Savvi notes



Hitler, AdolfAlso known as:?Adolf Schickelgruber ??Born:?1889??Died:?1945?Occupation:?dictator of Germany, leader of the Nazi PartyFrom:?Dictators & Tyrants: Absolute Rulers and Would-Be Rulers in World History.right000Absolute dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, Adolf?Hitler?established?Nazism, instituted policies of racial supremacy and genocide, and plunged the world into the second great war of the century.The man who, for a dark time, dominated not only Germany but much of Europe, intimidating and terrorizing the world, came from an undistinguished and squalid background. Born on April 20, 1889, in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, but raised mainly in Linz, he was the son of a minor customs official. Alois Hilter, an illegitimate child, had used his mother's maiden name, Schicklgruber, until 1876, when he took his step-father's name,?Hitler. Alois was a brutal father, contemptuous of what he saw as Adolf's dreaminess. The boy fared poorly in his studies, leaving secondary school in 1905 without a graduation certificate. He decided to become an artist, but his uninspired drawings and watercolors twice failed to gain him admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After the death of his mother, whom he idolized,?Hitler?went to Vienna, hoping to make a living as an artist. From 1907 to 1913, he eked out a meager existence by painting advertisements, postcards, and the like, falling into an aimless depression given direction only by a growing racial hatred focused primarily on the Jews, whom?Hitler?began to see as a threat to the Germanic—or "Aryan"—race.Hitler?moved to Munich in 1913, presumably to evade conscription into the Austrian army. He was nevertheless recalled to Austria in February 1914 for examination for military service, but was rejected as unfit. Yet, in August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I,?Hitler?eagerly enlisted in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment.War service transformed the lackluster youth into a passionately militaristic nationalist. He served in the front lines as a runner, was promoted to corporal, and was decorated four times, receiving the Iron Cross 1st Class on August 4, 1918. He was seriously wounded in October 1916 and was gassed at the end of the war. Having apparently found a home in the army,?Hitler?remained with his regiment until April 1920. He served as an army political agent, joining the German Worker's Party in Munich in September 1919. In April 1920, he left the army to go to work full-time for the party's propaganda section.This was a time of terrific ferment and crisis in Germany. The?Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, was heavily punitive, and Germany was also rocked by an abortive Communist revolution. Seizing on the unrest,?Hitlerwas instrumental in transforming the German Worker's Party by August 1920 into the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, commonly shortened to NSDAP or Nazi Party. Forming an alliance with Ernst Roehm, an army staff officer, he was elected president of the party in July 1921.?Hitler?became a streetcorner orator, loudly assaulting Germany's enemies—principally Communists and Jews, as well as the nations that had forced upon the German people an ignominious peace—and during November 8–9, 1923, he led theMunich Beer Hall Putsch, a bold attempt to seize control of the Bavarian government.The rebellion was quickly suppressed, and?Hitler?was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. While incarcerated at Landesberg prison, near Munich, he wrote his political autobiography,?Mein Kampf?("My Struggle"), in which he crystallized the political philosophy of nazism, proclaiming eternal opposition to Jews, Communists, effete liberals, and exploitive capitalists the world over, and extolling a reborn Germany of racial purity and unstoppable national will. He wrote of a Germany that would rise again to become the dominant power in the world, a Germany that would claim and obtain?Lebensraum—living space—in central Europe and in Russia.Adolf?Hitler?was released from prison after serving only nine months of his sentence, and he set about strengthening his party, especially in the industrial German north. During this period, he recruited the men who would lead the country into mass atrocity and all-consuming war: Hermann Goering, popular World War I air ace;?Josef Goebbels, master propagandist;?Heinrich Himmler, skilled in strongarm, terror, and police tactics; and Julius Streicher, a popular anti-Semitic journalist. The party's greatest boon came with the worldwide economic collapse of 1929 and the depression that followed. Forging an alliance with the Nationalist Party headed by industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, the Nazis increased the number of Reichstag seats they held from 12 to 107, becoming the second largest party in Germany.?Hitler?did not confine his party's activities to the Reichstag, but developed the SA (Sturmabeteilung, or?Brownshirts) into an effective paramilitary arm that quite literally beat down the opposition in the streets of Germany.Hitler?ran for president of the German republic in 1932, narrowly losing to Paul von Hindenberg, the superannuated incumbent hero of World War I. But the July elections gained the Nazis 230 Reichstag seats, 37 percent of the vote, making it the largest party represented, and eventually Hindenberg was compelled to appoint?Hitler?Reichskanzler?