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Dictator of Germany

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Fact 1      Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939

Fact 2     Ordered the mass execution of at least 6 million Jewish men, women, and children

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In 1920 was put in charge of the party's propaganda

Made himself the dictator of Germany

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Discharged from the hospital amid the social chaos that followed Germany's defeat, Hitler took up political work in Munich in May-June 1919. As an army political agent, he joined the small German Workers' Party in Munich (September 1919). In 1920 he was put in charge of the party's propaganda and left the army to devote himself to improving his position within the party, which in that year was renamed the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ( Nazi). Conditions were ripe for the development of such a party. Resentment at the loss of the war and the severity of the peace terms added to the economic woes and brought widespread discontent. This was especially sharp in Bavaria, due to its traditional separatism and the region's popular dislike of the republican government in Berlin. In March 1920 a coup d'état by a few army officers attempted in vain to establish a right-wing government.

Munich was a gathering place for dissatisfied former servicemen and members of the Freikorps, which had been organized in 1918-19 from units of the German army that were unwilling to return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the republic. Many of these joined the Nazi Party. Foremost among them was Ernst Röhm, a staff member of the district army command, who had joined the German Workers' Party before Hitler and who was of great help in furthering Hitler's rise within the party. It was he who recruited the "strong arm" squads used by Hitler to protect party meetings, to attack socialists and communists, and to exploit violence for the impression of strength it gave. In 1921 these squads were formally organized under Röhm into a private party army, the SA (Sturmabteilung). Röhm was also able to secure protection from the Bavarian government, which depended on the local army command for the maintenance of order and which tacitly accepted some of his terrorist tactics.

Conditions were favourable for the growth of the small party, and Hitler was sufficiently astute to take full advantage of them. When he joined the party, he found it ineffective, committed to a program of nationalist and socialist ideas but uncertain of its aims and divided in its leadership. He accepted its program but regarded it as a means to an end. His propaganda and his personal ambition caused friction with the other leaders of the party. Hitler countered their attempts to curb him by threatening resignation, and because the future of the party depended on his power to organize publicity and to acquire funds, his opponents relented. In July 1921 he became their leader with almost unlimited powers. From the first he set out to create a mass movement, whose mystique and power would be sufficient to bind its members in loyalty to him. He engaged in unrelenting propaganda through the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter ("Popular Observer," acquired in 1920), and through meetings whose audiences soon grew from a handful to thousands. With his charismatic personality and dynamic leadership, he attracted a devoted cadre of Nazi leaders, men whose names today live in infamy-Johann Dietrich Eckart (who acted as a mentor for Hitler), Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Julius Streicher.

The climax of this rapid growth of the Nazi Party in Bavaria came in an attempt to seize power in the Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch of November 1923, when Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff tried to take advantage of the prevailing confusion and opposition to the Weimar Republic to force the leaders of the Bavarian government and the local army commander to proclaim a national revolution. In the melee that resulted, the police and the army fired at the advancing marchers, killing a few of them. Hitler was injured, and four policemen were killed. Placed on trial for treason, he characteristically took advantage of the immense publicity afforded to him. He also drew a vital lesson from the Putsch-that the movement must achieve power by legal means. He was sentenced to prison for five years but served only nine months, and those in relative comfort at Landsberg castle. Hitler used the time to dictate the first volume of , his political autobiography as well as a compendium of his multitudinous ideas.

Hitler's ideas included inequality among races, nations, and individuals as part of an unchangeable natural order that exalted the " Aryan race" as the creative element of mankind. According to Hitler, the natural unit of mankind was the Volk ("the people"), of which the German people was the greatest. Moreover, he believed that the state existed to serve the Volk-a mission that to him the Weimar German Republic betrayed. All morality and truth were judged by this criterion: whether it was in accordance with the interest and preservation of the Volk. Parliamentary democratic government stood doubly condemned. It assumed the equality of individuals that for Hitler did not exist and supposed that what was in the interests of the Volk could be decided by parliamentary procedures. Instead, Hitler argued that the unity of the Volk would find its incarnation in the Führer, endowed with perfect authority. Below the Führer the party was drawn from the Volk and was in turn its safeguard.

