Adolph Hitler

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Adolf Hitler (pronounced/хad lf хh ра //( listen)), hypanized Adolf Hitler(Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria, Austro-Hungarian Empire; April 20, 1889-Berlin, Nazi Germany; April 30, 1945), was a German politician, military and dictator of Austrian origin. Imperial Chancellor since 1933 and Führer "caudillo." from Germany from 1934 until his death in 1945, he brought to power the German National Socialist Workers Party or Nazi Party, establishing a totalitarian regime during the period known as the Third Reich or Nazi Germany. He began World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939 and was a key figure in the perpetration of the Holocaust.

Hitler was the writer of at least two books; Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, the first is partly his autobiography and government program, where he shows his ideological bases for which he became who he was, and the second delves into more about his ideas raised in the first book. Both books are considered political philosophy, although Hitler is not commonly given the title of philosopher because his philosophical foundations were developed by other philosophers and also because he was influenced by Ariosophy.

Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, predecessor of the NSDAP, in 1919, assuming its definitive leadership in 1921. In 1923, after the pronouncement in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich, Hitler tried to seize power through a failed coup, by who was sentenced to five years in prison. During his stay in prison, he wrote the first part of his book My Struggle (in German, Mein Kampf), in the one that exposes his ideology together with autobiographical elements. Released eight months later, in 1924, Hitler gained growing popular support by exalting pan-Germanism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism, making use of his oratorical talent supported by efficient Nazi propaganda and symbolism-laden mass rallies.

He was appointed imperial chancellor (Reichskanzler) in January 1933 and, a year later, on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, he proclaimed himself leader and imperial chancellor (Führer und Reichskanzler), thus assuming the supreme command of the German state. He transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich and ruled with a single party based on the totalitarianism and autocracy of Nazi ideology.

Hitler's goal was to establish a New Order based on the absolute hegemony of Nazi Germany on the European continent. His foreign and domestic policy was aimed at seizing Lebensraum ('living space') for the Germanic peoples. He promoted the rearmament of Germany and after the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939, World War II would begin. With these acts, Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which established the conditions of peace after World War I.

Under Hitler's leadership, German forces and their allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa in 1941. These territorial conquests gradually decreased after the Battle of Stalingrad, until 1945, when the Allied armies defeated the German army. For racial reasons, Hitler caused the death of seventeen million people, including a figure of around six million Jews. Hitler was a supporter of an ultranationalist and racist policy, as well as a policy of discrimination and extermination that affected various ethnic, political and social groups: Slavic populations, Roma ethnic groups, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, political opponents, members of Freemasonry, prisoners of war, the physically and mentally disabled and, especially, Jews. Segregated from the social and economic life of the country since 1933, the Jews were the object of a plan of internment and extermination known as the Final Solution from 1941, in what was later called the "Holocaust".

In the last days of the war, Hitler, worn out by the defeats and in increasingly precarious physical and mental conditions, refused to surrender his weapons and continued to resist stubbornly. Finally Berlin was surrounded by the Red Army, causing him to commit suicide along with her partner Eva Braun in her bunker on April 30, 1945. He had married her the day before. Subsequently, his corpses were burned and buried in the courtyard of the chancery.

Politics

He rose to power during a period of economic, social and political crisis, accentuated by the effects of the Great Depression of 1929 and popular discontent and frustration in Germany as a result of the defeat in World War I. Throughout his political tenure, he used state propaganda and his charismatic oratory to persuade the masses, emphasizing his opposition to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the Jewish people, pacifism, and international communism, particularly the Soviet-Bolshevik. At the same time, he highlighted German nationalism, militarism, racism, the so-called preservation of the Aryan race, pan-Germanism, and the annexation or armed recovery of European territories lost by the German Empire after the First World War. After restructuring industry and the economy and quickly curbing inflation and unemployment, Hitler won popular support. He rearmed and organized the German armed forces, establishing a personal totalitarian dictatorship that transformed German society and eliminated its democratic system. His regime was characterized by racial discrimination, Aryan supremacy, and ethnic-religious and political persecution. Since 1939, as a consequence of the war, this model spread to the rest of Europe. On the ideological level, Hitler assumed the approaches of Italian fascism but with his own nuances based on the characteristics of Nazism and German society. An intense cult of personality developed around his figure.

He pursued an aggressive expansionist foreign policy to expand German Lebensraum ('living space') to Eastern Europe, and combat an alleged international conspiracy between Judaism, Freemasonry, communism and capitalism by the American, British and Soviet governments. His policy was aimed at establishing a New Order (Neuordnung ) in which Germany and the Aryan race would have a world hegemonic role.

Responsible for starting World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, by 1941, the period of its heyday, its troops and Axis allies occupied most of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, but they were defeated by the Allied powers in 1945. By the end of the war, Hitler's violent policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had caused the deaths of between 55 and 60 million people (about 2% of the world's population). time) mostly civilians, as well as a considerable degree of destruction of European cities. The systematic and massive extermination of political enemies and people considered racially "inferior" or "subhuman", through detention in a network of concentration and extermination camps in Germany and in the conquered territories, led to the death of just over six million of Jews in what was later called in the historical context the Holocaust, as well as homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war and political opponents of his regime. Estimates of the number of people who lost their lives as a result of racial measures taken by the Hitler government, its Axis allies, satellite states and collaborators, according to most historians would be approximately eleven or twelve million people, of whom half would correspond to the Holocaust.

Early Years

Childhood

Youth in Vienna and Munich

World War I

Hitler (right) together with several companions during the First World War.

On June 28, 1914, World War I broke out; A week later, Hitler volunteered for the German Army and was assigned to a Bavarian regiment. The start of the war caused great enthusiasm in the young Hitler, who thought that an opportunity had come to change his life:

I am not ashamed to say that, dragged down by my enthusiasm, I knelt down and thanked Heaven from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to live in that time.

After less than three months of training, Hitler was sent to the Western Front. He served in France and Belgium, as a courier for the 1st Company of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division. He participated in the first battle of Ypres, where his unit was decimated in four days. At the end of the battle, of the initial 3,500 soldiers, only 600 could continue fighting.

Hitler's political opponents would later accuse him of being a coward, but the evidence contradicts them. In October 1916, in northern France, Hitler was wounded in the leg and returned to the front in March 1917, promoted to the corporal rank. However, he was not promoted beyond this grade, as Hitler was considered at the time to have no leadership skills. Hitler was decorated twice: he received the Iron Cross 2nd class on December 2, 1914, and the Iron Cross 1st class on August 4, 1918, an honor that was rarely bestowed on a soldier of such a low rank. According to various accounts, Hitler earned his last Iron Cross for singlehandedly capturing fifteen enemy soldiers, although military records do not specify the reason for this award.

Soldier Adolf Hitler during World War I (1914-1918).

Hitler was regarded as a "correct" soldier, but was reportedly unpopular with his peers due to an uncritical attitude toward superiors. "Respect your superior, contradict no one, obey blindly," he said, describing his attitude while on trial for the Munich Putsch in 1923. One of his comrades commented:

We cursed him and found him intolerable. There was a white raven among us who didn't want to follow us when we cursed the war.

Indeed, Hitler never complained about the dirt on the front and never asked permission to leave it, although he was able to leave when he was recovering from a leg wound in a hospital in Berlin. When he returned, he began repeatedly predicting that Germany would lose the war because of the Jews and the Marxists, whom he accused of robbing the nation and failing to serve in the military. On a personal level, Hitler never received letters or presents from friends or relatives, and did not accompany soldiers when they talked about women. During the war, he also took the opportunity to draw some comic strips and instructional drawings for the Army newspaper.

