Adolf Hitler

20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); National Socialist GermanWorkers Party). Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. He was at the centre of the founding of Nazism, the start ofWorld War II, and the Holocaust.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of 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 hisrelease in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After hisappointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was toestablish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Germanic people. Hedirected the rearmament of Germany and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939, resulting in the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces and theirEuropean allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By 1943, Hitler's military decisions led to escalating defeats. In 1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. Hitler's supremacistand racially motivated policies resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, including an estimated six million Jews, and in the deaths of between 50 and 70 million people in World...