Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria. He spent his formative years in Vienna, where early experiences hardened his racist and antisemitic worldview. He served as a corporal in the German Army during World War I, earning the Iron Cross twice. After the war, Hitler joined a small German workers' party that he transformed into the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. His failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led to imprisonment, during which he wrote Mein Kampf, outlining his murderous ideology. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 and consolidated total power as Führer in August 1934. He launched massive rearmament and pursued aggressive territorial expansion, annexing Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia before igniting World War II with the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The actions of his regime represent one of the darkest chapters in human history. The Nazi state systematically planned and executed the Holocaust — the genocide of six million Jews plus millions of Roma, disabled people, political opponents, LGBTQ+ individuals, and Soviet POWs. These crimes are exhaustively documented and constitute among the most severe crimes against humanity ever committed. Multiple assassination attempts, most notably the July 1944 plot, failed to remove him. As the Third Reich collapsed and Soviet forces reached Berlin, Hitler died by suicide on April 30, 1945. His actions left roughly 50 million dead and a continent in ruins.