In the image, a cartoon illustrates Dolchstoßlegende: a Jewish woman strikes a German soldier behind her back. Hitler was a fervent believer of this legend, blaming the Jews and Marxists of the German defeat in World War I.

On October 13, 1918, shortly before the end of the war, Hitler was caught up in a British poison gas attack near Ypres. He was taken to a field hospital, where he was temporarily blinded by the toxic gases. On 10 November he was partially recovered at the military hospital at Pasewalk, near Stettin, when he was informed that the monarchy had been deposed and that the later known as the Weimar Republic had been proclaimed. When he learned that an armistice was to be signed the next day and that the war had been lost, Hitler recounts that he collapsed, later describing his reaction thus: "Everything went black again before my eyes."

Research by Bernhard Horstmann indicates that his temporary blindness may have resulted from a hysterical reaction to the German defeat.^{[citation needed]} Hitler metaphorically expressed that during That experience, when he took off the blindfold that covered his eyes, was when he discovered that the goal of his life was to achieve the salvation of Germany. Meanwhile, he was treated by a military doctor and a psychiatric specialist, who reportedly diagnosed the corporal as "incompetent at commanding people" and "dangerously psychotic".^{[citation needed ]} His commander declared: "I will never promote this hysteric!"^{[citation needed]} However, historian Sebastian Haffner, referring to the experience of Hitler at the front suggests that he at least had some sort of understanding with the military.

The German defeat in November 1918 had a huge impact on him, since in popular German belief the German army remained undefeated. Like many other German nationalists, Hitler blamed the Social Democrats (“the November criminals”) for the armistice. An explanation extended by the conservative right about the cause of the defeat was the Dolchstoßlegende («legend of the stab in the back»), which tried to argue that behind the back of the army, socialist and Marxist politicians had betrayed and "stabbed" the Germans and their soldiers in the back.

The Treaty of Versailles imposed war reparations and other economically damaging sanctions on the country, declaring Germany guilty of the horrors of World War I. During the negotiation of the document, controversies arose between the pacifying desire of Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, and the revenge of the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. Reconciliation was never within the goals of the UK and France because,^{[citation needed]} since mid-century XIX, Germany had rivaled these two powers for hegemony in Europe and control over colonial territories in Africa and Asia. The treaty was regarded by the Germans as a humiliation and was an important factor in creating the political and territorial claims demanded by Hitler and his National Socialist Party upon coming to power.

Beginnings in Nazism

Main article: Nazismo

Hitler's license as a DAP member.

Start of political activity

At the end of the war, the last phase of which was undoubtedly very important for his ideological evolution, Hitler realized that he did not have money, friends, relatives with connections, university studies, or political experience; so he decided to try to continue in the Army, something quite complicated in the middle of the demobilization period, although he managed to remain in their ranks until March 31, 1920.

Hitler left the Pasewalk hospital on November 19 and arrived in Munich on the 21st to rejoin his battalion. After the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 9 and the signing of the armistice on the 11th, Germany was plunged into the climate of revolutionary agitation in which the Weimar Republic was born and that in Bavaria, after the flight on November 7 of the last king of the Wittelsbach dynasty, Ludwig III, gave way to the new Republic of Bavaria with a provisional government dominated by the Social Democrats of the SPD and above all by the more radical USPD, under the presidency of Kurt Eisner. Soviet-style workers' and soldiers' councils sprang up, and Hitler returned to find his unit under the control of one of them for which, according to his own account in Mein Kampf, he requested to be transferred to another destination and was sent to the Traunstein prisoner of war camp, near the Austrian border, where he remained until finals of January or early February 1919. Although his version coincides with that of his colleague Ernst Schmidt, the attitude he maintained during these months must have been much more ambiguous than he lets on and would have justified a more extensive treatment if he had directly opposed the government that would later be described as that of the «November criminals». Not only was Traunstein also governed by soldiers' councils, but Hitler was summoned on April 3 as a representative (Vertrauensmann) of his battalion, a position that, among other attributions, had the mission of cooperating with the authorities transmitting propaganda material to the troops and that Hitler most likely already had in February. In addition, after the assassination of Eisner on February 21, there was a period of chaos and anarchy that culminated in the short phase of true communist rule, with the clear purpose of installing a "Soviet" republic and which is strictly known as Räterepublik or "republic of councils". The day after its establishment, on April 14, Hitler was re-elected representative of his unit, which seems to indicate a certain degree of support on his part for the policy of the socialist government or at least that he refrained from expressing any type of frontal opposition. This behavior, whether passive or opportunistic, It was not only later reported occasionally in the press, but was also the subject of comments by some Nazi leaders such as Ernst Röhm, Ritter von Epp or Rudolf Hess, but his rejection of the revolutionary left and his rejection of the revolutionary left seems beyond doubt. it is very probable that the votes he received were from soldiers who shared this criteria and knew his hostility towards the Räterepublik.

After the Soviet government in Bavaria was overthrown by the German Army and conservative paramilitary groups, Hitler was given the mission that gave him the opportunity to become involved in politics for the first time. His job was to investigate members of his unit who had collaborated with the Soviet government. His work was appreciated by his superiors, who employed him full-time, assigning him to the Army's Political Department of Press Affairs, at the district level. In this way, Hitler became a military spy, investigating the many socialist groups that were springing up throughout Germany. He also participated as an education officer in the "national thought", courses organized by the Department of Education and Propaganda of the Bavarian group of the Reichswehr. Hitler's main task then was to eradicate "dangerous ideas", such as democracy, socialism and pacifism. A key objective of this group was to create a "scapegoat" to justify German defeat.^{[citation needed]} The scapegoats were found among International Jewry, communists and liberal politicians, especially members of the Weimar coalition, who were regarded as the "November criminals".

In May or early June 1919, Hitler is already listed as V-Mann (Verbindungsmann, German term for a police spy) of the Intelligence Command (Aufklärungskommando) of the Army, with the aim of attracting other like-minded soldiers. In September, he was ordered to investigate a small party called the German Workers' Party (DAP). Although this party was nationalist, Hitler's superiors were unaware of this, and suspected that it might be a socialist or communist party.

On September 12, Hitler attended for the first time a DAP rally held at the Sterneckerbräu that was to have Dietrich Eckart as its main speaker, although he had to be replaced due to illness by Gottfried Feder. When in the final debate one of those present confronted Feder and began to defend Bavarian separatism, Hitler replied with a speech of such intensity that it caught the attention of Anton Drexler, who gave him a copy of his work My Awakening politician and encouraged him to come back and join the party. In the second half of that same month he joined the party and, although he would later claim to be its seventh member, he was actually assigned the number 555, also fictitious because for image reasons it was decided to start the numbering at 501 distributing the numbers in alphabetical order to the first militants. A few weeks later, on October 16, Hitler delivered his first public speech at the Hofbräukeller in an act attended by 111 people, Among which was Ernst Röhm, who would also join the party shortly after.

From that moment, the figure of Hitler gained more and more prominence, participating full-time in party activities and clearly outlining the new ideology:

In the early 1920s, Hitler developed a pronounced sense of his “national mission” (...). The "mission" can be summed up as follows: to nationalize the masses; to take over the state; to destroy the inner enemy—the "criminals of November" (referring to Jews and Marxists, more or less the same for their point of view)—to build defenses; to carry out the expansion "by the sword" to ensure the future of Germany, overcoming the "land shortage" (Iss of land).Raumnot) and acquiring new territories in Eastern Europe.

