Hitler

Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Speaker_Icon.svg/13px-Speaker_Icon.svg.png listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) wasan Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); National Socialist German Workers Party). Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933to 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 of World War II, and the Holocaust.
A decorated veteranof 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 HallPutsch, 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 attackingthe Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformedthe Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony incontinental Europe.
Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Germanic people. He directed the rearmament of Germany and the invasion ofPoland by theWehrmacht in September 1939, resulting in the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces and their European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By1943, Hitler's military decisions led to escalating defeats. In 1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies resulted in the...