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Eva Braun spouse of Hitler

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Eva Braun: Biography of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's mistress and later wife.

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On September 27, 1940, the Axis powers are formed as Germany, Italy and Japan become allies with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin. The Pact provided for mutual assistance should any of the signatories suffer attack by any nation not already involved in the war. This formalizing of the alliance was aimed directly at "neutral" America-designed to force the United States to think twice before venturing in on the side of the Allies.

The Pact also recognized the two spheres of influence. Japan acknowledged "the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe," while Japan was granted lordship over "Greater East Asia."

A footnote: There was a fourth signatory to the Pact-Hungary, which was dragged into the Axis alliance by Germany in November 1940.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Tripartite Pact is signed by Germany, Italy and Japan | September 27, 1940 | HISTORY

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On September 27, 1940, the Axis powers are formed as Germany, Italy and Japan become allies with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin. The Pact provided for mutual assistance should any of the signatories suffer attack by any nation not already involved in the war.

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Victims of Hitler's plan for a master race

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Climate of shame suppressed discussion of Third Reich's social impact.

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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. He was baptized a Catholic.

His father, Alois Hitler (1837-1903), was a mid-level customs official. Born out of wedlock to Maria Anna Schickelgruber in 1837, Alois Schickelgruber had changed his name in 1876 to Hitler, the Christian name of the man who married his mother five years after his birth.

Alois Hitler's illegitimacy would cause speculation as early as the 1920s-and still present in popular culture today-that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Credible evidence to support the notion of Hitler's Jewish descent has never turned up. The two most likely candidates to have been Hitler's grandfather are the man who married his grandmother and that man's brother.

Linz

In 1898, the Hitler family moved to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Hitler wanted a career in the visual arts. He fought bitterly with his father, who wanted him to enter the Habsburg civil service. After his father's death, Hitler eventually persuaded his mother, Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, to permit him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. As Klara was dying of breast cancer in the autumn of 1907, Hitler took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of the Arts. He failed to gain acceptance. In early 1908, some weeks after Klara's death in December 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna, ostensibly in the hope of renewing efforts to enter the Academy of Arts.

Vienna

Hitler lived in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913. He had grown up in a middle-class family, with relatively few contacts with Jewish people, in a region of the Habsburg state in which many German nationalists had been disappointed that the German Empire founded in 1871 had not included the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet the legacy of the Vienna years is not as clear as Hitler depicted it in his political autobiography. His impoverishment and residence in homeless shelters began only a year after his arrival and after he had frittered away a generous inheritance left by his parents and rejected all arguments of surviving relatives and family friends that he embark upon a career in the civil service.

By the end of 1909, Hitler knew real poverty as his sources of income dried up. That winter, however, helped briefly by a last gift from his aunt, he began to paint watercolor scenes of Vienna for a business partner. He made enough to live on until he left for Munich in 1913.

It is likely that Hitler experienced, and possibly also shared, the general antisemitism common among middle-class German nationalists. Nevertheless, he had personal and business relationships with Jews in Vienna. He was also, at times, dependent in part on Jews for his living. While this may have been a cause for discretion about his actual feelings about Jews, it was not until after World War I that Hitler can be demonstrated to have adopted an "antisemitic" ideology.

Influences upon Hitler in Vienna

Hitler was genuinely influenced in Vienna by two political movements. The first was the German racist nationalism propagated by the Upper Austrian Pan-German politician Georg von Schönerer. The second key influence was that of Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to his death in 1910.

Lueger was still in power when Hitler arrived in Vienna. Lueger promoted an antisemitism that was more practical and organizational than ideological. Nevertheless, it reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes and cast Jews as enemies of the German middle and lower classes. Unlike Schönerer, who was more comfortable with the elitist nationalism of the student fraternities, Lueger was comfortable with big city crowds and knew how to channel their protest into political gain. Hitler drew his ideology in large part from Schönerer, but his strategy and tactics from Lueger.

Munich

Hitler moved to Munich, Germany, in May 1913. He did so to avoid arrest for evading his military service obligation to Habsburg Austria. He financed his move with the last installment of his inheritance from his father. In Munich, he continued to drift. He supported himself on his watercolors and sketches until the outbreak of World War I gave his life direction and a cause to which he could commit himself totally.

Last Edited: Nov 7, 2007

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. He was baptized a Catholic. His father, Alois Hitler (1837-1903), was a mid-level customs official.

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Adolph Hitler, German politician, leader of the Nazi Party, and by near-universal accounts the most monstrous and terrifying leader in the twentieth century, led his nation into a disastrous war and triggered the extermination of millions of his own citizens due to his anti-Semitic ideology.

This page features a comprehensive resource on Adolph Hitler's background, beliefs, religious ideology, and explanations of his rise to power.

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(See main article: Hitler - Historical People)

Famous for being fascist Dictator of Germany
Born - 20th April 1889, Braunau am Inn, Austria
Parents - Alois Hitler, Klara Hitler
Siblings - Edmund, Paula
Married - Eva Braun
Children - None
Died - 30th April 1945, Berlin, Germany committed suicide

Adolph Hitler was born in the Austrian town of Braunau-am-Inn on 20th April 1889. The town was close to the Austro-German border and his father, Alois, worked as a border control clerk. His mother, Klara, was a housekeeper.

As a child he got on very well with his mother but he didn't get on well with his father, a strict authoritative disciplinarian. He attended school from the age of six years but did not do well in academic subjects. His school record showed reasonable grades for PE and some artistic talent.

Adolph Hitler left school at the age of sixteen and went to Vienna where he hoped to enter the Academy and become a painter. His application to enter the academy was rejected when he was 17 years old and a year later his mother died from cancer. His father had died four years earlier and with no relatives willing to support him Adolph Hitler found himself living rough on the streets of Vienna. He became interested in politics and was heavily influenced by the climate of anti-Semitism that existed in Austria at that time.

In 1914, Hitler crossed the border to Germany and joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He fought on the Western Front and was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery in battle. In 1918 he was temporarily blinded from a gas attack and was invalided out of the war. Hitler was dismayed when Germany lost the war and hated the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar government for signing the treaty. He dreamed of a return to the days of the Kaiser.

After the war he stayed in the army, but in intelligence. His activities led him to the German Worker's Party led by Anton Drexler. He liked the ideas of the party and joined in 1919. Drexler realised that Adolph Hitler was something special and put him in charge of the political ideas and propaganda of the party.

In 1920, the party announced its 25-point program and was renamed the National Socialist German Worker's Party - NAZIs.

In 1921, Hitler became leader of the party and soon began attracting attention, especially for his powerful speeches. Hitler stirred up Nationalist passion giving the people something to blame for Germany's problems. Hitler's opponents tried to disrupt the meetings so for protection Hitler set up the SA - Stormtroopers. Although the actual membership of the NAZI party remained quite low in this period, Hitler, through his meetings and speeches had given them a very high profile.

In March 1924, Adolph Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the Munich Putsch, which failed to overthrow the Bavarian government. While in prison he wrote his book Mein Kampf which set out his thoughts and philosophies. The book was published a year after Hitler's release from prison.

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The Great Depression, which saw a downturn in people's lives, helped to gain support for the Nazi party and by 1932 the Nazi party was the largest party in the Reichstag but did not have a majority. On January 30th 1933 Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. A month later on February 27th, the Reichstag building was set alight. The fire was blamed on the Communists and the Communist party was banned in Germany. This gave the Nazis a clear majority in the government.

On 23rd March 1933 the Enabling Act gave Adolph Hitler power to make laws without consulting the Reichstag for a period of four years. Over the next four months Hitler took steps towards dictatorship - trade unions and all other political parties were banned, the Nazis took control of all local government and Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. When President Hindenburg died in August 1934 Hitler combined the position of Chancellor and President and made himself Fuhrer of Germany.

As Fuhrer, Hitler began building his Third Reich. Ignoring the terms of the Treaty of Versailles he began building up the army and weapons. The Nuremburg Laws passed in 1935 defined Hitler's ideal pure Aryan German citizen and barred Jews from holding any form of Public office. In March 1936 Hitler began reclaiming land taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles by re-occupying the Rhineland. The move was unopposed by Britain and France. Anschluss with Austria in Spring 1938 was followed in the Autumn by the reclaiming of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia.

Although he had agreed by the terms of the Munich Agreement not to make further territorial claims, in March 1939 Hitler invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. His subsequent invasion and occupation of Poland on 1st September 1939 led to the outbreak of World War Two. Despite the outbreak of war, Hitler continued his policy of aggression and by May 1940 Britain was the only western European country that had not been invaded and occupied by the Nazis. The loss of the Battle of Britain led Hitler to abandon plans to invade Britain in favour of an invasion of Russia.

Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists and other 'undesirables' from Germany and Nazi-controlled countries were forced to wear identification badges. Jews were sent to concentration camps where the fit and healthy were put to forced labour while the young, old and sick were exterminated in gas chambers. In January 1942 plans to exterminate the entire Jewish population known as 'The Final Solution' were approved.

Defeat at the second battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was followed by defeat at Stalingrad. Adolph Hitler's refusal to allow soldiers to retreat and blind perusal of his goals led some Nazi members to question his leadership. In July 1944 an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. The attempt failed and the perpetrators were executed.

Throughout late 1944 and early 1945 the Germans were pushed back towards Berlin by the Allies in the west and the Russians in the East. On April 29th, 1945, Adolph Hitler married his long-term mistress Eva Braun, and a day later the pair committed suicide.

(See main article: Where Was Hitler Born?)

Interestingly enough, Adolph Hitler was not born in Germany, but in a small village in Austria, Braunau am Inn. The building where he was born has been used as a workshop, school, library, home for the disabled and a bank through the years, but as of 2014 there are plans to turn it into a "House of Responsibility" museum.

Adolph Hitler Could Have Had a Different Surname

Another interesting piece of trivia relating to Hitler's ancestry is that his surname would have been "Schicklgruber," had his father, Alois, not decided to have a name change. Alois was an illegitimate child and went by his mother's name until he changed it to "Hiedler" later in life. The spelling was somehow changed to "Hitler" in the record book. Today, it is very hard to imagine crowds of people yelling "Heil Schicklgruber" instead of "Heil Hitler."