On February 24, 1920, the party held its first major meeting in the halls of the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Before some two thousand attendees, Hitler read the twenty-five points of the party program that he and especially Drexler had drawn up in the previous weeks. Those twenty-five points later became the theoretical "unchangeable" basis of the National Socialist program and the date of February 24 a historical reason for annual celebration, although at the time it had a very limited impact and until the Völkischer Beobachter relegated the news to its inside pages.

On April 1, 1920, the German Workers' Party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party; that same day Hitler left the Army. Soon after, he organized squads of war veterans, led by Emil Maurice, to keep order at Party meetings, and to expel those who disagreed with the speakers. On October 5, 1921, these squads were organized under the name of Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as the brownshirts for the color of their uniforms. Soon the SA, under the initial command of Johann Ulrich Klintzich, ceased to limit itself to its role of maintaining order and began attacking opposition political groups and Jews, which eventually became its main activity. In the spring of 1920, Hitler took as his emblems the Hakenkreuz —the swastika— and the raised-arm salute of Italian fascism.

As early as 1921, Hitler was considered a great orator, speaking in front of ever-larger crowds. He gained notoriety outside the party for his controversial speeches, attacking the Treaty of Versailles, and rival groups (notably Marxists and Jews). That year, Hitler personally led the brownshirts against a gathering of Bavarian federalists. Although Hitler spent three months in jail for the beating his men gave the Federalists, when he came out he showed no remorse; on the contrary, he was more determined to use force against his adversaries:

In the future, the National Socialist movement will rudely avoid, if necessary by force, meetings or speeches that may distract the minds of our compatriots.

In the summer of 1921, Hitler was the leader of the party; he was not only the main speaker and propagandist, but also the main source of income for that revolutionary movement. However, the founders were resentful due to Hitler's dictatorial conduct, and taking advantage of the fact that he was traveling in northern Germany, they planned the merger of his party with other political groups; In this way, they planned to reduce the importance of Hitler and question his leadership. Hitler found out about these plans and returned to Munich, requesting dictatorial powers in the party, otherwise he would resign. Drexler responded by publishing a letter in a newspaper, denouncing Hitler's authoritarian abuses, but Hitler filed a legal claim against him, and Drexler had to retract it. Defeated, Drexler was removed from his position as president and Hitler succeeded him, becoming the undisputed leader of the Nazi Party. In this way, the "leadership principle" was established, which formed the system of political government in Nazi Germany.

In these years Hitler met Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, Ernst Hanfstaengl and Alfred Rosenberg, who together with Eckart, introduced him to higher social circles, from which he was able to obtain generous donations for the nascent party.

Encouraged by rapid growth, Hitler began to plot a seizure of power. However, his party was not yet the main political force in Bavaria, and was unknown outside of Bavaria, so Hitler concluded that he needed the support of the Bavarian political forces and military garrisons to achieve this goal. Influenced by the Benito Mussolini's march on Rome, Hitler devised a similar march to Berlin, with which he would easily subdue the national government.

By late 1922, he had a small and growing band of fanatical supporters, inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, who began to see in him the desire for a heroic national leader. In this sense, a book published that year referred to Hitler explaining that

the secret of his personality resides in the fact that what lay asleep in the depths of the soul of the German people has gained life in him [...]. And that is what has appeared in Adolf Hitler: the living incarnation of the yearning of the nation.

Munich Putsch

Main article: Putsch of Munich

Hitler together with the others accused by the Putsch of Munich during his trial.

In January 1923, after the German government fell behind in paying war reparations to France, France proceeded to occupy the industrial Ruhr region, devastating the German economy. The government then called for nonviolent resistance against France, but by September it was obvious that this strategy was not producing results. On September 26, German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann decided to restart payments to France, and cancel the resistance strategy. Stresemann foresaw that the nationalists and communists would start all kinds of protests and riots over these unpopular measures, so he declared a state of emergency that same day. In this way, the commander of the Army, General Hans von Seeckt, became in the main authority of the Republic. Hitler saw this period of political instability as the opportunity to stage his own version of the march on Rome.

However, the traditionally autonomous Bavarian state was unwilling to accept the central authority of General von Seeckt. That same day, the regional government declared its own state of emergency and placed Gustav von Kahr in command of Bavaria. The national government reacted by demanding the arrest of several nationalist leaders and also demanded the suppression of the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. When the Bavarian Army refused to obey its Commander-in-Chief, General von Seeckt threatened to use force against Bavaria. Hitler then realized that the regional situation could only get worse for him since the Stresemann government would probably manage to stabilize the situation. When Kahr refused to discuss the situation with Hitler and his allies, the latter suspected that the Bavarian government was going to capitulate to the Berlin government, or worse, was going to declare Bavarian independence. Hitler then decided to make a move risky: he was going to kidnap Kahr, the commander of the Army in Bavaria and the head of the regional police; once in his power, he was going to convince them to join his side, and then, together, they were going to march on Berlin to overthrow Stresemann. To win the support of the Army, Hitler decided to use General Erich Ludendorff, as a respected figure in his coup. The elderly general had been drawn into the Nazi movement a few weeks before.

On the night of November 8, 1923, Hitler and the brownshirts stormed a public meeting led by Kahr at the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall on the outskirts of Munich. Hitler proclaimed a revolution and announced his intentions to form a new government, along with Ludendorff, who was unaware of the coup. Before starting his "March on Berlin", which would overthrow the national government, Hitler demanded the help from Kahr and local military forces. The latter pretended to help Hitler, but, thanks to Ludendorff's ingenuity, he escaped as soon as he could and retook regional control.At dawn on November 9, the Bavarian Army and police were taking up positions against the coup plotters; Ernst Röhm and his Nazi troops were surrounded in the Bavarian War Ministry, and Hitler decided to march together with Ludendorff to free them. The elderly German commander had convinced Hitler that the soldiers and police would not shoot him, but would join his cause, but the police did not fall back on Ludendorff and a firefight ensued. Fourteen putschists and four policemen died during the scuffle, among them Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, one of the organizers of the putsch, who was shot while marching in the front line arm in arm with Hitler, who escaped only with a dislocated shoulder.

Hitler saluting the graves of the sixteen Nazis who died during the coup of 1923.

Hitler hid in the house of Ernst Hanfstaengl, where he wrote his first political testament in which he designated Alfred Rosenberg as his successor at the head of the NSDAP and named Max Amann vice president, but later versions of the events that they claim he attempted suicide. He was arrested on the night of November 11, charged with high treason, and Rosenberg became temporarily party leader. According to Joachim Fest, this unsuccessful subversion marked one of the great milestones in Hitler's life, since with it his apprenticeship would have ended and his true entry into politics would have been paved.

Her trial garnered international attention, and provided her with a political platform to announce her move. During his trial, which began on February 26, 1924, Hitler was given almost unlimited time to speak, which made his popularity grow due to his powerful and convincing nationalist speech. Unlike the participants in the Kapp coup, Hitler took responsibility for the attempted coup, but denied committing a crime:

I'm only responsible. But I'm not a criminal for that. If I present myself here today as a revolutionary, it is like a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no high treason against the traitors of 1918.
During his trial in 1924.

On April 1, 1924, Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison in the Landsberg fortress, even though the Constitution stipulated life imprisonment for such crimes. Hitler received privileged treatment from the guards and was able to receive letters and visits from his admirers. He was acquitted and released on December 20 of that same year, as part of a massive amnesty for political prisoners. In total, he only served nine months of his sentence.

Mein Kampf

Main article: Mein Kampf

Overcover Mein Kampf (1926-27).

Hitler's stay in Landsberg prison allowed him to organize his ideas, which he dictated to various secretaries. The result would be a work titled Mein Kampf (My Struggle), although he had originally planned to call it Four Years Fighting Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. This work, dedicated to Dietrich Eckart, was an autobiography and, more importantly, an exposition of National Socialist ideology.

