Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889 in Branau Am Inn, Austria. He died April 30, 1945. His dictatorial rule of Germany, which led to the deaths of millions before and during World War II, has placed him among history's most hated villains.
"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." [1]
Elie Wiesel wrote famously, and most eloquently about Hitler in 1998: "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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"[2]
Birth and pre political life
He was born in 1889 in Austria. His mother was his father's niece, and the incestuous relationship may have impacted development of Hitler's psychopathic nature. Later on Hitler became involved with his own niece, and this appears to have been a pattern in Hitler's family extending back several generations and explains Hitler's attitudes about intermarriage.
After leaving home he worked as an artisan painter. Hitler did not do particularly well in school, leaving formal education in 1905. Unable to settle to a regular job, he drifted. He wished to become an artist but was rejected from the Academy in Vienna. He immigrated to Germany and served as an enlisted soldier in the Imperial Bavarian Army in World War I, and gained the rank of corporal. He won several awards for bravery, including the Iron Cross First Class.
The Beginning Of His Political Life
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 soul had been occupied. 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 repeating often enough people will begin to believe it.
Many returning Army units remained intact, despite no longer directly under command of the German Army because of limitations set upon it by the Treaty of Versailles. The situation was highly politicized, and it appears Hitler was sent to spy originally upon a small splinter group called National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) were he found only a shell of an organization, but a willing audience to hear him talk. By 1921 he became leader of the group. With terrible economic conditions and rapid inflation, support for Hitler’s party grew. By 1923, the Nazi’s had 56,000 members and many more supporters.
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, he ordered his paratroopers to surround the building. Hitler went into building and took the prime minister hostage, in an attempt to convince him to join Hitler's coup against Berlin, and to become member in his new administration. The Bavarian prime minister agreed under pressure, but informed later that night the nation via radio, that he did not support Hitler.
The next morning, 9 November 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff were marching with approximately 2000 partly armed supporters through Munich in a show of strength. They were stopped by Bavarian armed and police forces. In the ensuing fight at least 14 Nazi supporters, three police men, 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 friends house, were had been in hiding since the failed coup. Ludendorff was acquitted from all charges, while Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison. In Landsberg prison Hitler wrote his book Mein Kampf. He was already released in 1924, after one year of prison.[1][2]
While in Landsberg prison Hitler became a close personal friend of an openly gay Nazi party member, Ernst Rohm. Hitler knew of and tolerated his deputy's sexual orientation, and Rohm later became head of the Stormtroopers, or SA, which catapulted Hitler into power in 1933.
Election of 1933
The newly formed Nazi party, which he dominated, selected him as its candidate for Chancellor in the 1933 election, to face off against the Socialists(Sozis). The Nazi paramilitary force staged a massive campaign of violence in the days before the election. This and his persuasive style of speaking are often credited for his victory.
Fire in the Reichstag
In 1933, a fire occurred in the Reichstag building, which Hitler used as a means to his own ends, blaming it on his enemies. That fire led to the implementing the Enabling Act which granted Hitler emergency powers and effectively put an end to parliamentary democracy. Later when President Paul Hindenburg died, he also assumed the powers of the President, effectively ending the Weimar Republic.
Holocaust
The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe was implemented by a government of a modern Western state to exterminate people of Jewish ancestry throughout Germany and all its occupied territories. Approximately six million people of all ages--men, women and children, were systematically murdered under a policy directed by Adolf Hitler. Other groups of "undesirables" and "asocials" were also targeted and killed.[3]
July 20, 1944
On July 20, 1944, officers of the German Wehrmacht succeeded in planting a bomb in Hitler's secret headquarters in East Prussia which exploded, killing three and injuring Hitler.
In the aftermath and up until the final days of the War approximately 5,000 people, mostly German officers, were executed for treason, disloyalty, or suspected of not offering fanatical resistance to fight to the end.
Marriage
He married Eva Braun, on 29 April 1945 in Berlin.
Death
Hitler apparently committed suicide in an air-raid shelter in Berlin on April 30, 1945, after the Allied forces had invaded Germany, and as the Russian Army was entering Berlin. [4]