The greatest enemy of Nazism was not, in Hitler's view, liberal democracy in Germany, which was already on the verge of collapse. It was the rival Weltanschauung, Marxism (which for him embraced social democracy as well as communism), with its insistence on internationalism and economic conflict. Beyond Marxism he believed the greatest enemy of all to be the Jew, who was for Hitler the incarnation of evil. There is debate among historians as to when anti-Semitism became Hitler's deepest and strongest conviction. As early as 1919 he wrote, "Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether." In Mein Kampf, he described the Jew as the "destroyer of culture," "a parasite within the nation," and "a menace."

During Hitler's absence in prison, the Nazi Party languished as the result of internal dissension. After his release, Hitler faced difficulties that had not existed before 1923. Economic stability had been achieved by a currency reform and the Dawes Plan had scaled back Germany's World War I reparations. The republic seemed to have become more respectable. Hitler was forbidden to make speeches, first in Bavaria, then in many other German states (these prohibitions remained in force until 1927-28). Nevertheless, the party grew slowly in numbers, and in 1926 Hitler successfully established his position within it against Gregor Strasser, whose followers were primarily in northern Germany.

The advent of the Depression in 1929, however, led to a new period of political instability. In 1930 Hitler made an alliance with the Nationalist Alfred Hugenberg in a campaign against the Young Plan, a second renegotiation of Germany's war reparation payments. With the help of Hugenberg's newspapers, Hitler was able for the first time to reach a nationwide audience. The alliance also enabled him to seek support from many of the magnates of business and industry who controlled political funds and were anxious to use them to establish a strong right-wing, antisocialist government. The subsidies Hitler received from the industrialists placed his party on a secure financial footing and enabled him to make effective his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed, based on the proclamation of his faith that Germany would awaken from its sufferings to reassert its natural greatness. Hitler's dealings with Hugenberg and the industrialists exemplify his skill in using those who sought to use him. But his most important achievement was the establishment of a truly national party (with its voters and followers drawn from different classes and religious groups), unique in Germany at the time.

Unremitting propaganda, set against the failure of the government to improve conditions during the Depression, produced a steadily mounting electoral strength for the Nazis. The party became the second largest in the country, rising from 2.6 percent of the vote in the national election of 1928 to more than 18 percent in September 1930. In 1932 Hitler opposed Hindenburg in the presidential election, capturing 36.8 percent of the votes on the second ballot. Finding himself in a strong position by virtue of his unprecedented mass following, he entered into a series of intrigues with conservatives such as Franz von Papen, Otto Meissner, and President Hindenburg's son, Oskar. The fear of communism and the rejection of the Social Democrats bound them together. In spite of a decline in the Nazi Party's votes in November 1932, Hitler insisted that the chancellorship was the only office he would accept. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg offered him the chancellorship of Germany. His cabinet included few Nazis at that point.

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Adolf Hitler - Nazi Leader, WW2, Germany

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Adolf Hitler - Adolf Hitler - Nazi Leader, WW2, Germany: Discharged from the hospital amid the social chaos that followed Germany's defeat, Hitler took up political work in Munich in May-June 1919. As an army political agent, he joined the small German Workers' Party in Munich (September 1919).

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Prime Minister during WW2

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Fact 1   Led Great Britain through the Britain war

Fact 2  Was outspoken about Hitler and appeasement before the outbreak of war

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Prime minister

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Winston Churchill - Military successes and political problems

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The Allied landings in North Africa necessitated a fresh meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, this time in Casablanca in January 1943. There Churchill argued for an early, full-scale attack on “the under-belly of the Axis” but won only a grudging acquiescence from the Americans. There too was ev…

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President of United States during Great depression

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Fact 1 enacted the lend lease-act

Fact 2 didn't enter WW ll until after pearl harbor bombing

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Elected New York senate in 1920

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Table of Contents

When was Franklin D. Roosevelt born?

