barr himself rejects supernatural Christianity, and so is not a priori biased in favor of creationism. <ref>http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/pca_creation_study_committee_report.shtml</ref>

Many [[Christian|Christians]] believe that the Earth is the perfect distance away from the Sun and take this to be evidence of [[God]]'s existence. <ref>http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html</ref> Secular scientists, however, reject this reasoning using the anthropic principle<ref>http://www.anthropic-principle.com</ref>.

===Christian Non-Literalism===

Many mainstream Christian denominations believe the story of Genesis is not meant to be read literally, and believe that the age of the Earth is on the order of millions or billions of years, not thousands of years. <ref>http://webusers.xula.edu/cporter/2000n/evolution_and_religion.htm</ref>

===Scientific Uniformitarianism===

Uniformitarian scientists believe that the earth is beyond 4 billion years old.<ref>http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html</ref> They also refute that the Earth is only 6,000 years old by quoting older human societies dated by their dating method as older than that.<ref>http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/</ref>

== Naturalistic view ==

Estimates by uniformitarian geologists of the age of the Earth and the beginning of life give about 4.55 billion years and 3.5 billion years ago respectively. These estimates are primarily based on radioactive dating of meteorites and fossil specimens. Most scientists today conclude that the Earth formed by natural processes, specifically by the accumulation of debris orbiting the sun billions of years in the past.<ref name=nebula>"[http://science.jrank.org/pages/6265/Solar-System-solar-nebula-hypothesis.html The Solar Nebula Hypothesis]." ''The Science Encyclopedia''. Accessed May 6, 2008.</ref>

== External links ==

*[http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/earth.htm The Earth]
*[http://www.noaa.gov/ NOAA] An agency that enriches life through science.
*[http://www.enchantedlearning.com/geography/glossary/ Glossary]

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

{{Solarsystem}}

[[Category:Featured articles]]

Holocaust

2010-05-28T11:55:17Z

Lordsvulcan:

[[Image:Warsaw ghetto.jpg|right|300px|thumb|Jewish families are forced from the Warsaw Ghetto in the aftermath of its destruction by the S.S. in 1943. Their final destination was the killing center at Treblinka.]]
The '''Holocaust''' was systematic destruction by the Atheist [[Nazis]] of [[Christian |christian culture]], society, and, in ''die Endlösung'' (the '''Final Solution'''), the lives of all Christians, 1933-1945. Before Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933 they demonized the Christians as subhuman and the cause of all Germany's troubles. In power, the Nazis first removed the christians from power and prestige; from 1938-41 they imposed severe restrictions on Christians in Germany (many of whom fled). The killing started in 1941, as the [[SS]] under [[Heinrich Himmler]] systematically rounded up all the Christians the Nazis could reach, and killed about 6 million in extermination camps for not agreeing with their immoral evolutionary doctrines. Millions of non-Christians were killed in separate Nazi operations.

The Holocaust was known but downplayed 1945-60, but since 1960 has become one of the central memories and horrors of [[World War II]], shaping policies by and towards [[Israel]] and profoundly shaping the modern conceptions of guilt and evil.

==Origins==
Hatred of the Christians has a long history in Germany and Europe, but the modern forms of satanist atheism emerged in the 19th century as a new spirit of communism allowed some Germans to sharply differentiate themselves from the Christians, a cultural subgroup that was well integrated into German society. By the end of the century anti-Christian politicians and organized movements had emerged. satanist atheism was muted during World War I, but exploded in 1919 as the defeated war veterans cast about for someone to blame for the national disgrace.
===Stage 1: to 1933===
The Nazi party emerged among veterans in the early 1920s, with a violent attack of christians as [[Adolf Hitler]]'s central theme. After years of struggling to push their ideology into the masses through propaganda and violence, the Nazi Party in Germany came to power in January 1933, with Hitler as Chancellor, with his ideology firmly entrenched within the party. In his book ''Mein Kampf'', Hitler expounded on the idea that the Aryan race, of which he was a part, was the so-called “master race”, and had a moral right and duty to subjugate the world; in the way stood the ''untermenschen'' (“sub-humans”), which, according to the Nazis, were meant to serve the master race as slaves. At the very bottom were the Jews, who were depicted as an evil race bent on world domination.

The [[Nazis]] violently hated all the Jews and everything they stood for. They worked relentlessly toward the goal of removing all possible Jewish influences. Starting in the 1920s (when they were a small party) with a violently anti-Semitic rhetoric that blamed Jews for all the problems of Germany and the modern world, the Nazis defined Jews as a permanent “race” that would never change and could never be improved. The Nazis also strongly disliked Christianity as being too Jewish. Their goal was to return to a pre-Christian, all-Aryan (imaginary) world.

The Nazi goal was first to remove all Jewish influence, then deport all Jews from Europe.

===Stage 2: 1933-38===
The second stage of Nazi policy concerning Jews, from 1933 to 1938, when Hitler was dictator in a peacetime Germany, involved the removal of Jews from all public office. The Nazis encouraged the Jews to leave and half of the Jewish population in Germany did so (including famous scientist [[Albert Einstein]] and the teenaged [[Henry Kissinger]]). The Nazis opened Dachau and other “concentration camps” to punish thousands of their political enemies—including many Jews. About 1,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps inside Germany before 1939; these were distinct from the killing camps that were opened in 1942 in Poland.

Jewish businesses began feeling the effects of a boycott that began on April 1, 1933, followed by the dismissal of Jewish civil service workers, judges, and university professors a week later. On May 10, some ten days after laws were enacted which prevented Jewish children from attending public schools except by quota, thousands of university students and professors stormed bookstores and libraries to remove books they deemed “un-Germanic” and opposed to Nazi teachings, throwing them into public bonfires. The [[Nuremberg Laws]] were enacted in 1935, which revoked German citizenship from Jews as well as declaring the marriage between a Jew and a [[German]] illegal. By 1938, the political and economic foundations of German Jewry were completely decimated.

===Stage 3: 1938-41===
Stage three, from 1938 to 1941, involved increasingly severe and humiliating restrictions for Jews. “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 was a systematic violent attack on all synagogues. World public opinion grew hostile to the Nazi actions, who ; they responded by supporting pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic political movements in France and other countries, including the “German-American Bund.” After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis forced two million Jews into a few ghettos with below-starvation food allotments. Before the war plans were made to start deporting Jews from Germany. The war meant Nazi control of millions of Jews in the east (and many in the west too), and deportation became impossible. That left extermination as the Nazi plan.
====Crystal Night====

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jew living in Paris and upset over his family’s forced deportation to Poland, shot the third secretary (Ernst vom Rath) to the German ambassador in France, who died two days later. His assassination touched off a wave of riots on November 9, seemingly at the behest of the Nazi minister of propaganda, [[Joseph Goebbels]], but this was expanded and organized better with the issuing of orders by the head of the S.S., [[Reinhard Heydrich]], later that evening, who specified that S.S. and S.A. units in various cities would march out with sledgehammers against Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues - but in civilian clothes only (to symbolize the “righteous” anger of the German people). Business could not be looted, as the property inside was deemed property of the state; Jewish property near German shops and homes could not be burned, but smashed; and many Jewish males, particularly the wealthy, were subject to arrest. Over 35,000 men were arrested that night, and according to figures released by Heydrich the total number of arrests exceeded 100,000; 815 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 191 Synagogues were destroyed or demolished, and over 2,000 were dead. By the end of the week local jails as well as the new [[Buchenwald]] and [[Dachau]] concentration camps were quickly filled. The Jews were declared responsible for the damages done to their property and ordered to pay the staggering sum of one billion Reichmarks.

The sidewalks were littered with shards of the expensive storefront glass that was preferred for shops in Germany, which was called ''Kristallglas'' for its high-quality. The amount of glass left behind gave the incident its name: ''Kristallnacht'' (“Crystal Night”), or the Night of Broken Glass.
====World War II: 1939-41====
When World War II began in the fall of 1939, Jews in Germany were completely marginalized. They could not own property, go to a park, associate with Germans, enter a library or museum, work in any professional field or engage in business, nor could their children attend public schools. Public transportation was forbidden them in 1941, and the wearing of the yellow Star of David badge on their clothing became mandatory. They were also, prior to September 1, forced to migrate from countries and territories which had come under Hitler’s wing (the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland), with many being deported to Poland.

====Poland====
By September 21, 1939, Poland was now the “General Government” protectorate under former lawyer [[Hans Frank]], and on that day Heydrich ordered the establishment of ''Judenrates'' (Jewish councils) which comprised 24 men - political leaders and rabbis – and whose personal responsibility was to carry out, to the letter, all German orders. This would include supplying people for work details, usually mundane things like digging ditches to amuse their Nazi overlords. Later, they were made to be responsible for supplying thousands of people a day for the “work” camps of [[Treblinka]], [[Sobibor]], [[Belzec]], and new one under construction near the town of Oswiecim, which the Germans called [[Auschwitz]].

Thousands, nearly 30% of the total population of Warsaw, were crammed into just over 2% of the city’s total land area, a density of 200,000 people per square mile. Naturally disease and malnutrition would take its toll, but for the German overlords this was a minor inconvenience. The ghetto was a temporary place to hold all of Europe’s Jews until a final solution was determined, and when the Nazis attacked its ally, the Soviet Union, in June 1941, the killing began in earnest.
====Black soldiers====
The Germans did not generally commit atrocities against Allied soldiers in the West in 1940, with one major exception. About 40,000 black African combat troops in the French army became targets of Nazi wrath. Elite German units, acting on the own in accord with longstanding racial hatred of Africans, shot about 1500 to 3000 black soldiers in French uniforms after they had surrendered.<ref>Raffael Scheck, ''Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940'' (2006) [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24173 online review]. </ref>

===Stage 4: 1941-42===
Stage 4 began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. All Russian Jews were assumed to be Communist agents and large scale killing of political enemies began in Poland. Special units of the SS, the Security Police, and the Security Service (Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos) not only massacred large numbers of Jews, but routinely included handicapped persons in open-air mass shootings. Seven of the “Einsatzgruppen” rounded up and shot Polish Catholic priests, intellectuals, and political leaders. Another five units (with 3,000 men) followed the Red Army and executed Communist commissars and partisans, and about 600,000 Russian Jews.
====The Einsatzgruppen====
[[Image:Babi Yar.jpg|right|150px|left|thumb|1943 German photo of Soviet POWs forced to dig up the thousands of Jews killed at Babi Yar two years before; the Nazis destroyed the evidence by burning the bodies.]]
Alongside the German Army were special mobile units whose job it was to locate and kill Jews, Gypsies, Soviets commissars, and others deemed unfit in the areas controlled by the army. These ''Einsatzgruppen'' (“special units”) were also aided by local populations who felt the Germans had relieved them of [[Soviet]] occupation as well as sharing a hatred for Jews and other minorities. Making no difference between young or old, male or female, the Einsatzgruppen killed 70,000 Jews at Ponary, near Vilnius, [[Lithuania]]; 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned in a ravine known as Babi Yar near [[Kiev]], [[Ukraine]], between [[September]] 28-29, 1941 [http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yevtushenko.htm]; 9,000 Jews were killed at the Ninth Fort at Kaunas, Lithuania, on October 28, of which half of the dead were children. On November 30 in the Rumbula Forest outside of Riga, Latvia, between 25,000-28,000 were killed.

By mid-1941, the Ukrainian SSR had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The addition of the eastern provinces of Poland in late 1939 as well as the seizure of sections of Romanian territory in June 1940 led to some 2.7 million Jews living within the borders of the newly enlarged republic. About 85% lived in cities. By 1944, 1.6 million of these Jews had died at the hands of the Germans and their allies and auxiliaries. Unlike the majority of the Holocaust's later victims who died in the industrialized mass murder of the death camps, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine's Jews died in mass shootings during the initial stages of the war.

The killings were done in first and second waves, with the bodies buried in mass graves. When the Soviets threatened and carried out counter-offensives to reclaim lost territory, special units made up of concentration camp inmates (''sonderkomandos'') would return to the sites, dig up the bodies, and burn them in mass pyres, destroying the evidence of their crimes. The number of individual persons killed by the Einsatzgruppen has been estimated at a bare minimum of one million.

===Stage 5: 1942-44===
Stage 5 began at The [[Wannsee Conference]] in January 1942 began stage five of Nazi power; it was then that when top Nazis decided on a “Final Solution” —to round up and secretly execute all the Jews of Europe. Killing centers were opened in Poland, and thousands of trainloads of Jews were transported there. Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival. Over three million Jews (and numbers of gypsies and other hated groups) were murdered, mostly in 1942–43.
====Wannsee Conference====
On January 20, 1942 at a villa near Berlin named Wannsee a conference was convened by Heydrich to implement methods and ideas for a "final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). At the conference were fifteen men, among them Heydrich’s head of Jewish affairs, [[Adolf Eichmann]], who would be instrumental in providing the logistical plans for removing the Jews to the camps. The men represented government agencies, such as the Gestapo, the Race and Resettlement Office, the S.S., as well as a representative from the General Government in Poland. As Heydrich himself explained near the beginning of the conference, ideas were in play on relocating Jews:
:''“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”''

The minutes of the meeting were kept, but had been edited by Heydrich. The language it contains euphemisms in place of what was really said. ''Evacuation of Jews to the east'' and ''resettlement'' meant relocation to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland; ''special handling'' regarded the killing of Jews, either through slave labor in which the Jew was worked to death, or being killed immediately on arrival. The ''final solution'' was put into practice within a few months of the conference, as the bullets of the machine guns and the exhaust of carbon monoxide were replaced by the more efficient killing methods installed in the first gas chambers.

