The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler
A factual summary of how Adolf Hitler came to lead Germany, how the Nazi state dismantled a democracy from within, and how it ended. This entry carries no humour; the subject does not permit it.
Why it was classified
Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889, Hitler served in the German army in the First World War and entered politics in postwar Munich, taking over the National Socialist German Workers' Party by 1921. The failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 led to a short imprisonment during which he dictated 'Mein Kampf.' The party gained ground amid the Depression, becoming the largest in the Reichstag by July 1932. He was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 through legal procedure and political miscalculation by conservative elites who believed he could be controlled. The Reichstag fire decree of February 1933 suspended civil liberties; the Enabling Act of March 1933 transferred legislative power to the cabinet; opposition parties and trade unions were banned within months; after President Hindenburg's death in August 1934 the offices of Chancellor and President were merged and the armed forces swore a personal oath to Hitler.
Why it matters
The regime pursued rearmament and territorial expansion — the Rhineland in 1936, Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939 — and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, beginning the Second World War in Europe. Nazi racial policy escalated from the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 to systematic mass murder: approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, alongside millions of Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Roma, disabled people, political prisoners and others. The war in Europe cost tens of millions of lives. After the failure of the invasion of the Soviet Union and the Allied advance on all fronts, Hitler killed himself in the Führerbunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945; Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7–8 May. The record matters because the collapse was constitutional before it was violent: an elected system was converted into a dictatorship in under eighteen months, using its own legal machinery.
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