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Childhood Years

Adolph Hitler's childhood years were not particularly happy. He was Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl's fourth child, but all of his older siblings died during infancy. The family moved to Germany when Adolph was three years old, and this is where he got his Bavarian accent. Adolph Hitler clashed a lot with his father, who wanted him to become a customs officer, while he was more interested in the arts. Hitler did not do very well in school and left school early. He also drifted between jobs, unable to settle and was rejected from the arts academy in Vienna as well as the School of Architecture.

An Interest in Politics

He discovered an interest in politics and the anti-Semitic climate in Austria at that time heavily influenced his views. Hitler volunteered for the German army in 1914 and his bravery in battle on the Western Front earned him the Iron Cross award. In 1918 he had to stop fighting due to temporary blindness caused by a gas attack and was very disappointed when Germany lost the war. Hitler hated the Treaty of Versailles and despised the Weimar Government for signing it in the first place. In his eyes, Germany needed a Kaiser again.

(See main article: What Is Mein Kampf?)

Mein Kampf, which means "My Struggle" or "My Fight" is Adolph Hitler's autobiography in which he outlines his ideology and political plans for Germany. After the failure that was the Beer Hall Putch in which Hitler and a group of men tried to overthrow the Bavarian government, he was sentenced to 5 years in jail for treason. He used this time to dictate his book to Rudolf Hess and it was eventually published in two volumes, respectively in 1925 and 1926. Hitler's views were popular at the time, his book sold close to 9,500 copies within its first year. He originally wanted to call the book "4 ½ years of struggle against lies stupidity and cowardice" but was advised to rather keep the name short.

Contents of Hitler's Autobiography

Apart from an autobiography about Hitler's youth and upbringing, Mein Kampf was also a bit of a blueprint of what Hitler had in store for what he called the Third Reich. If other European countries had taken Hitler seriously at the time and read this book they would have known what plans Hitler had for the expansion of Germany.

Hitler's Jewish Conspiracy Theory

He painted the Jews as a threat, with a conspiracy to take over the world. He also emphasizes that before he went to Vienna, he was very tolerant toward Jews as he had not met any Jews previously. He claims to have only changed his mind later on and then describes his Aryan philosophy in detail.

Types of Humans

Adolph Hitler divided humans into several categories, depending on physical appearance, to determine the different types of humans. The Aryan race (Germanic, fair-skinned, blond hair and blue eyes) is, according to him, the master race and culturally superior.

Doing People a Favor By Conquering their Lands

Hitler also argues in his book that lower people actually benefit if they are conquered by Aryans, as they learn from them and start to develop culture. Aryans were also not to inter-marry with other, lowly human types, a philosophy that later resulted in the passing of certain marriage laws in Germany.

Hatred of Communism and Judaism

Hitler believed that Communism and Judaism were the world's two greatest evils. Hitler also described the goal to create a "living space" for German people to live up to their "historic destiny" in his book and openly stated that Germany had to acquire land in the East by invading parts of Russia.

Flawed Parliamentary System

In is book, Adolph Hitler blames the Weimar Republic's parliament, the Social Democrats, the Marxists and the Jews for Germany's demise. He wanted to destroy the parliamentary system, which he thought to be corrupt in essence, calling the people who come to power opportunists.

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Was Hitler Jewish?

(See main article: Was Hitler Jewish?)

For someone so obsessed with "ethnic cleansing" and ancestry, Adolph Hitler was quite vague about his own descent. In the years following the war, and the ascent of Freudian psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, many rumors circulated that Hitler might have been related to the very people he despised and persecuted; it was a form of self loathing and projection that sadly culminated in the nearly-successful attempt to destroy those people he hated to belong to.

However, none of these rumors have been proven true beyond doubt. Hitler was definitely not a Jew in the true sense of word, but there is a faint possibility that one of his ancestors might have been Jewish.

Paternal Grandfather Theory

The identity of Adolph Hitler's paternal grandfather is not known, because Hitler's father has been registered as an illegitimate child. Hans Frank, a former Nazi official stated that Hitler's grandmother used to work as a housekeeper for a Jewish family named Franken
berger, in Graz. He claimed that Alois, Hitler's father, was the result of a sexual relationship with Leopold Frankenberger, the family's 19-year old son. With further investigation, no records of the existence of a Leopold Frankenberger in Graz have been found, causing historians to dismiss this theory.

DNA Test Theory

The Daily Telegraph, a British paper reported in 2010 on a DNA study that was conducted on 39 known relatives of Hitler. Samples showed that these family members of the Fuhrer had a chromosome that is not commonly found in Western Europe. Apparently 18 to 20 percent of carriers of this chromosome (Haplogroup E1b1b1) are Ashkenazi Jews, making this scientific study largely inconclusive. DNA tests of hair found on the hair brush Eva Braun (Hitler's mistress) also pointed to the same chromosome, suggesting that she, too, may have had Jewish ancestry.

(See main article: How Did Hitler Come to Power?)The process occurred over multiple decades. Adolph Hitler's rise to power started when he became politically involved and joined the Deutsche Arbeiterspartei. From there he worked himself up in the party, which later became the Nazi Party, through charm, violence and cunning negotiations. He was an excellent speaker and surrounded himself with people who, like him, were not afraid to use violence to fulfil their political objectives. At one stage, Hitler recognized that he was one of the best speakers in the Nazi party and demanded that they make him party leader or he would walk out. They conceded and he became party leader.

Rise of the Nazi Party

The grim atmosphere of the early 1930s greatly contributed to the rise of Hitler's Nazi Party as it left the Germans desperate for a strong leader. They considered the German government to be weak and the actions of Bruning, the chancellor only added to the bitterness of the German nation. They suffered due to the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression left many with huge financial problems, which were only worsened by the chancellor's decision to cut unemployment pay and wages. Thanks to a very successful propaganda campaign focused on the poor and the suffering, the Nazi Party rose from only 12 seats in Reichstag in 1928 to becoming the largest party in 1932 with 230 seats.

Hitler's Takeover

Although the Nazi Party had become very powerful, they lost close to two million votes in the November 1932 Reichstag elections, which meant that they only had 33 percent of the vote, and not the majority they needed. Papen, who wanted the position of vice chancellor and thought he could control Hitler, convinced Hindenburg to form a coalition with the Nazis and appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hindenburg finally gave in and appointed Hitler as chancellor. Hitler's final grab for power was when he negotiated with the Reichstag members to give him temporary "emergency" powers for four years, enabling him to act without the consent of parliament or the German constitution. While negotiations were taking place, his large military force was surrounding parliament with the threat of war, should they refuse. They didn't have much of a choice but grant him what he wanted and Hitler became absolute ruler of Germany.

(see main article: What Does Führer Mean?)

Before Adolph Hitler claimed it as his personal title, Führer simply meant "leader" or "guide" in German. It was also used as a military title for commanders who lacked the qualifications to hold permanent command. Since its connotation to Nazi Germany, führer is not used in political context anymore, but may be combined with other words to mean "guide." For instance, a mountain guide would be called a Bergführer, with "berg" meaning "mountain."

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Führer as Hitler's Title

Adolph Hitler claimed the word "Führer" as an unique name for himself and started using it when he became chairman of the Nazi Party. It was at the time not uncommon to call party leaders "Führer" but usually the word had an addition to indicate which party the leader belonged to. When adopting it as a single title, Hitler may have been inspired by Austrian politician, Georg von Schonerer who also used the word without a qualification and whose followers also made use of the "Sieg Heil" greeting.

After the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act which gave Hitler absolute power for four years, he dissolved the president's office and made himself the successor of Paul von Hindenburg. This was however in breach of the Enabling Act, and Hitler did not use the title as "president" but called himself "Führer and Chancellor of the Reich." He would, after that often make use of the title in combination with other political leadership positions he took, for instance " Germanic Führer" or "Führer and Supreme Commander of the Army"

(See main article: The Enabling Act: Hitler Seizes Absolute Power)

The Enabling Act ( Ermächtigungsgesetz ) of 1933 gave the German Cabinet power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, the legislative bodies of the Weimar government. It gave Adolph Hitler complete and absolute power.

The passage of the Enabling Act required Hitler to gain support from a quorum from a super-majority of the entire Reichstag; this process was made easier by nearly all Communist and some Social Democrat deputies being arrested under the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties after the burning of the Reichstag under the auspices of the beginning of a Communist revolution. But to win the rest of the votes, he needed to convince religious parliamentarians that Germany's religious life would be kept secure and that its civil society would not vanish.

Immediately before and after the opening of parliament, Hitler negotiated with the Center Party to get their support for the Enabling Act, which needed a two-thirds margin to pass. The legislation set aside parts of the Weimar Constitution, granting Hitler and his cabinet the right to rule by decree. Hitler personally negotiated with the leaders of the Center Party on March 20 and 22, promising that he would respect their rights and freedoms. He gave the following assurances to entice them to vote for the Enabling Act:

the state governments would continue to function
church schools could continue to operate
the concordats already in force with the German states of Prussia, Bavaria, and Baden would be honored
judges would remain inviolable
the parliament would continue to exist
the president's rights would continue unmolested.

The promises helped secure the Center Party's votes for the Enabling Act. Unfortunately for the Center Party, Adolph Hitler would use the power they bestowed on him to violate every one of these promises.

Over the next few months, Hitler swept away all political opposition-including the Catholic Center Party-while simultaneously negotiating a concordat with the Catholic Church. Hitler claimed he only wanted to eliminate political Catholicism, not the religious functions of the Catholic Church. In a meeting with Bishop Wilhelm Berning on April 26, and in other meetings with Catholic leaders, he insisted that his regime would not restrict organizations sponsored by the Catholic Church. He also feigned being offended by accusations that he would attack Christianity. On the contrary, he lied, he would never think of intervening in the rights of the Church and would not touch the Catholic youth organizations nor interfere with religious education. Two days later, Hitler wrote to Cardinal Adolf Bertram, assuring him that Catholic organizations had nothing to fear. Hitler again expressed his desire to live in peace with the Catholic Church when he met with the papal nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, on May 8.

How Hitler used Christianity to pass the Enabling Act

Another reason Adolph Hitler needed to reassure Germans in 1933 that his regime supported Christianity was to deflect growing unease over the anticlerical elements of the Nazi Party. By early 1933, German Catholic bishops had even banned Catholics from joining the Nazi Party (though this ban was lifted in late March 1933). To allay the growing criticism of Nazism as anti-Christian in 1933, Hitler stressed his regime's commitment to Christianity. In his first radio speech to the nation after becoming chancellor, Hitler promised to protect Christianity, since it was the basis for Germany's morality and family life, though in the speech, he did not explicitly claim that he or his party was Christian.