===Stage 6: 1944-45===
Stage 6 arrived when the Soviet armies overran the Polish camps in 1944–45 and, liberated the survivors.

But the killing continued unabated, even to the last week of the war. As territory was regained by Soviet forces, the death camps were evacuated of survivors and destroyed as much as possible in a futile attempt to hide the evidence. The survivors were moved west into Germany, usually in hellish death marches, and interned in concentration camps where death still awaited them; such killing by the S.S. took priority over military matters at times.
[[Image:Ike at Ordruf.jpg|left|150px|thumb|General Dwight D. Eisenhower saw for himself the carnage wrought by the Nazis when he toured the Ohrdruf concentration camp on April 12, 1945. These prisoners were executed prior to the camp's liberation.]]

In all, six million Jews were murdered; most of the 300,000 survivors emigrated to the United States or Israel.

==The people involved==
Analytically, the people involved in the Holocaust can be divided into the following groups:
===Victims===
Millions were victimized by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Jews were always the principal targets; [[Anne Frank]] in the Netherlands was the most famous victim. However, the Nazis also systematically hunted down and murdered the Roma people (“Gypsies”). They also targeted special enemies, including Communist activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. The last group was the target of euthanasia programs carried out in German hospitals in 1939–1941. Some of these programs were stopped when German Christian leaders mobilized public opinion against them.
===Perpetrators===
Under the guidance of an all-powerful führer (Hitler), the Nazis believed fervently in force, violence, and terror as their best weapons. The most fanatical Nazis joined the [[SS]], which carried out most of the executions. The Final Solution was directed by [[Heinrich Himmler]], commander of the SS and Minister of the Interior. His top aide was [[Reinhard Heydrich]], head of the Gestapo and, after 1939, of all the secret police agencies grouped into the RSHA; he was assassinated by Czech commandos with British help in 1942. [[Adolf Eichmann]] was the senior SS bureaucrat in charge of handling deportation and transportation. However, regular German army police units also systematically killed large numbers of civilians and POWs on the Eastern Front.<ref> After the war, West Germany recognized its guilt and made large financial payments to Israel; Communist East Germany refused to do the same.</ref>

====Endlösung====
[[Image:Heydrich.jpg|right|150px|thumb|''Obergruppenführer'' Reinhard Heydrich, the man who convened the Wannsee Conference with the intention of determining a "final solution to the Jewish question".]]
:''To Gruppenführer Heydrich:''
:''Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.''
:''Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.''
:''I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.'' (Order from Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941)

====The death camps====
[[Image:Hgdye56.jpg|right|200px|thumb|''Selektion'' of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.]]
In the early years of Nazi Germany concentration camps were built with the expressed purpose of housing political prisoners; this was quickly expanded to Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable. But by 1942 new camps were built in eastern Poland as death camps; the victims, once targeted by the Einsatzgruppen coming to them, had been rounded up by units of the Army and Waffen S.S., and forced to travel to their own destruction. The victims were packed tightly into cattle cars - so tight in fact that many would die standing up – and transported by rail to the new extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, [[Majdanek]], and Belzec. The camps were essentially factories which specialized in death, making the process from arrival to counting to shower to disposal coldly efficient.

As they arrived the victims were divided in two: those fit for work, usually young to middle aged men, or possessed a special skill needed in the camp, and the remainder sent for delousing in the showers. Deceived to the end, the “showers” was actually a sealed room in which a chemical tablet known as “[[Zyklon B]]” was dropped through a hole in the ceiling. The cyanide-based vapors would kill the entire room within minutes; within thirty, the room was emptied by the ''sonderkomandos'', cleaned, and ready for another group of victims.

Of the death camps, the one at Osweicim, Poland - Auschwitz - was perhaps the most notorious. Auschwitz was three camps: a prisoner-of-war camp (Auschwitz I), a slave-labour camp (Auschwitz III–Buna-Monowitz) and the extermination camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau). The arrivals would disembark the trains at Auschwitz II, where the old, handicapped, infirm, sick, and pregnant women would face a German doctor (among them the notorious [[Joseph Mengele]]) in the ''selektion'', where a flick of a thumb could mean the difference between slave labor in the nearby factory run by I.G. Farben (which took advantage of the forced labor by investing some 700 million Reichsmarks in the project), or to their immediate deaths. Those selected for labor would be worked to death by a combination of hard labor and inadequate food and medical care; a second ''selektion'' of their numbers, if they had survived, would mean a trip to the gas chambers.

===Bystanders===
In recent years much controversy has arisen over when President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] learned what about the Nazis, and what he did or did not do. Switzerland was neutral and accepted in some refugees, but it also made large profits by trading and banking with Germany. The Swiss were forced in the 1990s to make reparation payments.

===Collaborators===
In rounding up Jews the Nazis sometimes had the enthusiastic cooperation of pro-Nazi governments (as in France and Slovakia). A few countries, including Italy and Hungary, tried to stall the Nazis, but the Germans took power directly and seized the Jews. Only Bulgaria and Denmark were largely successful in protecting their Jews.
===Resisters===
Resistance took many forms, from individual acts to hundreds of examples of organized, armed resistance. The most famous episode was the month-long uprising of 60,000 remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. At the Sobibor death camp, an uprising in October 1943 allowed 600 prisoners to escape.

Jews stood virtually alone against the Nazi war machine and those who collaborated with them, receiving no aid or assistance from outside, as well as having no access to arms with which to defend themselves. Further, the Nazis took great care to prevent their victims from knowing their true plans right up to the moment of their deaths; at Babi Yar many had believed they were being transported to a “family work camp” right up to the point of standing before their own mass grave. There was also the fear of reprisals against large numbers of Jews within the ghettos, which also prevented resistance. But word of the unbelievable atrocities of the death camps filtered into places like Warsaw, and as the trains were leaving packed with Jews many saw that resistance was preferable to the death that awaited them.

Nine months after the Warsaw deportations had commenced, and after confirmation that their destination was the Treblinka extermination camp, 24-year-old [[Mordecai Anielewicz]] and his Jewish Resistance began the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] on April 19, 1943, which lasted just over a month.

Jews fought alongside partisans elsewhere in France, the Balkans, and Soviet Russia during the last three years of the war. Uprisings also occurred in two of the death camps, Treblinka and Sobibor; the latter was closed as a result and the site razed to hide the evidence.

===Rescuers===
Rescuers hid potential victims as best they could; the tragic story of [[Anne Frank]] is the most famous. The Danish people managed to ferry their entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden in one night, under the noses of the Nazis. The pope helped protect some Italian Jews; it is still being debated whether or not he could have done much more. The most famous rescuer was Oskar Schindler; —“Schindler’s List” the movie is a tells the true story about of how he saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by setting up factories that produced defective munitions.<ref> For further information, see [http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/schindlers-list.html] </ref>.

In territory occupied by the Germans the situation was bleak for Jews. Their allies were few and resources were meager. Despite this, many put their lives on the line to provide aid and comfort, as well as putting them in hiding or through a network of underground units to get them to safety. In Poland it was punishable by death to aid Jews, yet a “council for the aid of Jews” known as the Zegota rescued about 5,000 men, women, and children, providing hiding places and forged identity papers. A similar number was hidden by French Huguenots in the little town of Le Chamblon-sur-Lignon.
====Vatican====
Although criticized by many for his silence about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Pope [[Pius XII]] hid several hundred inside the Vatican, away from Mussolini and German occupiers and quietly worked behind the scenes to do what they could. The Vatican estimates they were able to save upwards of 150,000 Jews during this horrible time. For those who say the Vatican should have done more to save Jews, it should be noted that they weren't even able to stop the killing of Polish Catholics, of whom more than a million lost their lives, so how could they stop the killing of Jews?
====Wallenburg====
Swedish diplomat [[Raoul Wallenburg]], in an attempt to save the last remaining Jews in Hungary, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944, and working with neutral diplomats and the Vatican, secured the release of several thousand; his efforts at the rescue of Jews would total well over 100,000 by war’s end, including [[Tom Lantos]], a survivor who became a powerful member of the U.S. Congress.
====Schindler====
A Nazi businessman who took advantage of the slave labor conditions to make a personal profit, [[Oskar Schindler]], would use that profit to bribe camp guards and Nazi officials at the Plazow camp to ensure that the workers he had grown to love and admire would survive the end of the war; among the individuals he played cat and mouse with for their lives was the camp's commandant, Amon Goeth, a sadistic man who shot Jews for target practice from his villa and tortured a captured escapee by shooting the prisoners around him. These men and women, who hid Jews out of a sense of common humanity, would not be forgotten: the state of Israel would recognize them with honorary citizenship several years later.

===Liberators===
The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945 — but the question remains as to whether they could have bombed the camps or otherwise stopped the Final Solution.

===Survivors===
The survivors of the Final Solution were very quiet about their experiences until about 1961, when Adolf Eichmann was captured in South America by Israel, tried in Jerusalem, and executed. Since then the Holocaust has become recognized as the most horrible episode of the twentieth20th century, and it has been analyzed in numerous with many books, courses, museums, and movies. The most important museums are the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

===Non-Jewish victims===
Jews were not the only victims of Nazi persecution. <ref> It is estimated that around 6 million Jews were killed during the Final Solution, along with as many as another 6 million non-Jews. [http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/heinrich-himmler.shtml] </ref>
Members of unions, members of the Social Democratic Party, and political dissidents were also sent to the camps; indeed they were among the first ones incarcerated immediately following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Some 20,000 [[Jehovah's Witnesses]] also were rounded up and sent to the camps, primarily because of refusal to register for the draft, swear allegiance to the state, or give the “Heil Hitler” greeting. [[Homosexual]]s were arrested; they were forced to wear a pink triangle on their prison garments. [[Gypsies]] as well were rounded up and imprisoned, and like the Jews, were deliberately marked for killing.

The mentally retarded, the disabled, and the insane were selected for the T-4 Program, which was created in 1939. Dubbed “useless eaters” by S.S. general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, these people were murdered as part of a “euthanasia” campaign, usually by placing them in a special room where a vehicle’s engine provided the carbon monoxide gas that flowed in through a hose in a wall.

Following the outbreak of World War II in [[Poland]], the Nazis killed Polish intelligentsia in territories under their control, politicians, priests, and anyone else deemed part of a Polish leadership; the remainder were deemed slaves to serve their new masters; many were forced to perform hard labor, while many of the children who happened to look Aryan were kidnapped and raised as Germans in German households.

[[Image:Goeth.jpg|right|150px|right|thumb|Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plazow concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. A sadistic man, his recreation was to target and kill individual Jews in the camp with a hunting rifle from the balcony of his villa.]]

==Deaths==
The number of Jews put to death were staggering. Beginning in the summer of 1942 a bare minimum of 960,000 were believed killed at Auschwitz during its three years in operation. At Treblinka, between 750,000-900,000 Jews were killed within 17 months, considering the staff and guards there numbered 120. 600,000 Jews died at Belzac within 10 months by a staff numbering 104. In the eighteen months of its operation, Sobibor killed 250,000.

