Austrian-born politician who became Fuehrer (leader) and Chancellor of the Third Reich from 1933 until his death in 1945.  He rose from peasant origin to become dictator of Germany and conqueror of most of Europe.  Taking advantage of the wave of European fascism after World War I, he constructed a German regime unparalleled as an instrument of tyranny.  He won startling success in identifying his own morbid emotions with the needs of the German people.  His rule resulted in temporary advantage for a rearmed Germany, the ruin of much of the European structure, and the extermination of some 6 million Jews.  He was eventually smashed down by a global alliance, but not before he had brought Western civilization to the brink of destruction.

Early Years

    Adolf Hitler was born in the small village of Braunau, on the Inn River between Austria and Germany on April 20, 1889, the son of an Austrian customs official aged fifty-two, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and a peasant girl still in her twenties, Klara Poelzl Hitler.  Both sides of the family came from the Waldviertel (Woodlands) of Lower Austria, a back-country section of hills and woods housing a hardworking community of small peasants.  The unfriendly people were as harsh as the land they inhabited and suspicious of the city folk in Viennna, 50 miles away.  Little is known about Hitler's ancestry.  His grandfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, was a wandering miller who formed a relationship with a peasant girl, Anna Marie Schickelgruber, a household servant in Graz.  In 1837 Anna Marie gave birth to an illegitimate son, Alois.  Five years later Johan Hiedler and Anna Marie were married.  Alois used the name Schickelgruber until 1876, when he had it legally changed to Hitler because he had been reared in the house of his uncle, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.  Alois was married three times.  His third wife, Klara Poelzl, twenty-three years his junior, bore him five children, only two of whom lived to maturity, Adolf and his younger sister, Paula.

    Hitler's mother was a quietly, hardworking woman with a solemn, pale face and large, staring eyes.  She kept a clean household and a labored diligently to please her husband.  Hitler loved his indulgent mother, and she in turn considered him her favorite child, even if, as she said, he was "moonstruck".  Later, he spoke of himself as his mother's darling.  She told him how different he was from other children.  Despite her love, however, he developed into a discontented and resentful child.  Psychologically she unconsciously made him, and through him the world, pay for her own unhappiness with her husband.  Adolf feared his strict father, a hard and difficult mad who set the pattern for the youngster's own brutal view of life.  Miserable and lonely, with three unhappy marriages, Hitler had to bring his tipsy parent home.  Adolf later pictured his father as an inebriated sadist who squandered the family income.  This sour, hot-tempered man was master inside his home, where he made the children feel the lash of his cane, switch, and belt.  Alois snarled at his son, humiliated him, and corrected him again and again.  There was deep tension between two unbending wills.  It is probable that Adolf Hitler's later fierce hatreds came in part from this hostility to his father.  He learned early in life that right was always on the side of the stronger one.

    In 1895, just before he reached the age of six, Adolf entered the Volksschule (public school) in the village of Fishlham.  Two years later his slightly religious mother sent him to the monastery school at Lambach, where she hoped that he would eventually become a monk.  He was expelled after he was caught smoking on the monastery grounds.  The family then moved to Leonding, a small suburb of Linz, where young Adolf at first did well in school.  He was noted among his comrades for his insistence on playing the game "Follow the Leader," in which he was always the leader.  From 1900 to 1904 he attended the Realschule (high school for science) at Linz and in 1904 to 1905 at Steyr.  His performance in high school was less than mediocre.  "The things which pleased me, I learned," he wrote later.  "Above all, everything that I thought would be of use to me later as a painter.  The things which seemed to me meaningless in this respect or which did not appeal to me, I sabotaged completely."  Adolf left school at sixteen without being graduated.
    For two years Adolf did nothing, remaining at home, roaming the streets, or spending hours in the public library reading German history and mythology.  He dreamed about becoming an artist and was talented in the art of evading responsibilities.  He developed a lifelong contempt for educated people.  "Most of my teachers," he said, "had something wrong with them mentally, and quite a few of them ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics."  The only teacher he admired was a Dr. Leopold Poetsch, a fervent Pan-Germanist, who taught the young man to despise the Hapsburgs and support the cause of German nationalism.  Adolf's only friend was August Kubizek, an upholsterer's helper, who served as a one-man audience for his flights into mysticism.

    In October 1907, when he was eighteen, Hitler left his mother, who was incurably ill with cancer, and went to Vienna to make his way in the world.  He suffered a terrible setback when the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts failed him on the admission examinations.  He never recovered from this blow to his price, which he blamed on "those stupid professors".  In December 1908 his mother died, another crushing event in his life.  For the next five years he lived on charity, occasional odd jobs, and the sale of his sketches.  "Five years of misery and woe in Vienna," he wrote later.  "Five years, in which I earned my living first as apprentice and then as unknown painter.  Hunger was my faithful companion.  It never left me for a moment".  He made daily rounds of the cafes and picture framers, trying to sell his drawings so that he could eat.  Looking like an untidy vagabond, he seldom shaved and wore a filthy black derby and a long overcoat reaching down to his ankles.

