Adolf Hitler

Biography

Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, in 1889. After failing to enter art school in Vienna, he moved to Munich and volunteered for the Bavarian Army in 1914. He served on the Western Front as a dispatch runner, reached the rank of Gefreiter and received the Iron Cross First Class.

In 1919 he joined the small German Workers' Party, which became the Nazi Party, and he became its leader in 1921. His failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 led to a prison term, during which he wrote Mein Kampf. During the Depression the party grew into the largest in the Reichstag, and he was appointed Chancellor in January 1933.

He quickly made Germany a one-party dictatorship, and after President Hindenburg's death in 1934 he combined the offices of head of state and government as Führer. He rearmed Germany, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and invaded Poland in September 1939, which began the Second World War in Europe.

His regime carried out the Holocaust, the murder of about six million Jews, and killed millions of other people. After early victories, Germany was defeated on the Eastern Front and in the West. Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945, as Soviet troops took the city.