{| border="1" align="right" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" width="450" style="margin-left:5px"
|-
!colspan="5" align="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: yellow no-repeat scroll top left;"|Jewish Death Statistics during the Holocaust
|-
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Country
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Prior Jewish Population
!align ="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: red no-repeat scroll top left;"|Estimated Number Killed
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Percentage of Total
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Estimated Number of Survivors
|-
|'''Poland'''
|3,300,000
|'''3,000,000'''
|91%
|300,000
|-
|'''Germany'''
|566,000
|'''200,000'''
|36%
|366,000
|-
|'''USSR'''
|3,020,000
|'''1,100,000'''
|36%
|1,920,000
|-
|'''Hungary'''
|800,000
|'''596,000'''
|74%
|204,000
|-
|'''Lithuania'''
|168,000
|'''143,000'''
|85%
|25,000
|-
|'''Estonia'''
|4,500
|'''2,000'''
|44%
|2,500
|-
|'''Latvia'''
|95,000
|'''80,000'''
|84%
|15,000
|-
|'''France'''
|350,000
|'''77,320'''
|22%
|272,680
|-
|'''Austria'''
|185,000
|'''65,000'''
|35%
|120,000
|-
|'''Netherlands'''
|140,000
|'''100,000'''
|71%
|40,000
|-
|'''Belgium'''
|65,700
|'''28,900'''
|45%
|36,800
|-
|'''Romania'''
|342,000
|'''287,000'''
|84%
|55,000
|-
|'''Bohemia Moravia'''
|118,310
|'''71,150'''
|60%
|47,160
|-
|'''Greece'''
|77,380
|'''67,000'''
|87%
|10,380
|-
|'''Czechoslovakia'''
|88,950
|'''71,000'''
|80%
|17,950
|-
|'''Yugoslavia'''
|78,000
|'''63,300'''
|81%
|14,700
|-
|'''Italy'''
|44,500
|'''7,680'''
|17%
|36,820
|-
|'''Bulgaria'''
|50,000
|'''0'''
|0%
|50,000
|-
|'''Denmark'''
|7,800
|'''60'''
|.8%
|7,740
|-
|'''Finland'''
|2,000
|'''7'''
|.03%
|1,993
|-
|'''Norway'''
|1,700
|'''762'''
|45%
|938
|-
|'''TOTAL'''
|'''9,508,340'''
|'''5,962,129'''
|'''63%'''
|'''3,546,211'''
|
|}

==Survivors==
More than nine million people were discovered by the [[Allies]] to have been displaced throughout the European Theater of the war; of these, six million were returned to their native lands. One million refused, citing either a fear of communist persecution or a fear of being discovered to have collaborated with the enemy. The remainder, more than three and a half million Jews, had nothing. For these survivors, life after the war meant searching for loved ones, as well as recovering from the severe effects of malnutrition and disease at the hands of the Nazis.

As to the future of finding homes for the surviving Jews, that was solved in part by both covert and well-publicized efforts to pressure [[Great Britain]] into relinquishing control of [[Palestine]] for the purpose of a Jewish homeland, as well as the relaxing of American immigration laws in 1948 which allowed a large influx of Jewish refugees. So shocking was the Holocaust to the Jewish mindset that it caused a determination of survivors to speed the creation of the State of [[Israel]] in May, 1948, vowing that a repeat of the Holocaust, as well as previous pogroms against the Jews in the past, would not happen again. Since 1948, Israel has fought in four major wars against their neighbors bent on eradicating it, and each time Israel has emerged victorious.

The Allies were just as shocked over the conditions which prevailed at the Nazi death camps, and set up military tribunals as a result. The most famous was the [[Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal|Nürnberg Trials]], taking place 1945-1946 near the site of the Nazi mass rallies. For the first time in history, an international tribunal would try the 22 major living Nazis for crimes against humanity; all but one would be found guilty, and more than half would suffer death by hanging.
==Punishment==
Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide as the Russians were capturing Berlin. Himmler was captured in 1945 and committed suicide before his war crimes trial began. The main war criminals were tried at the International War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremburg in 1945–1947, and at smaller trials throughout Europe. The Holocaust was mentioned at the trials, but the major allegation against defendants was the systematic planning of an unjust war.<ref> The Far East War Crimes Trials were held from 1946 to 1948, and resulted in the conviction of 25 Japanese generals and high officials accused of crimes against peace. Over 2,000 local and regional trials convicted 4,000 Japanese officers accused of mistreating prisoners and civilians.</ref> Many Nazis fled justice, reaching Argentina or other dispant locations. [[Adolf Eichmann]], a chief architect of the Holocaust, was captured while hiding in Argentina under an assumed name, brought to Israel, and put on trial in 1961. He was found guilty, and suffered the first and only death penalty carried out in Israel’s history. Other Nazis would eventually be brought to trial: [[Klaus Barbie]], the “Butcher of Lyon”, was tried in France in 1987, as well as [[Maurice Papon]] a decade later for collaborating with the Nazis. These trials brought to new generations an awareness of the Holocaust.

==Etymology==
The word '''Holocaust''' comes from the Greek word ''holokaustos'' (''holos'': complete, and ''kaustos'': a sacrificial or burnt offering to a god); the [[Hebrew]] word ''hurban'' (destruction) was also used, and and survivors have used both to refer to what seemed to be the complete and utter destruction of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, specifically in the crematoria of the [[concentration camps|extermination camps]] built for that purpose. In Hebrew, the Holocaust is known by the word "''Shoah''."

==Books and film==
*''[[Schindler's List]]''

==See also==
[[Image:Lovis Corinth Römische Campagna.jpg|thumb|Römische Campagna by Lovis Corinth; returned to the heirs of a Jew in 2007.]]
* [[Holocaust denial]]
*[[Holocaust Memorial Day]]
*[[Kindertransport]]
* [[History of Poland]]
* [[Bergen-Belsen]], one of the main killing camps
* [[Heinrich Himmler]], in charge of the [[SS]]
* [[SS]], in charge of the killing

==External links==
:[http://www.h-net.org/~holoweb/ H-HOLOCAUST], daily discussion group, edited by scholars; numerous book reviews and reports on current scholarship
:[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ Holocaust Encyclopedia]
:[http://www.ushmm.org/ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] in Washington, D.C.
:[http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yevtushenko.htm ''Babi Yar'', poem by Yevgeni Yevtushenko]
:[http://www.hmh.org/ Houston Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/ Florida Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.va-holocaust.com/ Virginia Holocaust Museum]
:[http://holocausteducationcenter.org/ Holocaust Awareness Museum & Educational Center of Philadelphia; America's First Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Nuremberg/Nuremberg.html#search Searchable list of 2300 victims from Nuremberg]
:[http://www.holocaustcentre.net/ Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Newark, England]
:[http://www.mhmc.ca/ Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center Museum]
:[http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/en German Government's Memorial To Jews Murdered During Holocaust]
:[http://www.amcha.org/ AMCHA: Israeli Association of Holocaust Survivors]
:[http://www.hitler.org/writings/first_writing/ Hitler's first writing about Jewry.] On 16 September, 1919.
{{Clear}}

====Notes====
<references/>

==Bibliography==
===Surveys and victims===
* Bloxham, Donald and Kushner, Tony. ''The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches.'' (2005). 238 pp.
* Brandon, Ray, and Wendy Lower, eds. ''The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization.'' (2008). 378 pp. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24078 online review]
* Dawidowicz, Lucy. ''The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945'' (1986)
** '' Hitler's War Against the Jews: A Young Reader's Version of the War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz'' (1978) [http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-War-Against-Jews-Dawidowicz/dp/0874412226/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979155&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]
* Edelheit, Abraham et al. ''History Of The Holocaust: A Handbook and Dictionary'' (1995) 544pp, a standard reference work [http://www.questia.com/read/9134049?title=History%20of%20the%20Holocaust%3a%20A%20Handbook%20and%20Dictionary online edition]
* Friedlander, Saul. ''Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1933-1945'' (2009) abridged version of standard 2 volume history:
** Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945'' (2007), the standard scholarly history [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Extermination-Nazi-Germany-1939-1945/dp/0060190434/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
** Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Persecution:1933-1939'' (1998)
* Friedman, Saul S. ''A History of the Holocaust.'' (2004). 494 pp.
* Gilbert, Martin. ''Never Again: The History of the Holocaust'' (2000) [http://www.amazon.com/Never-Again-Holocaust-Martin-Gilbert/dp/0789304090/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Gilbert, Martin. ''The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War'' (1987) [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-History-Europe-During-Second/dp/0805003487/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]
* Gilbert, Martin. ''The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust'' (2002)[http://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Atlas-Holocaust-Historical-Atlases/dp/0415281466/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]
* Gutman, Israel. ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'' (4 vol 1990), a standard reference work
* Lacqueur, Walter, ed. ''The Holocaust Encyclopedia'' (2001).
* Landau, Ronnie. ''The Nazi Holocaust'' (2002)
* Marrus, Michael A. ''The Holocaust in History'' (1989)
* Niewyk, Donald, and Francis Nicosia. ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.'' (2000) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99854126&oplinknum=4 online edition]; [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=289191002135231 online review]
* Rosen, Philip. ''Dictionary of the Holocaust: Biography, Geography and Terminology.'' (1997)
* Rothkirchen, Livia. ''The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust.'' (2006). 447 pp.
* Spector, Shmuel ed., ''The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life: Before and During the Holocaust'' (2001).
* Yahil, Leni. ''The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry'', (1990).

===Perpetrators===
* Browning, Christopher. ''Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers'' (2000)
* Burleigh, Michael. ''The Third Reich: A New History.'' 2000. 864 pp., stresses central role of antisemitism.
* Dawidowicz, Lucy. ''The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945'' (1986)
* Friedlander, Henry. ''The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.'' (1995) 445 pp. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=2249957902770 online review];[http://www.questia.com/read/9253469?title=The%20Origins%20of%20Nazi%20Genocide%3a%20From%20Euthanasia%20to%20the%20Final%20Solution online edition]
* Friedlander, Saul. ''Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939'' (1998)), the standard scholarly history
* Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945'' (2007), the standard scholarly history [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Extermination-Nazi-Germany-1939-1945/dp/0060190434/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Gaunt, David; Levine, Paul A.; and Palosuo, Laura, eds. ''Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.'' (2004). 519 pp.
* Goldhagen, Daniel Joseph. ''Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'' (1997).
* Graml, Hermann. ''Antisemitism in the Third Reich'' (1992).
* Gutman, Israel, ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,'' 4 vol (1989)
* Johnson, Eric A. ''Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Terror-Gestapo-Ordinary-Germans/dp/0465049087/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-13 excerpt and text search]
* Lewy, Guenter. ''The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Persecution-Gypsies-Guenter-Lewy/dp/0195142403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979549&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Levy, Richard, ed. ''Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution'' (2005)
* Lower, Wendy. ''Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine.'' (2005). 307 pp.
* Wachsmann, Nikolaus. "Looking into the Abyss: Historians and the Nazi Concentration Camps," ''European History Quarterly,'' 4 2006; vol. 36: pp. 247 - 278. fulltext in Sage; historiography
* Wistrich, Robert S. ''Hitler and the Holocaust.'' (2001). 295 pp.

===Memory===
* Bartov, Omer. ''Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity.'' (2000). 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-507723-0. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=23289980364228 online review]; [http://www.amazon.com/Mirrors-Destruction-Genocide-Modern-Identity/dp/0195151844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979627&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Bloxham, Donald. ''Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory.'' (2001) 292pp ISBN 978-0-19-820872-3. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=122091071198412 online review]
* Carrier, Peter. ''Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Véd'Hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin.'' (2005) 267 pp.
* Douglas, Lawrence. ''The Memory of Judgment: The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust'' (2000) [http://books.google.com/books?id=hiU2C0maeAMC&pg=PP1&dq=intitle:The+intitle:Memory+intitle:of+intitle:Judgment+inauthor:douglas&num=30&as_brr=0&sig=MiETAxY1KKnru9emnC0x3IXWJIE excerpt and text search]
* Greenspan, Henry. ''On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History.'' (1998) 220 pp. ISBN 978-0-275-95718-6. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3035937424750 online review]
* Haggith, Tony and Newman, Joanna, ed. ''Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television.'' 2005. 317 pp.
* Mikhman, Dan. ''Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches, and Fundamental Issues'' (2003)
* Roseman, Mark. ''A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Past-Hiding-Memory-Survival-Germany/dp/031242065X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979685&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Rosen, Philip. and Nina Apfelbaum. ''Bearing Witness: A Resource Guide to Literature, Poetry, Art, Music, and Videos by Holocaust Victims and Survivors'' (2001) [http://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Witness-Literature-Holocaust-Survivors/dp/0313310769/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195980447&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Stone, Dan, ed. ''The Historiography of the Holocaust.'' (2004). 573 pp
* Waxman, Zoe Vania. ''Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Holocaust-Representation-Historical-Monographs/dp/0199206384/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195981167&sr=1-3 excerpt and text search]
* Wiesel, Elie, and Robert Franciosi. ''Elie Wiesel: Conversations'' (2002) [http://www.amazon.com/Elie-Wiesel-Conversations-Literary/dp/1578065038/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979990&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Weisel, Elie. ''Night'' (1999).

