Adolf Hitler: Proclamation to the German People

About the Author

Adolf Hitler, whose very name has become synonymous with evil, was born on April 20, 1889, in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn to a doting mother and an authoritarian father. In 1894 the family moved to Linz, Austria. After his father's death in 1903, Hitler lived on his own in Vienna, Austria, where he attempted to pursue a career as an artist and where he became a confirmed anti-Semite. He joined the army in World War I, attaining the rank of corporal, and on two occasions was decorated for bravery. After the war, he landed in Munich, Germany, and became involved in politics. His first appointment was as a police spy for the German military; his task was to infiltrate the German Workers' Party. Hitler, though, agreed with the party's nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Communist message, so he joined the party and became a member of its executive committee. The party later changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party—the Nazis—as a way of broadening its appeal.

In the years that followed, Hitler gained notoriety as a skilled orator who was able to tap into Germans' sense of humiliation as a result of defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. In 1921, Hitler threatened to resign from the party unless he was made chairman. The party's executive committee acceded to his demands because of his popularity. Hitler began attracting influential supporters, and based on that support, he led the so-called Beer Hall Putsch on November 8, 1923. Backed by the Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary group that protected party meetings and intimidated opponents, he and a group of supporters stormed a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich and declared that they were seizing the Bavarian government with a view to marching on Berlin and seizing the federal government. The next day, however, as the group marched on the Bavarian War Ministry, they were arrested. In his trial for treason, Hitler was given ample opportunity to speak; although he was convicted, he won widespread support for the views he expressed in his defense. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served only one year. During his year in prison, he was given preferential treatment by prison authorities, received volumes of fan mail, and wrote the first volume of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf.

In the years that followed, the party was in disarray and had to be rebuilt. Improvements in the German economy made the Nazi message less attractive to middle-of-the-road citizens. In the elections of 1924 (when Hitler was still in prison) and 1928, the party received little support. But in 1930 the worldwide Great Depression hit Germany. The administration of President Paul von Hindenburg met with opposition from both the left and the right. A series of chancellors were unable to form coalitions in Germany's parliamentary government. Unable to form majorities, the Reichstag was ineffective and powerless, forcing the president to rule by emergency decree. With violence, poverty, and unemployment soaring, the government seemed unable to meet the crisis. Hitler saw the economic crisis as an opportunity. He declared his candidacy for president in the 1932 elections, running against Hindenburg and a Communist. He was perhaps the first politician to make use of the airplane in a political campaign, allowing him to speak in different cities on the same day. Although he lost the election, he attracted support from a broad cross-section of the public. More to the point, the party's candidates captured over a third of the vote. After the 1932 elections, it was the largest party in the Reichstag. Political infighting and intrigue left the governments of Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher ineffective just as Hitler was gaining additional support from German industrialists. With great reluctance, and desperate to find a chancellor who could forge a parliamentary coalition, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor.

Hitler moved quickly to consolidate his power through legislation such as the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act and by the elimination of opponents in the Night of the Long Knives. In August 1934 Hindenburg died. The Reichstag decided to suspend the office of president and transfer the president's powers to the chancellor, Hitler. Throughout the 1930s Hitler assumed absolute control over Germany. During these years he and his supporters launched their persecution of the Jews, Communists, trade unionists, and political opponents. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler remilitarized Germany. He formed new alliances with the Soviet Union, Italy, and imperialist Japan. He merged German-speaking Austria with Germany (the “Anschluss”) and grabbed the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Few were surprised when he launched World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

In the months and years that followed, the German military machine gobbled up large portions of Europe. Europe's Jews—along with Communists, the Roma (“Gypsies”), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, and even severely wounded veterans—were systematically killed in what is generally called the Holocaust. As the war progressed and the Allies, led by the United States and England, fought back, Hitler became increasingly unstable. He insisted on directing military affairs himself, often against the advice of his generals. Perhaps his greatest blunder was his decision to attack his former ally to the east, the Soviet Union, forcing him to fight a war on two fronts. As the Allies from east and west converged on Berlin, Hitler holed up in a bunker beneath the chancellery building. On April 30, 1945, he and his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before, committed suicide. Various German military units throughout Europe surrendered in the days that followed; the formal surrender of all German forces was signed on May 7, 1945. In the end, Hitler's murderous regime massacred some six million people.