PHRS Hitler

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Hitler, Adolf (18891945)

German Nazi dictator, born in Austria. He was Fhrer(leader) ofthe Nazi Party from 1921 and wroteMein Kampf/My Struggle192527. As chancellor of Germany from 1933 and head of state

from 1934, he created a dictatorship by playing party and stateinstitutions against each other and continually creating new officesand appointments. His position was not seriously challenged untilthe July Plot of 1944, which failed to assassinate him. In foreignaffairs, he reoccupied the Rhineland and formed an alliance with theItalian Fascist Benito Mussolini in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938,and occupied Sudeten under the Munich Agreement. The rest ofCzechoslovakia was annexed in March 1939. The RibbentropMolotov pact was followed in September by the invasion of Polandand the declaration of war by Britain and France (see World WarII). He committed suicide as Berlin fell.

Hitler was born in Braunau-am-Inn, and spent his early years inpoverty in Vienna and Munich. After serving as a volunteer in theGerman army during World War I, he was employed as a spy by themilitary authorities in Munich and in 1919 joined, in this capacity,the German Workers' Party. By 1921 he had assumed its leadership,renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NaziParty for short), and provided it with a programme that mixed

nationalism with anti-Semitism. Having led an unsuccessfuluprising in Munich 1923, he served nine months in prison, duringwhich he wrote his political testament,Mein Kampf.

The party did not achieve national importance until the elections of1930; by 1932, although Field Marshal Hindenburg defeated Hitlerin the presidential elections, it formed the largest group in theReichstag (parliament). As the result of an intrigue directed byChancellor Franz von Papen, Hitler became chancellor in a NaziNationalist coalition on 30 January 1933. The opposition was

rapidly suppressed, the Nationalists removed from the government,and the Nazis declared the only legal party. In 1934 Hitlersucceeded Hindenburg as head of state. Meanwhile, the drive to warbegan; Germany left the League of Nations, conscription wasreintroduced, and in 1936 the Rhineland was reoccupied.

Hitler and Mussolini, who were already both involved in theSpanish Civil War, formed an alliance (the Axis) in 1936, joined byJapan in 1940. Hitler conducted the war in a ruthless butidiosyncratic way, took and ruled most of the neighbouring

countries with repressive occupation forces, and had millions ofSlavs, Jews, Romanies, homosexuals, and political enemies killed inconcentration camps and massacres. He narrowly escaped death on

Hitler, Adolf

Hitler, Adolf

Mussolini andHitler

Euthanasia

Germany'sInvasion ofPoland

Rise ofHitler

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20 July 1944 from a bomb explosion at a staff meeting, prepared byhigh-ranking officers. On 29 April 1945, when Berlin was largely inSoviet hands, he married his mistress Eva Braun in his bunker underthe chancellery building and on the following day committedsuicide with her.

Early yearsHitler's father, originally called Schicklgruber until he changed hisname late in life, was a minor customs officer in the Austrianservice. Hitler was the only son of his third wife. Hitler's father diedwhen he was 14, leaving no resources for his continued education.With his mother he went to Vienna hoping to become an architect,but had to earn his living as assistant to a house-painter and byselling indifferent sketches. After spending a few years in Vienna heleft to settle in Munich in 1912. These years of penury were

formative both of his philosophy of life and of his character and itwas probably then that he first absorbed the anti-Semitic and pan-Germanic views current among extreme nationalists at the time.

World War IHitler joined a Bavarian reserve regiment at the start of World WarI, serving in the trenches as a dispatch rider. He reached the rank ofGefreiter(lance corporal), was wounded in the Battle of the Sommein 1916 and gassed in 1918. He became convinced that Germanyhad been betrayed by Jewish and Marxist influences and returned

from the war bitter at Germany's defeat. Back in Bavaria, heattended, and later conducted, courses designed to keep ex-soldiersaway from Bolshevism, where he came under the influence ofGottfried Feder, the intellectual founder of the Nazi movement.

Takes over the NazisHe then became the seventh member of an insignificant politicalgroup in Munich, the German Workers' Party, and soondistinguished himself with his almost hypnotic popular oratory.