    In Vienna Hitler learned to hate.  He rejected the teachings of Karl marx and remained anti-Marxist throughout his life.  Influenced by the writings of Karl Lueger, he began to hate the Jews as "rats, parasites, and bloodsuckers."  One day on a street in Vienna, he saw a Jew in a caftan and asked himself:  "Could this be a German?"  Then followed what he called a soul-searching battle between feeling and reason.  Jews, he decided, together with Marxists, had combined in a union to destroy the world.  "If the Jew wins over the world with the help of the Marxists, then this crown will be the wreath of death for mankind."  He also began to despise democracy.  He found relief in dreams of a great and glorious Germany that would in time take over the weak Hapsburg monarchy.  In cheap cafes he gave political harangues directed against his pet hatreds.  People began to listen to the sickly, harried young man with hypnotic eyes.  He left Vienna in May 1913 for Munich, a German city.  There, too, he was depressed and embittered, a lonely stranger in a gay, throbbing metropolitan center.

Military service

    In February 1914 Hitler was temporarily recalled to Austria to be examined for military service, but he was rejected as "too weak, and unfit to bear arms."  When war broke out in August 1914, he wrote to the King of Bavaria and asked to serve in his army.  He was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Infantry (List Regiment), composed mostly of student volunteers.  With only a few weeks of training, he was sent to the front.  He proved to be an able and courageous soldier.  Until 1916, he served as an orderly and later as a dispatch bearer.  In four years he took part in forty-seven battles, often in the thick of the fighting.  He was wounded twice.  On October 7, 1916, he was brought to the hospital at Hermits with a wounded leg.  Two years later, only four weeks before the end of the war, he was badly gassed, and he spent three agonized months in a small hospital near Berlin.  He received his first decoration, the Iron Cross (Second Class) in 1914, and he was given the Iron Cross (First Class), a rare award for a common soldier in the Imperial German Army, on August 4, 1918.  The latter medal was for the capture of an enemy officer and fifteen men.  However, Hitler was never promoted beyond the rank of lance corporal.

    The war had a profound influence on Hitler's life.  It gave him, at long last, the purpose for which he had dreamed.  He learned about violence and its use.  Later, he told how the creeping gas began to eat into his eyes during the last days of the war.  When he began to weaken under the terror of blindness, a voice thundered, "Miserable fool, you want to weep while thousands are worse off than you."  Hitler recounted that the more he tried to understand the great events of the hour, the more his brow burned the shame:  "I knew everything was lost.  Only fools-liars and criminals-could hope for mercy from the enemy.  In these nights my hatred grew against the men who had brought about this crime.  I, however, decided to go into politics."

Rise to party Leadership

    After Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I, Hitler returned to Munich.  Angered by the revolution in Germany and the rise of the Weimar Republic, he turned to politics to work against both the Treaty of Versailles and the new German democracy.  Remaining on the roster of his old regiment, he was assigned to spy on political parties.  In September 1919 he was ordered to investigate a small group of nationalistic veterans of the German Workers party (Deutscher Arbeiterpartei).  The party had no program and no plan of action (it was just against the government), and it had only $2 in its treasury, but Hitler was much impressed by its few definite ideas, which coincided with his own.  He joined the party as member No. 55 and later was made No. 7 of its Executive Committee.  He had finally found the right outlet for his talents in political agitation and organization, and he lost no chance to talk before a crowd wherever he could find one:  "I could speak!  After 30 minutes the people in the tiny room were electrified!"

    Within two years Hitler advance to leadership of the little party.  He changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie, the National Socialist German Worker's party, later to be known everywhere as the NSDAP.  The word Nazi was an acronym of the words NAtional SoZIalist.  Hitler left the army to devote all his time to building the new party.  Conditions were favorable:  there was economic discontent, and there was strong resentment against the victorious allies.  In his program of Twenty-five points, announced on February 24, 1920, Hitler emphasized the ideas he had absorbed in Vienna:  anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, the concept of Aryan racial supremacy, contempt for liberal democracy, and the principle of leadership (Fuhrerprinzip).  The program was designed to appeal to everyone with a grievance of some kind.  Most of Hitler's ideas were not new, but he colored them with extraordinary showmanship and eloquence.  He gave the Nazi party the swastika symbol (Hakenkreuz) and the "Heil!" (Hail!) greeting both borrowed from older racial groups.  He managed to acquire a party newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, or Racial Observedr, to represent the party's views.  As a trained militia to guard his meetings, he organized the Sturmabteilung (SA), the brownshirted Storm Troopers, under the command of a close friend, Capt Ernst Roehm.  A second unit, the Schutzstaffel (SS) was a blackshirted, highly disciplined personal bodyguard for Hitler himself, pledged to fight to the death for him.

    By late 1923 Hitler was convinced that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse and that he now could fulfill his promise to "march on Berlin" and strike down the government of "Jewis-Marxist traitors."  With the support of the Army he would bring Germany under nationalist control.  As a front man he brought into the plan Gen. Erich Ludendorff, the reactionary militarist of World War I.  In the Beer-Hall Putsch held in Munich on November 8, 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff took advantage of the chaotic political situation to force the leaders of the local government in Munich and the local Reichswehr commander to proclaim a national revolution.  Holding a captive audience in the beer hall, Hitler, in wild excitement, jumped on a chair, fired a pistol into the air, and announced the revolution:  "Tomorrow will find a national government in Germany, or it will find us dead!"  The next day the Nazis marched through the streets of Munich to the War Ministry, but a cordon of police fired on them and dispersed the column.  The Putsch collapsed.