Throughout its 782 pages, Hitler detailed the steps that a future National Socialist German state would have to follow to finally become the "master of the world". He first advocated the final conclusion of Franco-German hostility, which would be achieved with the destruction of France. Once this was achieved, Germany would finally be free to expand, with the aim of achieving the so-called "German living space". Hitler concludes that the Third Reich should not seek colonies in Asia or Africa, but should expand eastward, at Russia's expense. While acknowledging that various peoples already inhabit Eastern Europe, he asserts that the German people have the right to evict to its occupants:

... nature has not reserved this land for the future possession of a particular nation or race; on the contrary, this land exists for the people who possess the power to take it.
About the German expansion east.

Hitler believes that the conquest of Russia will be relatively easy, since the Bolsheviks control it, and therefore the Jews.

Regarding the internal politics of the Third Reich, Hitler clearly defines that the system of government will be a dictatorship: In addition, the State will have very little to do with the economy, since in reality it will be a "racial organism". After establishing that the Aryan race is superior to the rest, he asserts that the Aryan race must subjugate the others in order to "preserve and increase culture". He concludes that the Germans are in the current state because they did not preserve their purebred, and "gradually lost their cultural creativity". After writing this, it is not surprising that he determined the main purpose of the Nazi state to be:

...the preservation of the original racial elements that confer culture and create the beauty and dignity of a superior humanity.
About the purpose of the State.

He claims that in the distant future, humanity will face problems that only a superior race, with world domination, can solve.

Although Hitler's interpretation of German history in Mein Kampf is now considered grotesque and inaccurate, many Germans shared his historical vision. Worse yet, when Hitler rose to power in 1933, he would stick to his writings and carry out the expansion to the east, which would lead to World War II and a genocide of the Slavic and Semitic peoples.

Mein Kampf not only served as the exposition of Hitler's ideas, it also provided him with his main source of income. Although the book was published in two volumes between the years of 1925 and 1926, it only sold about 240,000 copies between 1925 and 1934, although in the early years sales were low. Hitler spent those years dodging the applicable copyright taxes on his book, and accumulated a tax debt of about 405,500 marks. This debt would haunt him until he became chancellor.

Party restructuring

Between 1924 and 1929 the Nazis experienced electoral losses.

Hitler was released from prison on December 20, 1924. His revolutionary movement was probably at its lowest ebb, the Nazi Party and its media organs had been banned; furthermore, Hitler was prohibited from speaking in public and the regional government was recommending that he be extradited to Austria.During his absence, Gregor Strasser and Erich Ludendorff led the Nazi movement, and gradually distanced themselves from it.

Nationally, the political and economic instability that had contributed to the rapid growth of the Nazi Party was becoming a thing of the past. Hyperinflation and heavy indemnity payments had been dampened, and the French had agreed to pull out of the Rhineland. Although Hitler rose to some national prominence thanks to his failed coup, the mainstay of his party remained Munich, and in the following months popular support began to wane. In the December parliamentary elections, the Nazis, who participated under the name of the "National Socialist Freedom Movement," lost half their voters; by contrast, the Social Democrats were recovering lost votes. The Nazis would continue in decline until 1929, meanwhile, Hitler had to continue organizing the party and fighting to maintain its leadership.

Although many of his colleagues believed he was finished, Hitler emerged from prison with a messianic vision of his role in history, and assured that the good times of the Republic would not last. A few days later he requested an interview with Heinrich Held, Bavarian Prime Minister, and after making promises of good behavior, got him to legalize the Nazi Party again. The Nazi newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter was also allowed to circulate again. Believing in Hitler's promises, Held told his Minister of Justice:

The wild beast is controlled. We can afford to loosen the chain.
Dr. Heinrich Held about Hitler.

Although Hitler remained an authoritarian, his promises to adhere to the Constitution were partially true. However, the future dictator had not changed his ideology, but his strategy. Having failed to overthrow the Republic with a coup, he now pursued the "strategy of legality"; this meant adhering to the rules of the Weimar Constitution in order to legally rise to power. Some members of the party, especially the leaders of the "brown shirts", opposed this strategy. Röhm ridiculed her, dubbing Hitler "Adolphe Legalité". In this way, Hitler would now rely on democracy and elections to rise to power, and then destroy them:

Instead of working to get power through an armed coup, we must cover our noses and enter Parliament as opposition to Catholic and Marxist deputies. If overcoming them in votes takes more time than overcoming them in shots, at least the result will be guaranteed by its own constitution... Sooner or later we will reach the majority, and after that Germany.
About your new constitutional strategy.

On February 27, 1925, Hitler made his first speech since his arrest in 1923, although most of his trusted men were missing: Rosenberg, Röhm, Strasser and Ludendorff did not attend, Eckart was dead, and Göring was in exile. However, Hitler made it clear that he was not planning to share leadership with anyone else:

Only I lead the movement, and no one can impose conditions on me while I personally assume responsibility.
In his first speech when he left prison.

This time, however, Hitler could not contain himself. He soon began calling the state, the Jews and the Marxists "the enemy" and threatened them with death, and was immediately banned from speaking by the Bavarian state for two years. From then on, most of his time was spent in Obersalzberg, where he continued to write Mein Kampf. Fearing that at any moment he would be deported, on April 7, 1925, he renounced his Austrian citizenship, effectively becoming a man without a nationality, as the Bavarian government refused to grant him a German one.

Gregor Strasser, a Nazi leader who repeatedly questioned Hitler's leadership.

Unable to use his oratory skills, Hitler then began working as a propagandist and organizer. It was during these years that he organized the Nazi Party at the national level, and began to create groups of all kinds within it. Soon the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were created, and organizations were established in Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Saarland, and the Free City of Danzig. The SS was established as a subdivision of the SA; its members were required to swear a special loyalty oath to Hitler and soon distinguished themselves as being more trustworthy than the rude "brownshirts." Hitler placed himself at the head of the Nazi hierarchy, under the title of "Supreme Leader of the Party and the SA, Chairman of the National Socialist German Workers' Organization." In addition, he created the "Reich Directorate", made up of the main Nazi hierarchs. One of the goals of creating this vast and complex structure was the formation of "a state within a state"; this way, when the Nazis finally came to power, Hitler could destroy the republican structure in no time, and replace it. by the structure of his Party.

Determined to turn his party into a relevant national force, Hitler called Gregor Strasser and proposed organizing the movement in northern Germany. Strasser's personality competed with Hitler's, and the idea of working with Independence in Prussia, Saxony, Hanover and the Rhineland pleased him, so he dedicated himself to this task together with his brother Otto Strasser and a young secretary named Joseph Goebbels. However, Strasser's independent personality and his firm belief in the socialist element of the National Socialist program earned him the animosity of Hitler. Before long, Strasser would become the most serious threat to the latter's leadership, and this would ultimately cost him life.

On November 22, 1925, Strasser held a conference in Hanover, where he supported the expropriation of the assets of the deposed nobility, a measure that was soon to be consulted in a plebiscite. In this way, the Nazi organization from the north, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Gauleiter Nord-West, joined the Marxists in the election campaign. Hitler counterattacked on February 14, 1926, organizing a conference in Bamberg., where he forced Strasser and Goebbels to retract their program. To complicate Strasser's position, Goebbels abandoned his cause a few days later and joined Hitler. However, this would not be the end of the enmity between Hitler and Strasser.

