From failed painter to dictator of Germany, Hitler built a regime on racism, propaganda and terror, launched the Second World War, and directed the murder of six million Jews.
Last updated: October 2026
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. An Austrian-born failed artist turned demagogue, he rebuilt a fringe party into a mass movement, seized power through a mix of electoral success, backroom dealing and violence, and then dismantled German democracy within months. His regime persecuted and murdered Jews, Roma, disabled people, political opponents and others it deemed inferior or dangerous, launched the Second World War by invading Poland in 1939, and directed the Holocaust, the systematic murder of about six million Jews. Hitler killed himself in Berlin in April 1945 as Soviet troops closed in, leaving a continent in ruins and a warning that democracies can vote themselves out of existence.
Hitler was born in 1889 in the Austrian border town of Braunau am Inn, the son of a customs official. He failed at school, was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and lived in poverty in Vienna and Munich before the First World War, painting postcards and absorbing the city's pan-German nationalism and antisemitism. The war transformed him: he served as a messenger on the Western Front, was wounded, was decorated, and experienced Germany's defeat in 1918 as a betrayal. Like many veterans, he embraced the stab-in-the-back legend, the false claim that Germany's army had been undefeated in the field and had been betrayed by Jews, socialists and republican politicians at home. The legend gave him an enemy and an explanation, and he never let go of either.
After the war, Hitler worked as an army political instructor in Munich and in 1919 joined a tiny nationalist group that became the National Socialist German Workers' Party. He proved a mesmerising speaker, and by 1921 he controlled the party. The Nazi program mixed extreme nationalism, racism and antisemitism with promises to workers: jobs, land reform, an end to the Treaty of Versailles, and a racially pure Greater Germany. In November 1923, Hitler attempted a coup in Munich, the Beer Hall Putsch, which failed; he was tried, imprisoned for less than a year, and used the trial and his imprisonment to build his legend. In prison he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925-1926), a rambling manifesto that laid out his racism, his hatred of Jews and Marxism, and his ambition to conquer living space in Eastern Europe. Few readers at the time took it as a program. It was.
Germany's Weimar Republic was a democracy born in defeat, burdened by the Versailles treaty's reparations and territorial losses, and shaken by the hyperinflation of 1923, in which savings were wiped out. Yet by 1928 the republic was stabilising, and the Nazi Party won under 3 percent of the vote. The Great Depression changed everything. Unemployment rose from under two million in 1929 to more than six million by early 1932, and desperate voters turned to the extremes. In the July 1932 election, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag with about 37 percent of the vote, though never a majority. Conservative politicians believed they could tame Hitler by making him Chancellor in a cabinet dominated by conservatives. On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him.
The destruction of democracy took weeks. The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, blamed on a Dutch communist, gave Hitler the pretext for an emergency decree suspending civil liberties, and thousands of communists and social democrats were arrested. The Enabling Act of 23 March 1933, passed with the support of the Centre Party under intimidation, gave Hitler's government the power to legislate without parliament. Trade unions were abolished, opposition parties were banned or dissolved, the press was brought under control, and the federal states were stripped of autonomy. In June and July 1934, the Night of the Long Knives saw Hitler murder Ernst Rohm and other rivals within his own movement, along with conservative critics. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of Chancellor and President and required the armed forces to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him. The dictatorship was complete, eighteen months after his appointment, and it had been achieved through a mixture of legality, terror and the complicity of elites who thought they could control him.
The Nazi state was not a tidy machine but a tangle of competing agencies, the party, the SS, the ministries, the army, all competing for Hitler's favour, with Hitler arbitrating from above. Its ideology was racial: the state existed to purify and strengthen the so-called Aryan race and to destroy or enslave those it defined as enemies, above all Jews, who were blamed in Nazi propaganda for everything from communism to capitalism. The regime's first targets were political opponents: communists, social democrats and trade unionists filled the first concentration camps, such as Dachau, opened in March 1933. The persecution of Jews escalated step by step: the boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripping Jews of citizenship and banning marriages between Jews and Germans, the seizure of Jewish property, and the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed, and about 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps.