    On February 26, 1924, Hitler was brought to trial on charge of high treason.  He took advantage of the occasion to convert the proceedings into a propaganda triumph.  acting as his own lawyer, he put on a dazzling display of oratory.  He took full blame for planning the Putsch.  "This is my attitude:  I would rather be hanged in a Bolshevik Germany than perish under the rule of French swords."  The hour would come when the masses, who stood on the streets with their swastika banners, would unite with those who would fire on them.  The companies would grow into battalions, the battalions into regiments, the regiments into divisions.  "Even if you judge us guilty a thousand times, the goddess of the eternal court of history will laugh and tear up the verdict of this court, but she pronounces us not guilty."  Hitler was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.  His courtroom behavior made a deep impression on Germans, who began to regard him as a great national hero.  He himself learned a vital lesson from the inglorious Putsch:  it was necessary above all that his movement achieve political power by legal means.

    Hitler served only nine months of his sentence at Landsberg am lech.  He settled down in a comfortable cell and began to ponder is mistakes.  He ate breakfast in bed, lectured to his fellow prisoners, and walked in the garden of what was more a sanitarium than a prison.  He also dictated to Rudolf Hess the first volume of Mein Kampf, which became the political bible of the Nazi movement.  In this crude, turgid, disorganized book, Hitler gave the story of his life, his philosophy, and the blueprint of the program he intended to achieve for Germany.  The basic theme was social Darwinism:  individuals and nations are both subject to a continuous struggle for life.  Power was preeminent, and morality was foolish.  The racially superior German people were threatened by Jews, "the plastic demon of the fall of mankind," by Marxists, Bolsheviks, and liberals, and by humanists or humanitarians of any kind.  Germany could become great again only if it waged relentless warfare against these internal enemies.  Under a dictatorship supported by the people, a new, powerful Germany would seek Lebensraum, the living space denied it by external enemies.  The new Nazi movement would prepare the strategy for world domination.  Mein Kampf was a wordy, repetitious book, but it eventually became a best seller.  By 1939 it had been translated into eleven languages, and more than 5.2 million copies had been sold.  The royalties made Hitler a rich man.

Rebuilding the Nazi party

The collapse of the 1923 Putsch resulted in the temporary disintegration of the Nazi party, but Hitler, released from Landberg Prison under an amnesty in December 1924, was soon hard at work reconstructing his movement.  Assisted by two close followers, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, a propaganda wizard, and Capt. Hermann Goering, a World War I flying ace, Hitler went about the critical business of winning mass support.  His immediate problem was to decide between the socialist left of his followers in Berlin and the nationalist right in Munich, between the northern party members led by Gregor Strasser and his own comrades in Bavaria.  At a party conference held in February 1926, Hitler outmaneuvered Strasser and stripped him of any influence on the growing Nazi movement.  Meanwhile, with rare political acumen, he used his oratorical skill to attract both left and right.  His propaganda appealed to the lower classes hard hit by the economic depression.  At the same time, his insistence upon attaining power by legal means, which won him the name Adolf Legalite, gave him prestige with the military, the nationalists, and the conservatives.  This combination of insight into mass psychology and willingness to work with the conservative right was a powerful factor in elevating Hitler to supreme political power.  He gradually recovered the ground he had lost since the abortive Beer Hall Putsch.  By 1930 he was the undisputed head of the Nazi movement.  Funds began to flow into the party's coffers from wealthy Rhineland industrialists, who saw in Hitler their best safeguard against the annoying unions and the inroads of communism.  At the same time Hitler drew increasing support from solid bourgeois elements as well as from discontented workers, to both of whom he promised security and relief from despoliation by Jewish financiers.

Rise to Political Power
 

 In the 1928 Reichstag  elections the Nazis won only 12 seats to the Communists’ 54. During the economic depression starting in 1929 Hit-ler made an alliance with the Nationalist Alfred Hugen-berg  ran a united campaign against the Young Plan . Through newspapers controlled by Hugenberg, Hitler was able for the first time to address a considerable national audience. Moreover, he was now able to reach greater numbers of industrial and business magnates who could easily place his party on a secure financial basis. In the 1930 elections the NSDAP won more than 6 million votes and 107 delegates to the Reichstag, thereby becom-ing the second largest party in the country. The number of Communist representatives rose to 77. Hitler’s drumbeat-ing tactics had won him the attention of the German electorate.

 After acquiring German citizenship through the state of Braunschweig on February 25, 1932, Hitler decided to test his party’s strength by running for the Presidency. The aging incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg , had the support of the Socialists, Catholics, and labor. There were two other candidates: Theodor Duesterberg , an army officer, and Ernst Thaelmann, the Communist party leader. Hitler staged an energetic campaign for the presidential elections of March 13, 1932, winning more than 30 percent of the vote and depriving Von Hindenburg of an absolute majority. In the runoff elections of April 10, the popular old war hero was returned the victor with 53 percent of the vote (Von Hindenburg, 19,359650; Hitler, 13,418,011; Thaelmann, 3,706,655). In the elections of July 1932 the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag and became the largest politicall party in Germany. The following November Hitler received a slight setback when the num-ber of Nazi deputies dropped to 196, as that of the Com-munists rose to 100. There followed a deadly battle in the streets between the Brownshirts and the Red Front.