Indeed, most of his speeches between 1933-34 that mentioned his support for Christianity stopped short of professing any personal faith in it or Jesus. The closest he came during that time to professing Christian faith publicly was during a mid-February speech in 1933. As in his 1922 profession of faith, he was responding to criticism from the Center Party that Nazism was a danger to Christianity. Adolph Hitler countered this opposition by proclaiming that with his regime "Christians and not international atheists" were leading the nation.

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Even this was not a clear-cut profession of personal faith, though it implied he was a Christian. In his speech to the German parliament on March 23, 1933, he acknowledged the Christian churches as important institutions in the preservation of the German people, and he called it the basis of morality; still, he stopped short of identifying himself or his party as essentially Christian.

(See main article: Why did Hitler hate the Jews?)

Looking at the horrible way Jews were treated during the Holocaust, Hitler's hate for them must have been really extreme and apparently there were enough Germans supporting his notion that Jews needed to be eradicated. But what caused all of this?

Historians today still debate the reasons for the Nazi hate for Jews, as there are many factors that might have played a role.

Factors That May Have Contributed

Religious Conflict - Conflicts between Christianity and Judaism have existed for years, which partly helped create an atmosphere of anti-semitism in Europe.
Anti-semitism in Vienna - Hitler spent a part of his youth in Vienna, Austria, where anti-semitism was very prevalent and highly advocated. He may have been influenced by some of the ideological ideas of that environment.
Jewish Economic Power - At the time when World War 1 broke out, a majority of financial institutions, banks and large companies were controlled by Jewish people. Hitler blamed the loss of the war, the economic downfall of Germany and the bad decisions of the Weimar Republic on Jewish capitalism.
Conspiracy theory - Hitler believed that the Jewish had some conspiracy to control the world and that they would stab Germans in the back whenever it would suit them.
Biological differences - Hitler and many Nazis believed in the superiority of the Aryan (German) race and that Jews were inferior to such an extent that they were almost non-human in his eyes. He felt that he would be doing the world a favor by wiping out the Jewish race.

These factors are only explain part of the answer to the question. For more information on this topic, we recommend listening to an interview with European History Richard Weikart, who discusses the religious beliefs of Adolph Hitler. A cursory look at Hitler's value system goes a long way toward explaining why he thought it was in the best interest of the German people to murder millions of its own fellow citizens.

(See main article: What Did Hitler Believe In?)

When Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture Him was placed in the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in December 2012, it provoked considerable contention and even ire. In that exhibit, only the back of the kneeling supplicant is visible. In earlier displays of Him at art galleries around the world, visitors usually approached the praying figure from the back and received a jolt when they walked around to the front and recognized the face: a youthful rendition of Adolph Hitler. According to the notes accompanying one exhibition of Him, the "dictator is represented in the act of pleading for forgiveness." The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization, roundly criticized the statue's display at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial as "a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis' Jewish victims."

There is certainly no evidence he ever sought forgiveness from God, for he was convinced to the end of his life that he was obeying his God. However, in his unreliable memoir, Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler claimed he did kneel in prayer, at least on one occasion. To atheists, they argue that what Hitler believed in was Christianity. When World War I broke out, he wrote, "Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time." After Hitler came to power, he enjoined his fellow Germans in a 1936 speech, "Let us fall down upon our knees and beg the Almighty to grant us the strength to prevail in the struggle for freedom and the future and the honor and the peace of our Volk, so help us God!" Hitler intentionally cultivated an image of piety and righteousness that served him well in his climb to power and in maintaining popularity after achieving power. He wanted people to see him as a kneeling, devout supplicant.

Some people still believe in the image of Adolph Hitler the Pious and use it as a weapon against religion, while others recoil in horror at the thought that Hitler could have been religious. One of the most famous atheists in the world, Richard Dawkins, crossed swords intellectually with Pope Benedict XVI over the religious identity of Hitler and Nazism. On his papal visit to Britain in September 2010, Benedict harshly criticized atheism and secularism while lauding Britain for having fought "against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society." Dawkins was livid. In his article "Ratzinger [i.e., Benedict] Is an Enemy of Humanity," Dawkins reminded readers that Benedict was a former member of the Hitler Youth; thus, Dawkins maintained, Benedict should be more circumspect. Dawkins insisted that Hitler was not an atheist but a Catholic who sincerely believed in God. He even quoted a 1922 speech where Hitler called himself a Christian and referred to Jesus as "my Lord and Savior."

Part 1: divergent views

This controversy over Adolph Hitler's religion-as well as the relationship between religion and Nazism in general-has raged since Hitler emerged as a significant political figure in Munich in the early 1920s. Otto Strasser, a leader in the early Nazi movement who broke away from Hitler in 1930, told his brother in the late 1920s why he was increasingly dissatisfied with Hitler: "We are Christians; without Christianity Europe is lost. Hitler is an atheist." Despite the fact that Hitler never renounced his membership in the Catholic Church, before he seized power in 1933 and for about two months thereafter, the Catholic hierarchy forbade Catholics from joining the Nazi Party because they viewed Hitler's movement as fundamentally hostile to their faith. In 1937, Pope Pius XI condemned the Nazi regime, not only for persecuting the Catholic Church and harassing its clergy, but also for teaching ideology that conflicted with Catholic doctrines. The White Rose, a student resistance movement at the University of Munich that espoused Catholicism, wrote in a 1942 anti-Nazi pamphlet, "Every word that issues from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace he means war and when he most sinfully names the name of the Almighty, he means the force of evil, the fallen angel, Satan." Hans and Sophie Scholl and other White Rose activists were guillotined after they were caught distributing leaflets denouncing the German atrocities in Eastern Europe and encouraging their fellow Germans to oppose the regime.

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And yet, Hitler was incredibly popular during the Third Reich, almost to the very end. Most Germans who voted for Hitler or joined his party considered themselves good Christians, and many of them hailed Hitler as a protector of Christianity from the godless communists. Some Protestant pastors and Catholic priests joined the Nazi Party and cheered Hitler on, and some internationally respected Protestant theologians climbed aboard the Nazi juggernaut, too. By the mid-1930s, about 600,000 German Protestants had joined the German Christian movement, which synthesized Nazi ideology and liberal Protestant theology. In 1933, Hitler publicly promoted the German Christian candidates in the Protestant Church elections, giving encouragement to those who hoped for an amalgamation of Christianity and Nazism.

Some argue that what Hitler believed in were more nefarious beliefs. The conflicting views of Hitler as atheist or Hitler as devout Christian are further complicated by the widespread view of Hitler as a disciple of the occult. Hitler's evil was so intense and inexplicable that some suspect he must have had supernatural connections with the underworld that enabled him to sway the masses and rise to power in Germany. Myriads of books and films purport to prove Hitler was a follower of the black arts.

So what did Adolph Hitler believe in? Was he an atheist, a Christian, or an occultist? He was none of these three. He was not an atheist, because he sincerely believed in the existence of God. He was not a Christian, because the God he believed in was not Jesus Christ or the God of the Christian Bible. He was not an occultist, because he overtly rejected occult beliefs and mystical practices.

What Adolph Hitler believed in was pantheism-or, if not pantheism, at least close to it. He believed that nature, or the entire cosmos, is God. At first glance, it might seem that Hitler's pantheistic worship of nature is incidental, a bit of trivia that does little or nothing to help us understand the man and the atrocities that he committed. But to suppose this would be a mistake. Hitler's devotion to nature as a divine being had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide to morality. Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil.

When Hitler explained how he hoped to harmonize human society with the scientific laws of nature, he emphasized principles derived from Darwinian theory, especially the racist forms of Darwinism prominent among Darwin's German disciples. These laws included human biological inequality (especially racial inequality), the human struggle for existence, and natural selection. In the Darwinian struggle for existence, multitudes perish, and only a few of the fittest individuals survive and reproduce. If this is nature's way, Hitler thought, then he should emulate nature by destroying those destined for death. Thus, in his twisted vision of religion, Hitler believed he was serving his God by annihilating the allegedly inferior humans and promoting the welfare and prolific reproduction of the supposedly superior Aryans.

Part 2: Nazism as a political religion

Another debate that has exercised historians is whether the Nazi regime itself should be characterized as a "political religion." Most of those interpreting Nazism as such construe it as a secular substitute for the dominant religion in early twentieth-century Germany (i.e., Christianity). There are some historians who interpret Nazism as a purely political movement and thus question the analytical helpfulness of the idea of political religion. On the other extreme, historians insist that Nazism was not merely quasi-religious or pseudo-religious, but a full-blown religion. Since the debate influences perceptions of what did Adolph Hitler believe in, I will address it briefly in this introduction.

What Hitler did believe in was the use of religious symbols. There is no doubt Hitler and the Nazi Party appropriated religious symbols, terminology, and emotions in their speeches, mass rallies, and ceremonies. For instance, at the 1936 Nuremberg Party Congress, about 100,000 political leaders in the party gathered at the Zeppelin Field on Friday night. One hundred fifty powerful spotlights arranged in a rectangle around the crowd shined heavenward, creating pillars of light. The Nazis dubbed this spectacle a "cathedral of light," and before Hitler stepped up to the tribune to deliver his speech, the German Labor Front leader Robert Ley led the Nazi leadership in what he called a "confession of faith," stating, "In this hour of consecration, where an unending cathedral arches over us, proceeding into infinity, we vow: We believe in a Lord God in heaven, who created us, who guides and protects us, and who has sent you, my Führer, to us, so that you may liberate Germany. That is what we believe, my Führer."

According to the official Nazi report, this "confession of faith" was greeted with a roar of approval. From the Nazi perspective, the beauty of this minimalist confession of faith in the outdoor cathedral was that it could potentially appeal to anyone who believed in any kind of God, whether Christian or anti-Christian, theist, deist, or pantheist. Indeed, the Nuremberg Party Rally continued through the weekend, and when it came time for the normal Sunday morning worship services for the Christian God, Adolph Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy conspicuously participated in Nazi Party festivities instead of going to church. Instead of celebrating the Lord's Day, Sunday at the Nuremberg Party Rally was SA Day, a time to honor the SA, or Nazi stormtroopers.

