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| Adolf Hitler |
Nazi
leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was one of the most powerful and infamous
dictators of the 20th century. After World War I, he rose to power in the
National Socialist German Workers Party, taking control of the German
government in 1933. His establishment of concentration camps to inter Jews and
other groups he believed to be a threat to Aryan supremacy resulted in the
death of more than 6 million people in the Holocaust. His attack on Poland in
1939 started World War II, and by 1941 Germany occupied much of Europe and
North Africa. The tide of the war turned following an invasion of Russian and
the U.S. entry into battle, and Hitler killed himself shortly before Germany’s
defeat.
To avoid
being arrested for evading military service in Austria-Hungary, Adolf Hitler
left Vienna for Munich in May 1913 but was forced to return–then he failed the
physical. He volunteered for the Bavarian army the following year and served
during all of World War I on the Western Front. His experiences
in the fighting affected his thinking about war thereafter.
After World War I, Hitler came to control the
National Socialist German Workers Party, which he hoped to lead to power in
Germany. When a coup attempt in 1923 failed, he turned, after release from
jail, to the buildup of the party to seize power by means that were at least
outwardly legal. He hoped to carry out a program calling for the restructuring
of Germany on a racist basis so that it could win a series of wars to expand
the German people’s living space until they dominated and exclusively inhabited
the globe.
He believed that Germany should fight wars
for vast tracts of land to enable its people to settle on them, raising large
families that would replace casualties and provide soldiers for the next war of
expansion. The first would be a small and easy war against Czechoslovakia, to
be followed by the really difficult one against France and Britain. A third war
would follow against the Soviet Union, which he assumed would be simple and
quick and would provide raw materials, especially oil, for the fourth war
against the United States. That war would be simple once Germany had the
long-range planes and superbattleships to fight a power thought inherently weak
but far distant and possessing a large navy.
Once Hitler had come to power in 1933, German
military preparations were made for these wars. The emphasis in the short term
was on weapons for the war against the western powers, and for the long term,
on the weapons for war against the United States.