 Meanwhile, the political situation was deteriorating rapidly. Chancellor Heinrich Bruening , although liberal and moderate in outlook, felt himself compelled to govern by decree. It was an unfortunate decision that actually prepared the way to dictatorship. On May 30, 1932, Von Hindenburg dismissed Bruening from office. There began a bitter political batt1e behind the scenes between the Junkers in the east, the wealthy industrialists in the west, and Reichswehr officers. These three groups took over the Cabinet, first headed by Franz von Papa , a shrewd politician and a master of intrigue, arid then by Gen. Kurt von Schleicher , an army officer who preferred a military dictatorship. Von Papen made a political deal with Hitler. The two met secretly on January 4, 1933, and decided to work together for a government in which Hitler would be Chancellor and Von Papen’s asso-ciates would hold important ministries. They also agreed to eliminate Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews from political life. Hitler promised to renounce the socialist part of his program, while Von Papen pledged that he would obtain further subsidies from the industrialists for Hitler’s use. The final problem was to win the support of the elderly President, who had little use for the crude upstart lance corporal of World War I. Both Oskar von Hindenburg , the President’s son, who was worried about the family estate at Neudeck in the east, and a wealthy banker, Kurt Freiherr von Schroeder , urged the President to go along with Von Papen. On January 30, 1933, with great reluctance Von Hindenburg named Hitler German Chancellor with a coalition Cabinet but refused him extraordinary powers. It was a great moment for the little man who had been an unwashed tramp on the streets of Vienna. He had achieved his goal without a Putsch, without revolution, in the constitutional way he had promised.

 Beginning of the Third Reich, 1933—1934. Hitler promised that the Third Reich, which began n 1933, would last for 1,000 years. Once in power, he moved rapidly to establish and consolidate an absolute dictatorship. He obtained Von Hindenburg’s agreement for new elections because a majority could not be obtained in the Reichsrag. His first concern was to alert the country to the dangers of the red terror. He would consolidate his own position ii the expense of the Communists. The Reichstag fire  on the night of February 27, 1933, provided him with the excuse he needed to destroy his opponents and set the ground for his system of totalitarianism. The fire was apparently the work of a weak-minded twenty-four year -old Dutch vagabond, Martnus van der Lubbe , who had once belonged to a Communist dub in Holland. but some observers concluded that the Nazis themselves had set the fare and blamed it on the Communists. It was charged that a group of Storm Troopers entered the Reichstag by way of a tunnel running from Hermann Goering’s headquarters, prepared the fire by soaking the curtains and rugs with flammable liquids, and then brought in the simpleminded ex-Communist Dutchman to start small fires of his own. The question of responsibility for the fire is still the subject of controversy among historians.

 Whether or not the Nazis set the Reichstag fire, it served Hitler well. Not only did it make the imposing edifice a blazing inferno, but it also gave Hitler a reason for crushing his opponents. In the elections of March 5, 1933, the Nazis increa5ed their representation in the Reichstag from 196 to 288 and their popular vote from 11,737,000 to 17,277,200, or some 44 percent of the total. With support from the Nationalists, Hitler now had a 52 percent majority. On March 24, 1933, the Reichstag passed the so-called Enabling Act , the Law to Remove the Distress of People and State (Gesetz zur Erhe-bung der Not von Volk und Reich). In five brief paragraphs ~t took away from the Reichstag the powers of legislation, including control of the budget, initiation of constitutional amendments, and approval of treaties with foreign nations, and gave them to the Reich Cabinet for a period of four years. Within a few months all other politi-cal parties were banned, Nazi Statthalter (governors) were in control of the German states, trade unions were dis-solved, and all elements of the population were organized into party-controlled units.

  Hitler consolidated his power by a premeditated system of brutality and terror. Those who dared to speak up against his regime were beaten or disappeared by assassi-nation, arrest, or imprisonment. Although he carefully avoided offending powerful interests, Hitler astutely pushed the conservatives aside while handling the radi-cals roughly. He revealed a superb mastery of Machiavel-lian politics in his campaign to harry, arrest, and deprive opponents of their rights and lives. He made government, law, education, and religion subservient to National Socialism. Like Mussolini, he would watch over his peo-ple from cradle to grave. “Hell Hitler!” became the obliga-tory form of greeting, the swastika the symbol of the Nazi state, the “Horst Wessel Lied”  its official anthem, and bread and circuses the daily fare of the German people. Under the guidance of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels a cult of Fuehrer worship  was propagated. In 1934 the chancellorship and the Presidency were united in the person of Hitler.