After this encounter, Hitler's party became even more centralized, and the so-called Führerprinzip ("Leader's Principle") was finally entrenched in the party organization. Under this system, leaders would not be chosen by their group, but rather appointed by their superiors, with full responsibility delegated to them, while demanding the same unquestioning obedience from their subordinates. According to Hitler, all power and authority had to be delegated from the top down.

Rise to power

Main article: Ascense to the power of Adolf Hitler

Rise Through the Depression

Nazi party meeting in 1930.

The Great Depression brought new times for the German revolutionary. For years Hitler had predicted that it would come and as several banks went bankrupt and millions lost their jobs, he declared his satisfaction, because he understood that the moment was opportune for his revolutionary speech:

Never in my life have I been more willing and internally presto to the struggle than these days. Because the harsh reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans to the unparalleled scams, lies and betrayals of the Marxists deceivers of the people.
About the Great Depression.

A key element of Hitler's speech was his ability to revive a sense of national pride, weakened in World War I and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. After these events, Germany had lost economic importance in Europe, along with all its colonies, and had also incurred a heavy debt by accepting responsibility for the war. Hitler promised to repudiate the Treaty of Versailles, suspend severance payments, create jobs, fight corruption, and control the rich. Subtly, the Nazis also began to associate Jews with communists and corrupt businessmen, reviving longstanding anti-Semitic sentiments..

Hitler poses for the camera.

The economic instability of the Great Depression soon spilled over into politics, benefiting Hitler. In March 1930, Heinrich Brüning was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg, as the outgoing Chancellor was unable to secure a parliamentary majority to govern. Brüning did not succeed either, but he remained in power thanks to Hindenburg's presidential decrees. In this way, the will of the chancellor was subject to that of the president, and the will of the German Parliament was relegated to the background. However, Brüning was a democrat, and proceeded to call new elections, hoping to obtain the necessary parliamentary majority to be able to govern without Hindenburg's approval. Ironically, the 1930 parliamentary elections did not contribute to strengthening democracy, since they would make the Nazi Party the second political force in Germany and the Communist Party the third.

After gaining popular support, Hitler proceeded to seek support from the Army. Hitler's nationalist discourse made an impression on young officers; and a week after the elections, during a trial against three officers who had promoted Nazi ideology in the Army, Hitler was called to testify and took advantage of this opportunity to try to win the support of the military, assuring that he would "revenge" the Revolution of November and that it would eliminate the limits imposed on the German Army in the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's relative electoral success also attracted the attention of German businessmen. From 1931, Walther Funk began to introduce powerful industrialists to Hitler; In addition, several companies began to finance him, among which the Allianz insurance company stands out. However, most German companies refused to support the future dictator.

Intrigues of Schleicher and Papen

Election ballot for the 1932 German presidential elections.

As the leader of the second political force in Parliament, Hitler was soon included in the plans of the rulers of the Weimar Republic. In late 1931 he met with Chancellor Brüning and President Hindenburg, but both were unable to to reach a political agreement with him. It was after this first meeting that Hindenburg asserted that:

...the "Bohemian Cabo" was a curious character that could become a post office minister, but certainly not a Chancellor.
Hindenburg about Hitler.

On January 7, 1932, Brüning met Hitler again, and tried to persuade him to approve the postponement of the 1932 presidential election. The elderly Hindenburg did not want to run for re-election, and it appeared that Hitler he would become president in the absence of other weighty candidates; if Hitler accepted the postponement of the elections until Hindenburg's natural death, Chancellor Brüning would then request the restoration of the German monarchy, albeit under a system of government similar to the British one. Hitler realized that this measure would not benefit him, and after making a series of demands that were immediately rejected by Hindenburg, he refused to support Brüning's plan. In this way, Hindenburg was forced to aspire to a second term to avoid a Hitlerite triumph.

On February 25, Hitler finally decided to become a German citizen, and immediately put forward his candidacy, in opposition to Hindenburg's. Despite Hitler's impressive election campaign, Hindenburg easily won these elections, leading him by more than 16 percentage points. The Austrian candidate had doubled his party's votes in two years, but seemed incapable of seizing power through votes without compromising politically with Hindenburg. It was in this year that the animosity between Strasser and Hitler rose again; despite his defeat at Bamberg in 1926, Gregor Strasser had remained an important leader of the Nazi Party, and was more accepted by Parliament and the President than Hitler. Due to his political talents, Hitler kept him in his closest circle of advisers, and along with Goebbels, Göring, Frick and Röhm, he was in the highest echelon of the Party by 1932. However, Strasser began to criticize Hitler's intolerant stance., who refused to share a government with Hindenburg's men.

Fascist greeting, April 1932

After this electoral defeat, the "brown shirts", which already outnumbered the Army, were banned. It was at this time that General Kurt von Schleicher, the architect of Brüning's rise, began to conspire to bring about his downfall. Schleicher contacted Hitler through Röhm; to the latter he offered to legalize the SA again, with plans to later annex them to the Army.On the other hand, he offered Hitler the call for new parliamentary elections, in exchange for supporting a new government. As a former friend of Hindenburg's, Schleicher managed to convince him to force Brüning's resignation, and later persuaded him to appoint Franz von Papen chancellor. In the new parliamentary elections of 1932, the Nazi Party became the first political force in Parliament, but it did not reach the necessary majority to govern. With these results, Hitler refused to support Papen, and claimed the Chancellorship for himself, again refusing to share power with the Hindenburg and Schleicher faction. With this new failure, the Strasser current in the Nazi Party strengthened, and Hitler's political leadership began to be publicly criticized by him.

Like his predecessor, the new chancellor, he proved unable to win a parliamentary majority, and Papen then called new elections, the third in 1932. Although in these elections the Nazis continued to be the leading political force, they lost votes, and Hitler was even further away from reaching a majority in Parliament. However, this did not change his strategy, since the Austrian politician continued to demand the Chancellorship for himself, rejecting the offer of the Vice-Chancellorship that Hindenburg extended to him. For his part, Schleicher began to plan the fall of Papen, and convinced Hindenburg that if he appointed him chancellor he would manage to divide the Nazi Party by separating Strasser. Hindenburg agreed on December 2, 1932, however Schleicher's rule was brief, as Hitler would succeed him in less than two months.

At this point it was clear that even before the Nazis' rise to power, power no longer resided with the people or the democratically elected Parliament, but with President Hindenburg, who was very old and prone to manipulation by the cabal that surrounded him. This was obvious to Hitler, and so when Papen approached him a few days after leaving the Chancellery, he decided to make a deal with him, as the former chancellor still had the President's confidence. This alliance came at an opportune time for Hitler, since the Nazi Party was bankrupt, and the most radical supporters were leaving the ranks to join the Communist Party. To complicate the situation, Schleicher had launched his plan to divide the Nazis, offering Strasser the Vice Chancellorship, and although Strasser had not accepted, he did have a heated discussion with Hitler, after which he resigned all his posts and sent his version of the story to the newspapers, threatening to wipe out the Party. This was the most serious threat against the Nazi movement since 1925, and Hitler threatened to commit suicide:

If the game fell to pieces, I'll put an end to everything in three minutes with a shot.
About Strasser's threat.

Strasser had control over a significant part of the Nazi structure, but at the critical moment he decided to travel to Italy for a vacation, hoping that Hitler would call him back. The future dictator not only did not call him, but took advantage of his absence to remove all his sympathizers from important positions in the party, and in his place he appointed his most faithful supporters. Then he summoned all the Nazi leaders to Berlin, where he took an oath of personal allegiance from them. Four days after Strasser's departure, Hitler had finally taken control of the entire political structure of the party.

Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, January 30, 1933.

