Biography - Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, in Austria (a country south of Germany) to an extremely domineering father. After his father’s death in 1903 Hitler became rebellious and began failing at school. He dropped out of school and with dreaming of becoming an artist, he moved to Vienna to become a painter. However, he failed to be accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts and ended up living a lonely life as a poor street artist painting post cards. Antisemitism was common in Vienna, and it is believed that this is where Hitler first developed his extreme hatred toward Jewish people.
When World War I began in 1914, Hitler volunteered to enlist in the German army and fought on the Western Front. Hitler said he found acceptance and accomplishment fighting the war where he won several awards for bravery, including the highly respected Iron Cross First Class, and was wounded several times. Hitler was in a military hospital recovering from his wounds when he heard that Germany had signed the armistice that ended the war.
Like many German soldiers, Hitler had a difficult time readjusting to life after the war in the chaos of post-war Germany. He got a job in the army keeping track of radical political organization. This is how he first came in contact with the National Socialist German Workers Party, called the Nazis. He joined Nazi Party and soon became its most well known speaker. Hitler’s speeches drew more people into the Nazi Party and, in 1921, Hitler became the Fuhrer, or leader, of the party.
In 1923, Germany suffered terrible hyperinflation (a period where money quickly loses its value) and many Germans were unhappy with the democratic government in Germany. Hitler believed he could use this to take power in Germany. Hitler organized the Nazi Party to violently overthrow the government. However, the rebellion was quickly put down by the local police and Hitler was charged with treason and sentenced to a year in prison. It was during his time in prison that Hitler wrote his book, Mien Kampf or “My Struggle” which described his goals of expanding Germany to make an empire and to make it a racially pure society – it would only be for Germans. After his release from prison, Hitler continued to lead the Nazi Party, but it was a marginal party in German politics.
It was the economic crisis of the Great Depression in the early 1930’s that made the Nazi Party a major political force in Germany. By 1932, the Nazi Party was one of the largest political parties in Germany. The other large party was the communist party. Many Germans supported Hitler and the Nazis because they feared the communists. In 1932, Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. When the President of Germany died in 1934, Hitler used Emergency Powers to make himself Fuhrer, or leader, of Germany. After taking power, Hitler moved ruthlessly to eliminate other political parties by having their leaders arrested and even had many of the leaders of the Nazi Party who could challenge him killed in an event called the Night of the Long Knives.
Once Hitler had full control over Germany, he began to prepare Germany for wars of conquest to enlarge Germany. He put millions of unemployed people to work on rebuilding the German military. In addition, he began to turn Germany into racially pure country by forcing Jews to leave the country. He did this by enacting laws that banned Jews from doing professional work and from attending school. He also allowed his supporters to attack Jews openly in the Night of Broken Glass.
Hitler began to take over other countries to achieve his goal of gaining “living space” for the Germans. He envisioned a future German Empire that would cover most of Europe in which the other peoples of Europe would either be killed or forced to work as slave labor for Germans. In the late 1930’s, Hitler took over Austria and Czechoslovakia without having to fire a single shot. Then, in 1939, he began World War Two by attacking Poland. Then the next year he conquered France and began to bomb Britain. The year after that, he attacked the Soviet Union and his army got all the way to Moscow, the Soviet capital city. By the end of 1942, it looked to the world as if Hitler might achieve his goal of building a Nazi Empire. In the areas that Germany had taken over, Hitler ordered the Nazi forces to round up people to be used as slave labor and sent out death squads to kill Jews.
However, at that point the war began to turn against Hitler. First, he had not fully defeated Britain and the Soviet Union. Both of these countries recovered from their earlier defeats and began to push back the German army. Second, Hitler had declared war on the United States and now the United States joined with Britain and the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1943, the Allies began to win victories on all fronts and began to push the Nazi forces back. However, even in the face of defeat, Hitler did not give up his dream of creating a racially pure Germany and ordered the speeding up of killing Jews in specially built death camps.
As the war turned against Hitler, he became more isolated. He did not appear in public, he refused to listen to his military advisers and began to put resources into "super" weapons that he believed would give him victory. In 1944, a group of military officers tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. After this, Hitler became increasing paranoid and determined to fight to the bitter end of the war, even if it meant the total destruction of Germany in the process. Under the slogan of "total victory or total ruin," Hitler ordered German army destroy everything as it retreated and that all men, even school boys and old men, be drafted into the army. Hitler’s secret police were ordered to kill any German who opposed these actions. Hitler spent the last few months of his life living in a bunker in the center of the bombed out ruins of Berlin, still desperately believing that he could win the war and build his Nazi Empire. However, as Russian soldiers attacked Berlin, Hitler recognized that all was lost and wrote his will in which he blamed the Jews for starting the war. After this, he married his long-time mistress Eva Braun and then committed suicide.
Source # 1 - Nazi poster from 1930 election. "National-Sozialistische Deutsche-Arbeiter-Parti" means "National Socialist German Worker's Party". The red words coming from the snake are: usury, Versailles, unemployment, war guilt lie, Marxism, Bolshevism, lies and betrayal, inflation, Locarno, Dawes Pact, Young Plan, corruption, Barmat, Kutistker, Sklarek [the last three Jews involved in major financial scandals], prostitution, terror, civil war.
Source # 2 - Graphs showing the unemployment rate in Germany and the popularity of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's
Source # 3 - Excerpt from the graphic novel Berlin: City of Smoke that shows the street conflicts between the Nazis and communists in Berlin - click here (You need to be logged into your BHS Google account to access this source)
Source # 4 - Video of Nazi Rule of Germany in the 1930's - click here
Source # 5 - Video of Nazi ideology and programs - click here
