(Braunau, Bohemia, 1889 - Berlin, 1945) Maximum leader of Nazi Germany.

After being appointed

chancellor in 1933, he liquidated the democratic institutions of the republic and established a single-
party dictatorship, the Nazi party, the National Socialist Party, from which he brutally suppressed all
opposition and promoted a formidable propaganda apparatus at the service of his ideas. . : superiority
of the Aryan race, nationalist and pan-Germanic exaltation, revanchist militarism, anti-communism and
anti-Semitism.

The doctrine of the "vital space" and the pan-Germanic ideal of the peoples of the German language
would lead to an aggressive expansionism; in support of his belligerent policy, Hitler rearmed Germany
and reorganized and modernized his army until it became a fearsome Machine. France and Great Britain
consented to the annexation of Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, but the German invasion
of Poland finally unleashed the Second World War (1939-45), whose first phase gave Hitler control of all
of Europe, except Great Britain. The fall of the invasion of Russia and the intervention of the United
States reversed the course of the struggle; despite the inevitable defeat, Hitler rejected all negotiations,
dragged Germany to desperate resistance and suicide in his bunker, the days before the fall of Berlin.

Biography

Son of an Austrian customs officer, his childhood was spent in Linz and his youth in Vienna. The
formation of Adolf Hitler was scarce and self-taught, as he received little education. In Vienna (1907-13)
he failed in his vocation as a painter, lived poorly as a tramp and saw his racist prejudices grow before
the spectacle of a cosmopolitan city, whose intellectual and multicultural vitality was completely
incomprehensible to him. From that time dates his conversion to Germanic nationalism and anti-
Semitism.

In 1913 Adolf Hitler fled the Austro-Hungarian Empire to not perform military service; he took refuge in
Munich and enlisted in the German army during the First World War (1914-18). The defeat made him
pass to politics, brandishing an ideology of nationalist reaction, marked by the rejection of the new
democratic regime of the Weimar Republic, the politicians accused of having betrayed Germany by
accepting the humiliating conditions of peace of the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

Back in Munich, Hitler enters a small right-wing party, which soon becomes the main leader, renaming it
as the National Socialist Party of German Workers (NSDAP). This party declares itself nationalist, anti-
Semitic, anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-pacifist and anti-capitalist, although this last
revolutionary component of a social nature is soon forgotten. Such a variegated ideological
conglomerate, false negative, feeds on the German media in the face of the uncertainties of the modern
world. Influenced by Mussolini's fascism, this movement, adverse as much as what exists as a growing
trend of progress, represented the reactionary response to the crisis of the liberal state that the war had
accelerated.

However, Hitler was slow to make his propaganda heard. In 1923 he failed in a first attempt to take
power from Munich, supporting the armed militias of Ludendorff ("Brewery Putsch"). He was arrested,
tried and imprisoned, although he only spent nine months in the box, which he took advantage of to
shape his extremist political ideas in a book titled My Struggle that designed the main lines of his
subsequent action.
From 1925, already constituted in freedom, Hitler reconstituted the National Socialist Party expelling the
possible rivals and surrounded himself with a group of faithful collaborators like Goering, Himmler and
Goebbels. The crisis economic crisis unleashed since 1929 and the political difficulties of the Weimar
Republic delivered an audience among the legions of the unemployed and disaffected willing to listen to
their demagogic propaganda, wrapped in a paraphernalia of parades, flags, hymns and uniforms.

The Third Reich

Skillfully combining legal political struggle with the illegitimate use of violence on the streets, the
National Socialists or Nazis were gaining electoral weight until Hitler (who had never reached the
majority) was appointed head of government by President Hindenburg in 1933. From the Chancellery,
Hitler destroyed the constitutional regime and replaced it with a one-party dictatorship based on his
personal power. Thus began the so-called Third Reich (The Third German Empire, after the Holy Empire
of the Middle Ages and the Empire of 1871, disappeared with the First World War), which was not a
total regime based on an exacerbated nationalism and the exaltation of a racial superiority without any
scientific foundation (based on stereotypes that contrast with the ridiculous figure of Hitler himself).

Adolf Hitler

After the Death