In his speech immediately after Ley's "confession of faith," Adolph Hitler gave this faith a slightly different twist, exhorting the party leaders to put their faith in the German Volk. He first rehearsed the way that Germany had risen up from its position of weakness and degradation since he had come to power four years earlier. This "miracle of renewal in our people (Volk)," Hitler suggested, came about not as a "gift from heaven for unworthy people" but because they had fanatically sacrificed for the "resurrection of a Volk." "It is the faith in our Volk that has made us small people (Menschen) great," Hitler pronounced. The future, he believed, was auspicious because the German Volk was " born again." The speech was saturated with religious terminology, most of it directed not toward God, but toward the German Volk. Nonetheless, Hitler closed his speech by promising the young people in Germany that if they would do their duty, "then God the Lord will never forsake our Volk." This 1936 speech was not unusual, as Hitler often invoked religious themes to arouse consecration to the German Fatherland while simultaneously appealing to God as the providential creator and sustainer of the German Volk.

Apparently, Adolph Hitler liked the effects of the "cathedral of light," for the Nazis repeated it the following two years (the last party rallies held because of the advent of World War II). In his closing speech at the 1937 rally, Hitler reflected on the quasi-religious experience of that eventful week, stating, "What almost shook us several times this week was the confession of faith in a volkisch (nationalist-racist) worldview of a new generation, and more than once hundreds of thousands stood here, no longer under the impression of a political rally, but under the spell of deep prayer!" At the "cathedral of light" at the 1938 Nuremberg Rally, Ley took matters a step further by almost deifying Hitler before the Führer came to the podium. During the Second German Empire (1871-1918), a common nationalist slogan had been "One Volk-one Empire-one God." Just about every German would have recognized this saying, since it was emblazoned on many postcards and even on a German postage stamp during the Second Empire. Ley used an altered version of that saying when he introduced Hitler to about 140,000 Nazi political leaders:

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One Volk-one Empire-one Führer! How often in the last decade and above all in the last years has this call of all Germans resounded upward again and again. This battle cry of all Germans is jubilation and joy for some, confession and faith for others, and pride and power for the entire German nation. Young and old, rich and poor, without distinction all Germans repeat it again and again, and so we also want to let this confession of Germans ring out in this solemn hour in the cathedral of light: One Empire-One Volk-One Führer!
In this new slogan, which was widely disseminated in the Third Reich on posters and a postage stamp, the Führer had replaced God. Just two years earlier, Ley had led the gathered Nazi Party officials in confessing faith in a God who had sent the Führer. By 1938, the confession of faith did not even mention God and seemed to imply that Hitler was now filling His shoes.

To be sure, Adolph Hitler likely never thought he was God. But as many historians have suggested, he reveled in Messianism and often portrayed himself as the man chosen by Providence to liberate Germany and lead it to greatness. Derek Hastings concludes in his detailed examination of Hitler's early religious identity that by the time Hitler left prison in late 1924, he had come "to see his political mission in increasingly all-encompassing messianic terms." In The "Hitler Myth, " Ian Kershaw does not use the term Messianism, as Hastings and some other historians do, but he does note that a "pseudo-religious motivation . . . obviously lay for many behind the Hitler cult." Indeed, plenty of Germans looked upon their Führer as a quasi-deity, elevating him high above mere mortals. After Goebbels finished reading Hitler's Mein Kampf in October 1925, he raved in his diary, "Who is this man? Half plebeian, half God! Actually the Christ or only John [the Baptist]?" The messianic thrust of the Hitler cult manifested itself frequently, as in this Hitler Youth song at the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally:

We are the joyful Hitler Youth
We need no Christian virtue For our Führer Adolf Hitler Is ever our Mediator.
No pastor, no evil one, can hinder Us from feeling as Hitler's children. We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel, Away with incense and holy water.
The church can be taken away from me,
The swastika is redemption on the earth, It will I follow everywhere, Baldur von Schirach [leader of the Hitler Youth], take me along!
Not only was this a clear expression of a desire to replace Christianity with Nazism, but it also exalted Hitler to a position that the Christian churches gave Jesus, who is often called the Mediator in the Bible and Christian theology.

In the end, if all one means by "political religion" is the political appropriation of religious symbols, terminology, rites, ceremonies, and emotions, then clearly the Nazis excelled at this. However, is this enough for Nazism to qualify as a religion, a political religion, or a secular religion, all terms used at times to describe Nazism?

Moreover, what did Adolph Hitler believe in regarding Nazism as a religion? This is easier to decipher, since he explicitly answered this question more than once. In Mein Kampf, he explicitly rejected the idea that he should become a religious reformer, insisting that Nazism was a political, not a religious movement. In fact, throughout his career, Hitler urged neutrality on purely religious questions, and he tolerated a variety of views about religion within the Nazi Party. Some leading Nazis considered themselves Christians, while others were staunchly and forthrightly anti-Christian. Some Nazis embraced occultism, while others scoffed at it. Some promoted neo-paganism, while others considered pagan rites and ceremonies absurd. Hitler really did not care what they believed about the spiritual realm as long as it did not conflict with Nazi political and racial ideology. In October 1941, in the midst of a diatribe against the Christian churches, Hitler admitted that Nazism could never be a complete substitute for religion because it did not offer anyone a coherent position on metaphysics. Thus he counseled toleration for those who had a heartfelt desire for religion. He remarked that someone feeling a need for metaphysics cannot simply be handed the Party Program.

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Though Adolph Hitler dismissed the idea that Nazism was a religion, he did consider it more than just a political party or movement. He often presented Nazism as a fundamental worldview that provided a foundation for his political ideology and policies. The second volume of Mein Kampf contains two chapters on Weltanschauung, or worldview (rendered as "philosophy" in the standard English translation), in which Hitler argued that any successful political movement must be built on a coherent worldview. Hitler expressed the kernel of this worldview in one of these chapters:
The folkish worldview [i.e., Hitler's own position] finds the importance of mankind in its basic racial elements. In the state it sees in principle only a means to an end and construes its end as the preservation of the racial existence of man. Thus, it by no means believes in an equality of the races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated, through this knowledge, to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe. Thus, in principle, it serves the basic aristocratic idea of Nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual. It sees not only the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals. . . . But it cannot grant the right to existence even to an ethical idea if this idea represents a danger for the racial life of the bearers of a higher ethics.
In this passage, Adolph Hitler hinted at his pantheism by equating the "eternal will that dominates the universe" with the "aristocratic idea of Nature." However, he clearly enunciated the central tenet of his worldview: the primacy of race. This racial worldview attempted to explain the essence of human existence and the meaning of history, while also providing moral guidance. Therefore, what did Hitler believe in regarding pantheism? Though this does not make Hitler's ideology a religion per se, his comprehensive philosophy of life inevitably came into conflict with many religions, because most religions also claim to provide answers to these fundamental questions. Hitler recognized this problem, maintaining in Mein Kampf that a worldview such as his own must be intolerant toward any other worldview that conflicts with it-and here he specifically mentioned Christianity as a rival.

He knew that converting Germans to his worldview of what Hitler believed in would not leave the religious landscape unchanged. In an August 1933 speech, Hitler stated, "The unity of the Germans must be guaranteed by a new worldview, since Christianity in its present form is no longer equal to the demands being placed on the bearers of national unity." Three years later, in his cultural speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally, he told the party faithful, " A Christian era can only possess a Christian art, a National Socialist era only a National Socialist art." Hitler believed that the triumph of his worldview would transform the entire culture of Germany, whereupon it would no longer reflect previous religious concerns.

What did Adolph Hitler believe in regarding secularism? Did Hitler's desire to supplant Christian culture with Nazi culture mean he was intent on secularizing German society? This is hotly debated. Already in 1947, the German theologian Walter Künneth argued that Nazism was the result of religious decay and secularization. The roots of Nazi ideology, he thought, were found in Darwin, Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Oswald Spengler, whose ideas he considered products of secularization. Many scholars today agree with Künneth that Nazism is a manifestation of secularization. Detlev Peukert, for instance, argued in his seminal essay, "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science," for the importance of a secularized version of science in shaping Nazi ideology. Claudia Koonz explicitly calls Nazis "modern secularists" and interprets the Nazi conscience as a "secular ethos." Richard Steigmann-Gall, meanwhile, strenuously objects to this interpretation, arguing instead that "Nazism was not the result of a 'Death of God' in secularized society, but rather a radicalized and singularly horrific attempt to preserve God against secularized society." And Todd Weir, while admitting that the Nazi stance toward secularism was ambiguous and even paradoxical, nevertheless argues that the Nazi's espousal of "positive Christianity" made them opponents of secularism.

Scholars and especially popular works on Hitler, in fact, have identified him with just about every major expression of religion present in early twentieth-century Germany: Catholic Christianity, non-Catholic Christianity, non-Christian monotheism, deism, pantheism, occultism, agnosticism, and atheism. One reason for this confusion is that Hitler consciously obfuscated his position whenever he thought he could gain political capital needed to secure power or retain popularity. While many of his long-term goals were fixed, he was flexible about short-term policies, and he was not averse to concealing his goals if he knew they would not be popular.

Another problem creating confusion about what Hitler believed in is that some people (though usually not historians, who know better) think the Nazis had a coherent religious position. Some wrongly assume that because Rosenberg or Himmler embraced neo-paganism, this must have been the official Nazi position. However, there was no official Nazi position on religion, except perhaps for the rather vague and minimalist position that some kind of God existed.

(See main article: Was Hitler a Christian?)

Was Adolph Hitler a Christian? This question has been asked by historians and World War Two aficionados for decades. During Hitler's lifetime, some observers warned that he was the Antichrist. In 1942, Arthur Szyk, a Polish Jew living in the United States, drew a caricature of Hitler as the Antichrist bringing death and destruction to humanity. Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus ( Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, "As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it."

Reasons to Believe

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. They rarely asked if Adolph Hitler was a Christian. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them.

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Indeed, savvy politician that he was, Hitler often cultivated the image of being a Christian. One of the more spectacular examples was the striking photograph that Heinrich Hoffmann captured on April 23, 1932, as Hitler was exiting the Marienkirche (Mary's Church) in Bremerhaven. In that photo, a bright cross is hovering directly over Hitler's head, giving him a halo effect. This photo was included in Hoffmann's popular book of Hitler photographs, Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt ( Hitler as no one knows him). The caption reinforced the image: "A photographic chance event becomes a symbol: Adolph Hitler, the supposed 'heretic,' leaving the Marinekirche [sic] in Wilhelmshaven."