Through his friends Erich Rhm, a staff officer at Munich, and vonEpp, he maintained close contacts with the German army, theReichswehr. He ousted Anton Drexler, the founder of the party, asleader in 1921. The party was now called the National SocialistGerman Workers' Party and adopted Hitler's nationalist and anti-Marxist creed. After an argument with Rhm over the role of thenewly created SA (Sturmabteilung) troops (the Brownshirts), Hitlerorganized a special detachment to be his own disciplined politicalsoldiers rather than the brawling street-fighters of Rhm'sBrownshirts. This was formally established in 1926 as the SS

(Schutzstaffel) in imitation of Mussolini'sfasces.

Beerhall Putsch

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Thinking that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse,Hitler launched an abortive coup in Munich in November 1923, inalliance with Rhm, the war hero Erich von Ludendorff, andHermann Goering, in an attempt to make Ludendorff dictator. Thecoup failed and Hitler was arrested and tried for treason. He was

sentenced to five years' imprisonment and during his incarcerationin the fortress of Landsberg worked on the final draft ofMeinKampfwith the aid of Rudolf Hess.

Building the partyDuring his time in prison, the Nazi party all but disintegrated andwhen he was released under an amnesty in 1924, he set to workimmediately to rebuild the party organization. Although for sometime the Strasser brothers, creators of the Nazi party in northernGermany, were more influential than Hitler in the party ranks, he

gradually recovered the ground he had lost and ousted the Strassers.By 1930 he was the undisputed head of a considerable party. Fundswere increasingly flowing in from the big industrialists, who sawNational Socialism as a safeguard against communism.'Nationalism' gradually superseded 'Socialism' in the partyprogramme, although its language still played lip service to its morerevolutionary roots.

When the world economic crisis came in 1930, Hitler ably exploitedthe discontent of both the working class and the more solid middle-

class elements, who saw their standard of living threatened by thecrisis. His rhetoric won over many converts and in the next electionin September 1930 the Nazis increased their representation in theReichstag from 12 to 107 seats. He stood against Hindenburg in thepresidential election of 1932 and although he was beaten in thesecond ballot, he had managed to poll some 13 million votes andwas now a political power to be reckoned with. In a rapidlydeteriorating political situation, Chancellor Heinrich Brning feltcompelled to govern by decree and, though liberal in outlook, his

regime paved the way to dictatorship. He resigned as chancellor inJune 1932 and was succeeded by von Papen. Hitler had regardedhimself as heir to the chancellorship but was blocked by the covertresistance of the old right-wing regime, with its backing ofindustrialists andJunkers. Von Papen dissolved the Reichstag andheld fresh elections but the Nazi party doubled its strength to 230seats and Hitler was now head of the biggest single party.Eventually Hitler and von Papen reached an agreement: Hitlerrenounced the socialist section of his programme, and von Papenreleased the subsidies from the industrialists to Hitler's coffers, and

induced Hindenburg to accept Hitler as chancellor in January 1933.

The Third Reich

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During 1933, the Weimar Republic gave way to the Third Reich andby the end of the year the one-man party had become the one-partystate. Political opponents 'disappeared', either assassinated or sent toconcentration camps. Having crushed opposition in Germany atlarge, Hitler turned his attention to stifling the last vestiges of

dissent in his own party. In the 'Night of the Long Knives' of 30June 1934, over a hundred leading Nazis were murdered, includingGregor Strasser, Rhm, and Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. Allpower now passed to the National Socialist executive, which, for allpractical purposes, meant Hitler himself. When Hindenburg died inAugust 1934, Hitler was declared his successor but abjured the titleofReichsprsidentin favour ofFhrerand Kanzler(chancellor).