When did Franklin D. Roosevelt die?

What is Franklin D. Roosevelt best known for?

Where did Franklin D. Roosevelt go to school?

When did Franklin D. Roosevelt get married?

Read a brief summary of this topic

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in full Franklin Delano Roosevelt, byname FDR, (born January 30, 1882, Hyde Park, New York, U.S.-died April 12, 1945, Warm Springs, Georgia), 32nd president of the United States (1933-45). The only president elected to the office four times, Roosevelt led the United States through two of the greatest crises of the 20th century: the Great Depression and World War II. In so doing, he greatly expanded the powers of the federal government through a series of programs and reforms known as the New Deal, and he served as the principal architect of the successful effort to rid the world of German National Socialism and Japanese militarism.

Early life

Roosevelt was the only child of James and Sara Delano Roosevelt. The family lived in unostentatious and genteel luxury, dividing its time between the family estate in the Hudson River valley of New York state and European resorts. Young Roosevelt was educated privately at home until age 14, when he entered Groton Preparatory School in Groton, Massachusetts. At Groton, as at home, he was reared to be a gentleman, assuming responsibility for those less fortunate and exercising Christian stewardship through public service.

In 1900 Roosevelt entered Harvard University, where he spent most of his time on extracurricular activities and a strenuous social life; his academic record was undistinguished. It was during his Harvard years that he fell under the spell of his fifth cousin, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive champion who advocated a vastly increased role for the government in the nation's economy. It was also during his Harvard years that he fell in love with Theodore Roosevelt's niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was then active in charitable work for the poor in New York City. The distant cousins became engaged during Roosevelt's final year at Harvard, and they were married on March 17, 1905. Eleanor would later open her husband's eyes to the deplorable state of the poor in New York's slums.

Roosevelt attended Columbia University Law School but was not much interested in his studies. After passing the New York bar exam, he went to work as a clerk for the distinguished Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn, but he displayed the same attitude of indifference toward the legal profession as he had toward his education.

Early political activities

Motivated by his cousin Theodore, who continued to urge young men of privileged backgrounds to enter public service, Roosevelt looked for an opportunity to launch a career in politics. That opportunity came in 1910, when Democratic Party leaders of Dutchess county, New York, persuaded him to undertake an apparently futile attempt to win a seat in the state senate. Roosevelt, whose branch of the family had always voted Democratic, hesitated only long enough to make sure his distinguished Republican Party relative would not speak against him. He campaigned strenuously and won the election. Not quite 29 when he took his seat in Albany, he quickly won statewide and even some national attention by leading a small group of Democratic insurgents who refused to support Billy Sheehan, the candidate for the United States Senate backed by Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic organization. For three months Roosevelt helped hold the insurgents firm, and Tammany was forced to switch to another candidate.

In the New York Senate Roosevelt learned much of the give-and-take of politics, and he gradually abandoned his patrician airs and attitude of superiority. In the process, he came to champion the full program of progressive reform. By 1911 Roosevelt was supporting progressive New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1912. In that year Roosevelt was reelected to the state senate, despite an attack of typhoid fever that prevented him from making public appearances during the campaign. His success was attributable in part to the publicity generated by an Albany journalist, Louis McHenry Howe. Howe saw in the tall, handsome Roosevelt a politician with great promise, and he remained dedicated to Roosevelt for the rest of his life.

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For his work on behalf of Wilson, Roosevelt was appointed assistant secretary of the navy in March 1913. Roosevelt loved the sea and naval traditions, and he knew more about them than did his superior, navy secretary Josephus Daniels, with whom he was frequently impatient. Roosevelt tried with mixed success to bring reforms to the navy yards, which were under his jurisdiction, meanwhile learning to negotiate with labour unions among the navy's civilian employees.