Hoffmann's claim that this was a "chance event" is rather suspicious, as the photo looks too good to be true. The caption, meanwhile, implied that Hitler was not a heretic, as some presumed, because here he was at church. The photo was such brilliant propaganda that the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall used it on the dust jacket of his 2003 book, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919 -1945, in which he tries to show the affinities of Nazism and Christianity. Apparently, it still convinces some that Hitler is a Christian.

In any case, sometime between 1935 and 1938, Adolph Hitler apparently decided that he no longer needed to pander to the Christian sensibilities of the German public. In the 1938 edition of Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt, Hoffmann altered the photo by removing the cross) (apparently, Hitler no longer wanted to be associated with this symbol). Hoffmann also changed the caption: "Adolph Hitler after sightseeing at the historic Marinekirche [sic] in Wilhelmshaven." While Germans viewing the version with the cross would likely think Hitler was leaving a church service, the later caption made clear Hitler was not attending a worship service, but merely visiting a historic site.

Most historians today agree that Adolph Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler's "superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse" should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of "established religion." Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but "Hitler's God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood." In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian.

Hitler's anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because-as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf - he did not want to offend possible supporters. In August 1924, while he was in Landsberg Prison, Hitler privately told Hess about having to camouflage his opposition to religion, just as he had to hide his enmity toward alcohol. Hitler had remained silent while Hess and fellow Nazis discussed their positions vis-à-vis the Protestant Church, but later he told Hess how he felt. Even though Hitler found playing a religious hypocrite distasteful, he dared not criticize the church, because he knew this might alienate people.

Hitler's tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona. He was usually more circumspect, refraining from open criticism of Christianity. However, many of his colleagues testified that Hitler's personal opinion about Christianity did not match his hypocritical public stance; Hitler, for his part, thought religion itself was hypocritical. According to Wagener, who accompanied Hitler from 1929 to 1933, Hitler honored Jesus as a great socialist but believed the Christian churches had completely perverted His teachings and were, in fact, teaching the exact opposite.

In reading through Goebbels' Diaries, Adolph Hitler's monologues, and Rosenberg's Diarie s, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler's monologues were primarily about the "problem of Christianity." In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler's secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler's evening discussions at the headquarters, "the church plays a large role." She added that she found Hitler's religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler's own monologues confirm Schroeder's impression.

Reasons to Disbelieve

In fact, Adolph Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings. In a long diatribe ridiculing many core Christian teachings, Hitler told his colleagues that the Christian concept of heaven was insipid and undesirable. After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, "Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine." He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a "Negro with his fetish" is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation.

Hitler, in his own twisted mind, believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics. In February 1942, Hitler again scoffed at the basic teachings of Christianity, sarcastically relating the story of humanity from a Christian standpoint. He implied that God was responsible for original sin and commented that God's method of redemption by sending his Son was a "murderous subterfuge." Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission. In the course of this anti-Christian diatribe, Hitler called the Catholic Church a form of idolatry and "Satanic superstition."

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Adolph Hitler's monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, "Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost." In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as "Jew-Christianity." While Hitler often associated Jesus with Aryan traits and socialism, he consistently lambasted Christianity as Jewish and communist. He denigrated the "Jew-Christians" of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a "JewishChristian deed." Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

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In the end, the evidence is preponderant against Hitler embracing any form of Christianity for most of his adult life. Was Hitler a Christian? No.

Even though he tried to palm himself off as a Christian when it served his political purposes, none of his friends and comrades considered him one. Even though he never officially left the Catholic Church, Schroeder claimed he promised to withdraw from the church immediately after the war to symbolize the dawn of a new historical era. All of Adolph Hitler's close associates agreed with Schroeder, testifying that he was antagonistic toward Christianity. He admired the whip-wielding Jesus, whom he considered a fellow Aryan warrior fighting against the allegedly infernal Jews, but he had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek.

He also did not believe that Jesus's death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus's resurrection. In private conversations and monologues he railed at Christianity because it had followed the lead of that insidious Jewish rabbi Paul. Despite Hitler's disingenuous public statements, and despite his esteem for (his anti-Semitic version of) Jesus, it is abundantly clear that Hitler did not consider himself a Christian.

(See main article: Hitler's Religion: Christianity, Atheism, Pantheism?)

In mid-January of 1940, Adolph Hitler was discussing with his colleagues a rather frequent topic of his conversations and monologues: the church. After he sarcastically imitated Niemöller, the Confessing Church leader who was incarcerated in a concentration camp, someone in his entourage indicated to him that posterity might not be able to figure out what Hitler's religion was, because he never openly stated his beliefs. The person who brought this to Hitler's attention had clearly noticed the discrepancy between his private expressions of intense antipathy to Christianity and his public religious image. Since many in Hitler's entourage were also intensely anti-Christian, perhaps they were trying to provoke him to state his personal religious views publicly. In any case, this observation about the inscrutability of Hitler's religious views still has merit today- even though we have far more information about Hitler available to us than most of his contemporaries had.That, of course, does not mean everyone draws the same conclusion. As we have seen, some people today interpret Hitler as an atheist, while others insist he was a Christian. In fact, he has been described as an adherent of just about every major religious position in twentieth-century European society (excepting Judaism, of course), which included agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, occultism, deism, and non-Christian theism.

Interestingly, when he was confronted in January 1940 with the observation that people might not know Hitler's religion, he suggested that, on the contrary, it should not be difficult for people to figure it out. After all, he asserted, he had never allowed any clergy to participate in his party meetings or even in funerals for party comrades. He continued, "The Christian-Jewish pestilence is surely approaching its end now. It is simply dreadful, that a religion has even been possible, that literally eats its God in Holy Communion." Hitler clearly thought that anyone should be able to figure out that he was not a Christian. Nonetheless, Rosenberg reported in his diary later that year that Hitler had determined that he should divulge his negative views about Christianity in his last testament "so that no doubt about his position can surface. As head of state he naturally held back-but nevertheless after the war clear consequences will follow." Many times, Hitler told his colleagues that he would reckon with Christianity after the successful conclusion of the war.

Interestingly, even in these conversations, Adolph Hitler only indicated what he did not believe. He did not explain at that time what he did believe about God, the after-life, or other religious issues. Indeed, it is much easier to figure out what Hitler did not believe than to figure out Hitler's religion and feelings. Probably, this is partly because Hitler considered God ineffable. Hitler's God was not one who revealed himself clearly to humanity, but a mysterious being who superseded human knowledge.

What he did not believe

So, what did Adolph Hitler not believe? He continually rejected Christianity, calling it a Jewish plot to undermine the heroic ideals of the (Aryan-dominated) Roman Empire. He did not accept the deity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, or indeed any of the miracles of Jesus. There is no evidence that he believed in a triune God. Though he esteemed Jesus as an Aryan fighter against Jewish materialism who was martyred for his anti-Jewish stance, he did not ascribe to Jesus's death any significance in human salvation. Indeed, he did not believe in salvation at all in the Christian sense of the term, because he denied a personal afterlife. Despite his public invocations to God, Hitler also did not believe in the efficacy of prayer. His God responded to people and judged them according to their works, not their words. Although he spurned Christianity, this did not lead him to disbelieve in every form of deity, however. He overtly rejected atheism, associating it with "Jewish-Bolshevism." Further, he explicitly condemned mysticism, occultism, and neo-paganism. Thus, it is evident Hitler was neither a Christian, atheist, occultist, nor neo-paganist.

While this narrows the range of options of Hitler's religion slightly, it still leaves us with agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, and non-Christian theism. A reasonable case could be made for more than one of these options. In order solve this puzzle, however, one must not only examine the full panoply of his religious statements but also decipher how to weigh those statements on Hitler's religion. Are his private statements more revealing of his true convictions than his public speeches? Probably, but even his private statements must be used cautiously. Are his books a better indication of his personal beliefs than his speeches? This is likely, because he seemed to be more systematic in explaining his worldview in Mein Kampf and in his Second Book. However, they also served propaganda purposes and must be used carefully as well. There also remains the question of whether Hitler even had a coherent metaphysic; if not, perhaps there is no single answer to what Hitler's religion was.

One problem is that Adolph Hitler often portrayed God as an impersonal force, yet sometimes he implied God did take a personal interest in humanity, or at least in the German people's destiny. Though he usually insisted that God does not intervene in the natural cause-and-effect relationships in the universe, at times he seemed to ascribe a role to Providence in history. When he survived assassination attempts, for instance, he took it as a sign from Providence that he was specially chosen to fulfill a divine mission. Until the very end of World War II, he thought his God would not fail to bring victory to the German people.

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One of the reasons it is unlikely that Hitler was a theist is because he did not seem to think God could contravene the laws of nature. Hitler often called the laws of nature eternal and inviolable, thus embracing determinism. He interpreted history as a course of events determined by the racial composition of people, not by their religion or other cultural factors. The way to understand humanity and history, according to Hitler, was to study the laws of nature. He considered science, not religious revelation, the most reliable path to knowledge. What Hitler thought science revealed was that races are unequal and locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence, which would determine the future destiny of humanity.

Whether Hitler construed the laws of nature as the creation of a deistic or theistic God, or the emanation of a pantheistic God, he clearly grounded his morality on the laws of nature, which he consistently portrayed as the will of God. Since nature brought about biological improvement through struggle, Hitler defined moral goodness as whatever contributed to biological progress. Evil or sin, in Hitler's opinion, was anything that produced biological degeneration. Thus, Hitler thought he was operating in complete harmony with God's will by sterilizing people with disabilities and forbidding the intermarriage of Germans and Jews. Killing the weak to make way for the strong was part of the divine plan revealed in nature, in Hitler's view.

Thus, even murdering disabled Germans, launching expansionist wars to wrest territory from allegedly inferior races, and murdering millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, Slavs, and others defined as subhumans, was not only morally permissible but also obedience to the voice of God and aspects of Hitler's religion. After all, that was how nature operated, producing superabundantly and then destroying most of the progeny in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler often reminded his fellow Germans that even if this seemed ruthless, it was actually wise. In any case, he warned that they could not moralize about it, because humans were completely subject to the laws of nature.

Pantheism and brutal power politics

In the end, while recognizing that Adolph Hitler's religion was somewhat muddled, it seems evident his religion was closest to pantheism. He often deified nature, calling it eternal and all-powerful at various times throughout his career. He frequently used the word "nature" interchangeably with God, Providence, or the Almighty. While on some occasions he claimed God had created people or organisms, at other times (or sometimes in the same breath) he claimed nature had created them. Further, he wanted to cultivate a certain veneration of nature through a reinvented Christmas festival that turned the focus away from Christianity. He also hoped to build an observatory-planetarium complex in Linz that would serve as a religious pilgrimage site to dazzle Germans with the wonders of the cosmos. Overall, it appears a pantheist worldview was where Hitler felt closest to home.