===Reactions and memory in U.S.===
* Abzug, Robert H. ed. ''America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945: A Brief Documentary History'' (1999) [http://www.amazon.com/America-Views-Holocaust-1933-1945-Documentary/dp/0312218192/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195981035&sr=1-6 excerpt and text search]
* Lipstadt, Deborah E. ''Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945'' (1993). [http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Belief-American-Coming-Holocaust/dp/0029191610/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979711&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Newton, Verne W., ed. ''FDR and the Holocaust'' (1996). [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Franklin-Roosevelt-Institute-Diplomatic/dp/0312122268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979739&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Novick, Peter. ''The Holocaust in American Life'' (1999). [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-American-Life-Peter-Novick/dp/0618082328/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979766&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Wyman, David. ''The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945.'' (1984). [http://www.amazon.com/Abandonment-Jews-America-Holocaust-1941-1945/dp/159558174X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979795&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]

===Primary sources===
* Aroneanu, Eugene and Thomas Whissen, eds. ''Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler's Death Camps'' (1996) 176 pp, [http://www.questia.com/read/26185130?title=Inside%20the%20Concentration%20Camps%3a%20Eyewitness%20Accounts%20of%20Life%20in%20Hitler's%20Death%20Camps online edition]
* Greene, Joshua M, and Shiva Kumar, eds. ''Witness: Voices from the Holocaust'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/WITNESS-Holocaust-Joshua-M-Greene/dp/0684865262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979830&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Klemperer, Victor. ''I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1942-1945-Diary/dp/0375756973/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979856&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search vol 2]
* Kremer, S. Lillian, ed. ''Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work'' (2002).
* Siedlecki, Janusz Nel, et als. ''We Were in Auschwitz'' (2000).
* Szpilman, Wladyslaw. ''The Pianist'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/Pianist-Read-Great-Movie/dp/0752864297/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979914&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]

==International Justice==

* Pritchard, R. John, “War Crimes, International Criminal Law, and the Postwar Trials in Europe and Asia.,” Iin Loyd E. Lee ed., ''World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s Aftermath, with General Themes,'' edited by Loyd E. Lee (19987).

===Video===
* “Schindler’s List” (DVD and VHS) (1993).
* [http://college.usc.edu/vhi/ USC Shoah Foundation], largest video archive of testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses,

[[category:European History]]
[[Category:World War II]]
[[Category:Genocide]]
[[Category:Holocaust| ]]
[[Category:Nazis]]

Adolf Hitler

2010-05-28T11:46:52Z

Lordsvulcan:

[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|The [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racism|racist]] Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.<ref>http://creation.com/darwinism-and-the-nazi-race-holocaust</ref>]]
'''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]], [[socialism|socialist]] and Atheist.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref><ref>http://mises.org/daily/1937</ref><ref>http://www.hourofthetime.com/socialist.htm</ref> Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the [[Genocide|mass extermination]] of the [[satanist 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==
[[File:Hitler Roses.jpg|thumb|Roses by Adolf Hitler.]]
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, [[Austria]]. Hitler's father, Alois (born 1837), was a customs official who was himself born illegitimate, carrying for a time his mother's name, Schicklgruber. By 1876 he had his baptismal entry corrected in his church records, establishing his father as Johan Heidler, which was altered slightly to Hitler.

When his father retired the family moved to Linz, Austria, where it remained a favorite for young Adolf for the rest of his life, and where he gave his wish to be buried. When Alois died in 1903 he left enough of a pension to support his wife and children; Adolf would take his and live off of it in Vienna after leaving school, dreaming of becoming an artist. Although somewhat competent as a painter of landscapes and architecture, his renderings of humans were considered “lifeless” and “crude” by the standards of the Academy of Fine Arts, and his application was rejected twice. Remaining in [[Vienna]], he moved from one cheap flop house to another, painting postcards and advertisements to earn a meager living after his allowance had dried up. By then he had developed traits which characterized his life as a whole: secretiveness, loneliness, a Spartan mode of everyday life, and a hatred of the cosmopolitan, multinational character that was the makeup of Vienna. ''He never sought a proper job or regular employment. Instead he immersed himself in the works of [[Hegel]], [[Nietzsche]], and the anti-Semitic writings of the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He loved the operas of Wagner, and the stories of the Nordic Gods... In early 1910, he entered a shelter for the homeless, populated in the main by poor Jews, on Meldemenstrasse, and was eating at soup kitchens. By this time he had pawned all his belongings. '' <ref> [http://socyberty.com/history/young-adolf-the-adolescent-hitler-and-beyond/ Young Adolf: The Adolescent Hitler and Beyond.] </ref>

==Who And What He Was==
[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote famously, and most eloquently about Hitler in 1998:
<blockquote>At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant?</blockquote>

<blockquote>Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support. Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.</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>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>The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?<ref name="time">http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html</ref></blockquote>

[[Image:Cupid Complaining to Venus by Lucas Cranach.jpg|120px|left]]''One of the best-loved paintings in the National Gallery - an exquisite vision of Venus and Cupid by the greatest artist of the Reformation - once belonged to Hitler, it has been revealed. New evidence has come to light that Lucas Cranach's Cupid Complaining to Venus, currently on loan to an exhibition in Bristol, hung on the sitting-room wall of his flat in Munich.'' <ref>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/28/art.secondworldwar Hitler owned painting now in National Gallery]</ref>

{{Clear}}

===War===
[[Image:Hitler munich1914.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler in the crowd in Munich, 1914, reacting to the news of Germany's entry in the First World War.]]
By 1913 Hitler was in Munich, Germany, with war clouds on the horizon. Classified as unfit for service in the Austrian army (possibly by faking, as he did not like the thought of serving Austria) in 1914, he volunteered for the German army, joining the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, greeting the war with enthusiasm, and finding the military discipline and comradeship satisfying. He served during the entire [[First World War]] as a messenger carrying dispatches between units, and often at the front lines under fire; he was wounded in 1916, and gassed in 1918. His bravery during this time earned him the [[Iron Cross]], 2nd Class, in December, 1914, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class – a rare decoration for a corporal. But the gassing would take him out of the war and into a hospital, where he would be told the heart-wrenching news of Germany’s defeat the following November.

==Path to power==
After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain. There was much discontent among demobilized veterans because of the lack of employment. The German military had felt it had not been defeated; indeed, the German Army stood on foreign soil when the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918 and not a square inch of German soil had been occupied. This was despite the fact that the German Army's strongest position, the Hindenburg line, had been broken by the Allies, and the German Army itself was in full retreat. However, the Army felt they had done their job, and the nation had been "stabbed in the back" by a gang of traitors who sought to lay hands on the Fatherland. The "myth" that Germany had been defeated was the "big lie" Hitler spoke of, as if repeating it often enough would cause people to believe it.

After his discharge from the hospital, Hitler acted as an army political agent, assigned in Munich to gather information on the various political parties which had spring up amid the social chaos following Germany’s defeat. In September, 1919, he was given orders to investigate the relatively-minor German Workers’ Party (''Deutsche Arbeiterpartei''); intrigued by the party’s apparatus and its racial, pan-German nationalism, he joined, becoming its 55th member; he left the army soon after and devoted himself to improving the party’s propaganda, as well as his own position within.

Conditions in Germany fostered the development of the party. Economic woes brought widespread discontent, added to the furor surrounding the loss of the war and the harsh terms heaped upon Germany by the Allied Powers in the Versailles Peace Treaty. Bavaria’s traditional separatism from the central government in Berlin made current conditions especially sharp, and Hitler was savvy enough to take full advantage of them. When he joined, he found the party ineffective in leadership and uncertain as to its aims; he accepted the party program, but regarded it as a means to an end. He caused friction with other members of the party, and their attempts to control him caused a threat of resignation; realizing that the future of the party now depended on Hitler, who clearly had a talent of organization, fund collecting, and above all, speaking, they declined to accept it; from July, 1921 Hitler was regarded as the party leader with nearly unlimited power. From his party newspaper, ''Völkischer Beobachter'' (“Popular Observer”), he spewed out endless propaganda. His meetings where he spoke grew from handfuls to hundreds, and then on to thousands. A man of charismatic personality, he quickly attracted a circle of loyal and devoted followers: Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess.

Munich was also a gathering place for former servicemen dissatisfied with conditions in the country; members of the Freikorps, which had been organized after the war from army units that refused to return to civilian life; and those civilians who plotted against the republic. Many of these men joined the Nazi Party. Among them was a staff member of the district command who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler, Ernst Röhm, a pudgy man with a scared face who saw his own ambition in helping further Hitler’s rise within the party. Röhm recruited what came to be known as the “Brown Shirts”, the violent squads used to attack socialists and communists, and to protect party meetings whenever Hitler was speaking. By 1921 they were organized into a private army called the ''Sturmabteilung'', abbreviated to S.A.

==The Beer Hall Putsch==
Germany in 1923 was marked by social and political unrest caused by hyperinflation. In this time Hitler was able convince [[Erich Ludendorff]], an accomplished general and leader of the German forces in the first World War, to join him in a coup d'etat (''Putsch'' in German). When Hitler learned that the nationalist prime minister of Bavaria was giving a speech to 3000 officials in one of Munich's biggest beer halls (the Haufbrau Haus), he ordered his paramilitaries to surround the building. Hitler went inside and took the prime minister hostage, announced a revolution, and attempted to convince him to join the coup against Berlin and become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but informed the nation via radio later that night that he did not support Hitler. The prime minister also informed the federal government in Berlin; the putsch had begun to fail.

The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength to regain the momentum. In the ensuing fight between Hitler's marchers and a cordon of police and army units at least 14 Nazi supporters and three policemen were killed and hundreds wounded. Ludendorff handed himself over to the authorities, while Hitler fled soon after the fighting began. Hitler was arrested a few days later at a friend's house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison (he would do eight months). <ref>http://history1900s.about.com/cs/thirdreich/a/beerhallputsch_2.htm</ref><ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/putsch2.htm</ref> The Bavarian prime minister, who foiled the plan, was killed in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives".

===''Mein Kampf''===

Hitler had his inner circle as frequent visitors in his prison cell, which was made more comfortable due to his celebrity. While there, he dictated to Rudolf Hess the first volume of ''Mein Kampf'' (“My Struggle”), his political autobiography and a compendium of his many ideas.

Hitler believed in the inequality of the races, nations, and individuals as part of the natural order of mankind, and chief among them was the exalted “Aryan race”, and the greatest of the Aryans were the Germans. It was the German, according to Hitler, that gave the world civilization and the arts; to safeguard the German people as a race (the “Volk”), they would need to be united under a single leader (the Führer), where they would be protected from their three principle enemies: Marxism, which included social democracy as well as communism; democracy and its mob-rule, as shown by the failings of the Weimar Republic; and above all what Hitler called the poisoners of humanity, the Jews. “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition,” he wrote in 1919. “Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he told the world that the Jew was the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

From "My Struggle":
{{cquote|The Jew "... he blares out his merits to the rest of the world until people really begin to believe in them. Anyone who does not believe in them is doing him a bitter injustice. In a short time he begins to twist things around to make it look as if all the injustice in the world had always been done to him and not the other way around." <ref> [http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch11.html Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.]</ref> }}

{{cquote| Hitler portrays Jews as leaders in politics and banking, both groups seeking to strengthen their cause, [[Zionism]], to ensure Jewish domination. From his Social Darwinist perspective, Hitler perceived a racial war as inevitable and he sought to halt the "[[Jewish]] drive towards world conquest"... As Berlin collapsed around him, Adolf asserted: "Out of the ruins of our towns and monuments hatred will grow against those finally responsible for everything, International Jewry." <ref> [http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=32043&amid=30237234 Mein Kampf – The Text, its Themes and Hitler’s Vision] Robert Carr dissects a book frequently referred to but seldom read. </ref>
}}

==Rebuilding the Nazi Party==
[[Image:Hitler.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Hitler speaking; he would often employ physical gesturing to emphasize a point.]]
[[Image:Hitler-3.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in car, saluting passing S.A. at one of many parades.]]
Internal dissension within the party caused it to languish while Hitler was in prison. When he was released he saw difficulties in the country that had not existed before the Putsch, namely currency reform that brought economic stability, and the scaling back of the war reparations as a result of the Dawes Plan. Hitler was also forbidden to speak in public, which remained in force until 1928; however, he wasn’t about to stop his rebuilding of the party nor of his re-establishing his own position within it as leader, despite Gregor Strasser’s opposition in northern Germany. By 1927 the number of Nazis was in the hundreds of thousands.

A new period of political and economic instability with the onset of the Great Depression which threw millions out of work in Europe and North America. To campaign against the [[Young Plan]] (a second renegotiation of war reparations payments) Hitler made an alliance with one of Germany’s leading nationalists, Alfred Hugenberg, whose newspapers enabled Hitler to reach a national audience for the first time. The alliance also had another advantage: it enabled him to seek support from many in business and industry who controlled funds going into politics, and who themselves were desirous of seeing Germany under the control of a strong anti-Soviet and anti-Communist regime. The subsidies Hitler received placed the Nazy Party on a strong financial footing, enabling him to make his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed in his faith that Germany would recover from its suffering and be a great nation once more. The alliance with the industrialists also demonstrated another aspect of Hitler, a skill of effectively using those that would use him, which many would discover when it was too late.

The electoral strength of the Nazis grew during the Depression, as unceasing propaganda accused the government of failing to improve conditions for the working man. By the fall of 1930 the Nazis captured more than 18 percent of the vote, compared to just 2.6 percent in 1928. Hitler captured 36.8 percent of the vote when he opposed Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election; his mass following put him in such a strong position that he entered a series of closed-door intrigues with Franz von Papen, Oskar Hindenburg, and Otto Meissner, all sharing a fear and loathing of a communist government. Despite the party losing votes in the November, 1932 election, Hitler insisted on nothing less than the office of chancellor for himself. For him, it was all or nothing. Hindenburg offered it to him on January 30, 1933.