 Consolidation of the dictatorship. Only one thing remained in the way of absolute dictatorship—the radical element within the party centering in the SA and its leader, Capt. Ernst Roehm. Thus far Hitler had main-tained an alliance with the business and military leaders who had paved the way for his own rise to political power, and for the time being he wanted to avoid a radical solution to the problem of Germany’s ills. But Roehm and his impatient followers called for a “continu-ing revolution.” The Alte Kiimpfer , Hitler’s old comrades, demanded a larger role in Army affairs, The German generals made it plain to Hitler that he would lose their support unless he corrected the behavior of the Storm Troopers. Hitler was forced to choose between the national and socialist sides of his movement. He survived by adopting a hard solution. Rallying behind him the party and Army leaders and especially the SS led by Heinrich Himmler , he struck furiously in the Blood Purge  of June 30. 1934. He flew to Bad Wies-see in Upper Bavaria, where Roehm and several of his followers were staying at the Hanselbauer Sanatorium, a private hotel. Hitler entered the room quietly, awakened Roehm, and arrested him. Two days later he ordered the SA leader to kill himself within ten minutes. An unbeliev-ing Roehm refused, whereupon he was shot down in his cell.

  Meanwhile, 150 top SA leaders were arrested in Berlin, and most of them were massacred 4 at a time. No one knows how many were slaughtered in the purge. Six assassins killed former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher in his villa. In Munich the seventy-two-year-old Gustav von Kahr , who a decade earlier had crushed Hitler’s Beer-Hall Putsch, was dragged from his home, murdered, and left in a swamp. “In those hours,” Hitler said, “I was the supreme judge of the German people.” When the purge ended, Hitler emerged as the undisputed dictator of the Third Reich.

  The rule of traditional law was now finished. On the death of Von Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler assumed the titles of Fuehrer and Kanzler (Chancellor) after rejecting the designation Rezrhsprdsident (Reich Pres-ident). All army officers were required to take an oath of allegiance, not to the constitution but to Hitler himself.

  From this point on Hitler paid relatively little attention to domestic affairs. He made his broad lines of policy dear to his subordinates, with the understanding that they would carry out the system of terror he deemed necessary to maintain the existence of his regime. Each of these officials—Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, and others— exercised arbitrary power within his own domain by setting up a special office of his own. The Fuehrer
watched them carefully and saw to it that no one private organization could become strong enough to challenge his own authority. He encouraged Himmler to construct a concentration camp system to deal with domestic enemies. Through the Nuremberg Laws on citizenship and race  of 1935 he deprived Jews of their citizenship and banned marriage between Aryans (Germans) and non-Aryans (Jews). He supported restrictive laws that led to a massive emigration of Jews, socialists, and intellectuals, who found it difficult to sur-vive in the closed society of the Third Reich.

  Germany became a vast prison camp. Gestapo  agents raided homes in the middle of the night. Some captives vanished forever; others were taken to dun-geons, where they were beaten and tortured to extract confessions. Crimes—from holdups to murders—were called “politics” in the name of the “national revolution.” There was a scramble to mount the Nazi bandwagon:  those who had low numbers in the party, showing early membership, took advantage of their good luck by appro-priating jobs in the civil service. Famous professors were dismissed from their posts in favor of incompetent Nazi successors. Great mass meetings were held at Nuremberg to stir the emotions of the people. Rags and standards merged in a riot of color as marchers headed for the stadium to hear the words of the master. Meanwhile, Goebbels’s propaganda machine glo-rified the Fuehrer: “We are witnessing the greatest mira-cle in history. A genius is building the world’” And again: “We heard his voice while Germany slept. His hand has made us a nation again.”’” He alone is never mistaken!” “He is always like a star above us!”

The road to war, 1935—1939.

  Certain that his position in Germany was now consolidated by terrorism, Hitler began his campaign to restore German power in Europe and achieve the goals he had outlined in Mein Kampf. His first concern was to rearm the country. At first secretly and then openly, he violated the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles for German disarmament. With huge expendi-tures on arms and the unemployed drained off into the Army, the economy improved.  Shortly after he became Chancellor. Hitler adopted an aggressive foreign policy. His treaties with the Vatican and Poland (1934) were designed to conceal his intentions. In October 1933 he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. He attempted to move into Austria in the summer of 1934 but retreated when the Italian dictator Mussolini sent troops to the frontier to guard Austria’s independence. In March 1935 Hitler announced that Germany would build a peacetime army of thirty-six divisions, or 550,000 men, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Great Powers protested only mildly. A year later, in March 1936, Hitler sent his troops marching into the demilitarized Rhine-land, while at the same time denouncing the Locarno Pact .

 When, in July 1936, civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler gave aid to Gen. Francisco Franco and the Spanish fas-cists. He sent his Luftwaffe  to Spain to gain experi-ence in what amounted to a dress rehearsal for World War II. In the Rome-Berlin Pact of October 25, 1936. Germany and Italy joined in a common front against bolshevism and the Western powers. Hitler saw this solid bloc of 115 million people as ready to obtain “living space” for the “have-not” nations. During this period of military prepa-ration coupled with economic reorientation aiming at self-sufficiency Hitler adopted the tech-nique of deliberately lying in order to lull his future victims into a false sense of security. While preparing for war, he spoke publicly of his yearning for peace. The bigger the lie, he said, the more people would believe it. By the end of 1937 Hitler’s expansionist policy was in full force. On November 5, 1937, almost two years before the invasion of Poland, he called a meeting with his military leaders, since known as the Hosabach Conference . at which he made it dear that he intended to solve the German space problem “no later than 1943—1945.” By various stratagems he got rid of two members of the High Command, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg and Col. Gen. Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, both of whom were present at the Hossbach Conference and both of whom opposed his aggressive designs. In 1938 Hitler achieved Anschluss  with Austria by manipulating a crisis in Austro-German relations and then sending the German Army across the frontier to incorporate Austria forcibly into the Third Reich. A plebiscite held under Nazi direction won 99.59 percent approval of Anschluss. “This is the proudest hour of my life,” said Hitler.

