Adolf Hitler was a German dictator who was leader of the Nazi Party from 1933 until his death in 1945. He and his government are known for causing World War II and The Holocaust, which killed millions of innocent civilians in Europe from 1939-1945 .
Several songs were written to commemorate the Führer and to glorify Nazism.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in a small town in Austria near the border with Germany. He was the fourth child of six. He was born with only one testicle.
Hitler failed high school exams twice. In 1905, a couple years after his father's death, he left school. During this time, he developed a hatred against Jews. In September 1907, he went to Vienna and took an entrance examination, but failed that a month later. A few months later, Hitler's mother died and he subsequently became depressed.
In 1909, Hitler went to Vienna again to study art. He tried to become a student at the Academy of Arts, but failed the first entrance examination. He painted many pictures and sold them at low prices. At this time, he officially became antisemitic as the city he was in had a sizeable Jewish community.
In 1913, at 24 years old, he left Vienna for Münich, because he did not want to join the Austrian Army, as he did not like that there were too many different ethnic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On 16 August 1914, Hitler joined the Bavarian Army. He fought for the German Empire in World War I. He served in Belgium and France in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a runner. He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class on 2 December 1914.
Political career[]
After World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers Party, in which he later became the party's leader. He renamed the party the National Socialist German Workers Party. It became known as the Nazi Party.
In 1923, Hitler got together several hundred other members of the Nazi Party and tried to take over the Weimar Republic government, though the coup failed. Hitler was briefly sent to prison, where he wrote a book called Mein Kampf with his close friend Rudolf Hess.
In January 1933, Hitler was elected into the German government and became a dictator in the following months. He ended freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and put his enemies in prisons and concentration camps or killed them. He banned every other political party except the Nazi Party by the summer of 1933 and Germany became a one-party state. Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, spread extreme nationalism within Germany. All media came under the control of the Nazi Party and they had to praise Hitler and the Nazis. Also, more people were born because Hitler wanted more people of the "master race" (those he called "Aryans"). After the death of Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler declared the office of President vacant and made himself Führer (both Head of State and Head of Government) and became a full dictator with no checks and balances. He made Germany a totalitarian fascist dictatorship.
Hitler is known for starting World War II by ordering the German Army to invade Poland. His army took over western Poland, and later most of Europe, including France and the Soviet Union. During the war, Hitler ordered the Nazis to kill many people, including women and children, homosexuals and disabled people, Slavs, Romani people, and around six million Jews in The Holocaust. Finally, some of the Allied powers worked together to defeat Nazi Germany. Hitler lost all of the lands that he had taken. Millions of Germans were killed in the war.
Hitler married to Eva Braun on 29 April 1945. 40 hours later, they both committed suicide by poisoning themselves with cyanide, and later Hitler shot himself with a gun.