Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German:Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from1934 to 1945. Hitler was at the centre of the founding of Nazism, the start of World War II, and the Holocaust.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursorof the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment,during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism,antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorshipbased on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had thegoal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Germanic people. He directed the rearmament of Germany and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939, leading to the outbreak ofWorld War II in Europe. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces and their European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By 1943, Hitler's military decisions led to escalating defeats. In1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, including an estimated six...