The HolocaustFrom the moment Hitler came to power he instituted a reign of

terror against Jews, homosexuals, Romanies, and politicalopponents. Anti-Semitic measures were introduced in stages,starting with boycotts of Jewish businesses in April 1933 andculminating in the full horror of the extermination camps and the'final solution' in 1941. Official propaganda was directed againstJews, stoking up popular hatred as in the organized terror of theKristallnacht when Jewish businesses and property were attacked bygovernment-sponsored mobs on 9 November 1938. Jews wereincreasingly marginalized by a combination of vicious propagandaand anti-Jewish laws, such as forcing all Jews to wear yellow stars,

making them visible targets for both official repression and privatehostility. Once World War II started, these policies were carried intothe countries Germany occupied and by 1941, there was a networkof extermination camps, mainly in Poland. The Holocaust reachedits height after the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, ameeting of top Nazi officials who developed a systematic policy ofefficient extermination. There are no definitively accurate figuresfor the number of people exterminated by the Nazis but it isreckoned that by the end of the war some 6 million Jews had been

killed and over a million people belonging to other groups, such asSlavs and Romanies, designated as Untermenschen ('subhumans').

Rebuilding German powerHaving established his position in Germany, Hitler now began hislong campaign to restore German power in Europe, heralding hisadvent to power by a series of increasingly grave breaches of treatyobligations and flouting European opinion. He began a massiveprogramme of rearmament, secretly at first and then ever moreflagrantly. For example, Germany was not supposed to have an air

force but Goering built the Luftwaffe from scratch under the guiseof a civilian airline, announcing its existence officially in April1935.

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Hitler then turned to the territorial clauses of the various treatiesbinding Germany, starting with the plebiscite in the Saar region inJanuary 1935. The result, partly influenced by terrorism, was anoverwhelming majority for retrocession to Germany and Hitler usedthis as a bolster to denounce the military clauses of the Treaty of

Versailles in March 1935 and introduce conscription for theReichswehr. A year later he boldly risked marching his forces intothe demilitarized Rhineland zone, in defiance of the Pact ofLocarnoof 1925, which, he claimed, had been abrogated by a Franco-Sovietalliance. The remilitarization of the Rhineland was followed by twoyears of the most active German military preparations combinedwith a complete overhaul of the economy to make Germany self-sufficient.

When the Civil War broke out in Spain in July 1936, Hitler seized

the opportunity to test his newly built army and air force on the sideof the right-wing general Franco. Other events abroad during 193637, such as the League of Nations' failure to check Mussolini'sAbyssinian adventure, increased the nervous tension in Europe, andwent far to strengthen Hitler's position. Mussolini was a natural allyand the two countries allied in the RomeBerlin Axis in October1936.

Expansionism abroadFrom the end of 1937, Hitler pursued an aggressively expansionist

foreign policy which for two years won spectacular successes. Heannexed Austria in March 1938 by manipulating an abrupt crisis inAustro-German relations, then sending the German army across thefrontier and declaringAnschluss, the incorporation of Austria withinthe Reich. He then moved on to the campaign to 'liberate' Sudeten,an ethnic German area within Czechoslovakia this was an attackon a sovereign state bound by treaty with the Western powers andby ethnic ties with Russia. However, Hitler well understood theunderlying realities of the immediate political situation and realised

that the West was not prepared to fight. The Munich Agreement inAugust 1938 handed him Sudeten in return for assurances that hehad no more territorial claims to make, the same claim he had madeafter the annexation of Austria. He then took the rest ofCzechoslovakia piece by piece during early 1939 and at the sametime announced his annexation of Memel in violation of theVersailles Treaty. Hitler now seemed, in the eyes of the averageGerman, not only to be the preserver of peace but a consummatestatesman, surpassing all his predecessors in extending the Reichfrontiers. Within less than a year he had added 10 million Germans

to the Third Reich, broken the one formidable bastion to Germanexpansion to the southeast, and made himself the most powerfuldictator in Europe since Napoleon.

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The outbreak of warIn March 1939, Hitler renounced the nonaggression treaty withPoland of 1934 and demanded the return of Danzig and the 'PolishCorridor'. The UK and France guaranteed Polish independence andwarned Hitler they would stand by Poland. Hitler was shaken by

this development, particularly when the two Western powers begannegotiations with Moscow. Rather than abandon his designs onPoland he forgot his hatred of communism and proposed anonaggression pact with the USSR. Stalin agreed and theRibbentropMolotov pact was signed on 23 August 1939. Withoutany danger of Soviet interference, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg onPoland on 1 September 1939, and two days later the UK and Francedeclared war.