Since it is so difficult to pinpoint exactly what Hitler's religion was, it might seem his religion was historically inconsequential. However, hopefully this study of Hitler's religion sheds light on a number of important issues. First, his anti-Christianity obviously shaped the persecution of the Christian churches during the Third Reich. Second, his religious hypocrisy helped explain his ability to appeal to a broad constituency. Third, his trust that his God would reward his efforts and willpower, together with his sense of divine mission, imbued him with hope, even in hopeless circumstances. This helps us understand why he was so optimistic until the very end, when it should have been obvious much earlier that the game was up.

Finally, and most importantly, his religion did not provide him any transcendent morality. Whatever Hitler's stance on other religious issues, his morality was entirely of this world, derived from his understanding of the workings of nature. This was the most pernicious element of his religion. Adolph Hitler followed what he considered the dictates of nature by stealing, killing, and destroying.

(See main article: Hitler's Views on Eugenics and Aryan Supremacism)

Adolph Hitler's views on eugenics were based on social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan Race, or the Germanic "master race" through eugenics at the center of Nazi belief. But Hitler did not create these views. He merely put into policy ideas that circulated throughout the western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The roots of Nazi ideology were found in Darwin, Nietzsche, and philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They made their way to Hitler by way of Julius Friedrich Lehmann, a Munich publisher specializing in medical texts, as well as works disseminating scientific racism and eugenics. Lehmann befriended Hitler in the early 1920s and sent him inscribed copies of many of the racist books churned out by his publishing house, including books that popularized racist anthropology. Lehmann also published the journal Deutschlands Erneuerung ( Germany's Renewal), which was filled with articles promoting racism and eugenics. In a March 1922 circular, Hitler recommended that Nazi Party members read this journal, and in 1924 he published an article in it himself (in part because the Nazi press had been banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch).

Hitler's views of eugenics in his own words

In his two books, Adolph Hitler discussed evolutionary theory as vital to his theory of racial struggle and eugenics. Several times throughout Mein Kampf, he specifically employs the term "struggle for existence" ("Kampf um das Dasein"); in fact, the phrase or its plural appears three times in a passage several pages long where Hitler described why the Germans should be both pro-natalist and expansionist. Historian Robert Richards, however, inexplicably claims that Hitler's views in this passage are un-Darwinian, because-according to Richards- a Darwinian should supposedly want population expansion only within restricted borders, which would allow the fit to triumph over the unfit.

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One of the most important factors in Hitler's reasoning was the living space ( Lebensraum) is to be taken from allegedly inferior races. Thus, expanding is part of the Darwinian racial struggle that allows the allegedly fitter Nordic race to outcompete allegedly inferior races. Contra Richards, Hitler's discussion makes perfect sense in a Darwinian world if unequal races are waging a struggle for existence. In fact, the whole idea of Lebensraum was first formulated by Friedrich Ratzel, a Darwinian biologist who later became a geographer. In addition, many pro-natalist eugenicists with impeccable Darwinian credentials, such as Alfred Ploetz or Max von Gruber, agreed with Hitler's position on expansionism (indeed, they may have influenced Hitler in this matter).

Later in Mein Kampf, in the chapter on "Nation and Race," Adolph Hitler discussed biological evolution in the context of racial purity. He argued that racial mixing is deleterious to biological organisms, precisely because it would stymie biological evolution. His reasoning was thus: If two organisms at different levels mate, this will result in offspring below the level of the higher parent-"consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level." Hitler did not use the term "struggle for existence" here, but he described this struggle as a contest between organisms in which the stronger prevail and the weaker are eliminated. He then stated, "If this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher evolution ( Höherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable.

Adolph Hitler did indeed believe in human evolution. It was not a peripheral element of his worldview, either. It helped shape his understanding of the human struggle for existence, natural selection among humans and human races, eugenics, pronatalism, killing the disabled, and expansionism. Of course, Hitler's evolutionary views were synthesized with many other influences, such as anti-Semitism and nationalism; it was by no means the sole influence on his ideology or policies. But in addition to all the times Hitler explicitly broached the topic of human evolution, he even more frequently discussed the racial struggle for existence, the struggle for existence within the Nordic race, natural selection, and many other Darwinian themes.

Hitler often abbreviated these terms as "racial struggle," "struggle," and "selection," just as many of his contemporaries, including biologists and eugenicists, did, but key issue here is the concept, not the exact terminology. When Hitler spoke about the "selection" of the strongest organisms and the elimination of the weakest, it did not matter whether he used the exact term "natural selection" (though he did at times). He was obviously describing it, and that is the crucial issue.

Eugenics as a scientific policy

After coming to power, Adolph Hitler continued to prioritize science over religion. When meeting with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Hitler reminded him that the world was changing, and he thought the Catholic Church should change with it. He reminded the cardinal of the Church's past conflicts with science over its belief in a six-day creation and the geocentric theory of the solar system. Then he told Faulhaber that the Church must abandon its opposition to Nazi racial and eugenics legislation, because such policies "rest on absolute scientific research." Strange as it may seem to us today, Hitler saw his racial and eugenics agenda as scientific and all opposition to it as the product of benighted, outmoded religion.

In April 1940, Goebbels reported that, in Hitler's view, Catholicism was "setting itself in ever sharper contrast to the exact sciences. Its [Catholicism's] end will be accelerated by this." In November 1941, Hitler overtly dismissed the teachings of Catholicism and any other religion that contradicted the findings of science. He stated, "Today no one who is familiar with natural science can any longer take seriously the teaching of the church. What stands in contradiction to natural laws cannot be from God." Again, Hitler was not discounting all religion, but he clearly thought science had a superior claim to knowledge. As Michael Burleigh argues, Hitler "subscribed to the view that science had largely supplanted Christianity, without rationalism eradicating the need for belief, or undermining the existence of a creator God in whom he continued to believe.

Core tenets of Adolph Hitler's worldview were that the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also held a view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could "produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.

Bibliography

Mein Kampf - Adolph Hitler
World War Two Casualty Figures Hitler on his plans to exterminate the Jews
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Declassified CIA documents on the personality of Hitler
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Adolph Hitler: His Life, Ideology, Rise, and Downfall - History

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Loading... Adolph Hitler, German politician, leader of the Nazi Party, and by near-universal accounts the most monstrous and terrifying leader in the twentieth century, led his nation into a disastrous war and triggered the extermination of millions of his own citizens due to his anti-Semitic ideology.

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In the muddy, lice infested, smelly trenches of World War I, Adolf Hitler found a new home fighting for the German Fatherland. After years of poverty, alone and uncertain, he now had a sense of belonging and purpose.

The "war to end all wars" began after the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was gunned down by a young Serbian terrorist on June 28, 1914. Events quickly escalated as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany urged Austria to declare war on Serbia. Russia then mobilized against Austria. Germany mobilized against Russia. France and Britain then mobilized against Germany.

All over Europe and England, young men, including Adolf Hitler, eagerly volunteered. Like most young soldiers before them, they thought it would be a short war, but hopefully long enough for them to see some action and participate in the great adventure.

It would turn out to be a long war in which soldiers died by the millions. An entire generation of young men would be wiped out. The war would also bring the downfall of the old European culture of kings and noblemen and their codes of honor.

New technologies such as planes, tanks, machine-guns, long-range artillery, and deadly gas were used by the armies against each other. But a stalemate developed along a line of entrenched fortifications stretching from the North Sea, all the way through France to the Saar River in Germany. In these miserable trenches, Adolf Hitler became acquainted with war.

Hitler had volunteered at age 25 by enlisting in a Bavarian Regiment. After its first engagement against the British and Belgians near Ypres, 2,500 of the 3,000 men in the Hitler's regiment were killed, wounded or missing. Hitler escaped without a scratch. Throughout most of the war, Hitler had great luck avoiding life-threatening injury. More than once he moved away from a spot where moments later a shell exploded killing or wounding everyone.

Hitler, by all accounts, was an unusual soldier with a sloppy manner and unmilitary bearing. But he was also eager for action and always ready to volunteer for dangerous assignments even after many narrow escapes from death.

Corporal Hitler was a dispatch runner, taking messages back and forth from the command staff in the rear to the fighting units near the battlefield. During lulls in the fighting he would take out his watercolors and paint the landscapes of war.

Hitler, unlike his fellow soldiers, never complained about bad food and the horrible conditions or talked about women, preferring to discuss art or history. He received a few letters but no packages from home and never asked for leave. His fellow soldiers regarded Hitler as too eager to please his superiors, but generally a likable loner notable for his luck in avoiding injury as well as his bravery.

On October 7, 1916, Hitler's luck ran out when he was wounded in the leg by a shell fragment during the Battle of the Somme. He was hospitalized in Germany. It was his first time away from the Front after two years of war. Following his recovery, he went sightseeing in Berlin, then was assigned to light duty in Munich. He was appalled at the apathy and anti-war sentiment among German civilians. He blamed the Jews for much of this and saw them as conspiring to spread unrest and undermine the German war effort.

Hitler (seated on right) and fellow soldiers during World War I. The dog had the name Fuchsl and was actually Hitler's pet during the war until it was stolen from him.

This idea of an anti-war conspiracy involving Jews would become an obsession to add to other anti-Semitic notions he acquired in Vienna, leading to an ever-growing hatred of Jews.

To get away from the apathetic civilians, Hitler asked to go back to the Front and was sent back in March of 1917.

In August 1918, he received the Iron Cross 1st Class, a rarity for foot soldiers. Interestingly, the lieutenant who recommended him for the medal was a Jew, a fact Hitler would later obscure. Despite his good record and a total of five medals, he remained a corporal. Due to his unmilitary appearance and odd personality, his superiors felt he lacked leadership qualities and thought he would not command enough respect as a sergeant.

As the tide of war turned against the Germans and morale collapsed along the Front, Hitler became depressed. He would sometimes spend hours sitting in the corner of the tent in deep contemplation then would suddenly burst onto his feet shouting about the "invisible foes of the German people," namely Jews and Marxists.

In October 1918, he was temporarily blinded by a British chlorine gas attack near Ypres. He was sent home to a starving, war weary country full of unrest. He laid in a hospital bed consumed with dread amid a swirl of rumors of impending disaster.