  A greater test of Hitler’s policy came later in 1938 when he began a campaign to liberate the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. This was an attack on a sovereign state whose independence had been guaran-teed by the Western powers and by ties with the Soviet Union. After Nazi-inspired riots inside Czechoslovakia, Hitler promised the Sudeten Germans that he would not neglect them. The saber rattling frightened British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier who went to Germany and signed the humiliating Munich Agreement . These bloodless victories elevated Hitler’s prestige among Ger-mans. Within less than a year he had added 10 million people to the Third Reich. After each victory he pro-claimed that he had no further territorial claims to make. The one-time mendicant adventurer of Vienna was now the most powerful dictator in Europe since the Napo-leonic era. His people regarded him as a consummate statesman, even greater than Bismarck, while diplomats in the Western countries feared him as a persistent aggressor.

  Poland was Hitler’s next designated victim. He now claimed the Polish Corridor and Danzig, the loss of which he attributed to the Treaty of Versailles. The Western powers, in response to Poland’s appeal, guaranteed Pol-ish independence. Meanwhile, Hitler began negotiations with Moscow with the excuse that it was vital to avoid war on two fronts, as he had pointed out in Mein Kampf. On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and 5oviet Russia, mortal enemies, signed a pact of friendship agreeing to divide Poland between them. This was Stalin’s reply to the diplomats of the West, whom he suspected of trying to turn Hitler against him. Prime Minister Chamberlain, appalled by this diplomatic bombshell, informed Hitler that Britain would not hesi-tate to fulfill its obligations to Poland. An angered Hitler made no reply but said privately: “I am 50 years old, and prefer war now to when I shall be 53 or 60.”

Early domination of World War II.

  From this stage on, Hitler’s life and career merged with the cascading events of World War II. He put on his soldier’s tunic and announced that he would not change it until Germany was triumphant. In the first weeks of the war, starting on September 1, 1939. Poland was crushed between German and Russian forces. Hitler insisted that he was neither at war nor at peace, a convenient fiction leaving him with the initiative both on the battlefield and in diplomacy. In an extraordinary speech to the Reichstag on October 6, 1939, he suggested peace to Britain and France—his “last offer.” But by now it was realized everywhere that his world could not be trusted. A month later, on the anniver-sary of the 1923 Beer-Hall Putsch, he announced that he was giving orders for a five-year war that would end only in victory for the Third Reich.

  Then came the Sitzkrieg , the sit-down war, lasting through the winter of 1939—1940, when neither Hitler nor his enemies in the west attempted an attack. The French stayed behind their Maginot Line , while British pilots bombed Germany with leaflets. In his New Year address of 1940, Hitler declared that he was tighting for a “new order” in Europe. In March 1940 he met his ally, Mussolini, on the Brenner Pass to reveal his plans. Suddenly, on April 9, Hitler moved against Denmark and Norway with the explanation that the British had laid mines in Norwegian waters. A month later he sent his troops in a Blitzkrieg  on Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. “This battle will decide the fate of Germany for a thousand years.” On June 22, 1940, a triumphant Hitler required the French to agree to an armistice in the same railway carat Compigne  in which the Germans had been forced to sign the armistice in 1918. The Fuehrer returned to Berlin as a conquering hero. The events of the preceding weeks had confirmed the average German’s belief in Hitler’s genius.  He was given the major credit for the overall planning of a bnlliant military campaign. For the Allies it was a disas-trous defeat,

  Hitler’s next step was to subjugate Britain by aerial bombardment, to be followed by invasion in Operation Sea Lion.  The expected surrender of Brit-ain failed to materialize, however, as RAF pilots struck back at Hitler’s great air armadas. On August 15, 1940, the British shot down 180 German aircraft. Without air con-trol Hitler could not invade Britain, His strategy now turned to the east. Mussolini, annoyed at being kept in ignorance of Hitler’s plans, invaded Greece, but his con-spicuous failure there made it necessary for Hitler to turn his attention to the Balkans and North Africa. On April 6, 1941, Hitler attacked Greece and Yugoslavia and then sent his Afrika Korps  hurtling toward Egypt. Success of this plan depended on the neutrality of Soviet Russia.

