FREE ESSAY ON HITLER

HITLER

Adolf Hitler was a german politician, a government leader and one of the 20th centuries
most powerful dictators. Making anti-semitism a keystone of his propaganda and policies,
he built up the Nazi party into a mass movement. Once in power, he converted Germany into
a fully militarized society and launched World War II. For a time he dominated most of
Europe and North Africa . He caused the slaughter of millions of Jews and others whom he
considered inferior human beings.
Hitler was born in Braunauam Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889, the son of a minor customs
official and a peasant girl. A poor student, he never completed high school. He applied
for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna but was rejected for lack of talent.
Staying in Vienna until 1913, he lived first on an orphan's pension, later on small
earnings from pictures he drew. He read voraciously, developing anti-Jewish and
antidemocratic convictions, an admiration for the outstanding individual, and a contempt
for the masses.
In World War I, Hitler, by then in Munich, volunteered for service in the Bavarian army.
He proved a dedicated, courageous soldier, but was never promoted beyond private first
class because his superiors thought him lacking in leadership qualities. After Germany's
defeat in 1918 he returned to Munich, remaining in the army until 1920. His commander
made him an education officer, with the mandate to immunize his charges against pacifist
and democratic ideas. In September 1919 he joined the nationalist German workers party,
and in April 1920 he went to work full time for the party, now renamed the National
Socialist German Workers (Nazi) party. In 1921 he was elected party chairman with
dichorial powers.
Organizing meeting after meeting, terrorizing political foes with groups of party thugs,
Hitler spread his gospel of racial hatred and contempt for democracy. He soon became a
key figure in Bavarian politics, aided by high officials and businessmen. In November
1923, a time of political and economic chaos, he led an uprising in Munich against the
postwar weimar republic, proclaiming himself chancellor of a new authoritarian regime.
Without military support, however, the Putsch collapsed. As leader of the plot, Hitler
was sentenced to five years imprisonment and spent the eight months he actually served
dictating his autobiography Mein kampf. Released as a result of a general amnesty in
December 1924, he rebuilt his party without interference from those whose government he
had tried to overthrow. When the Great depression struck in 1929, his explanation of it
as a Jewish-Communist plot was accepted by many Germans. Promising a strong Germany,
jobs, and national glory, he attracted millions of voters. Nazi representation in the
Reichstag rose from 12 seats in 1928 to 107 in 1930. 
During the following two years the party kept expanding, benefiting from growing
unemployment, fear of Communism, Hitler's self certainty, and the diffidence of his
political rivals. Nevertheless, when Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, he
was expected to be an easily controlled tool of big business. 
Once in power, however, Hitler quickly established himself as a dictator. Thousands of
anti-Nazis were hauled off to concentration camps and all signs of dissent suppressed. An
Enabling Act passed by a subservient legislature allowed him to Nazify the bureaucracy
and the judiciary, replace all labor unions with one Nazi controlled German Labor Front,
and ban all political parties except his own. The economy, the media, and all cultural
activities were brought under by Nazi authority by making an individuals livelihood
dependent on his or her political loyalty. 
Hitler relied on his secret police, the gestapo, and on jails and camps to intimidate his
opponents, but most Germans supported him enthusiastically. His armament drive wiped out
unemployment, an ambitious recreational program attracted workers and employees, and his
foreign policy successes impressed the nation. He thus managed to mold the German people
into the pliable tool he needed to establish German rule over europe and other parts of
the world. Discreding the churches with charges of corruption and immortality, he imposed
his own brutal moral code. He derided the concept of human equality and claimed racial
superiority for the Germans. As the master race they had the right to dominate all
nations they subjected. The increasingly ruthless persecution of the Jews was to inure
the Germans to this task.
Setting out on his empire-building mission, Hitler launched Germany's open rearmament in
1935 sending troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, and annexed Austria and
Czechoslovakia under German control. He also came to the aid of the Fascist rebels in
Spain's civil war. Outmaneuvered and fearful of war, no one resisted.
Hitler realized that any further moves might lead to a European conflict, and he
unhesitatingly prepared for the struggle, which he believed would strengthen Germany's
moral fiber. Having neutralized the Soviet Union with the promise of a partition of
Poland after the latters defeat, he attacked Poland in September in 1939. The poles were
quickly overpowered, and their allies, the British and French, who had declared war on
Germany, would do nothing to help. In the spring of 1940 Hitler's forces overran routed
the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The defeat of Britain was averted by the Royal Air
Force, which fended off the German Luftwaffe.
Driven by his ambitions and his hatred of communism, Hitler then turned on the Soviet
Union. To protect his flank, he first subdued the Balkan Peninsula. The invasion of the
USSR in June 1941 quickly carried the German armies to the gates of Moscow, but in
December they were pushed back by the Russians, just as the U.S. entered the war. Hitler
then realized that the war was lost militarily, but he resolved to play for time in the
hope that some new miracle weapon or a diplomatic maneuver might still save the
situation.
As the time passed and defeat became more certain, Hitler still refused to give up,
feeling that Germany did not deserve to survive because it had not lived up to its
mission. Throughout this period the campaign to destroy world Jewry continued, and the
endless trains took millions of Jews to extermination camps, seriously interfering with
the war effort. An officers plot to assassinate Hitler and the end of the war failed in
1944. Finally on April 30, 1945, with all of Germany overrun by Allied invaders, Hitler
committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, as did his long time companion Eva Braun, whom he
had married the day before.
Hitler had a charismatic personality of overpowering forcefulness. An amoral man,
rootless and incapable of personal friendships, he looked to his fellow humans as mere
bricks in the world structure he wished to erect. He knew how to appeal to peoples basic
instincts and made use of their fears and insecurities. He could do that, however, only
because they were willing to be led, even though his program was one of hatred and
violence. His impact was wholly destructive, and nothing of what he instituted and built
survived.