After war broke out in Europe in 1914, Roosevelt became a vehement advocate of military preparedness, and following U.S. entry into the war in 1917, he built a reputation as an effective administrator. In the summer of 1918 he made an extended tour of naval bases and battlefields overseas. Upon his return, Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that her husband had been romantically involved with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. She offered him a divorce; he refused and promised never to see Mercer again (a promise he would break in the 1940s). Although the Roosevelts agreed to remain together, their relationship ceased to be an intimate one.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt | Accomplishments, New Deal, Great Depression, World War II, & Death

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Franklin D. Roosevelt, in full Franklin Delano Roosevelt, byname FDR, (born January 30, 1882, Hyde Park, New York, U.S.-died April 12, 1945, Warm Springs, Georgia), 32nd president of the United States (1933-45). The only president elected to the office four times, Roosevelt led the United States through two of the greatest crises of the 20th century: the Great Depression and World War II.

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Leader of communist Russia during WW ll

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Fact 1 switched sides when Hitler attacked

Fact 2 harsh leader and killed around 9 million people

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At the 11th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1922, the leaders decided to expand the party's Central Committee. Due to this expansion, a secretariat became a necessity. Stalin was appointed the head of this new office on the 3rd of April

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Dictator of Italy

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Fact 1 Friends with Adolf Hitler

Fact 2 Was removed from power in 1943 and eventually killed by citizens

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Led a coalitionist of fascists leaders to Rome and forced king to yield

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Early life

Mussolini was the first child of the local blacksmith. In later years he expressed pride in his humble origins and often spoke of himself as a "man of the people." The Mussolini family was, in fact, less humble than he claimed-his father, a part-time socialist journalist as well as a blacksmith, was the son of a lieutenant in the National Guard, and his mother was a schoolteacher-but the Mussolinis were certainly poor. They lived in two crowded rooms on the second floor of a small, decrepit palazzo; and, because Mussolini's father spent much of his time discussing politics in taverns and most of his money on his mistress, the meals that his three children ate were often meagre.

A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully at school and moody at home. Because the teachers at the village school could not control him, he was sent to board with the strict Salesian order at Faenza, where he proved himself more troublesome than ever, stabbing a fellow pupil with a penknife and attacking one of the Salesians who had attempted to beat him. He was expelled and sent to the Giosuè Carducci School at Forlimpopoli, from which he was also expelled after assaulting yet another pupil with his penknife.

He was also intelligent, and he passed his final examinations without difficulty. He obtained a teaching diploma and for a time worked as a schoolmaster but soon realized that he was totally unsuited for such work. At the age of 19, a short, pale young man with a powerful jaw and enormous, dark, piercing eyes, he left Italy for Switzerland with a nickel medallion of Karl Marx in his otherwise empty pockets. For the next few months, according to his own account, he lived from day to day, jumping from job to job.

At the same time, however, he was gaining a reputation as a young man of strange magnetism and remarkable rhetorical talents. He read widely and voraciously, if not deeply, plunging into the philosophers and theorists Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges Sorel, picking out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no coherent political philosophy of his own yet impressing his companions as a potential revolutionary of uncommon personality and striking presence. While earning a reputation as a political journalist and public speaker, he produced propaganda for a trade union, proposing a strike and advocating violence as a means of enforcing demands. Repeatedly, he called for a day of vengeance. More than once he was arrested and imprisoned. When he returned to Italy in 1904, even the Roman newspapers had started to mention his name.

For some time after his return little was heard of him. He once more became a schoolmaster, this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so he confessed, a life of "moral deterioration." But soon tiring of so wasteful a life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism, and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment.

During a period of freedom in 1909, he fell in love with 16-year-old Rachele Guidi, the younger of the two daughters of his father's widowed mistress; she went to live with him in a damp, cramped apartment in Forlì and later married him. Soon after the marriage, Mussolini was imprisoned for the fifth time; but by then Comrade Mussolini had become recognized as one of the most gifted and dangerous of Italy's younger socialists. After writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper of his own, La Lotta di Classe ("The Class Struggle"). So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! ("Forward!"), whose circulation he soon doubled; and as its antimilitarist, antinationalist, and anti-imperialist editor, he thunderously opposed Italy's intervention in World War I.