==In power==
Almost immediately, Hitler established himself as dictator. Less than a month after taking office, on February 27 the Reichstag building was set on fire under mysterious circumstances (but officially blamed on a feeble-minded Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe); Hitler soon after succeeded in getting several decrees passed removing much of the guarantees of freedom in the name of state security, and which also allowed an intensified campaign of violence against dissidents. Incredibly, in a special election set in those conditions on March 5, the Nazis pulled 43.9 percent of the vote. On March 21, the new Reichstag assembled at the Potsdam Church, as much a show of unity between the old guard under Hindenburg and the Nazis as it was a show of peace. Two days later the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler full powers; with the exception of the Nazis, all other political parties, including those which had helped pass the Enabling Act, ceased to exist within three months. Many of their leaders were tossed in concentration camps.

===Night of the Long Knives===
[[Image:HitlerRohm1933.JPG|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with Ernst Röhm in 1933]]
Hitler, however, did not wish to start an immediate revolution. He still needed the support of the one agency he needed to implement his ideas: the army. But he did have one growing problem that was a thorn in the army’s side, the million-plus men of the S.A. and their leader, Ernst Röhm, who wanted nothing less than the merger of the S.A. into the army, with himself in overall command. At first, Hitler tried getting Röhm’s support by persuasion, but Hitler’s inner circle was for removing him by any means possible. On June 29, 1934, Hitler ordered a purge, flew towards a resort near Munich where a number of S.A. leaders were vacationing, and had them all arrested; many would be shot without trial. Refusing to shoot himself when offered, Röhm was killed in his cell at Dachau, his last words, ironically, “Mein Führer, mein Führer!” <ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/roehm.htm</ref><ref>http://www.adolfhitler.ws/lib/nsdap/Rohm.html</ref><ref>http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/roehm/index.html</ref>
On July 13, Hitler gave speech in the Reichstag, announcing that some seventy-four individuals had been shot for threatening the stability of the Reich.
:''"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people…It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." ''
Hitler also used this event to settle his account with other opponents, such as Georg Strasser, who stood for a more socialist and less racist national socialism, and the former Bavarian prime minister who foiled the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Satisfied that the S.A. leadership was thoroughly broken up (thousands of S.A. members were either arrested or killed that night), the army approved of Hitler’s actions. Hindenburg died a few days later on August 2, and Hitler merged the office of president with the chancellorship, and with it the supreme command of the German armed forces. During this time the world was slowly recovering economically from the Depression, but it quickened in Germany, coincidently with Hitler’s rise to power. Taking credit for the recovery made him very popular, bringing him a 90 percent approval rating in a voter plebiscite that year.

===Beginnings of expansion===
In matters of state, the running of domestic affairs was left to subordinates, which was something Hitler had little attention for. Foreign policy always peaked his interest, in so much as to the advantages of a “Greater Germany”, which was his chief ambition. The first part of realizing this, according to ''Mein Kampf'', was to be a reunion of the German peoples within Europe; the second would be an expansion of Germany to the east (lebensraum). Expanding would mean a renewed conflict with the Slavic peoples, whom Hitler intended to serve as slaves to the “New German Order.” To follow through on his ambitions, he would have to remove Poland and the Soviet Union as countries; France also would have to be stabilized in the west, as she was Germany’s enemy for more than a century. He counted as possible allies Italy, with its fascist government under [[Benito Mussolini]], and Britain, whom he regarded as having a similar, Teutonic heritage.
[[Image:Hitler6-thumb.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with his dog, Blondie.]]
Before any of his ambitions could take place, there was one thing he detested which needed immediate removal: the restrictions placed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Posing as a man of peace to allay suspicions, he insisted that he was a champion of Europe wishing only for the removal of the inequalities leveled by the treaty, and posturing as a shield against Bolshevism. In October, 1933, he had Germany withdraw from the [[League of Nations]]. The following January he signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland. His individual repudiations of parts of the treaty were followed by offers of negotiations for new agreements, while maintaining Germany’s limited ambitious nature.

While this was going on, Germany was steadily building up the armed forces. Rigorous training using wooden guns and trucks marked as “tanks” got needed battlefield training for officers. Potential fighter pilots began their training in gliders at public demonstrations – Germany, under terms of the treaty, was not allowed an air force – and later they would fly in new civilian stunt planes and transports, which on the drawing board were designed to be rapidly turned into fighters and bombers. Conscription was introduced in January, 1935, and in June of that year Hitler successfully signed a naval treaty with Britain, giving him rights to a respectable navy; but even while the ink was drying, Germany was secretly building a large U-boat fleet.

The matter of reuniting the German peoples came into being in July, 1934, and here Hitler overreached. German organizations were covertly aiding Austrian Nazis in the overthrow of their government, culminating in an attempted revolt as well as murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. When the attempt clearly failed, Hitler denied involvement. In January, 1935, a plebecite was introduced in the Saarland; more than 90 percent voted to return the territory to Germany. Then in March, 1936, came his greatest slap to the Versailles Treaty: against the advice of his generals, and in open defiance of France and Britain, he ordered troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Germany was once again becoming the leading power in continental Europe. By October, 1936, Germany had signed an alliance with Italy, proclaiming a “Rome-Berlin axis,” followed by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. All three countries would sign a single, mutual alliance pact, the following year.

===Health care in Nazi Germany===

According to Michael H. Kater "physicians became Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazis they did more in the service of the nefarious regime than any of their extra-professional peers."<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=lDMIHDTLEN4C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Reich+Minister+of+the+Interior%2Bhealth%2Bcivilian+patient&source=bl&ots=2lLhun_7PE&sig=olfzxYKJAswVjjIEqjBcZPKhCXM&hl=en&ei=3D2MSsrZAZGeMLeq7JMO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=&f=false Doctors Under Hitler] By Michael H. Kater, pp. 4-5.</ref><ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=NnPBlkKk8AQC&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=physicains+became+nazified+much+thoroughly+and+sooner&source=bl&ots=sWUPklUojC&sig=fAJrGFwHYn-0gJDKPWLERHikAY4&hl=en&ei=GUaMStjmKIfaNb66rZMO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false Atrocities on trial: historical perspectives on the politics of prosecuting war crimes]
By Patricia Heberer, Jürgen Matthäus], p. 110.</ref><ref>[http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v073/73.1marrus.html The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial in Historical Context] Michael Robert Marrus, Bulletin of the History of Medicine,Volume 73, Number 1, Spring 1999, pp. 106-123, E-ISSN: 1086-3176 Print ISSN: 0007-5140 [http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Moral%20Issues%20in%20Medicine/Human%20Experimentation/Nuremberg%20Doctors%27%20Trial.html]</ref> After 1933, physicians joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than did any other profession. By 1935, almost a third of the non-Jewish German physicians belonged to the Nazi Party. From 1925 to 1944, the per cent of doctors in the party was almost three times as high as in the population as a whole. <ref>Michael H. Kater, ‘’The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945’’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.</ref>

The National Association of Sickness Fund Physicians [http://healthcare-economist.com/2008/04/24/health-care-around-the-world-germany/] was established in 1933 as a national bargaining unit to replace the numerous, more local, associations with which sickness funds had negotiated in the past. Thus, several thousand sickness funds were forced to deal with a single organization, or [[single payer]], that held a legal monopoly over medical services. The drive by the medical profession to transform the organization and delivery of [[health care]] services from self-governing sickness funds to physician-controlled services was complete.<ref>[http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/76/1/78.pdf Social Medicine vs Professional Dominance: The German Experience], Donald W. Light, PhD, Stephan Liebfried, PhD, and Floran Tennstedt, PhD.</ref>

==Anschluss==

Removed from their offices in January 1938 were Hjalmar Schacht (economic ministry); Werner von Fritsch (soldiers’ representative); and Konstantin von Neurath (foreign office); the reason being was they were not fully accepting of Nazism. Beginning his plans of German conquest, he started with Austria. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, was invited to Berchtesgaden in February, where he was browbeaten and forced to sign an agreement placing Austrian Nazis in the government. When Schuschnigg resisted and announced a plebiscite for Austrian voters concerning independence, Hitler ordered German troops into Austria, completely taking over the country within days. His return to Vienna was in triumph; enthusiastic crowds greeted him by the tens of thousands, in sharp contrast to the scenes of privation he had gone through there in his youth. Austria was annexed (Anschluss) to the Reich a short time later.

While the Anschluss was going on, Hitler was speaking in friendly terms with Czechoslovakia; nearly as soon as Austria ceased to exist, Hitler proceeded with his plans against the Czechs. The northwestern region of Czechoslovakia was the Sudetenland, inhabited by a German minority, and the leader of them, Konrad Henlein, was instructed to make impossible demands for those Germans on the Czech government. In the interest of preventing a general war (which Hitler wanted), Mussolini and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain concluded a peaceful agreement in Munich on September 30, giving Hitler the Sudetenland without firing a shot. Chamberlain would return to Britain, waving the agreement signed between himself and Hitler, declaring it to be “peace for our time”, but his act of appeasement would ensure the peace would last only a few more months. Despite assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demands, “Czechia”, as the remainder of Czechoslovakia was called, became a German protectorate on March 15, 1939, when Hitler ordered it occupied. Just over a week later, Lithuania was forced to cede to Germany the territory of Memel (Klaipeda), on the border of East Prussia.

==Poland==
Poland’s turn was next, and listening to the rumblings was France and Britain, which signed guarantees of mutual assistance to the Polish nation should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler also signed pacts: a “Pact of Steel” with Italy, strengthening the alliance between Rome and Berlin, and then a treaty that caught many off-guard: a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23. A secret clause in the pact allowed for the simultaneous invasion of Poland, and the division of the country in the center from north to south. Poland was invaded on September 1; two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Hitler assumed his own war strategy. Poland was conquered within weeks, and when a desired peace accord with Britain failed to materialize, he ordered the army to prepare for a western offensive. Norway was invaded and occupied, forestalling a British move on that country; Denmark was occupied by April, 1940. Hitler than adopted General Erich von Manstien’s plan for an offensive against France itself, which would move through neutral Belgium’s Ardenne Forest on May 10, taking that country as a matter of convenience, as well as avoiding the static fortifications of France’s Maginot Line. The German forces, extremely successful in their operations, reached the coastal ports on the English Channel in 10 days; Holland and Belgium both surrendered within days. But south of Dunkirk was where the army was ordered to halt. Hitler had hoped even at this stage in the battle that Britain would commit to peace; instead, the halting of the German army allowed the British to remove 170,000 fighting men.

On June 10, Italy entered the war as German tanks were sweeping across northern France. Hitler signed an armistice with France on June 22, the signing taking place in the same rail car at the same site where the Germans surrendered in 1918.

Having failed in getting the British to sign an armistice, Hitler prepared his forces for “Operation Sea Lion,” the invasion of Britain. However, the Luftwaffe was defeated in its attempt to gain air superiority over British airspace, also known as the Battle Of Britain, which forced the permanent postponement of Sealion.

Facing the failure of the British to give in, Hitler started to prepare to double-cross his erstwhile partner in the Poland conquest, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Then Mussolini invaded Greece, got bogged down in the Balkans, and the threat loomed that he would lose his whole army there. Hitler found it necessary to come to his aid, while at the same time taking direct control of Yugoslavia in the wake of the overthrow of the pro-Nazi government.

==Barbarossa==
The attack on Soviet Russia began June 22, 1941. Rapid in its advancement, the German army captured a large swath of territory between the Baltic and Black seas, and captured close to 3,000,000 prisoners. But Hitler, already micro-managing military operations, became overbearing to his generals; he preferred to go after many targets, while his generals argued for a single objective. A few miles in front of Moscow, the German army was halted by a Russian offensive in December, as well as something he had absolutely no control over: the severe Russian winter.

In the lands already occupied by German forces, S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler was preparing the ground for Hitler’s new German order. Expelling the Jews from Germany was the first step, and this was carried out by laws and decrees beginning in 1933; the Germans would switch to outright force in 1939, as Jews were first deported en-masse to Poland, then walled into ghettos after the occupation began. By 1941, a policy crafted under S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich had changed expulsion for extermination in what was called "a final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). The system of concentration camps was supplemented by the creation of specialized killing centers in the occupied countries, especially in Poland, where camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzac “processed” thousands of victims daily. Some six million Jews died during what was called the [[Holocaust]], as well as an additional five million Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped, the aged, and many others that the Nazis considered “subhuman” in accordance with German racial policies.<ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm</ref>

==Beginning of the end==
[[Image:Adolf_hitler6.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in 1944, by now looking tired and strained.]]
Hitler grew increasingly strained by the end of 1942, depending on large amounts of drugs supplied by his physician, Theodor Morell, as a result of the twin defeats of El Alamein (which he lost the bulk of his Afrika corps to British general Montgomery), and Stalingrad (where he lost an entire army of 250,000 men to the Russians). He spent more time in his headquarters in East Prussia, and his time in the public eye ceased to exist. He refused to visit bombed German cities, and, as with Stalingrad, refused to allow German armies to withdraw from the battlefield when the situation was lost. Still, he could make stunning, decisive decisions when called for, such as the commando raid that resulted in the rescue of Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans in July, 1943.