On January 4, 1933, Hitler met with Papen, where they agreed to form a coalition in case the latter managed to convince Hindenburg to make the National Socialist leader chancellor. On January 22, Hitler had another meeting with Otto Meissner and with Oskar von Hindenburg, Secretary and son of the president respectively, getting their support. On January 28, after spending several days trying to get support from any political force without success, Chancellor Schleicher submitted his resignation to Hindenburg. The aging president immediately sought the advice of Papen, who assured him that he could form a government with Hitler, where the Nazis would be in the minority and under control.

Finally, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. Conservative politicians such as Papen, and wealthy industrialists such as Emil Kirdorf, thought that he would control the German revolutionary and make him work for the better. their interests, but in a few weeks Hitler would prove to be more capable than these, and during his rule, many of those who helped him in his race to power would end up being executed, confined in concentration camps or fleeing into exile for their lives..

Establishment of the dictatorship

Hitler with his first cabinet, January 31, 1933. Mainly made up of conservatives who wanted to control Hitler, they were very soon subjugated. (To the front: Hermann Göring and Franz von Papen to the left)

With his rise to power, Hitler was far from secure, the same forces that had led to the resignation of the last three chancellors were still in force, and therefore Hitler had to deal with President Hindenburg and his cabal., who in turn was supported by the Army and by his own cabinet of ministers, controlled by conservatives and industrialists, where the Nazis were a minority. In addition, the Nazi Party had expectations of 4 million brownshirts who, led by Ernst Röhm, they made no secret of their disdain for the fact that so many conservative elements shared government with Hitler. Additionally, there were the opposition political forces in Parliament, social democrats and communists, who controlled various regional governments; although, despite their aversion for Nazism, they were never able to approach each other to form a common front against it.

The Reichstag fire and the enabling law

Main articles: Reichstag Fire, Reichstag Fire Decree, 1933 German parliamentary elections and Enabling Act 1933.

With only 34% of Parliament under his control, Hitler still had to turn to the "Old Gentleman", President Hindenburg, to get his laws passed. Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, who enjoyed Hindenburg's support, was certain that "in two months we will have cornered Hitler so much that he will start screaming". Papen was not the only one who underestimated Hitler, the press in general followed this same line of thought:

The composition of the cabinet does not leave Herr Hitler the least possibility of filling his dictatorial ambitions.
The New York Times, 31 January 1933

Aware of his situation, Hitler initially concealed his revolutionary plans, avoiding alarming the common citizen as much as possible in his first speeches. However, he immediately began working to acquire more power; after sabotaging talks with the Center Party, Hitler informed his cabinet that new elections were necessary.To the protests of Hugenberg and Papen, Hitler calmed them down by assuring them that he would not change the composition of the cabinet regardless of the outcome. For the campaign of the new parliamentary elections, set for March 5, Hitler was able to make use of State resources; in addition, he had the support of an important group of industrialists; who, after Hermann Göring assured them that they would probably be the last elections "in the next hundred years", donated three million period marks for the Nazi cause. Additionally, days before, Hitler had had a dinner with various leaders from army; despite his call for the rearmament of Germany, the results were mixed, with few senior officers having democratic sentiments and many wanting a military dictatorship but distrusting the Nazis.

Not content with having plenty of resources to campaign, Hitler began to put obstacles in the way of opposition parties. Through presidential decrees, he imposed restrictions on political rallies and restrictions on the press.In addition, he consolidated the authority of a regional parallel government in Prussia, and placed Göring in command of the state police. Soon after, the Prussian police with the help of the "brown shirts" began to break up the opposition rallies; only the most deluded opponents turned to the police when harassed by the Nazis. Soon, seven more regional governments of smaller states were usurped by the Nazis, who established parallel authorities.

The Reichstag fire allowed Hitler to accelerate his plans of persecution against his opponents, accusing them of being a coup.

On February 27, 1933, a week before the elections, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Although there are still doubts about the authorship of the arson, it is clear that Hitler profited greatly from this crime. After the police caught a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene of the crime, Göring began to accuse Hitler. the communists of wanting to carry out a coup, and the Nazi press soon copied his speech. The next day, Hitler wasted no time in issuing a six-article emergency decree, drafted by Göring, requesting the suspension of various articles of the Weimar Constitution in order to "protect German cultural documents". the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree ended all the rights that democratic nations usually defend: freedom of expression; respect for private property; Press freedom; the inviolability of the home, correspondence and telephone conversations; as well as freedom of assembly and association. In addition, it allowed the national government to intervene in any regional government it deemed incapable of maintaining order in its state. After Papen and Meissner supported the decree, the aging president signed it.

With these powers, Nazi persecution intensified, communist leaders were arrested and sent to concentration camps; In addition, an alert campaign against "communist terror" began from the state media, trying to convince the German citizen that, unless they did not vote for the Nazis, the country would enter a civil war. On the other hand, On the other hand, Hitler moderated his speech, asserted that he only needed four years in power, and downplayed his anti-Semitism in public, as the future post-war president of Germany, Theodor Heuss, put on record:

Vocifera much less. He has stopped vomiting fire against the Jews and in these days he is able to speak a four-hour speech without mentioning the word "Jewish".
Theodor Heuss, on the Hitlerite speech before the 1933 parliamentary elections in Germany.

On March 5, 1933, the last democratic elections were held under Hitler's government. Despite his intense electoral campaign and the persecution of his opponents, the parliamentary majority continued to elude the Nazis, who obtained 44% of the seats. Allied with Hugenberg's nationalists, Hitler now controlled half of Parliament; but in order to carry out his national revolution, the chancellor demanded two-thirds of the seats. To remedy this, and making use of the Reichstag fire decree, all Communist deputies and a few unfortunate Social Democrats were arrested, ignoring the parliamentary immunity they enjoyed.

Hitler "subordinates" before Paul von Hindenburg, opening the new Parliament, March 21, 1933. Two days later, Hitler gets the enabling law that ends the parliamentary government, which makes him in fact a constitutional dictator.

Now Hitler had enough deputies to change the Constitution and wrap himself up with more power; however, he first carried out a symbolic act to reassure the movements represented by President Hindenburg: the military, the junkers , and the monarchists. On March 21, the same date that Bismarck inaugurated the first Parliament of the German Empire, Hitler inaugurated the first Parliament of the Third Reich; He selected the Potsdam Barracks Church, a site of historical importance to Prussian militarists, and Goebbels then strove to create an atmosphere that would give the impression that Hitler was subservient to the aged Hindenburg. The French ambassador, present at the ceremony, wrote after:

After the striking commitment made by Hitler in Potsdam, how could these men—Hindenburg and his friends, the Junkers and the monarchist barons, Hugenberg and his nationalist Germans, the German Army officers—... hesitate to give him his full confidence, to fulfill all his requests, to grant him all the powers he demanded?
André François-Poncet, French ambassador to Germany between 1931 and 1938.

On March 23, 1933, the German Parliament, meeting in the Kroll Opera, passed the Law to Alleviate the Hardships of the People and the Reich, known as the Enabling Act of 1933. Hitler delivered a moderate speech that contrasted with his usual rants. He promised to use his powers only in essential cases, and he compromised with all classes; in addition, he preached for the search for peace with the West and even with the Soviet Union. However, at the end of his presentation, he made it clear that if he did not he obtained these powers legally from Parliament, his government would obtain them through other, more violent methods. Only the Social Democrats voted against Hitler; the Zentrum relented after Hitler promised them that any of his laws could be vetoed by President Hindenburg. In this way, 441 MPs approved the law against 94 Social Democratic MPs.

With this law, Hitler, for a period of four years, seized all the powers of the Legislative Branch, and gained the ability to enact laws that "could deviate from the Constitution." Hindenburg, the law kept the powers of the president intact. In this way, the German Reichstag voluntarily succumbed to the chancellor, acquiring a state of total impotence that it would maintain until the postwar period.