Soon, however, he changed his mind about intervention. Swayed by Karl Marx's aphorism that social revolution usually follows war and persuaded that "the defeat of France would be a deathblow to liberty in Europe," he began writing articles and making speeches as violently in favour of war as those in which he previously had condemned it. He resigned from Avanti! and was expelled from the Socialist Party. Financed by the French government and Italian industrialists, both of whom favoured war against Austria, he assumed the editorship of Il Popolo d'Italia ("The People of Italy"), in which he unequivocally stated his new philosophy: "From today onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that steel has met steel, one single cry comes from our hearts- Viva l'Italia! [Long live Italy!]" It was the birth cry of fascism. Mussolini went to fight in the war.

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Benito Mussolini | Biography, Definition, Facts, Rise, & Death

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Benito Mussolini, the controversial Italian dictator and founder of fascism, rose to power through his charismatic leadership but ultimately led Italy into disastrous alliances during World War II.

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General of Japanese Military

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Fact 1    Ordered attack on Pearl Harbor

Fact 2    Eventually sentenced to death after Tokyo trials

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1935 was given the command of the kwantung army

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How did Tōjō Hideki change the world?

Where was Tōjō Hideki educated?

Where is Tōjō Hideki buried?

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Tōjō Hideki, (born December 30, 1884, Tokyo, Japan-died December 23, 1948, Tokyo), soldier and statesman who was prime minister of Japan (1941-44) during most of the Pacific theatre portion of World War II and who was subsequently tried and executed for war crimes.

Early life and rise to power

A graduate of the Imperial Military Academy and the Military Staff College, Tōjō served briefly as military attaché in Japan's embassy in Berlin after World War I. He was an esteemed administrator and skillful field commander and became noted as a stern disciplinarian. In 1928 he was made commander of the 1st Infantry Regiment, members of which participated in a mutiny of the Tokyo garrison in late February 1936 that he helped suppress. In 1937 he was named chief of staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria.

He returned to Tokyo in 1938 as vice-minister of war and was one of the leading advocates of Japan's Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy (1940). In July 1940 he was appointed minister of war in the cabinet of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro. Tōjō succeeded Konoe as prime minister on October 18, 1941, and pledged his government to a Greater East Asia program, a "New Order in Asia." He retained control of the Ministry of War and was also minister of commerce and industry from 1943.

World War II and conviction for war crimes

A hardworking and efficient bureaucrat, Tōjō was also one of the most aggressive militarists in the Japanese leadership. He led his country's war efforts after the attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and under his direction smashing victories were initially scored throughout Southeast Asia and the western Pacific region. After a series of Japanese military reverses in the Pacific, Tōjō assumed virtual dictatorial powers, taking over the post of the chief of the General Staff. The successful Allied invasion of the Mariana Islands so weakened his government, however, that he was removed as chief of staff on July 16, 1944, and on July 18 he and his entire cabinet announced their resignation. Four days later he was succeeded as prime minister by Koiso Kuniaki. Tōjō spent the remainder of the war in the military reserve, effectively banned from power.

On September 11, 1945, after Japan's formal surrender, Tōjō shot himself in a suicide attempt, but he was nursed back to health and on April 29, 1946, with other Japanese wartime leaders, was indicted for war crimes before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. At the trial he was found guilty and then hanged. Tōjō's legacy continued, as he was one of those convicted of war crimes who also had been included among Japan's military dead commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Periodic visits to the shrine by various Japanese prime ministers and other government officials have sparked strong protests from China, South Korea, and other countries that were under Japanese occupation during the war.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Michael Ray.

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Tojo Hideki | Biography, Early Years, World War II, Facts, & Death

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Tojo Hideki, soldier and statesman who was prime minister of Japan (1941-44) during most of the Pacific theater portion of World War II and who was subsequently tried and executed for war crimes. Learn more about Tojo's early life, military career, and political leadership in this article.