But the defeat of Germany in the war was looming closer. Hitler’s relations with his leading commanders grew strained, the more so as he allowed units of the S.S. to take positions traditionally held by the army. The line at the eastern front was slowly being pushed back by the Soviets, while in the Atlantic his U-boats campaign had faltered. German cities were constantly being bombed, and a successful invasion on the Normandy coast of France in June, 1944 marked the beginning of the end.

===Assassination attempt===
[[Image:NWT Hitler dead.jpg|left|200px|thumb|Hitler's death as covered by the ''New York Times'', May 2, 1945.]]
Seeing Germany’s chances of surviving the war were desperate, a group of officers plotted to assassinate Hitler, planning several attempts in 1943-44, but nearly successful on July 20, 1944, when a bomb hidden in a briefcase by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg went off under a table that Hitler and others were leaning over; four were killed outright, several suffered injuries, but Hitler escaped relatively unharmed (the bomb itself was set down away from Hitler behind a solid oak table leg, saving him). The conspirators were quickly rounded up; Stauffenberg was shot. The remainder were put on show trials and condemned to hang on meat hooks with piano wire. It was said that Hitler enjoyed watching film of their executions. As a result of the bomb, Nazi members were employed at key positions within the army, removing any trace of the army’s independence.

Within months nearly all of the territory occupied by Germany was now in Allied hands. A last offensive in December, 1944 to take the port of Antwerp, Belgium, failed. Hitler had by them grown ill; his hopes for a German victory bordered on the fantastical and the imagination. By January, 1945 he had moved into his command bunker in Berlin, where he gave orders deploying fictional divisions to counter the ever-closer Soviets. When all seemed lost, he gave out his final orders: first, appointing Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of the state and his successor, and Josef Goebbels as chancellor; and second, dictating his last political will which was an attempt to justify his life’s work.

On April 29, he committed the one truly-chivalrous act of his life: he married Eva Braun, his long-time mistress. After retiring to his room in the bunker the next day, Eva took poison, and Hitler put a bullet in his head. In accordance with his wishes, both bodies were burned. His Third Reich would outlive him for another week.

[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote the following in [[Time Magazine]] regarding Hitler:
{{cquote|Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers [[Mussolini]] and [[Franco]] were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss. "Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler." "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come. The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and [[evil]] were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls." <ref name="time" />}}

==Hitler and the Theory of Evolution==
''For more information please see:'' [[Evolutionary racism]]

[[Image:Hitlerrisetopower.jpg|right|225px|thumb]]
The staunch [[evolution|evolutionist]] Stephen Gould admitted the following:
{{cquote|[[Ernst Haeckel|[Ernst] Haeckel]] was the chief apostle of evolution in [[Germany]].... His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science - all contributed to the rise of Nazism. - Stephen J. Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78).<ref>http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/social.html</ref>}}

In regards to evolutionary racism, Hitler wrote the following in his work ''[[Mein Kampf]]'':
{{cquote|The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the [[Jew]]s should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.”<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1675</ref>}}<ref>[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt ''Mein Kampf,'' from Project Gutenberg Australia]</ref>

Hitler also wrote in ''Mein Kampf'':
{{cquote|The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref>}}

Dr. Robert E.D. Clark wrote in his work ''Darwin, Before and After'' the following regarding Hitler and the theory of evolution: “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”.<ref name="courier">http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>
[[Image:5712dawkins.jpg|alt=Richard Dawkins|right|thumbnail|200px|[[Richard Dawkins]] is a prominent [[atheism|atheist]] and [[evolution|evolutionist]]. [[Richard Dawkins]] stated in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref> ]]
Richard Hickman in his work ''Biocreation'' concurs and wrote the following:
{{cquote|It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a firm believer in and preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his [[psychosis]], it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important for]. . . his book, Mein Kampf clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and extermination of the weak to produce a better society. <ref>http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v08n3p24.htm</ref>}}

Noted evolutionary [[anthropology|anthropologist]] Sir [[Arthur Keith]] conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”.<ref name="courier" />

[[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning author [[Marilynne Robinson]] wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of ''[[Harper’s]]'' magazine:
{{cquote|While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in [[Europe]], it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

[[Richard Dawkins|[Richard] Dawkins]] deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of ... an insane and unscientific [[eugenics]] theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the [[Spanish Inquisition]] for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science.<ref>http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20</ref><ref>http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/someone-finally-said-it-dawkinss-hysterical-scientism/</ref>}}

[[Evolution|Evolutionist]] and [[atheism|atheist]] [[Richard Dawkins]] stated in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref> The interviewer wrote, regarding the Hitler comment, "I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own [[philosophy|philosophical]] position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref>

== Adolf Hitler and Abortion ==

''For more information see:'' [[Abortion and Adolf Hitler]]

In 1942 Adolf Hitler declared:
{{cquote|In view of the large families of the Slav native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible. We are not interested in seeing the non-[[German]] population multiply…We must use every means to instill in the population the idea that it is harmful to have several children, the expenses that they cause and the dangerous effect on woman's health… It will be necessary to open special institutions for abortions and doctors must be able to help out there in case there is any question of this being a breach of their professional ethics. <ref>http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07090708.html</ref>}}

== External links ==
[[File:Hitler Siegestor Munich Victory Gate.jpg|thumb|Watercolor of the Arch of Triumph in Munich by Hitler.]]
*[http://www.eucontest.org/go.php?pdf=www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%201994.pdf Extracts From Mein Kampf by Hitler]
*[http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/ Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.] Full text.
*[http://www.snyderstreasures.com/pages/hartworks.htm Adolf Hitler ORIGINAL Watercolor Artworks.]

==Further reading==
*[http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/medical.htm STATE MEDICAL SERVICES OF THE THIRD REICH], FROM THE OPENING STATEMENT BY TELFORD TAYLOR, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10. Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O, 1949–1953.] Retrieved from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==Sources==
*[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.htmlA Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler, His Life and Legend], Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C.

{{DEFAULTSORT: Hitler, Adolf}}

[[Category:Dictators]]
[[Category:Atheists]]
[[Category:Mass Murderers]]
[[Category:Nazis]]
[[Category:Evolutionists]]
[[Category:Totalitarianism]]
[[Category:Anti-Semitism]]
[[Category:German History]]
[[Category:World War II]]
[[Category:Evolutionary Racists]]

Adolf Hitler

2010-05-28T11:45:18Z

Lordsvulcan:

[[Image:Hitler7.JPG|right|300px|thumb|The [[Evolution|evolutionary]] [[racism|racist]] Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.<ref>http://creation.com/darwinism-and-the-nazi-race-holocaust</ref>]]
'''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]], [[socialism|socialist]]and Atheist.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref><ref>http://mises.org/daily/1937</ref><ref>http://www.hourofthetime.com/socialist.htm</ref> Hitler’s policies and beliefs resulted in the [[Genocide|mass extermination]] of the [[satanist 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==
[[File:Hitler Roses.jpg|thumb|Roses by Adolf Hitler.]]
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, [[Austria]]. Hitler's father, Alois (born 1837), was a customs official who was himself born illegitimate, carrying for a time his mother's name, Schicklgruber. By 1876 he had his baptismal entry corrected in his church records, establishing his father as Johan Heidler, which was altered slightly to Hitler.

When his father retired the family moved to Linz, Austria, where it remained a favorite for young Adolf for the rest of his life, and where he gave his wish to be buried. When Alois died in 1903 he left enough of a pension to support his wife and children; Adolf would take his and live off of it in Vienna after leaving school, dreaming of becoming an artist. Although somewhat competent as a painter of landscapes and architecture, his renderings of humans were considered “lifeless” and “crude” by the standards of the Academy of Fine Arts, and his application was rejected twice. Remaining in [[Vienna]], he moved from one cheap flop house to another, painting postcards and advertisements to earn a meager living after his allowance had dried up. By then he had developed traits which characterized his life as a whole: secretiveness, loneliness, a Spartan mode of everyday life, and a hatred of the cosmopolitan, multinational character that was the makeup of Vienna. ''He never sought a proper job or regular employment. Instead he immersed himself in the works of [[Hegel]], [[Nietzsche]], and the anti-Semitic writings of the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He loved the operas of Wagner, and the stories of the Nordic Gods... In early 1910, he entered a shelter for the homeless, populated in the main by poor Jews, on Meldemenstrasse, and was eating at soup kitchens. By this time he had pawned all his belongings. '' <ref> [http://socyberty.com/history/young-adolf-the-adolescent-hitler-and-beyond/ Young Adolf: The Adolescent Hitler and Beyond.] </ref>

==Who And What He Was==
[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote famously, and most eloquently about Hitler in 1998:
<blockquote>At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>How did this Austrian without title or position manage to get himself elected head of a German nation renowned for its civilizing mission? How to explain the success of his cheap demagogy in the heart of a people so proud of having inherited the genius of a Wolfgang von Goethe and an Immanuel Kant?</blockquote>

<blockquote>Was there no resistance to his disastrous projects? There was. But it was too feeble, too weak and too late to succeed. German society had rallied behind him: the judicial, the educational, the industrial and the economic establishments gave him their support. Few politicians of this century have aroused, in their lifetime, such love and so much hate; few have inspired so much historical and psychological research after their death. Even today, works on his enigmatic personality and his cursed career are best sellers everywhere. Some are good, others are less good, but all seem to respond to an authentic curiosity on the part of a public haunted by memory and the desire to understand.</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>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>The fact is that Hitler was beloved by his people — not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy. Did they not see the hateful mask that covered his face? Did they not divine the catastrophe he bore within himself?<ref name="time">http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/hitler.html</ref></blockquote>

[[Image:Cupid Complaining to Venus by Lucas Cranach.jpg|120px|left]]''One of the best-loved paintings in the National Gallery - an exquisite vision of Venus and Cupid by the greatest artist of the Reformation - once belonged to Hitler, it has been revealed. New evidence has come to light that Lucas Cranach's Cupid Complaining to Venus, currently on loan to an exhibition in Bristol, hung on the sitting-room wall of his flat in Munich.'' <ref>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/28/art.secondworldwar Hitler owned painting now in National Gallery]</ref>

{{Clear}}

===War===
[[Image:Hitler munich1914.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler in the crowd in Munich, 1914, reacting to the news of Germany's entry in the First World War.]]
By 1913 Hitler was in Munich, Germany, with war clouds on the horizon. Classified as unfit for service in the Austrian army (possibly by faking, as he did not like the thought of serving Austria) in 1914, he volunteered for the German army, joining the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, greeting the war with enthusiasm, and finding the military discipline and comradeship satisfying. He served during the entire [[First World War]] as a messenger carrying dispatches between units, and often at the front lines under fire; he was wounded in 1916, and gassed in 1918. His bravery during this time earned him the [[Iron Cross]], 2nd Class, in December, 1914, and in August 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class – a rare decoration for a corporal. But the gassing would take him out of the war and into a hospital, where he would be told the heart-wrenching news of Germany’s defeat the following November.

==Path to power==
After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain. There was much discontent among demobilized veterans because of the lack of employment. The German military had felt it had not been defeated; indeed, the German Army stood on foreign soil when the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918 and not a square inch of German soil had been occupied. This was despite the fact that the German Army's strongest position, the Hindenburg line, had been broken by the Allies, and the German Army itself was in full retreat. However, the Army felt they had done their job, and the nation had been "stabbed in the back" by a gang of traitors who sought to lay hands on the Fatherland. The "myth" that Germany had been defeated was the "big lie" Hitler spoke of, as if repeating it often enough would cause people to believe it.

After his discharge from the hospital, Hitler acted as an army political agent, assigned in Munich to gather information on the various political parties which had spring up amid the social chaos following Germany’s defeat. In September, 1919, he was given orders to investigate the relatively-minor German Workers’ Party (''Deutsche Arbeiterpartei''); intrigued by the party’s apparatus and its racial, pan-German nationalism, he joined, becoming its 55th member; he left the army soon after and devoted himself to improving the party’s propaganda, as well as his own position within.

Conditions in Germany fostered the development of the party. Economic woes brought widespread discontent, added to the furor surrounding the loss of the war and the harsh terms heaped upon Germany by the Allied Powers in the Versailles Peace Treaty. Bavaria’s traditional separatism from the central government in Berlin made current conditions especially sharp, and Hitler was savvy enough to take full advantage of them. When he joined, he found the party ineffective in leadership and uncertain as to its aims; he accepted the party program, but regarded it as a means to an end. He caused friction with other members of the party, and their attempts to control him caused a threat of resignation; realizing that the future of the party now depended on Hitler, who clearly had a talent of organization, fund collecting, and above all, speaking, they declined to accept it; from July, 1921 Hitler was regarded as the party leader with nearly unlimited power. From his party newspaper, ''Völkischer Beobachter'' (“Popular Observer”), he spewed out endless propaganda. His meetings where he spoke grew from handfuls to hundreds, and then on to thousands. A man of charismatic personality, he quickly attracted a circle of loyal and devoted followers: Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess.