  Hitler now nude the most critical decision of his career. He had 250 divisions of German troops and about 100 divisions from satellite countries. He decided to attack the Soviet Union in the belief that he could complete the task in six weeks. He would then separate Russia from its Western allies by stressing his own anti-Bolshevik cru-sade. On June 22, 1941, German troops crossed the border and surged into the Soviet Union on a front extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. At first Hitler was success-ful, as his troops covered two-thirds of the distance to Moscow in twenty-six days. The Russians, using a defense-in-depth strategy, retreated. “Today,” said Hitler on October 2, 1941, “begins the last, great decisive battle of the war.” He was partly right: it was decisive in favor of the Russians. Although he boasted that he had smashed Russia, his final desperate assault on the Cauca-sus was a disastrous failure. On December 19, 1941, after the catastrophe at Moscow, Hitler dismissed his com-mander in chief, Field Marshal Waither von Brauchitsch , and assumed control of all military operations himself. By this time the United States had entered the war, and four-fifths of the world was ranged against Nazi Germany.

  Hitler’s New Year message of 1942 showed a marked decline in his usual euphoric and confident mood. His armies were still winning victories in the Ukraine and in North Africa, but the great impulse of Blitzkrieg was no longer working effectively. He retreated into his field headquarters, constantly quarreling with his military advisers on strategy and tactics. Hitler continued to make errors of judgment. On the eastern front he moved hap-hazardly from one objective to another or ordered his armies to stand and fight when their position was hope-less. He neglected the Mediterranean area at a time when a relatively small additional effort might have brought decisive results.

  Meanwhile, Hitler paid less and less attention to poli-tics and diplomacy. He ordered Heinrich Himmler to prepare the framework for his New Order in Europe. con-sisting of the countries annexed by the Third Reich, the territories of Czechoslovakia and Poland, France and Bel-gium under Nazi governors, and Norway and Holland in a loose union. In all the occupied countries there arose powerful resistance movements, which Hitler attempted to smash by the same kind of terror he had used successfully in Germany. He imported vast numbers of foreign work-ers to supply his armies. He ordered Himmler to expand both the concentration camps and the extermination camps  to deal with dissidents and to cleanse the Aryan race by destroying the Jews and other “inferior” elements.

  The turning point came in the fail of 1942. By this time Gen. Erwin Rommel  was routed at El Alamein . In November Hitler’s Sixth Army, commanded by Gen. Friedrich von Paulus , began to stall and break down before Stalingrad. “I won’t leave the Volga,” Hitler shouted and ordered the encircled Sixth Army to be known as Fortress Stalingrad. In February 1943, Von Pawlus surrendered. This was a disaster and meant the loss of the war. Hitler had publicly promised to capture Stalin-grad but had allowed his armies to bleed to death in attempting to redeem his pledge. Until this time he had been successful in achieving the goals he had set for him-self. Now he began to speak less of victory than of the in-ability of his enemies to defeat him. He retreated into his own world of fantasy and isolated himself from those who would warn him of the consequences of defeat. His health began to decline as he depended more and more upon the injections given by Dr. Theodor Morell , whose drugs were having a serious effect on his health. Hitler’s days of glory were ended.

Military decline.
 
 Unwilling to concede defeat, Hitler ordered total mobilization of the German economy in a final effort to extricate himself. There was one crisis after another to plague him, in July 1943 Mussolini’s regime collapsed in Italy. and Hitler had to assume the responsibility of rebuilding it. He hoped that the tremendous pounding of German cities by Allied air power would rekindle the fighting spirit of his people. Germany would never capitulate: “She will go on fighting past 12 o’clock”’

  Blows began to rain in on the Fuehrer from all directions. The Allies smashed his armies in North Africa, In Russia his troops were pushed back from village to village to their own soil. Anglo-American forces invaded Sicily and then the mainland of Italy, reaching Naples on Orb-ben, 1943, andRomeonJune4, 1944. OnJune 6 camethe supreme event of 1944, Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France. One of the most remarkable expeditions in military history, it was accomplished with complete initial surprise. Soon a million Allied troops were pushing the Germans eastward, bypassing Paris and rut-ting the Germans to pieces in their own version of a Blitzkrieg. Hitler was caught in a giant trap as the Allied armies moved across the Rhine and the Russians drove en relentlessly from the east. Goering’s Luftwaffe was unable to protect German cities and industrial centers from the effects of shattering Allied air bombardments. The U-boat campaign was a failure.
All these factors in a desperate military situation encouraged the small anti-Hitler movement inside Ger-many to take action. Criticism of the Fuehrer had moved in several stages from opposition to resistance to conspir-acy. The several small and loosely connected German opposition groups were never organized into a strong mass movement. Apparently, they did not have the mass strength of the underground fighters in the occupied countries who waged war against the Nazis. The German Resistance , however, did make several attempts to eliminate Hitler. On July 20, 1944, a number of high military and civilian officials, including Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, mayor of Leipzig, and the thirty-seven-year-old Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stautfenberg (executed a long-planned plot against Hitler at his eastern front headquarters. Sur-viving the bombing with some injuries. Hitler took vicious vengeance on the conspirators.