Propaganda and terror worked together. Joseph Goebbels controlled the press, radio, film and the arts, and the regime staged mass rallies, most famously at Nuremberg, that turned politics into spectacle. The Hitler Youth indoctrinated children; the Gestapo and the SS, under Heinrich Himmler, ran a system of surveillance, denunciation and camps that made open dissent suicidal. Yet the regime also delivered things many Germans wanted: unemployment fell, driven by rearmament, public works and the removal of Jews and women from the workforce statistics; the Rhineland was remilitarised in 1936; Austria was annexed in 1938; and the Sudetenland was handed over by Britain and France at Munich in 1938. For many Germans, the regime's early years felt like a national recovery, and that consent, combined with terror, is what sustained it. Historians now stress both: the dictatorship rested on genuine popularity and on a violence that made opposition unthinkable.
Economic and social policy served rearmament and war. Hjalmar Schacht and later Hermann Goring drove a program of autarky and rearmament that rebuilt German military power in defiance of Versailles. Workers lost unions and the right to strike but gained subsidised holidays through the Strength through Joy organisation, and the regime cultivated the image of a classless national community. Women were pushed out of professions and universities and celebrated as mothers of the race. Disabled people were stigmatised as lives unworthy of life, and in 1939 the regime began the T4 euthanasia program, murdering disabled children and adults in gas chambers, a program that became a technical and organisational rehearsal for the Holocaust.
Hitler's foreign policy followed Mein Kampf: revise Versailles, unite all ethnic Germans, and conquer living space in Eastern Europe, above all in the Soviet Union, whose Slavic population was to be enslaved or removed and whose land was to feed a German empire. He moved in stages, testing each time whether Britain and France would fight. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 met no response. The Anschluss with Austria in March 1938 was greeted by cheering crowds. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 gave Germany the Sudetenland, and Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned proclaiming peace for our time. Six months later, in March 1939, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, proving that Hitler's aims went beyond ethnic Germans and discrediting appeasement. Britain and France then guaranteed Poland.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 stunned the world: Hitler and Stalin, ideological enemies, agreed not to attack each other and secretly divided Poland and the Baltic states between them. Freed from the fear of a two-front war, Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later, and the Second World War began. The early campaigns were devastatingly successful: Poland fell in weeks, Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, and France, which had held out for four years in the First World War, collapsed in six weeks. By the summer of 1940, Germany controlled most of continental Europe, and only Britain held out, surviving the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-organised murder of about six million Jews, carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, alongside the murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men and political opponents. It grew out of persecution and war, not from a single order: historians debate the precise decision-making process, but the evidence shows a radicalisation in which shooting squads, ghettos, deportations and death camps formed a single system of destruction. This section states the facts plainly and without sensational detail, because the victims deserve accuracy, not horror as spectacle.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen followed the army and shot more than a million Jews, along with communists and others, in mass executions at sites including Babi Yar near Kyiv, where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered in two days in September 1941. In occupied Poland, Jews were forced into ghettos, where starvation and disease killed tens of thousands. In late 1941 and early 1942, the regime built extermination camps, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where victims were murdered in gas chambers and their bodies burned. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the logistics of deporting Jews from across Europe to these camps. By the end of the war, about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population had been murdered, including about three million Polish Jews and about one million children.
Ordinary people were involved at every level: railway clerks scheduled the deportation trains, local police guarded ghettos, neighbours denounced hidden families, and companies supplied the gas and the crematoria. But there were also rescuers: in Denmark, ordinary citizens ferried nearly all Danish Jews to safety in Sweden; in Bulgaria, public protest stopped deportations; individuals such as Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest and Oskar Schindler saved thousands. After the war, the Nuremberg Trials and later trials established that following orders was not a defence, and the Holocaust became the central case in international law, in the 1948 Genocide Convention, and in the moral education of postwar Europe. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem preserve the documentation and the names, and Holocaust denial, which claims the murder did not happen, is contradicted by an overwhelming mass of German, Allied and survivor evidence.
