Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party) and totalitarian dictator (Führer) of Germany from 1933 to 1945. His expansionist policies initiated World War II in Europe with the 1939 invasion of Poland, and his racial ideology drove the Holocaust.

Early Years in Vienna and World War I

Born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary to a customs official, Hitler moved to Vienna as a young man hoping to study painting, but was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts. Living in men's hostels and selling watercolor postcards, he absorbed the extreme Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric prevalent in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

After moving to Munich in 1913, he volunteered for the Bavarian Army at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, serving four years on the Western Front as a regimental dispatch runner and receiving the Iron Cross. Temporarily blinded by a British mustard gas attack in October 1918, he learned of Germany's surrender from a hospital bed, embracing the 'stab-in-the-back myth' that the German army had been betrayed on the home front rather than defeated in the field.

Rise to Power Amid the Great Depression

Entering politics in postwar Munich, Hitler used his fiery oratorical skills to take over the small German Workers' Party, renaming it the Nazi Party. After his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, he spent nine months in Landsberg Prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'), outlining his racial hierarchy and ambition to conquer Lebensraum ('living space') in Eastern Europe.

Shifting to electoral politics, Hitler capitalized on the 1929 Great Depression, which left six million Germans unemployed. Promising to tear up the Treaty of Versailles and restore national pride and employment, the Nazis became Germany's largest parliamentary party. Appointed Chancellor in January 1933, Hitler used the Reichstag fire to suspend civil liberties, banned all opposition parties, and merged the offices of Chancellor and President in 1934 to rule as absolute dictator.

World War II, the Holocaust, and Downfall

Emboldened after Britain and France appeased his annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering World War II. Using fast-moving Blitzkrieg tactics, German forces conquered France and Western Europe by June 1940. However, after failing to subdue Britain in the air, Hitler gambled on invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 and declared war on the United States in December 1941, pitting Germany against a coalition of industrial giants.

While the Nazi regime operated a continent-wide network of concentration and extermination camps that murdered six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust, Hitler increasingly overruled his generals on the battlefield. His refusal to allow strategic withdrawals contributed to the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. As Western Allied and Soviet armies converged on Germany, Hitler retreated to his underground bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where he took his own life on April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought just blocks away.