Munich was also a gathering place for former servicemen dissatisfied with conditions in the country; members of the Freikorps, which had been organized after the war from army units that refused to return to civilian life; and those civilians who plotted against the republic. Many of these men joined the Nazi Party. Among them was a staff member of the district command who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler, Ernst Röhm, a pudgy man with a scared face who saw his own ambition in helping further Hitler’s rise within the party. Röhm recruited what came to be known as the “Brown Shirts”, the violent squads used to attack socialists and communists, and to protect party meetings whenever Hitler was speaking. By 1921 they were organized into a private army called the ''Sturmabteilung'', abbreviated to S.A.

==The Beer Hall Putsch==
Germany in 1923 was marked by social and political unrest caused by hyperinflation. In this time Hitler was able convince [[Erich Ludendorff]], an accomplished general and leader of the German forces in the first World War, to join him in a coup d'etat (''Putsch'' in German). When Hitler learned that the nationalist prime minister of Bavaria was giving a speech to 3000 officials in one of Munich's biggest beer halls (the Haufbrau Haus), he ordered his paramilitaries to surround the building. Hitler went inside and took the prime minister hostage, announced a revolution, and attempted to convince him to join the coup against Berlin and become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but informed the nation via radio later that night that he did not support Hitler. The prime minister also informed the federal government in Berlin; the putsch had begun to fail.

The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength to regain the momentum. In the ensuing fight between Hitler's marchers and a cordon of police and army units at least 14 Nazi supporters and three policemen were killed and hundreds wounded. Ludendorff handed himself over to the authorities, while Hitler fled soon after the fighting began. Hitler was arrested a few days later at a friend's house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted of all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison (he would do eight months). <ref>http://history1900s.about.com/cs/thirdreich/a/beerhallputsch_2.htm</ref><ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/putsch2.htm</ref> The Bavarian prime minister, who foiled the plan, was killed in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives".

===''Mein Kampf''===

Hitler had his inner circle as frequent visitors in his prison cell, which was made more comfortable due to his celebrity. While there, he dictated to Rudolf Hess the first volume of ''Mein Kampf'' (“My Struggle”), his political autobiography and a compendium of his many ideas.

Hitler believed in the inequality of the races, nations, and individuals as part of the natural order of mankind, and chief among them was the exalted “Aryan race”, and the greatest of the Aryans were the Germans. It was the German, according to Hitler, that gave the world civilization and the arts; to safeguard the German people as a race (the “Volk”), they would need to be united under a single leader (the Führer), where they would be protected from their three principle enemies: Marxism, which included social democracy as well as communism; democracy and its mob-rule, as shown by the failings of the Weimar Republic; and above all what Hitler called the poisoners of humanity, the Jews. “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition,” he wrote in 1919. “Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he told the world that the Jew was the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

From "My Struggle":
{{cquote|The Jew "... he blares out his merits to the rest of the world until people really begin to believe in them. Anyone who does not believe in them is doing him a bitter injustice. In a short time he begins to twist things around to make it look as if all the injustice in the world had always been done to him and not the other way around." <ref> [http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch11.html Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.]</ref> }}

{{cquote| Hitler portrays Jews as leaders in politics and banking, both groups seeking to strengthen their cause, [[Zionism]], to ensure Jewish domination. From his Social Darwinist perspective, Hitler perceived a racial war as inevitable and he sought to halt the "[[Jewish]] drive towards world conquest"... As Berlin collapsed around him, Adolf asserted: "Out of the ruins of our towns and monuments hatred will grow against those finally responsible for everything, International Jewry." <ref> [http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=32043&amid=30237234 Mein Kampf – The Text, its Themes and Hitler’s Vision] Robert Carr dissects a book frequently referred to but seldom read. </ref>
}}

==Rebuilding the Nazi Party==
[[Image:Hitler.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Hitler speaking; he would often employ physical gesturing to emphasize a point.]]
[[Image:Hitler-3.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in car, saluting passing S.A. at one of many parades.]]
Internal dissension within the party caused it to languish while Hitler was in prison. When he was released he saw difficulties in the country that had not existed before the Putsch, namely currency reform that brought economic stability, and the scaling back of the war reparations as a result of the Dawes Plan. Hitler was also forbidden to speak in public, which remained in force until 1928; however, he wasn’t about to stop his rebuilding of the party nor of his re-establishing his own position within it as leader, despite Gregor Strasser’s opposition in northern Germany. By 1927 the number of Nazis was in the hundreds of thousands.

A new period of political and economic instability with the onset of the Great Depression which threw millions out of work in Europe and North America. To campaign against the [[Young Plan]] (a second renegotiation of war reparations payments) Hitler made an alliance with one of Germany’s leading nationalists, Alfred Hugenberg, whose newspapers enabled Hitler to reach a national audience for the first time. The alliance also had another advantage: it enabled him to seek support from many in business and industry who controlled funds going into politics, and who themselves were desirous of seeing Germany under the control of a strong anti-Soviet and anti-Communist regime. The subsidies Hitler received placed the Nazy Party on a strong financial footing, enabling him to make his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed in his faith that Germany would recover from its suffering and be a great nation once more. The alliance with the industrialists also demonstrated another aspect of Hitler, a skill of effectively using those that would use him, which many would discover when it was too late.

The electoral strength of the Nazis grew during the Depression, as unceasing propaganda accused the government of failing to improve conditions for the working man. By the fall of 1930 the Nazis captured more than 18 percent of the vote, compared to just 2.6 percent in 1928. Hitler captured 36.8 percent of the vote when he opposed Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election; his mass following put him in such a strong position that he entered a series of closed-door intrigues with Franz von Papen, Oskar Hindenburg, and Otto Meissner, all sharing a fear and loathing of a communist government. Despite the party losing votes in the November, 1932 election, Hitler insisted on nothing less than the office of chancellor for himself. For him, it was all or nothing. Hindenburg offered it to him on January 30, 1933.

==In power==
Almost immediately, Hitler established himself as dictator. Less than a month after taking office, on February 27 the Reichstag building was set on fire under mysterious circumstances (but officially blamed on a feeble-minded Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe); Hitler soon after succeeded in getting several decrees passed removing much of the guarantees of freedom in the name of state security, and which also allowed an intensified campaign of violence against dissidents. Incredibly, in a special election set in those conditions on March 5, the Nazis pulled 43.9 percent of the vote. On March 21, the new Reichstag assembled at the Potsdam Church, as much a show of unity between the old guard under Hindenburg and the Nazis as it was a show of peace. Two days later the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler full powers; with the exception of the Nazis, all other political parties, including those which had helped pass the Enabling Act, ceased to exist within three months. Many of their leaders were tossed in concentration camps.

===Night of the Long Knives===
[[Image:HitlerRohm1933.JPG|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with Ernst Röhm in 1933]]
Hitler, however, did not wish to start an immediate revolution. He still needed the support of the one agency he needed to implement his ideas: the army. But he did have one growing problem that was a thorn in the army’s side, the million-plus men of the S.A. and their leader, Ernst Röhm, who wanted nothing less than the merger of the S.A. into the army, with himself in overall command. At first, Hitler tried getting Röhm’s support by persuasion, but Hitler’s inner circle was for removing him by any means possible. On June 29, 1934, Hitler ordered a purge, flew towards a resort near Munich where a number of S.A. leaders were vacationing, and had them all arrested; many would be shot without trial. Refusing to shoot himself when offered, Röhm was killed in his cell at Dachau, his last words, ironically, “Mein Führer, mein Führer!” <ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/roehm.htm</ref><ref>http://www.adolfhitler.ws/lib/nsdap/Rohm.html</ref><ref>http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/roehm/index.html</ref>
On July 13, Hitler gave speech in the Reichstag, announcing that some seventy-four individuals had been shot for threatening the stability of the Reich.
:''"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people…It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." ''
Hitler also used this event to settle his account with other opponents, such as Georg Strasser, who stood for a more socialist and less racist national socialism, and the former Bavarian prime minister who foiled the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Satisfied that the S.A. leadership was thoroughly broken up (thousands of S.A. members were either arrested or killed that night), the army approved of Hitler’s actions. Hindenburg died a few days later on August 2, and Hitler merged the office of president with the chancellorship, and with it the supreme command of the German armed forces. During this time the world was slowly recovering economically from the Depression, but it quickened in Germany, coincidently with Hitler’s rise to power. Taking credit for the recovery made him very popular, bringing him a 90 percent approval rating in a voter plebiscite that year.

===Beginnings of expansion===
In matters of state, the running of domestic affairs was left to subordinates, which was something Hitler had little attention for. Foreign policy always peaked his interest, in so much as to the advantages of a “Greater Germany”, which was his chief ambition. The first part of realizing this, according to ''Mein Kampf'', was to be a reunion of the German peoples within Europe; the second would be an expansion of Germany to the east (lebensraum). Expanding would mean a renewed conflict with the Slavic peoples, whom Hitler intended to serve as slaves to the “New German Order.” To follow through on his ambitions, he would have to remove Poland and the Soviet Union as countries; France also would have to be stabilized in the west, as she was Germany’s enemy for more than a century. He counted as possible allies Italy, with its fascist government under [[Benito Mussolini]], and Britain, whom he regarded as having a similar, Teutonic heritage.
[[Image:Hitler6-thumb.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Hitler with his dog, Blondie.]]
Before any of his ambitions could take place, there was one thing he detested which needed immediate removal: the restrictions placed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Posing as a man of peace to allay suspicions, he insisted that he was a champion of Europe wishing only for the removal of the inequalities leveled by the treaty, and posturing as a shield against Bolshevism. In October, 1933, he had Germany withdraw from the [[League of Nations]]. The following January he signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland. His individual repudiations of parts of the treaty were followed by offers of negotiations for new agreements, while maintaining Germany’s limited ambitious nature.

While this was going on, Germany was steadily building up the armed forces. Rigorous training using wooden guns and trucks marked as “tanks” got needed battlefield training for officers. Potential fighter pilots began their training in gliders at public demonstrations – Germany, under terms of the treaty, was not allowed an air force – and later they would fly in new civilian stunt planes and transports, which on the drawing board were designed to be rapidly turned into fighters and bombers. Conscription was introduced in January, 1935, and in June of that year Hitler successfully signed a naval treaty with Britain, giving him rights to a respectable navy; but even while the ink was drying, Germany was secretly building a large U-boat fleet.

The matter of reuniting the German peoples came into being in July, 1934, and here Hitler overreached. German organizations were covertly aiding Austrian Nazis in the overthrow of their government, culminating in an attempted revolt as well as murdering Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. When the attempt clearly failed, Hitler denied involvement. In January, 1935, a plebecite was introduced in the Saarland; more than 90 percent voted to return the territory to Germany. Then in March, 1936, came his greatest slap to the Versailles Treaty: against the advice of his generals, and in open defiance of France and Britain, he ordered troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Germany was once again becoming the leading power in continental Europe. By October, 1936, Germany had signed an alliance with Italy, proclaiming a “Rome-Berlin axis,” followed by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. All three countries would sign a single, mutual alliance pact, the following year.

===Health care in Nazi Germany===

According to Michael H. Kater "physicians became Nazified more thoroughly and much sooner than any other profession, and as Nazis they did more in the service of the nefarious regime than any of their extra-professional peers."<ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=lDMIHDTLEN4C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Reich+Minister+of+the+Interior%2Bhealth%2Bcivilian+patient&source=bl&ots=2lLhun_7PE&sig=olfzxYKJAswVjjIEqjBcZPKhCXM&hl=en&ei=3D2MSsrZAZGeMLeq7JMO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=&f=false Doctors Under Hitler] By Michael H. Kater, pp. 4-5.</ref><ref>[http://books.google.com/books?id=NnPBlkKk8AQC&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=physicains+became+nazified+much+thoroughly+and+sooner&source=bl&ots=sWUPklUojC&sig=fAJrGFwHYn-0gJDKPWLERHikAY4&hl=en&ei=GUaMStjmKIfaNb66rZMO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false Atrocities on trial: historical perspectives on the politics of prosecuting war crimes]
By Patricia Heberer, Jürgen Matthäus], p. 110.</ref><ref>[http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v073/73.1marrus.html The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial in Historical Context] Michael Robert Marrus, Bulletin of the History of Medicine,Volume 73, Number 1, Spring 1999, pp. 106-123, E-ISSN: 1086-3176 Print ISSN: 0007-5140 [http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Moral%20Issues%20in%20Medicine/Human%20Experimentation/Nuremberg%20Doctors%27%20Trial.html]</ref> After 1933, physicians joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than did any other profession. By 1935, almost a third of the non-Jewish German physicians belonged to the Nazi Party. From 1925 to 1944, the per cent of doctors in the party was almost three times as high as in the population as a whole. <ref>Michael H. Kater, ‘’The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945’’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.</ref>

The National Association of Sickness Fund Physicians [http://healthcare-economist.com/2008/04/24/health-care-around-the-world-germany/] was established in 1933 as a national bargaining unit to replace the numerous, more local, associations with which sickness funds had negotiated in the past. Thus, several thousand sickness funds were forced to deal with a single organization, or [[single payer]], that held a legal monopoly over medical services. The drive by the medical profession to transform the organization and delivery of [[health care]] services from self-governing sickness funds to physician-controlled services was complete.<ref>[http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/76/1/78.pdf Social Medicine vs Professional Dominance: The German Experience], Donald W. Light, PhD, Stephan Liebfried, PhD, and Floran Tennstedt, PhD.</ref>

==Anschluss==

Removed from their offices in January 1938 were Hjalmar Schacht (economic ministry); Werner von Fritsch (soldiers’ representative); and Konstantin von Neurath (foreign office); the reason being was they were not fully accepting of Nazism. Beginning his plans of German conquest, he started with Austria. Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian chancellor, was invited to Berchtesgaden in February, where he was browbeaten and forced to sign an agreement placing Austrian Nazis in the government. When Schuschnigg resisted and announced a plebiscite for Austrian voters concerning independence, Hitler ordered German troops into Austria, completely taking over the country within days. His return to Vienna was in triumph; enthusiastic crowds greeted him by the tens of thousands, in sharp contrast to the scenes of privation he had gone through there in his youth. Austria was annexed (Anschluss) to the Reich a short time later.

