Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born at the Gasthof zum Pommer, which is an inn in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary.  He is the fourth of Alois and Klara +Hitler's six children.  When he was three, his family moved to Kapuzinerstrasse 5 in Passua Germany.  He was a child who loved to play Cowboys and Indians and became fascinated with war after reading a picture book about the Franco-Prussian War.  He moved around several times.  On February 2, 1900, Hitler's little brother, Edmund, died of measles, and this caused emotional changes in Adolf, including changing from an outgoing and confident boy to a sullen, detached boy who challenged his father and his teachers.  While Adolf had a good relationship with his mother, he had a difficult relationship with his father, who often beat him.  Alois wanted his son to become an Austrian customs official, but Adolf resisted, and this caused conflict.  Adolf wished to become an artist, but his father sent him to a technical high school.  When his father refused to relent to his wishes, Adolf became more rebellious and bitter.German Nationalism was becoming an obsession for Hitler, and also a way for him to rebel against his father.  After his father died suddenly in 1903, Adolf's behavior became more disruptive and he was asked to leave.  He enrolled at the Realschule in Steyr, but after completing his second year there, he went out with his friends for a celebration and tore up his school certificate which he used as toilet paper.  Someone turned it into the school's director, and he was expelled, and never returned to school.  Hitler's mother died from breast cancer when she was 47.  He was rejected by the Academy of Arts twice and began living in a shelter for the homeless in 1909.

      Hitler fought in World War I in France and Belgium.  He was twice decorated for bravery.  Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and became leader in 1921.  He was imprisoned following a failed coup in Bavaria in 1923, but he gained support by promoting German nationalism, anti-capitalism, anti-semitism, and anti-communism using propaganda and charismatic oratory.  He was appointed as the chancellor in 1933 and at that point, the transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, which was a single party dictatorship.  It was based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideals of national socialism.  Hitler's goal was to establish a New Order had had absolute Nazi German hegemony.  In order to achieve his goal, he went after foreign policy with the goal of obtaining living space for Aryan people.  When Poland was invaded, The United Kingdom and France declared war against the nation of Germany, and this led to the start of World War II in Europe. Within only about three years, Germany and the rest of the Axis powers had begun to occupy the majority of Europe, most of Northern Africa, Southeast and East Asia, and the Pacific Ocean.  During the war, Nazis systematically killed more than 17 million civilians, of whom approximately six million were Jewish people who were killed through genocide in what is today known as the Holocaust. 

  As the war was coming to an end and Hitler knew that Berlin was falling in 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun, his long-time mistress, and to avoid capture by the Soviets, they both committed suicide two days later.

                                          Pavan