 Hitler’s last days. With the war hopelessly lost, Hitler moved his headquarters to Berlin. Here in the Fuehrer-bunker , built underground below the Chancellery garden, he passed his last days. In the midst of his lackeys the Nazi dictator played Out the final act of his life. He spent hours before giant war maps, shifting colored pins about to locate units that no longer existed. By this time he was in a state of extreme nervous exhaustion: although only fifty-six, he moved as if he were prematurely senile. His health grew even worse under the ministrations of his doctors. With the exception of Goebbels and Martin Bor-mann, his secretaries, and several others, his lieuten-ants began to desert him. He denounced Goering for trying to usurp his leadership and Himmler for seeking to negotiate with the Allies. Albert Speer , his Minister of Armaments and War Production, refused to carry out his orders for a scorched-earth policy. At last acknowledg-ing defeat, the Fuehrer decided to leave the world in a gesture of Wagnerian self-immolation. Germany, too, he said should commit suicide, for the Germans had been unworthy of his genius and had been defeated in the struggle for life. Two further acts remained for him. In the early hours of April 29, 1945. he married Eva Braun (his mistress, and immediately afterward dictated his last will and political testament, in which he justified his life and work.  The next day he retreated into his suite and shot himself, while Eva took poison to end her life. In accordance with his instructions, the bodies were dumped into a trough in the Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline, and burned.

 Personality and character. Hitler’s personality is a familiar one in every German Biersiube (taproom). Self-educated, shrewd, arrogant, the German of this type holds forth on every subject under the sun, from food to world politics, from music to cleansing the race. Pomp-ous, omniscient, he refuses to discuss ideas but instead issues dicta and ukases. He mistakes his own intuitions for scientific fact. He knows all the answers to the mean-ing of history. He lives in a curious dream world and dismisses as nonsense any idea opposed to his judgments and disconnected monologues.

 Hitler’s unguarded all-night off-the-record table talk gives clues to his personality and character. Race: “It’s our duty continually to arouse the forces that slumber in our people’s blood.” Self-glori-fication: “There was a time when there was only one Prussian in Europe and he lived in Rome. There was a second Prussian. He lived in Munich, and was myself in Sense of grandeur: “When one enters the Reich Chancel-lery, one should have the feeling that he is visiting the master of the world” Suspicions: “I never met an Englishman who didn’t say that Churchill was off his head.” “There’s no doubt about it—Roosevelt is a sick brain.” Hostility: “There’s nobody more stupid than the Americans, They can never fight like heroes.”

  The mind of Hitler has fascinated psychiatrists, psy-choanalysts, psychologists, and historians. It is now gen-erally agreed that he suffered from lack of mental stability, and some believe that he was burdened by several types of insanity. His character was molded in his early years by an accumulation of frustrations, hostility, and hatreds attributable to the obscurity and failures of his early days. The British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper  described Hitler’s mind in a striking sentence: “A terrible phenome-non, imposing indeed in its granite harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber—like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse—.old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure—the intellectual detritus of centuries.”’

 Historical significance. Dispassionate observers agree on the importance of Hitter’s role not only in the history of the twentieth century but in the annals of modem times. He won his way to political power by a mixture of vio-lence and deceit and used the same device to destroy other nations. By the time he committed suicide he had broken the structure of the world in which he lived and had led the way to even greater possibilities for destruc-tion. The enormous power he wielded was unprece-dented, especially in the technical resources he controlled, His ideas were old and shopworn, but his methods, while Machiavellian, took on the trappings of modern technol-ogy. Both in his drive to power and during his chancellor-ship he used lies, terror, and extreme cruelty to gain his end. In the eyes of the world he became the incarnation of evil. His legacy is the memory of one of the most horrible tyrannies in the course of civilization.

 There are three levels of value judgments on the life and career of Hitler, To German nationalists of similar persua-sion he was the great national hero who fought against an unjust Carthaginian peace and lifted Germany once more to the pinnacle of prestige and international power. To a small group of revisionist historians he was a unique political genius who was able to respond effectively to the mistakes of other, less able diplomats, in the way that Frederick the Great took advantage of Maria Theresa’s errors. To the largest group of observers, however, Hitler is regarded as an amoral evil genius who brought Western civilization to its nadir and nearly destroyed it in the process. He alone was responsible, they say, for the horror and barbarism of the Third Reich. A disturbed neu-rotic himself, he found in the tortured state of mind of the German people after the shock of defeat in World War I a mirror of his own morbid emotions, of extreme frustra-tion and hostility. Throughout his life he, an Austrian, insisted on identifying himself with the German people and, by inflaming them with his hypnotic oratory and shrewd propaganda, found an outlet for his own hatreds and ambitions. His intuitive understanding of the Ger-man mind was extraordinary. He achieved one startling success after another and later was able to construct a massive tyranny among a people who in the past had contributed much to the best in European culture. A complex concatenation of circumstances elevated him from the soapbox to the seat of power in Germany; it took a worldwide coalition of powers to strike him down.
The true monument to Hitler was the devastation of the nation he ruled with such cruelty and terror. He made his own unwitting epitaph in these prophetic words to Hermann Rauschning: “We must be prepared for the hardest struggle which a nation has ever had to face. Only through this test of endurance can we become ripe for the dominion to which we are called. lt will be my duty to carry on this war regardless of losses. The sacrifice of lives will be immense. . . . We shall have to abandon much that is dear to us and today seems irreplaceable. Cities will become heaps of ruins; noble monuments of architec-ture will disappear forever. This time our sacred soil will not be spared. But I am not afraid of this.”