Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) was an Austrian politician who became the dictator of Germany in 1933, running a deeply antisemitic regime until his suicide in 1945.
Hitler was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1889. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, he signed up to the German Imperial Army where he was deployed to the Western front. He was a good soldier and eventually earned an Iron Cross for his efforts. After Germany's loss in WW1, he, along with many of his fellow soldiers, blamed elite Jews for plotting their nation's downfall.
After a few years of homelessness, Hitler joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, a right wing antisemitic political party which espoused the conspiracy theory that Jews were secretly controlling many world governments and attempted to establish a global communist regime. This theory, though ludicrous, captured the hearts and minds of many anti-communists within Germany's growing working class as it gave them a scapegoat to blame for their problems.
Hitler was quick to jump on board with this and quickly gained a position of power within the party due to his incredible public speaking skills. Eventually he became the sole leader, renaming the party to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), more commonly known as the Nazi Party. The party quickly gained membership from extremist conservative ex-soldiers and Hitler began plotting to overthrow the Germany government. Along with Ernst Rohm, he organised a paramilitary within the party called the "Storm Division" and attempted to seize the city of Munich in an event known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
This failed and resulted in Hitler's incarceration and imprisonment. In prison, he would write an antisemitic manifesto known as Mein Kampf (English: My Struggle). The manifesto succeeded in spreading his ideas and theories across Germany, and by the time of his release in 1925, he was more popular than ever.
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He reformed the Nazi Party and began contesting elections. In the July 1932 federal election, he won the most seats within the Reichstag. He did not become the Chancellor of Germany until 1933, at which point he used the Reichstag fire as evidence that the Jews and Communists were conspiring against Germany and gained the power to ban political parties, under the impression that he would use it to ban the German Communist Party. Instead he would ban every political party in Germany, except for the Nazis.
He became the dictator of Germany and took the title of Fuhrer in 1934. His government initiated aggressive expansionist policies, which led to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 after the invasion of Poland. Hitler's ideology of racial purity and antisemitism culminated in the Holocaust, the systematic genocide of six million Jews and millions of other marginalised groups, including Romani people, disabled individuals, and left wing dissidents. The war, which ravaged much of Europe, ended in 1945 with Germany's defeat. Facing imminent capture by Allied forces, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, marking the collapse of the Nazi regime.
Adolf Hitler's was not a Christian and held atheist views. While he publicly used Christian rhetoric to appeal to the predominantly Christian population of Germany, his private statements and policies reveal a disdain for organised religion, particularly Christianity, which he saw as weak and incompatible with his ideology. Hitler's regime actively suppressed religious institutions, promoting a pseudo-religious belief in German supremacy and the state instead.