Hitler's fatal error was the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa. He expected a quick victory as in France, but the Soviet Union absorbed the blow, moved its industry east of the Urals, and counterattacked. The German army reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, was stopped, and then lost at Stalingrad in early 1943, where an entire German army was destroyed. Meanwhile, the United States entered the war after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and Hitler, in one of the war's great unforced errors, declared war on the United States himself. From 1943 onward, Germany was pushed back on all fronts, while Allied bombing devastated German cities and the regime's persecution intensified into its final, frantic phase.
In July 1944, a group of German officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the regime. The bomb wounded but did not kill him, and the conspirators were executed in a purge that killed thousands. Hitler retreated to his Berlin bunker as Soviet troops encircled the city in April 1945. He married Eva Braun on 29 April, dictated a political testament blaming the Jews for the war he had started, and on 30 April he took his own life. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945. The war he began killed an estimated 60 to 80 million people worldwide, the deadliest conflict in human history, with the Soviet Union and China bearing the largest losses. The total is a range, not a precise figure, because wartime record-keeping collapsed in the countries that suffered most.
Eva Braun (1912-1945). Hitler's companion from 1929, who lived largely in seclusion at the Berghof and in Berlin. She married Hitler on 29 April 1945 and died with him the following day.
Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945). Nazi Minister of Propaganda from 1933, who controlled the German press, radio, film and arts and built the cult of the leader. He killed his six children and himself with his wife in the Berlin bunker in May 1945.
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945). Head of the SS and chief organiser of the Holocaust, who built the concentration camp system and commanded the machinery of persecution. He took his own life after capture by British forces in May 1945.
Hermann Goring (1893-1946). Nazi leader who commanded the Luftwaffe and directed the Four-Year Plan for rearmament. Convicted at Nuremberg, he took his own life the night before his scheduled execution.
Ernst Rohm (1887-1934). Leader of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary, whose growing power alarmed Hitler and the army. He was murdered on Hitler's orders during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934). Field Marshal and President of Germany from 1925, who appointed Hitler Chancellor in January 1933 and whose death the following year allowed Hitler to merge the offices of Chancellor and President.
Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). British Prime Minister who pursued appeasement, signing the Munich Agreement of 1938, and who declared war on Germany in 1939 after the invasion of Poland.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965). British Prime Minister from May 1940, who refused to negotiate with Hitler and led Britain through the Battle of Britain and the war until victory in Europe.
Claus von Stauffenberg (1907-1944). German army officer who planted the bomb in the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. He was executed the same night.
Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947). Swedish diplomat in Budapest who issued protective passports and sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944. He was arrested by Soviet forces in 1945 and died in Soviet custody.
Oskar Schindler (1908-1974). German industrialist who protected more than a thousand Jewish workers in his factories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, saving them from deportation and murder.
Anne Frank (1929-1945). Jewish girl whose diary, written while hiding in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944, became one of the most widely read documents of the Holocaust. She died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Hitler's legacy is the destruction he caused and the institutions built to prevent its repetition. The Nuremberg Trials established that heads of state and soldiers could be held personally responsible for aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity, a principle that underpins the International Criminal Court today. The 1948 Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1949 Geneva Conventions all trace directly to the crimes of the Nazi regime. The Federal Republic of Germany was built on the explicit rejection of Hitler's state, with a constitution designed to prevent any future dictatorship, and Germany's reckoning with its past, through trials, education and memorials, remains the most thorough in history, though it took decades to begin in earnest.
The second legacy is intellectual and political. The word fascism, the study of totalitarianism, the analysis of propaganda, and the psychology of obedience all took shape around the question of how a civilised, educated nation could follow Hitler. Historians still debate the balance between Hitler's intentions, the structures of the Nazi state and the participation of ordinary Germans, a debate known as the intentionalist versus functionalist controversy. The third legacy is the simplest and the most important: the Holocaust is the benchmark against which the world measures genocide, and the phrase never again, coined in its aftermath, remains the standard by which every subsequent atrocity is judged and, too often, found wanting.
