Hitler

German dictator, born in Braunau, Upper Austria, the son of a minor customs official, originally called Schicklgruber. One of history's most brutal leaders, he converted Germany, a defeated nation, into a fully remilitarized society, and launched World War 2. With anti-Semitism and racism the cornerstone of his ideology and policies, he conquered and dominated most of Europe over five years, and ordered the deaths of millions of Jews and others whom he considered inferior (Untermenschen).

He studied at Linz and Steyr, and attended an art school in Munich, but failed to pass into the Vienna Academy. He lived in Vienna (1904Ð'-13), doing a variety of menial jobs. In 1913 he emigrated to Munich, where he found employment as a draughtsman. In 1914 he served in a Bavarian regiment, became a corporal, and was wounded in the last stages of the war, twice winning the Iron Cross for bravery. In 1919 he joined a small political party which in 1920 he renamed as the National Socialist German Workers' (or NAZI) Party. In 1923, with other extreme right-wing factions, he attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government in an abortive uprising, the Ð''Munich beer-hall putsch'. He was imprisoned for nine months in Landsberg jail, during which time he dictated his political testament, Mein Kampf (1925, My Struggle), to Rudolf Hess. He expanded his party greatly in the late 1920s, and though he was unsuccessful in the presidential elections of 1932 against Hindenburg, he was made chancellor by Hindenburg in 1933.

He then suspended the constitution, silenced all opposition, exploited successfully the burning of the Reichstag building, and brought the Nazi Party to power, having several of his opponents within his own party (the SA) murdered by his bodyguard, the SS, in the Night of the Long Knives (1934). In contravention of the Versailles Treaty, he rearmed the country (1935), established the RomeÐ'-Berlin Ð''axis' with Mussolini (1936), created Ð''Greater Germany' by the Anschluss with Austria (1938), and absorbed the German-populated Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, in which Britain and France acquiesced at Munich (1938). He then demanded from Poland the return of Danzig and free access to East Prussia, which, when Poland refused, precipitated World War 2 (3 Sep 1939).

His domestic policy was one of total Nazification, enforced by the Secret State Police (Gestapo).