Gleichschaltung

Main article: Gleichschaltung

Germany then entered a process known as Gleichschaltung (coordination), whereby state and society began to be assimilated by the Nazi Party and its organizations. In his desire to unify Germany under a totalitarian central government, Hitler first used the enabling law against German federalism. The governments of the largest states, Prussia and Bavaria, had already been usurped, and the governments of other smaller states soon met the same fate. On March 31, with the help of Wilhelm Frick, Hitler then enacted a law dissolving all regional diets, and ordering their reconstitution under the results of the last national elections. A week later, Hitler appointed governors for each state, and he granted them the power to dissolve diets and dismiss judges. In this way, all regional governments began to follow the directives of Berlin, and Hitler managed to end the zealous autonomy that the historic German states had defended since the War of the Thirty Years (1618-1648).

Hitler and Hindenburg during the May 1, 1933 celebrations.

Hitler's next target was the trade unions, once-powerful labor organizations that had successfully countered a right-wing coup in 1920. But before finishing them off, Hitler and Goebbels, now Minister of Propaganda, first strove to build trust from the working class: after reinstating May 1 as a public holiday; the Nazis organized workers' demonstrations all over the country; Hitler himself spoke at Tempelhof airport in front of one hundred thousand workers, promoting the motto "Honour, work and respect for the worker". The next day, May 2, the government's attitude drastically changed, all unions were dissolved and forcibly 'coordinated' into a single union, the German Labor Front, and their leaders were placed in 'protective custody', a euphemism for concentration camp internment; not even those who had been collaborating with the Nazi regime were spared. Only the Catholic unions were granted a two-month respite, then treated the same. From then on, union representatives were directly chosen by Hitler, and as the contracts signed by them were legally binding, strikes were de facto prohibited.

At this point, the opposition political parties found themselves so defenseless and powerless that they began to bow down to the slightest pressure from the national government; on May 10, all the property of the Social Democratic Party was confiscated, and its newspapers were closed; the Social Democrats responded by electing a new leadership more tolerant of Nazism, but three days later, Wilhelm Frick dissolved the movement as "subversive". Social Democratic leaders ended up accompanying their communist counterparts in the concentration camps. The German People's Party and the German Democratic Party, bastions of German democracy, voluntarily dissolved in early July; The Bavarian People's Party disbanded on 4 July, and its national ally, the Zentrum, did the same the next day. Hitler's right-wing allies, too, could not avoid being "coordinated", on 21 June the police seized all the offices of the German National People's Party, Hugenberg's party; a week later he resigned from his position as Minister of Agriculture, and dissolved the party, also "voluntarily".

With political opposition neutralized, Hitler then proposed to his cabinet to outlaw all parties except the Nazi Party. This cabinet had been modified, highlighted Hjalmar Schacht as the new Minister of Economy, and now had eight Nazis; and although the conservative Franz von Papen remained in the government as vice-chancellor, he was well aware of the futility of his position.The one-party law was passed on July 14, with almost no opposition within the cabinet.

While Hitler strove to "coordinate" German society with the Party, he at the same time worked to keep "inferior" racial elements out of society. On April 1, he called for a boycott of Jewish businesses, in response to a "media campaign" the United States and England had allegedly launched against him. One victim of this period was Albert Einstein, whose assets and property were later seized. of a bread knife found in his new summer home being discovered and deemed a "Communist weapon". Although brownshirts were posted outside Jewish businesses, there was generally little violence, and the ineffective measure had to be lifted three days later. The boycott did serve to bring the elderly Hindenburg out of his lethargy, albeit temporarily; the president rebuked the chancellor for the fact that Jewish war veterans were not being treated as German citizens. Hitler made a vague promise to calm him down, but on April 7 he enacted laws prohibiting the presence of Jews in public administration, and restricted their presence in law and medicine. He then limited the number of Jewish students in universities, under the pretext of preventing "overcrowding". However, the 1933 measures were not considered dangerous by many Jews, who believed that Hitler's aim was limited to harassing Jews from Eastern Europe.

The purge of the “brownshirts”

Chart showing the marking system in the Nazi concentration camps.

In a short time, he managed to establish himself in power, holding the posts of Chancellor and President of the Republic on the death of Hindenburg (August 2, 1934), naming himself Führer. He eliminated opponents of his own party and collaborators of dubious fidelity during the so-called "Night of the Long Knives", beginning the process of eliminating various racial, political, social and religious groups that he considered "enemies of Germany" and "impure races". », which led him to reassign the guidelines to the concentration camps for the systematic liquidation of communists, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses (Bibelforscher), gypsies, the mentally ill and homosexuals, mainly, as well as an intense rearmament.

Factories and factories began to work on the rearmament machinery. In addition, to absorb unemployed labor, modern autobahns or highways began to be built.

Third Reich

Main article: Nazi Germany

Having gained the political power he needed, Hitler went on to garner support and convince most Germans that he was their savior in the face of Great Depression-derived economics, communism, "Judeo-Bolshevism," and the Treaty of Versailles, along with other "undesirable" minorities. The Nazis eliminated opposition through a process known as the Gleichschaltung.

Economy and culture

Ceremony in honor of the fallen (Totenehrung(September 1934)

Hitler was in charge of one of the greatest expansions of industrial production and civil improvement ever seen in Germany, mostly on the basis of debt floating and rearmament. During a National Socialist Women's Organization (NSF) speech in September 1934, Adolf Hitler argued that for the German woman her world was "her husband, her family, her children, and her home." she".

This policy was reinforced by establishing the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, together with financial incentives for women who had four or more children. The unemployment rate was substantially reduced, mostly through the production of weapons, construction of civil works (Todt Organization) and sending women home so that men could take their jobs. In view of this, it was even claimed that the German economy succeeded in employing everyone, at least according to the propaganda of the time. Much of the funding for reconstruction and rearmament came from Hjalmar Schacht's manipulation of the currency, including credits through mefo accounts. The negative effects of this inflation were offset during the following years by the acquisition of gold from the treasuries of the annexed nations.

Hitler was also in charge of one of the largest infrastructure improvement campaigns in German history, building dozens of dams, highways, railways, and other civil works. Hitler insisted on the importance of family life: men should be the 'breadwinners', while women's priorities should be raising children and doing housework. This revitalization of industry and infrastructure came at the expense of the general standard of living, at least for those unaffected by chronic unemployment after the Weimar Republic, as wages fell slightly during World War II and Average cost of living increased by 25%. The workers and farmers, the frequent voters of the NSDAP, however, registered an increase in their standard of living.

Hitler parades at the Berlin Olympic Stadium together with members of the International Olympic Committee.

Hitler's government sponsored architecture on an immense scale, along with Albert Speer who would become the famous "Reich Architect." While as an architect he was important in the classicist application and reinterpretation of German culture, Speer proved much more effective as armaments minister in the closing years of World War II. All of these advances were widely exploited by the Ministry of Propaganda led by Goebbels.

In 1936, Berlin hosted the Summer Olympic Games, which were inaugurated and led by Hitler as a way of demonstrating Aryan German superiority over all other races. Olympia, the film about the games and other documentary propaganda films for the Nazi party were directed by Hitler's personal filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Although Hitler made plans for a Breitspurbahn (a large gauge railway network) these were canceled after the start of World War II. Had the railway been built, its gauge would have been 3 metres, making it even wider than Britain's Great Western Railway.

Hitler also helped design an accessible and practical car for the people, a car that would later become the Volkswagen Type 1, designed and built by engineer Ferdinand Porsche. The production of this was also postponed because of the war.

