Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, to Alois Hitler, a customs official, and Klara Pölzl. The family moved several times within Upper Austria. His father died in 1903 and his mother in 1907. Hitler attended secondary school but did not graduate; his attempts to gain admission as an artist in Vienna were rejected twice.

From 1908 to 1913 Hitler lived in Vienna in impoverished circumstances and encountered antisemitic and nationalist politics. The precise influence of these years on his later worldview is debated; later autobiographical claims are not always reliable. In 1913 he moved to Munich and from 1914 served as a soldier in the German army during the First World War, in which he was wounded and decorated.

Biographies describe Alois as an authoritarian father who physically abused his children and clashed with Adolf over schooling and career choices. Violence at home, family bereavements and especially his mother's death were distressing childhood experiences. The evidence partly consists of later recollections and requires critical comparison; a retrospective psychiatric diagnosis is not justified. Abuse also provides neither a sufficient explanation nor an excuse for Hitler's later antisemitism, political decisions and responsibility for mass murder.

After Germany’s defeat in 1918, Hitler remained in the army and was assigned to observe political groups. In 1919 he joined the German Workers’ Party, which became the NSDAP, and attracted attention as a speaker. After the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 he was convicted and imprisoned; in Mein Kampf he set out antisemitic, racist and expansionist ideas. After his release the party pursued electoral participation alongside intimidation and propaganda.

Economic crisis, political instability and support from conservative elites helped the NSDAP grow. Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 and used emergency powers and legislation to suppress opposition and establish a dictatorship. The regime dismantled trade unions, restricted civil rights, persecuted Jews and other groups, and rearmed Germany. In 1938 it annexed Austria and took the Sudetenland; in September 1939 Germany invaded Poland.

Hitler made central decisions on military strategy and persecution during the war. The 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union was linked to a war of colonial conquest and mass murder. His regime organised the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered, and also persecuted and killed Roma, disabled people, Polish and Soviet civilians, political opponents, gay men and other groups. In April 1945 Hitler died by suicide in Berlin.

On 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed by their foreign ministers. The public non-aggression treaty was accompanied by a secret protocol on spheres of influence in eastern Europe. It facilitated the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939 and subsequent occupation and repression. Germany broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. It was a diplomatic agreement between ideological enemies, not a rejection of territorial expansion.

The Reich government enacted the Animal Protection Law on 24 November 1933, prohibiting cruelty to animals and restricting animal experiments, subject to exceptions and implementing rules. Nazi-era anti-tobacco campaigns included smoking restrictions in certain government buildings, transport and institutions; there was no universal national smoking ban. Historian Robert Proctor places tobacco policy in the context of racial and bodily 'purity', propaganda and medical research. These measures do not alter the regime's responsibility for persecution and genocide.

Hitler’s political rise took place after Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. The peace settlement, inflation, political street violence and the Great Depression undermined confidence in parliamentary parties. Across Europe, authoritarian and fascist movements were gaining support by combining nationalism, anti-communism and mass propaganda.

Racist pseudoscience and antisemitism predated Nazism, but the Nazis made them state policy and linked them to territorial expansion. Radio, film and mass rallies were used to organise support and suppress criticism. The Second World War brought occupation, forced labour, deportation and destruction on an unprecedented scale; local institutions and collaborators played varied roles in occupied territories.

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1–16 August 1936: in the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the long jump and with the US 4 × 100 metres relay team. Newspaper reports from 1936 describe the Olympic Stadium crowd cheering him loudly and acknowledging his athletic performances with ovations. The German regime used the Games for international propaganda; the Nuremberg racial laws remained in force while, among other measures, anti-Jewish signs were temporarily removed from public view.

On returning to the United States, Owens received public celebrations, including a parade in New York. At the same time, as a Black American he continued to encounter racial separation and segregation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not invite him to a White House reception or personally congratulate him on his Olympic achievements. According to the biographical sources consulted, Owens also received no official congratulatory telegram from the president. The National Archives documents that the other Black American medal winners of 1936 likewise received no White House invitation.

For a celebration at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Owens had to use the freight elevator to reach the gathering because of the racial access restrictions of the period. The International Olympic Committee describes this specific incident in its account of Owens' life after the Games. This treatment at home occurred alongside public celebrations and the ovations he had previously received in Berlin. In 1976 Owens received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House from President Gerald Ford.

The Nazi regime unleashed the Second World War in Europe with the invasion of Poland in 1939. The war killed tens of millions through combat, occupation, bombing, hunger and disease. The Holocaust was the systematic genocide of European Jews; the regime also killed millions of other victims or persecuted them through forced labour, deportation, medical murder programmes and mass executions.

Within Germany the regime destroyed political opposition and independent trade unions, while police, courts and secret services enforced persecution. Jewish citizens were progressively stripped of rights, dispossessed, deported and murdered. Roma, disabled people, political opponents and other targeted groups were also affected. Consequences included destroyed communities, displacement and lasting trauma, alongside enduring changes to European borders and international institutions.

Victim numbers are reconstructed from German records, testimony and demographic evidence. Approximately six million murdered Jews is the broadly established historical estimate for the Holocaust, not an exact individual register or an arbitrarily disputed figure. For other victim groups and total war deaths, definitions, source coverage and estimates differ. Such uncertainties should be identified for each group without relativising the documented genocide or silently adding together different categories.

Hitler died by suicide in the Führerbunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945 as Soviet troops captured the city. Eva Braun also died by suicide after marrying him shortly beforehand. According to witnesses, their bodies were burned outside the bunker; the capture of Berlin and German surrender followed soon afterwards. The circumstances have been reconstructed from documents and testimony, despite later conspiracy theories.

After 1945, Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg and the Holocaust was extensively documented through testimony, archives and physical evidence. Historians analyse Hitler’s personal power alongside the cooperation of party, state, military, business and occupation administrations. His name became internationally associated with genocide and dictatorship, but scholarship also stresses the need to explain the institutions and social participation that carried out his policies.

After liberation, parts of some former camp sites were reused for detention. According to the Majdanek museum, the NKVD held Polish resistance members in two barracks of field III in August 1944; on 23 August the remaining prisoners were deported to the Soviet Union. According to the Auschwitz museum, Soviet authorities established transit camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau by April–May 1945 for German POWs and, among others, Polish civilians, with Polish security services involved. These were separate post-war detention practices, not a reopening of the Nazi extermination programme. Dates, camp sections, authorities and prisoner groups must therefore be distinguished precisely.