On November 10, 1918, an elderly pastor came into the hospital and announced the news. The Kaiser and the House of Hollenzollern had fallen. Their beloved Fatherland was now a republic. The war was over.

Hitler described his reaction in Mein Kampf: "There followed terrible days and even worse nights - I knew that all was lost...in these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed."

Not the military, in his mind, but the politicians back at home in Germany and primarily the Jews.

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The History Place - Rise of Hitler: Hitler in World War I

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In the muddy, lice infested, smelly trenches of World War I, Adolf Hitler found a new home fighting for the German Fatherland. After years of poverty, alone and uncertain, he now had a sense of belonging and purpose.

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

Adolf Hitler was the unremarkable artist who rose to become the dictator of Germany and the instigator of the Holocaust. Given the devastation left in Hitler's wake, a major question for historians of the 20th century has been how Hitler captured the German imagination and came to power.

He was not, as a person, a charismatic character; biographer Ian Kershaw described him as an "empty vessel outside his political life." He had few genuine friends, an overinflated view of his own intellect and no inborn connections to propel him to the top.

Nor did Hitler have especially original ideas; the German Workers' Party he joined in 1919, which would become the Nazi Party under his leadership, was just one of approximately 70 right-wing groups in Germany after World War I, Kershaw wrote in the biography " Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (opens in new tab)" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998).

But in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, it was Hitler's group that would gain dominance - and that was not a matter of luck, said Karl Schleunes, author of " The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (opens in new tab)" (University of Illinois Press, 1970).

"What makes the German Workers' Party different from the other 69 groups is that they don't have a Hitler, whose speaker talent and tactics are really quite effective," Schleunes said.

And once he achieved fame, Hitler was able to cover up his rather off-putting personality with media images of a cultured gentleman beloved by children and animals.

The early years

(Image credit: Public Domain)

Hitler's early life does not hint at his future. The son of a low-level civil servant in Austria, Hitler was groomed by his harsh, authoritarian father to become a bureaucrat as well. Other than the beatings from his father, the future dictator's early childhood was relatively normal, but he became sullen and friendless in adolescence, according to Kershaw's biography. He never finished high school and, from 1905 to 1907, sponged off of his mother.

In 1907, Hitler famously failed to win admission to art school, kicking off a period in which he lived in Vienna, making grand pronouncements about art, architecture and culture, but rarely making any serious effort to secure a future in art himself. In 1909, he ended up living for a time in a flophouse for the homeless. He soon turned to supporting himself by selling cheap paintings of city scenes.

In 1913, Hitler went to Munich, fleeing Austrian authorities who'd noticed that he'd dodged mandatory military service there. It was in the German military, however, that Hitler would find direction - and a springboard into politics.

Service in World War I gave Hitler a place in the world for the first time, Kershaw wrote, even as many of his fellow soldiers viewed him as a bit of a socially awkward oddball and prude. Germany admitted defeat in the war as Hitler rested in a hospital, recovering from a mustard gas attack. He returned to his regiment in Munich, Schleunes said, where he ultimately got a job with the information unit, working in military intelligence.

It was this job that put him on a collision course with the German Workers' Party. Hitler had long held right-wing nationalist views, but in a "critical development," Schleunes said, the army sent him to attend university lectures on German history, socialism and bolshevism - from a right-wing perspective.

In particular, Hitler ate up the words of a right-wing economist, Gottfried Feder, and a right-wing historian, Karl Alexander von Müller. It was Müller who noticed that Hitler had a talent for rhetoric, and his recommendations helped Hitler land a job in the intelligence unit as a spy keeping tabs on the German Workers' Party, Schleunes said.

Gaining power

It was Hitler's power as a speaker that turned him from informer to party member, Schleunes said. During a German Workers' Party lecture, someone suggested that it might be best for Bavaria to break from the rest of Germany, splintering the country. Hitler, a German nationalist, was appalled and argued against the idea. The leader of the party, impressed with his speaking style, asked him to join the party. A few days later, on Sept. 12, 1919, Hitler became the 55th member of the party, with the full permission of the army.

Hitler became a fiery speaker on the beer-hall circuit and was willing to risk the humiliation of low turnout by organizing rallies in large spaces, Kershaw wrote. His organizing talents propelled him to the top of the party's leadership.

In 1920, Hitler and the other leaders of the party changed its name from the German Workers' Party to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or "Nazi" for short). In 1921, Hitler was voted chairman of the party and took total control. The once-tiny group began to draw new members, absorbing other right-wing groups, Schleunes said.

Hitler remained a cold presence in person. "He's not an interesting conversationalist," Schleunes said. "He's really sort of a dull person, except when he appears before an audience, when somehow, a switch is turned on. He could milk an audience and shape it and get it to feel."

If Hitler's speaking abilities gave him the roots to flourish in the early Nazi Party, the chaos and resentment of Germany at the time were the soil that made his growth possible.The German people were in shock after losing World War I, Schleunes said. They'd been told throughout the war that they were winning. They faced food and coal shortages, and ended the war with millions killed and wounded. But these sacrifices were necessary, according to the army, because victory was close.

"They're told that for four years, and suddenly, they're told that 'We lost the war,'" Schleunes said. To understand how such a thing could happen, many turned to conspiracy theories - particularly, the theory that Jewish people on the home front had stabbed Germany in the back. "The situation, for someone like Hitler, is ripe," Schleunes said.

A wider popularity

(Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany)

Violence marked Hitler's early rise. By 1923, he was emboldened enough to attempt to overthrow the government of Bavaria by force, which he hoped would eventually lead to the overthrow of the national government in Berlin.

This "Beer Hall Putsch" failed, but there was widespread sympathy for Hitler's aims, Schleunes said. His trial became a megaphone broadcasting his ideas, and his light 9-month stint in prison gave him the opportunity to dictate the "almost unreadable" but wildly popular biography " Mein Kampf," Schleunes said.

"Hitler was smart enough to realize after the failure of his "Beer Hall Putsch" that he and his party could not come to power with violence against the institutions of the state, especially the army and the police," said Dr Benjamin Hett, author of " The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (opens in new tab)" (Henry Holt and Co, 2018). "They could only come to power by getting inside the system, and the path to that was through winning elections".

There were many factors that led to Hitler's more widespread acceptance in Germany, from economic depression to the country's hatred of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. But Hitler managed to expand his appeal from the beer-soaked halls of Munich to the rest of the country, in part via the mass media.

In 1932, he ran for president and struggled to reach middle-class voters, said Despina Stratigakos, a historian of architecture and the author of " Hitler at Home (opens in new tab)" (Yale University Press, 2015). To rehabilitate his personal image, he focused on his domestic portrayal. Instead of downplaying his transient, rather lonely personal history, Hitler and his propaganda team started to foreground his personal life.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

"He's being presented as a good man, a moral man, and the evidence for that comes from his private life," Stratigakos told Live Science. "It's fabricated, but it's very effective."

Hitler lost the 1932 election, but gained the support of many influential industrial interests. When the parliamentary elections failed to establish a majority government, Germany's president Paul von Hindenburg caved to outside pressure and named Hitler chancellor (the role of chancellor in Germany is similar to that of Prime Minister in other parliamentary systems, and Germany had both a president elected by the people and a chancellor representing the majority party in the government).

In 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to seize emergency powers and detain his political enemies. With communists and other leftists under arrest, he was able to push a law called the Enabling Act through parliament. The Enabling Act allowed Hitler's cabinet to institute legislation without parliamentary consent.

With the backing of the conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) and with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) barred from attending the vote on 24 March 1933, Hitler's proposal was passed by 444 votes to 94, a key step in usurping the democratic institutions of the state.

"In the wake of this law came what the Nazis called 'Gleichschaltung', or coordination, a process in which any organization at all that could possibly form the basis of opposition was abolished or taken over by the Nazis," said Hett. "This process was largely completed by July of 1933, when all political parties except the Nazis were formally outlawed."

As Hitler strong-armed his way to dictatorship, profiles of him rusticating in his residence in Obersalzberg, Bavaria, portrayed him as a cultured gentleman, beloved by dogs and children. Working with the architect Gerdy Troost, Hitler created a space with an expansive Great Hall that seemed inspired by the artist salons of pre-World War I Munich, Stratigakos said. German and English language magazines printed fluffy pieces on the Führer at home.

"Even the American Dog Kennel Gazette had this feature on Hitler as a dog lover," Stratigakos said. These cozy, domestic scenes helped soften the image of the Hitler. The strategy was so successful that the most-sold images of 1934 were pictures of Hitler at home playing with his dogs or with children.

Through his organization, oratory and public relations, Hitler "the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure," as Kershaw called him, had become not only the chancellor of Germany, but a beloved celebrity. The transformation was complete.

Additional resources

To read more about the life and rise of Hitler, you can visit The National WWII Museum website (opens in new tab). Additionally, you can watch this TED Talk video (opens in new tab) by Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard.

Bibliography

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Hitler's Rise: How a Homeless Artist Became a Murderous Tyrant

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(Image credit: Getty Images) Adolf Hitler was the unremarkable artist who rose to become the dictator of Germany and the instigator of the Holocaust. Given the devastation left in Hitler's wake, a major question for historians of the 20th century has been how Hitler captured the German imagination and came to power.

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Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945. Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation's democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a war state intent on conquering Europe for the benefit of the so-called Aryan race. His invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, triggered the European phase of World War II. During the course of the war, Nazi military forces rounded up and executed 11 million victims they deemed inferior or undesirable-"life unworthy of life"-among them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. He had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies.

How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious characters take and hold power in a country that was a world pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s?

Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he forged after returning as a wounded veteran from the annihilating trench warfare of World War I. He and other patriotic Germans were outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which the Allies compelled the new German government, the Weimar Republic, to accept along with an obligation to pay $33 billion in war reparations. Germany also had to give up its prized overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to France and Poland. The German army was radically downsized and the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. "We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!" explained one British official.

Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. By September 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread.

Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader.

In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany's parliamentary system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.

Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic's weakness on the influence of Germany's Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were trying to take over the country. "There are only two possibilities," he told a Munich audience in 1922. "Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew." The young Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest race-the Aryan race-ultimately prevailing by force of arms. "Mankind has grown great in eternal war," Hitler wrote. "It would decay in eternal peace."

Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music.

Nazi Party foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and other "inferior" peoples, absorb pure-blooded Aryans into a greatly expanded Germany-a "Third Reich"-and wage unrelenting war on the Slavic "hordes" of Russia, considered by Hitler to be Untermenschen (subhuman).

Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create lebensraum (living space) for their own farms and communities. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns.

Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party. By 1921, the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army-the Sturmabteilung SA (storm troopers)-made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By 1923, the SA had grown to 15,000 men and had access to hidden stores of weapons. That year, Hitler and WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff attempted to overthrow the elected regional government of Bavaria in a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in prison-in loose confinement. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of his political autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book brought together, in inflamed language, the racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his popular beer-hall harangues.

By 1932, the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. In January of the following year, with no other leader able to command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to starting it.

Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. The police were authorized to detain citizens without cause, and the authority usually exercised by regional governments became subject to control by Hitler's national regime.

Almost immediately, Hitler began dismantling Germany's democratic institutions and imprisoning or murdering his chief opponents. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler took the titles of führer, chancellor, and commander in chief of the army. He expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and began developing a new air force-all violations of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler's military spending and ambitious public-works programs, including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity. His regime also suppressed the Communist Party and purged his own paramilitary storm troopers, whose violent street demonstrations alienated the German middle class.

This bloodletting-called the "Night of the Long Knives"-was hugely popular and welcomed by the middle class as a blow struck for law and order. In fact, many Germans went along with the full range of Hitler's policies, convinced that they would ultimately be advantageous for the country.

In 1938, Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans. He colluded with Austrian Nazis to orchestrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. And in Hitler's most brazenly aggressive act yet, Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region populated predominantly by ethnic Germans.

The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping to avoid war-they had been bled white in World War I-these nations chose a policy of appeasement. At a conclave held at Munich in September 1938, representatives of Great Britain and France compelled Czech leaders to cede the Sudetenland in return for Hitler's pledge not to seek additional territory. The following year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the signers of the Munich pact, had taken Hitler at his word. Returning to Britain with this agreement in hand, he proudly announced that he had achieved "peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time."

A year later, German troops stormed into Poland.

Learn More

After being released from prison, Hitler vowed to work within the parliamentary system to avoid a repeat of the Beer Hall Putsch setback. In the 1920s, however, the Nazi Party was still a fringe group of ultraextremists with little political power. It received only 2.6 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections of 1928.

But the worldwide economic depression and the rising power of labor unions and communists convinced increasing numbers of Germans to turn to the Nazi Party. The Nazis fed on bank failures and unemployment-proof, Hitler said, of the ineffectiveness of democratic government. Hitler pledged to restore prosperity, create civil order (by crushing industrial strikes and street demonstrations by communists and socialists), eliminate the influence of Jewish financiers, and make the fatherland once again a world power.

Modern mechanized armies need a robust logistics chain to provide fuel, ammunition, and other sinews of war to sustain combat operations. Fighting the Allies during the North African campaign of 1942-1943, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps (DAK)was resupplied by a concerted air and sea lift effort.

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How Did Adolf Hitler Happen? | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945.

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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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Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.

Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.

Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany's defeat in World War I.

Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country's devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic "traitors" at home-a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler's rise.

Nazi Party

After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers' Party, which aimed to unite the interests of the working class with a strong German nationalism. His skilled oratory and charismatic energy helped propel him in the party's ranks, and in 1920 he left the army and took charge of its propaganda efforts.

In one of Hitler's strokes of propaganda genius, the newly renamed National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party, adopted a version of the swastika-an ancient sacred symbol of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism -as its emblem. Printed in a white circle on a red background, Hitler's swastika would take on terrifying symbolic power in the years to come.

By the end of 1921, Hitler led the growing Nazi Party, capitalizing on widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty. Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich would join the Nazis, notably Ernst Röhm, who recruited the "strong arm" squads-known as the Sturmabteilung (SA)-which Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch

On the evening of November 8, 1923, members of the SA and others forced their way into a large beer hall where another right-wing leader was addressing the crowd. Wielding a revolver, Hitler proclaimed the beginning of a national revolution and led marchers to the center of Munich, where they got into a gun battle with police.

Hitler fled quickly, but he and other rebel leaders were later arrested. Even though it failed spectacularly, the Beer Hall Putsch established Hitler as a national figure, and (in the eyes of many) a hero of right-wing nationalism.

'Mein Kampf'

Tried for treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but would serve only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg Castle. During this period, he began to dictate the book that would become " Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle"), the first volume of which was published in 1925.

In it, Hitler expanded on the nationalistic, anti-Semitic views he had begun to develop in Vienna in his early twenties, and laid out plans for the Germany-and the world-he sought to create when he came to power.

Hitler would finish the second volume of "Mein Kampf" after his release, while relaxing in the mountain village of Berchtesgaden. It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler's rise it became Germany's best-selling book after the Bible. By 1940, it had sold some 6 million copies there.

Hitler's second book, "The Zweites Buch," was written in 1928 and contained his thoughts on foreign policy. It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of "Mein Kampf." The first English translations of "The Zweites Buch" did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title "Hitler's Secret Book."

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic "purity," Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called "Aryan race" at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

"Mein Kampf" also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by "inferior" Slavic peoples-including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

The Schutzstaffel (SS)

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party. He established the Hitler Youth to organize youngsters, and created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a more reliable alternative to the SA.

Members of the SS wore black uniforms and swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. (After 1929, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS would develop from a group of some 200 men into a force that would dominate Germany and terrorize the rest of occupied Europe during World War II.)

Eva Braun

Hitler spent much of his time at Berchtesgaden during these years, and his half-sister, Angela Raubal, and her two daughters often joined him. After Hitler became infatuated with his beautiful blonde niece, Geli Raubal, his possessive jealousy apparently led her to commit suicide in 1931.

Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun, a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her.

The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic. Determined to achieve political power in order to affect his revolution, Hitler built up Nazi support among German conservatives, including army, business and industrial leaders.

The Third Reich

In 1932, Hitler ran against the war hero Paul von Hindenburg for president, and received 36.8 percent of the vote. With the government in chaos, three successive chancellors failed to maintain control, and in late January 1933 Hindenburg named the 43-year-old Hitler as chancellor, capping the stunning rise of an unlikely leader.

January 30, 1933 marked the birth of the Third Reich, or as the Nazis called it, the "Thousand-Year Reich" (after Hitler's boast that it would endure for a millennium).

Reichstag Fire

Though the Nazis never attained more than 37 percent of the vote at the height of their popularity in 1932, Hitler was able to grab absolute power in Germany largely due to divisions and inaction among the majority who opposed Nazism.

After a devastating fire at Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, in February 1933-possibly the work of a Dutch communist, though later evidence suggested Nazis set the Reichstag fire themselves-Hitler had an excuse to step up the political oppression and violence against his opponents.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving full powers to Hitler and celebrating the union of National Socialism with the old German establishment (i.e., Hindenburg).

That July, the government passed a law stating that the Nazi Party "constitutes the only political party in Germany," and within months all non-Nazi parties, trade unions and other organizations had ceased to exist.

His autocratic power now secure within Germany, Hitler turned his eyes toward the rest of Europe.

In 1933, Germany was diplomatically isolated, with a weak military and hostile neighbors (France and Poland). In a famous speech in May 1933, Hitler struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone, claiming Germany supported disarmament and peace.

But behind this appeasement strategy, the domination and expansion of the Volk remained Hitler's overriding aim.

By early the following year, he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations and begun to militarize the nation in anticipation of his plans for territorial conquest.

Night of the Long Knives

On June 29, 1934, the infamous Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had Röhm, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and hundreds of other problematic members of his own party murdered, in particular troublesome members of the SA.

When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, military leaders agreed to combine the presidency and chancellorship into one position, meaning Hitler would command all the armed forces of the Reich.

Persecution of Jews

On September 15, 1935, passage of the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, and barred them from marrying or having relations with persons of "German or related blood."

Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 1936 Berlin Olympics (in which German-Jewish athletes were not allowed to compete), additional decrees over the next few years disenfranchised Jews and took away their political and civil rights.

In addition to its pervasive anti-Semitism, Hitler's government also sought to establish the cultural dominance of Nazism by burning books, forcing newspapers out of business, using radio and movies for propaganda purposes and forcing teachers throughout Germany's educational system to join the party.

Much of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other targets occurred at the hands of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GESTAPO), or Secret State Police, an arm of the SS that expanded during this period.

Outbreak of World War II

In March 1936, against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine.

Over the next two years, Germany concluded alliances with Italy and Japan, annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia-all essentially without resistance from Great Britain, France or the rest of the international community.

Once he confirmed the alliance with Italy in the so-called "Pact of Steel" in May 1939, Hitler then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland, finally prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

Blitzkrieg

After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. The blitzkrieg ("lightning war") attack began on May 10; Holland quickly surrendered, followed by Belgium.

German troops made it all the way to the English Channel, forcing British and French forces to evacuate en masse from Dunkirk in late May. On June 22, France was forced to sign an armistice with Germany.

Hitler had hoped to force Britain to seek peace as well, but when that failed he went ahead with his attacks on that country, followed by an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany's alliance with Japan demanded that Hitler declare war on the United States as well.

At that point in the conflict, Hitler shifted his central strategy to focus on breaking the alliance of his main opponents (Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) by forcing one of them to make peace with him.

Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, including a notorious camp at Dachau, near Munich, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After war broke out, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion, while the existing concentration-camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.

In addition to forced labor and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments carried out by eugenicist Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death." Mengele's experiments focused on twins and exposed 3,000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews-some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war's end.

End of World War II

With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad, as well as the landing of U.S. troops in North Africa by the end of 1942, the tide of the war turned against Germany.

As the conflict continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medications administered by his personal physician.

Several attempts were made on his life, including one that came close to succeeding in July 1944, when Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that exploded during a conference at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split British and American forces.

But after January 1945, he holed up in a bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler made plans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan.

How Did Adolf Hitler Die?

At midnight on the night of April 28-29, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. After dictating his political testament, Hitler shot himself in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. Their bodies were burned according to Hitler's instructions.

With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, 1945, bringing the war in Europe to a close.

In the end, Hitler's planned "Thousand-Year Reich" lasted just over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the history of Germany, Europe and the world.

Sources

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
iWonder - Adolf Hitler: Man and Monster, BBC.
The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Adolf Hiter: Rise to Power, Impact & Death

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Adolf Hitler was leader of the Nazi Party who rose to become dictator of Germany. Hitler used his power to orchestrate the deaths of 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II.