Who Was Adolf Hitler?

1. Early life in Austria and service in the First World War

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary on the border with Germany, to Alois Hitler, a customs official, and Klara Hitler. He was raised near Linz in Austria. His father died in 1903 and his mother in 1907. He attended primary school in Austria and then the Realschule in Linz, which he left at the age of sixteen without completing his studies. He had no university education. In 1907 and 1908 he was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he then lived in poor conditions and earned money by painting postcards and pictures.

In 1913 he moved to Munich in Germany. When the First World War began in 1914 he volunteered for the German army, served as a messenger on the Western Front, was wounded, and was awarded the Iron Cross. Germany's defeat in 1918 and the terms imposed on it afterwards shaped his political views. He blamed the defeat on internal enemies, above all on Jewish people and on Marxists, a view that had no basis in the facts of the war but that he held for the rest of his life. The experience of the war, and the resentment that followed Germany's defeat, were the foundation of his politics.

Historians note that there is little in Hitler's early life that explains the scale of what followed. He was an unremarkable student, a failed art applicant and a junior soldier. The records of his youth are incomplete, and some details are disputed, but the broad outline is not: a childhood in provincial Austria, a period of poverty in Vienna, and four years of war that gave him, for the first time, a sense of purpose and belonging. It was after the war, in the political chaos of defeated Germany, that he found his audience.

2. The Nazi Party and the road to power

In 1919 Hitler joined the German Workers' Party in Munich, which became the National Socialist German Workers' Party, known as the Nazi Party, and he became its leader in 1921. The party was one of many small nationalist groups in post-war Germany, and Hitler's contribution was his ability as a public speaker. He spoke at meetings in beer halls, using simple language, repetition and attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, on the Weimar Republic and on Jewish people, and he drew crowds that the party's other leaders could not. He built the party around himself, demanding personal loyalty and removing rivals.

After a failed attempt to seize power in Munich in November 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, he was imprisoned for about a year and wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf, published in 1925. The book set out his political views, including his ideas about race, about the Jewish people and about Germany's need for territory in Eastern Europe. The attempt to take power by force had failed, and Hitler concluded that the party should seek power through elections and through legal means, a decision that shaped the next decade of his career.

His party won support during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. The Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, brought mass unemployment to Germany, and the Weimar Republic's governments were unable to deal with it. The Nazi Party's vote rose sharply, from under three per cent in 1928 to over thirty-seven per cent in July 1932, making it the largest party in the Reichstag. On 30 January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany, in the belief that the conservative politicians around him could control him. That belief proved wrong within months.

3. The seizure of power, 1933 to 1934

Within months of his appointment, Hitler's government removed democratic checks. The Enabling Act of March 1933 gave the government power to make laws without parliament, political opponents were arrested, and in June 1934 he ordered the killing of rivals inside his own movement, in the event known as the Night of the Long Knives. Trade unions were abolished, other political parties were banned, and the press was brought under state control. By the end of 1933 Germany was a one-party state, and the institutions that might have checked the government had been removed or silenced.

After Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, the offices of Chancellor and President were merged and Hitler took the title of Fuhrer, or Leader. The armed forces swore an oath of loyalty to him personally, rather than to the state or the constitution. The regime built its power on a combination of terror and consent: the secret police, the Gestapo, and the concentration camps dealt with opponents, while propaganda, public works and the fall in unemployment won support from Germans who had suffered through the Depression. Historians debate how much of the support was genuine and how much was the result of fear, but the regime's control was complete.

The government reduced unemployment in the 1930s through public works and rearmament, and rebuilt the German armed forces, in breach of the Treaty of Versailles. Some of his supporters at the time pointed to these achievements, and the fall in unemployment was real. The historical consensus, recorded by Britannica and by historians of the period, is that these do not change the assessment of his rule as a dictatorship responsible for genocide and aggressive war. The economic recovery was built on borrowing, on rearmament and on the removal of Jewish people and others from the economy, and it was preparation for war.

4. Persecution: the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht

Hitler's government introduced the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which removed the citizenship and rights of German Jews, banning marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews and excluding Jews from many areas of public life. The laws were the legal foundation of the persecution that followed. Jewish people were removed from the civil service, from the professions and from schools, and their businesses were taken over or closed. The laws defined who counted as Jewish by descent, not by religion, and they applied to people who had no connection to the Jewish faith.

In November 1938 the regime organised attacks on Jewish people and property across Germany, known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues were burned, shops were smashed, and Jewish people were beaten and killed. The attacks followed the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man, but they were organised by the regime, not a spontaneous outbreak. After Kristallnacht, the persecution became more systematic: Jewish people were fined, their property was seized, and emigration, which had been possible for some, became harder as other countries closed their doors.