While the Anschluss was going on, Hitler was speaking in friendly terms with Czechoslovakia; nearly as soon as Austria ceased to exist, Hitler proceeded with his plans against the Czechs. The northwestern region of Czechoslovakia was the Sudetenland, inhabited by a German minority, and the leader of them, Konrad Henlein, was instructed to make impossible demands for those Germans on the Czech government. In the interest of preventing a general war (which Hitler wanted), Mussolini and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain concluded a peaceful agreement in Munich on September 30, giving Hitler the Sudetenland without firing a shot. Chamberlain would return to Britain, waving the agreement signed between himself and Hitler, declaring it to be “peace for our time”, but his act of appeasement would ensure the peace would last only a few more months. Despite assurances that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demands, “Czechia”, as the remainder of Czechoslovakia was called, became a German protectorate on March 15, 1939, when Hitler ordered it occupied. Just over a week later, Lithuania was forced to cede to Germany the territory of Memel (Klaipeda), on the border of East Prussia.

==Poland==
Poland’s turn was next, and listening to the rumblings was France and Britain, which signed guarantees of mutual assistance to the Polish nation should it be attacked by Germany. Hitler also signed pacts: a “Pact of Steel” with Italy, strengthening the alliance between Rome and Berlin, and then a treaty that caught many off-guard: a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23. A secret clause in the pact allowed for the simultaneous invasion of Poland, and the division of the country in the center from north to south. Poland was invaded on September 1; two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Hitler assumed his own war strategy. Poland was conquered within weeks, and when a desired peace accord with Britain failed to materialize, he ordered the army to prepare for a western offensive. Norway was invaded and occupied, forestalling a British move on that country; Denmark was occupied by April, 1940. Hitler than adopted General Erich von Manstien’s plan for an offensive against France itself, which would move through neutral Belgium’s Ardenne Forest on May 10, taking that country as a matter of convenience, as well as avoiding the static fortifications of France’s Maginot Line. The German forces, extremely successful in their operations, reached the coastal ports on the English Channel in 10 days; Holland and Belgium both surrendered within days. But south of Dunkirk was where the army was ordered to halt. Hitler had hoped even at this stage in the battle that Britain would commit to peace; instead, the halting of the German army allowed the British to remove 170,000 fighting men.

On June 10, Italy entered the war as German tanks were sweeping across northern France. Hitler signed an armistice with France on June 22, the signing taking place in the same rail car at the same site where the Germans surrendered in 1918.

Having failed in getting the British to sign an armistice, Hitler prepared his forces for “Operation Sea Lion,” the invasion of Britain. However, the Luftwaffe was defeated in its attempt to gain air superiority over British airspace, also known as the Battle Of Britain, which forced the permanent postponement of Sealion.

Facing the failure of the British to give in, Hitler started to prepare to double-cross his erstwhile partner in the Poland conquest, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Then Mussolini invaded Greece, got bogged down in the Balkans, and the threat loomed that he would lose his whole army there. Hitler found it necessary to come to his aid, while at the same time taking direct control of Yugoslavia in the wake of the overthrow of the pro-Nazi government.

==Barbarossa==
The attack on Soviet Russia began June 22, 1941. Rapid in its advancement, the German army captured a large swath of territory between the Baltic and Black seas, and captured close to 3,000,000 prisoners. But Hitler, already micro-managing military operations, became overbearing to his generals; he preferred to go after many targets, while his generals argued for a single objective. A few miles in front of Moscow, the German army was halted by a Russian offensive in December, as well as something he had absolutely no control over: the severe Russian winter.

In the lands already occupied by German forces, S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler was preparing the ground for Hitler’s new German order. Expelling the Jews from Germany was the first step, and this was carried out by laws and decrees beginning in 1933; the Germans would switch to outright force in 1939, as Jews were first deported en-masse to Poland, then walled into ghettos after the occupation began. By 1941, a policy crafted under S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich had changed expulsion for extermination in what was called "a final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). The system of concentration camps was supplemented by the creation of specialized killing centers in the occupied countries, especially in Poland, where camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzac “processed” thousands of victims daily. Some six million Jews died during what was called the [[Holocaust]], as well as an additional five million Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped, the aged, and many others that the Nazis considered “subhuman” in accordance with German racial policies.<ref>http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/burns.htm</ref>

==Beginning of the end==
[[Image:Adolf_hitler6.jpg‎ |right|200px|thumb|Hitler in 1944, by now looking tired and strained.]]
Hitler grew increasingly strained by the end of 1942, depending on large amounts of drugs supplied by his physician, Theodor Morell, as a result of the twin defeats of El Alamein (which he lost the bulk of his Afrika corps to British general Montgomery), and Stalingrad (where he lost an entire army of 250,000 men to the Russians). He spent more time in his headquarters in East Prussia, and his time in the public eye ceased to exist. He refused to visit bombed German cities, and, as with Stalingrad, refused to allow German armies to withdraw from the battlefield when the situation was lost. Still, he could make stunning, decisive decisions when called for, such as the commando raid that resulted in the rescue of Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans in July, 1943.

But the defeat of Germany in the war was looming closer. Hitler’s relations with his leading commanders grew strained, the more so as he allowed units of the S.S. to take positions traditionally held by the army. The line at the eastern front was slowly being pushed back by the Soviets, while in the Atlantic his U-boats campaign had faltered. German cities were constantly being bombed, and a successful invasion on the Normandy coast of France in June, 1944 marked the beginning of the end.

===Assassination attempt===
[[Image:NWT Hitler dead.jpg|left|200px|thumb|Hitler's death as covered by the ''New York Times'', May 2, 1945.]]
Seeing Germany’s chances of surviving the war were desperate, a group of officers plotted to assassinate Hitler, planning several attempts in 1943-44, but nearly successful on July 20, 1944, when a bomb hidden in a briefcase by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg went off under a table that Hitler and others were leaning over; four were killed outright, several suffered injuries, but Hitler escaped relatively unharmed (the bomb itself was set down away from Hitler behind a solid oak table leg, saving him). The conspirators were quickly rounded up; Stauffenberg was shot. The remainder were put on show trials and condemned to hang on meat hooks with piano wire. It was said that Hitler enjoyed watching film of their executions. As a result of the bomb, Nazi members were employed at key positions within the army, removing any trace of the army’s independence.

Within months nearly all of the territory occupied by Germany was now in Allied hands. A last offensive in December, 1944 to take the port of Antwerp, Belgium, failed. Hitler had by them grown ill; his hopes for a German victory bordered on the fantastical and the imagination. By January, 1945 he had moved into his command bunker in Berlin, where he gave orders deploying fictional divisions to counter the ever-closer Soviets. When all seemed lost, he gave out his final orders: first, appointing Admiral Karl Dönitz as head of the state and his successor, and Josef Goebbels as chancellor; and second, dictating his last political will which was an attempt to justify his life’s work.

On April 29, he committed the one truly-chivalrous act of his life: he married Eva Braun, his long-time mistress. After retiring to his room in the bunker the next day, Eva took poison, and Hitler put a bullet in his head. In accordance with his wishes, both bodies were burned. His Third Reich would outlive him for another week.

[[Elie Wiesel]] wrote the following in [[Time Magazine]] regarding Hitler:
{{cquote|Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers [[Mussolini]] and [[Franco]] were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss. "Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler." "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come. The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and [[evil]] were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist. It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle weapons against even the sturdiest souls." <ref name="time" />}}

==Hitler and the Theory of Evolution==
''For more information please see:'' [[Evolutionary racism]]

[[Image:Hitlerrisetopower.jpg|right|225px|thumb]]
The staunch [[evolution|evolutionist]] Stephen Gould admitted the following:
{{cquote|[[Ernst Haeckel|[Ernst] Haeckel]] was the chief apostle of evolution in [[Germany]].... His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science - all contributed to the rise of Nazism. - Stephen J. Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78).<ref>http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/social.html</ref>}}

In regards to evolutionary racism, Hitler wrote the following in his work ''[[Mein Kampf]]'':
{{cquote|The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the [[Jew]]s should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.”<ref>http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1675</ref>}}<ref>[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt ''Mein Kampf,'' from Project Gutenberg Australia]</ref>

Hitler also wrote in ''Mein Kampf'':
{{cquote|The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable.<ref>http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=268</ref>}}

Dr. Robert E.D. Clark wrote in his work ''Darwin, Before and After'' the following regarding Hitler and the theory of evolution: “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”.<ref name="courier">http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/the_holocaust_why_did_it_happen</ref>
[[Image:5712dawkins.jpg|alt=Richard Dawkins|right|thumbnail|200px|[[Richard Dawkins]] is a prominent [[atheism|atheist]] and [[evolution|evolutionist]]. [[Richard Dawkins]] stated in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref> ]]
Richard Hickman in his work ''Biocreation'' concurs and wrote the following:
{{cquote|It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a firm believer in and preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his [[psychosis]], it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important for]. . . his book, Mein Kampf clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and extermination of the weak to produce a better society. <ref>http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v08n3p24.htm</ref>}}

Noted evolutionary [[anthropology|anthropologist]] Sir [[Arthur Keith]] conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”.<ref name="courier" />

[[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning author [[Marilynne Robinson]] wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of ''[[Harper’s]]'' magazine:
{{cquote|While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in [[Europe]], it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

[[Richard Dawkins|[Richard] Dawkins]] deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of ... an insane and unscientific [[eugenics]] theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the [[Spanish Inquisition]] for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science.<ref>http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20</ref><ref>http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/someone-finally-said-it-dawkinss-hysterical-scientism/</ref>}}

[[Evolution|Evolutionist]] and [[atheism|atheist]] [[Richard Dawkins]] stated in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref> The interviewer wrote, regarding the Hitler comment, "I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own [[philosophy|philosophical]] position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point."<ref>http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist</ref>

== Adolf Hitler and Abortion ==

''For more information see:'' [[Abortion and Adolf Hitler]]

In 1942 Adolf Hitler declared:
{{cquote|In view of the large families of the Slav native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible. We are not interested in seeing the non-[[German]] population multiply…We must use every means to instill in the population the idea that it is harmful to have several children, the expenses that they cause and the dangerous effect on woman's health… It will be necessary to open special institutions for abortions and doctors must be able to help out there in case there is any question of this being a breach of their professional ethics. <ref>http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07090708.html</ref>}}

== External links ==
[[File:Hitler Siegestor Munich Victory Gate.jpg|thumb|Watercolor of the Arch of Triumph in Munich by Hitler.]]
*[http://www.eucontest.org/go.php?pdf=www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%201994.pdf Extracts From Mein Kampf by Hitler]
*[http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/ Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.] Full text.
*[http://www.snyderstreasures.com/pages/hartworks.htm Adolf Hitler ORIGINAL Watercolor Artworks.]

==Further reading==
*[http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/medical.htm STATE MEDICAL SERVICES OF THE THIRD REICH], FROM THE OPENING STATEMENT BY TELFORD TAYLOR, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10. Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O, 1949–1953.] Retrieved from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==Sources==
*[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.htmlA Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler, His Life and Legend], Walter C. Langer, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C.

{{DEFAULTSORT: Hitler, Adolf}}

[[Category:Dictators]]
[[Category:Atheists]]
[[Category:Mass Murderers]]
[[Category:Nazis]]
[[Category:Evolutionists]]
[[Category:Totalitarianism]]
[[Category:Anti-Semitism]]
[[Category:German History]]
[[Category:World War II]]
[[Category:Evolutionary Racists]]