Blitzkrieg

After the invasion of Poland, Germany swept through theNetherlands, Belgium and France in equally rapid succession andsimultaneously launched invasions of Norway and Denmark. Thespectacular events of spring and summer 1940, culminating in thearmistice with France, only confirmed Hitler's genius in the eyes ofthe average German. In the spring of 1941 German forces invadedYugoslavia and Greece, while the air force belaboured the UK withbomber raids and the navy struck at its seaborne supplies.

Battle of Britain and Barbarossa

Hitler decided to weaken the British by attacking the empire in theeast. However, this plan depended on the neutrality of the USSRand, not being sure of this, Hitler and his advisers decided tocombine the attack on Egypt with an invasion of the USSR itself,Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941. This was a fatal decision whichbrought a powerful enemy into play against him and opened up anenormous second front. It revealed the essential weaknessunderlying all Hitler's foreign policy and it is possible that he tookthe decision against the advice of other Nazi leaders and the German

general staff. From then on he strove to divide the USSR from theWestern Allies by stressing Germany's anti-Bolshevik crusade.

The German campaigns in the Balkans and the Mediterranean werebrilliant in conception and execution, but British intervention inGreece and British resistance in Crete and Libya delayed Hitler'stimetable, and, as the summer of 1941 wore on it was becomingobvious that German optimism had outrun itself. The reverses in theBattle ofBritain in July 1941 were a great blow to German moraleand for some time Hitler was silent, but at a meeting of the Winter

Help Campaign 4 October, he announced a 'gigantic operation'which would bring about the defeat of the USSR. Following thefailure of the German army before Moscow, Hitler sacked the

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commander-in-chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, in December 1941,and assumed direct control of all military operations. When theUSA entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December1941, four-fifths of the world was now ranged against Germany.

Decline 194243Hitler's New Year message for 1942 showed a marked decline inbuoyancy, although the German armies were still a powerful force,and in the early half of 1942, the German armies in the USSRreached the Volga at Stalingrad while Erwin Rommel wasthreatening Cairo and Alexandria in North Africa. Yet before theautumn was past Rommel had been routed at El Alamein and theSoviets had destroyed von Paulus's 6th Army before Stalingrad.Hitler began to speak less of German victory than of the inability ofthe Allies to defeat Germany, and he soon faced new crises.

Mussolini was deposed in July 1943 and Italy capitulated to theAllies.

1944After the German armies had been driven out of the USSR, and withthe D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, it soon became clearthat the Allies would not, as Hitler had promised, be 'driven into thesea'. The German 'opposition', led by army generals and supportedby industrialists, liberals, and even elements of the left, attempted acoup d'tat, the July Bomb Plot. The signal was to be the

assassination ofHitler, but the bomb which was placed in hisheadquarters by a staff officer named von Stauffenberg did not killhim and the coup failed. It succeeded only in bringing about Hitler'smost savage purge: thousands of men and women were executedwho were not even necessarily implicated in the plot, but who mightconceivably have led another rising. Himmler took command of thearmy inside Germany so as to tighten the Nazi grip on it. However,as the year wore on, the Allies steadily closed in from all sides.

1945: defeatAs the Allies pressed into Germany in April 1945, Hitler married

his mistress, Eva Braun, on 29 April 1945 and both then committedsuicide in the air-raid shelter under the ruined chancellery in Berlinthe following day. It is generally considered that their bodies weresubsequently burned in the courtyard.

"The people of London with one voice would say toHitler: ... You do your worst and we will do our best."

Winston Churchill

British Conservative prime minister.[Speech at County Hall, London 14 July 1942]

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Copyright Helicon Publishing Ltd 2000. All rights reserved.

"I go the way that Providence dictates with the

assurance of a sleepwalker."

AdolfHitlerGerman Nazi leader.

[Speech in Munich, March 1936]

"I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will castour Reich into the abyss and bring our nation toinconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you

in your grave for what you have done."

Erich von LudendorffGerman general.

[To Reich president Hindenburg, 1933, on Hitler's appointment to

the Reich in the position of chancellor.]

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