The persecution was not limited to Jewish people. The regime targeted Roma people, disabled people, political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and others it defined as enemies or as unfit. The concentration camp system, which had begun in 1933 for political prisoners, expanded through the 1930s, and by the end of the decade it held tens of thousands of people. The pattern was consistent: a group was defined as a threat, its rights were removed by law, and then it was subjected to violence, imprisonment and, eventually, murder. The Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht are studied today as examples of how a state can use law to prepare the ground for mass murder.

5. The war in Europe, 1939 to 1945

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War in Europe. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. In the following year Germany occupied Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, and in 1941 it invaded the Soviet Union, the largest military operation in history. The invasion of the Soviet Union was the centre of Hitler's plans: he sought territory in Eastern Europe for German settlement, and he regarded the Soviet Union as the main enemy. The war in the east was fought with extreme brutality on both sides, and it was there that the majority of the war's deaths occurred.

Under Hitler's leadership Germany occupied much of Europe, and his regime carried out the Holocaust, the systematic murder of about six million Jews in shooting operations and extermination camps, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, together with millions of other victims, including Roma people, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and political prisoners. The murder was organised by the state, using railways, camps and killing centres, and it was carried out alongside the war. The decision to murder the Jews of Europe was taken by the regime's leadership, and the evidence for it is extensive: documents, testimony, and the records of the Nuremberg Trials after the war.

The war turned against Germany in 1942 and 1943, with the defeat at Stalingrad and the Allied landings in North Africa and Italy. In June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy, and in 1945 Soviet forces advanced from the east and Western forces from the west. Hitler refused to accept defeat and ordered the war to continue, at the cost of further destruction in Germany itself. As Allied forces closed in on Berlin, Hitler died by suicide on 30 April 1945 in his bunker in Berlin. Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. The war in Europe had killed more than 50 million people, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

6. The Holocaust: what happened and how it is known

The Holocaust was the systematic murder by Nazi Germany of about six million Jews, together with millions of other victims, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The murder took two main forms: mass shootings by mobile killing units in the occupied Soviet Union, and killing in extermination camps in occupied Poland, above all at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Majdanek. The victims were transported by rail from across Europe, and the camps were built and operated for the purpose of murder. The scale and the organisation of the killing are documented in German records, in the testimony of survivors and perpetrators, and in the physical evidence of the camps themselves.

The figure of about six million Jews is the figure used by Encyclopaedia Britannica and by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and it is accepted by historians. The total number of victims of the regime, including Roma people, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and political prisoners, is higher, and estimates vary, because the records are incomplete. The Nuremberg Trials after the war judged the leading figures of his regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the trials established the legal and historical record of what had been done. Denial of the Holocaust is rejected by historians and by the evidence, and in several countries it is a criminal offence.

The study of the Holocaust has changed over the decades. Early accounts focused on Hitler's intentions and on the decisions taken at the top; later research has shown how the murder was carried out by thousands of people, from railway officials to camp guards, and how it was enabled by the indifference and the cooperation of people across occupied Europe. The debate among historians is about how the killing developed, whether it was planned from the start or emerged during the war, not about whether it happened. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the memorials at the former camps are the main institutions that preserve the record, and they are the sources this article draws on for the figures given here.

7. Defeat, judgement and the historical consensus

Hitler is remembered as the dictator of Nazi Germany and as the central figure behind the Second World War in Europe and the Holocaust. Historians agree that his regime was responsible for the murder of about six million Jews and millions of other victims, and for a war that killed more than 50 million people. Some of his supporters at the time pointed to the fall in unemployment and the rebuilding of German power in the 1930s; the historical consensus is that these do not change the assessment of his rule as a dictatorship responsible for genocide and aggressive war. His name and the symbols of his movement are banned or restricted in several countries, and the study of his regime remains central to education about dictatorship, propaganda and genocide.

The Nuremberg Trials, held in 1945 and 1946, judged the leading figures of his regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and established the principle that individuals, not only states, could be held responsible for such crimes. The trials also produced the documentary record on which the history of the period is based. Later trials, in Germany and elsewhere, continued the process of judgement for decades, and the search for perpetrators continued into the twenty-first century. The legal legacy of Nuremberg is the foundation of modern international criminal law.

The comparison with other dictators of the period is instructive. Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet Union at the same time, was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens through famine, executions and the Gulag, and Mao Zedong, who led China after the war, was responsible for deaths on a comparable scale. The three regimes differed in their ideology and their methods, but they shared a pattern: the concentration of power in one leader, the removal of checks on that power, and the use of terror against their own populations. The study of Hitler's regime, alongside those of Stalin and Mao, is the study of how dictatorship works, and of how it can be prevented. That is why his life is still taught, and why the record of what his government did is preserved in the museums and the archives.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Adolf Hitler
• Wikipedia — Adolf Hitler
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Adolf Hitler
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — The Holocaust

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• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.