(Reich chancellor, or prime minister) on January 30, 1933.Hitler?now worked vigorously to consolidate his power, building himself into a formidable dictator. When?fire destroyed the Reichstag?on February 27, 1933,Hitler?found a pretext for legally abolishing the Communist Party and imprisoning its leaders. On March 23, 1933, he engineered passage of theEnabling Act, which granted him four years of unalloyed dictatorial powers. He began systematically dismantling all German parties, save for the NSDAP, purged Jews from all government institutions, and brought all government offices under the direct control of the party. He then purged his own ranks during the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934, murdering Ernst Roehm and hundreds of other Nazis whose radicalism posed a threat to?Hitler's absolute domination. Shortly after this, in August 1934, Hindenberg died andHitler?assumed the functions of the presidency, but adopted the title ofFührer—Supreme Leader—of the Third Reich.The Führer replaced the SA—Brownshirts—with the SS—Schutzstaffel, or Blackshirts—under Himmler. Together with a secret police organization called the Gestapo, the SS created a system of concentration camps to which political enemies, Jews, and others "undesirables" were "deported." In 1935,?Hitlerenacted the Nuremberg Racial Laws, which deprived Jews of citizenship. Such policies of terror were carefully orchestrated by propaganda minister Goebbels with programs of economic recovery as, in defiance of the Versailles treaty,Hitler?put his nation on a war footing by creating the?Luftwaffe?(air force) under Goering, remilitarizing the Rhineland (in 1936), and rearming generally.In October 1936,?Hitler?made an alliance with Benito?Mussolini, Fascist dictator of Italy. In March 1938,?Hitler?invaded and annexed Austria in the?Anschluss, then pressured Czechoslovakia into relinquishing the Sudetenland, a border region Germany long coveted.In the face of this aggression, the two major western European military powers seemed paralyzed into a policy of craven and cowering appeasement. In 1935, England agreed to an Anglo-German Naval Pact, then, at the Munich Conference of September 29–30, 1938, France and England agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, feeling that this would appease the Führer.Hitler?quickly annexed not only the Sudetenland, but the remainder of westernCzechoslovakia?as well, then went on to claim the "Memel strip" from Lithuania in March 1939. After concluding a nonagression pact with?Josef Stalin?of the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939,?Hitler?invaded Poland on September 1.Thus World War II began.?Hitler?quickly overran Poland and Scandinavia during April 9–June 9, 1940. France and England, having foolishly appeased?Hitler, belatedly responded to the Polish invasion. France fell quickly, during May 25–June 5, 1940, but Great Britain held out. Instead of mounting a mass invasion of England,?Hitler?sought air supremacy over its skies, and during July–October 1940, the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force fought the Battle of Britain. Suffering their first reversal of the war, the Germans were forced to back down from their British invasion plans.But such Allied victories were rare.?Hitler's armies controlled territory from North Africa to the Arctic and from France to central Europe. In April 1941, the German army invaded the Balkans, occupying Yugoslavia and Greece. Then, on June 22, abrogating the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact,?Hitler?executed "Operation Barbarossa," the invasion of the Soviet Union. Victories were quickly forthcoming in this vast country until, as with Napoleon before him, the Russian winter, combined with the dogged resistance of the Russian people and their army, stalled?Hitler's forces, first outside Moscow in December 1941, then, during the winter of 1942–43, at Stalingrad. The Russians began to exact a tremendous toll on the German army, draining?Hitler's resources.In the meantime, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan and Germany—a contingency for which?Hitler?had not planned. At home, the Führer became increasingly obsessed with consummating the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question" and instituted the Holocaust: genocide of some 6 million Jews, mostly in concentration camps now transformed into death camps designed for mass murder.By 1943, the tide of the war was turning hopelessly against Adolf?Hitler's Germany. The ruinous retreat from Russia was under way, North Africa was lost, and Mussolini had fallen to the Allied invasion of Italy. American and British bombers pummeled German cities, and in June 1944, the Allied D-Day operation commenced, troops were landed on the coast of France, and the invasion of western Europe had begun. In the face of these defeats, the Führer made increasingly desperate, reckless, and irrational military decisions, which turned many in his high command against him. On July 20, 1944, a cabal of officers attempted to assassinate him with a bomb hidden in a briefcase. Miraculously,?Hitler?survived, but was seriously injured and emotionally devastated.From December 16, 1944, to January 1945,?Hitler?committed his last reserves to a final offensive in the Ardennes, hoping to arrest the Allied advance and retake Antwerp. After the hard-fought Battle of the Bulge, the offensive was crushed, and?Hitler?retreated to the?Führerbunker, a hardened underground command shelter in Berlin. From this headquarters, he attempted to direct the fight to the last man. Finally, on April 29, 1945, as American, British, and Free French forces closed in from the west and the Russian army approached from the east,?Hitler?hastily married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. The next day, the couple committed suicide. Admiral Karl D?nitz, whom?Hitler?had appointed as his successor, sued for peace, and the?Third Reich—which?Hitlerhad called the Thousand-Year Reich—crumbled.?Further Reading: Alan Bullock.?Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1962); Bullock.?Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives?(New York: Knopf, 1992); John Toland.?Adolf Hitler?(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).Text Citation (Chicago Manual of Style format):Axelrod, Alan, and Charles Phillips. "Hitler, Adolf."?Dictators & Tyrants: Absolute Rulers and Would-Be Rulers in World History. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1995.Modern World History Online. Facts On File, Inc.??(accessed May?12,?2013). ................
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