Hitler regarded ancient Sparta as the first national socialist state, and praised its eugenic treatment of deformed children.

He also awarded the Order of the German Eagle, one of the Third Reich's highest distinctions, to industrialist Emil Kirdorf in April 1937, as a reward for his financial support during his rise to power. The following year, when he died, he also arranged a state funeral for her.

Rearmament and new alliances

Main articles: Powers of Axis and Tripartite Covenant.

Hitler and Mussolini.

Although it is speculated that since 1919, a secret program to reassemble an army was maintained by the German government, it is in March 1934, when Hitler publicly announces that the German Army would be expanded to 600,000 men (six times the number stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles), as well as the introduction of an Air Force (Luftwaffe) and the increase in the size of the Navy (Kriegsmarine). Great Britain, France and Italy, as well as the League of Nations, quickly condemned these actions. However, since Germany again explained that it was only interested in peace, no country took any action to stop this development and the German arms program was allowed to continue. In addition, the United Kingdom did not share France's pessimistic view of Germany, and in 1935 it signed a naval agreement with Germany, which allowed German tonnage to be increased to 35% of that of the British navy. This agreement, which was signed without consulting either France or Italy, directly weakened the League of Nations and set the Treaty of Versailles on the road to irrelevance.

In March 1936, the provisions of the German government again violated the treaty by introducing troops and reoccupying the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. Given the inaction of the governments of Great Britain and France, the expansionist eagerness of Germany spread. In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War began when the army, led by General Francisco Franco, rose up against the government of the Republic. After receiving a plea for help from General Franco in July 1936, Hitler sent troops in support of Franco, and Spain served as a test bed for the new German forces and their methods, including the bombing of cities, such as Guernica, in April 1937, the first bombardment against civilian targets in history, and which, later, Pablo Picasso captured in his famous painting.

Count Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini's foreign minister, declared an alliance between Berlin and Rome on October 25, 1936, which he called "The Axis." On November 25 of the same year, Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. To strengthen the relationship with this nation, Hitler met in 1937 in Nuremberg with Prince Chichibu, brother of Emperor Hirohito.

The Tripartite Pact was signed by Saburo Kurusu on behalf of the Japanese Empire, Adolf Hitler for Germany, and Galeazzo Ciano on September 27, 1940. It was later expanded to include Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. This group became known as the Axis Powers. Later, on November 5, 1939, in the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler held a secret meeting with the War and Foreign Ministers, plus the three heads of services, recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum and revealed his plans for the appropriation of "living space" (Lebensraum) for the German people.

World War II

Early Wins

On March 12, 1938, Hitler pressed Austria for unification with Germany (the Anschluss) and made a triumphant entry into Vienna on March 14. This was followed by the escalation of the Sudetenland crisis, in the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland; This led to the Munich Accords of September 1938, which authorized the annexation and immediate military occupation of these territories by Germany. As a result of the summit, TIME magazine proclaimed Hitler "Man of the Year" for 1938. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hailed this agreement as "peace in our time," but by In line with Hitler's military demands, Britain and France also abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Hitler ordered the German Army to enter Prague on March 15, 1939, taking Prague and Bohemian Castle and proclaiming a German protectorate in Moravia.

Hitler salutes the German troops heading to Poland.

After this, Hitler raises complaints regarding the Free City of Danzig and the Polish corridor (the Danzig Crisis), which had been ceded by Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. Great Britain had been unable to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for an alliance against Germany, and on August 23, 1939, Hitler signed a secret non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) with Stalin agreeing to the future partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. After having guaranteed assistance to Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, but did not act immediately. Not long after, on September 17, Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland.

Hitler in Yugoslavia.

In April 1940, he orders German forces to march on Denmark and Norway. In May 1940, Hitler orders his forces to attack France, conquer the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium. France surrendered on June 22, 1940. This series of victories persuaded his main ally, Benito Mussolini of Italy, to join the war on Hitler's side in May 1940.

Britain, whose defeated French forces were evacuated from the coastal city of Dunkirk, continued to fight alongside Canadian forces in the Battle of the Atlantic. After his efforts for peace were systematically rejected by the British government, now led by Winston Churchill, Hitler orders bombing raids on the British Isles, leading to the Battle of Britain, a prelude to the planned German invasion. Attacks began to hit Royal Air Force bases and radar stations protecting south-east England. However, the Luftwaffe did not defeat the British Royal Air Force in late October 1940. Air superiority for the invasion, dubbed Operation Sealion, was not assured, and Hitler ordered several bombing raids to be carried out on British cities, including London and Coventry, mostly at night.

The Fall

On June 22, 1941, still without subduing England, three million German soldiers attacked the Soviet Union, breaking the non-aggression pact that Hitler had signed with Stalin two years earlier. This invasion, called Operation Barbarossa, which was estimated to last a few months, seized large amounts of territory, including the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine. They also surrounded and destroyed many Soviet forces. But the Germans, due to a four-month delay due to operations in Greece and Yugoslavia, failed to reach Moscow in December 1941, which was also influenced by the early arrival of the Russian winter with temperatures as low as -50 °C (the coldest). hard in 50 years), all this together with the fierce Soviet resistance, reinforced with Siberian troops of the then General Zhúkov specially adapted to the extreme conditions. The invasion had not achieved the quick victory that Hitler wanted.

Hitler giving a speech against Roosevelt, December 11, 1941.

Hitler signed the declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, four days after the Empire of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, many historians consider this step a serious tactical and political error, since he managed to gather thus against him a coalition that included the world's largest empire (the British Empire), the world's largest industrial and financial empire (the United States), and the world's largest army (the Soviet Union).

In late 1942, German forces were defeated at the Second Battle of El Alamein, thwarting Hitler's plans to seize the Suez Canal and the Middle East. In February 1943, the titanic Battle of Stalingrad ended with the encirclement and destruction of the German 6th Army. Soon after came the gigantic Battle of Kursk (1,300,000 Soviets, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces, and 2,400 aircraft, versus 900,000 Germans, 2,700 tanks, 2,000 aircraft).

Since Stalingrad, Hitler's military plan became increasingly erratic, the Russians began to advance forcing the withdrawal of exhausted German forces, and the internal economic situation in Germany deteriorated.

After the Allied invasion of Italy (Operation Husky) in 1943, Hitler's ally Mussolini was deposed by Pietro Badoglio, who surrendered to the Allies. Throughout 1943 and 1944, the Soviet Union constantly forced Hitler's armies back along the Eastern Front. On June 6, 1944, the Western Allied armies landed in northern France in Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious military operation ever conducted.

Hitler shows Benito Mussolini the state in which the room remained in which he carried out the attack on 20 July 1944.

In the German Army, the more realistic knew that defeat was inevitable, and some officers came up with a plan to finish off Hitler and end the war. In July 1944, one of them, Marshal Erwin Rommel's former artillery observation officer Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb at Hitler's headquarters in Rastenburg, the so-called Wolfsschanze or Wolf's Lair, but without achieving its objective, in one of the attacks against Hitler that was closest to success.

The repression was relentless and led to the arrest of some 5,000 people, including the entire families of the main individuals involved. The detainees were tortured and subjected to quick show trials, held starting on August 7, which they resulted in the execution of some two hundred of the accused. The main resistance movement was destroyed, although small isolated groups continued to function. The list of characters who fell is extensive and we can mention Wilhem Canaris, Friedrich Fromm and Erwin Rommel, among others.

The assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 left him progressive scars that slowly affected his reasoning, development, and control of the situation.

Hitler also experienced a decline in his health. His left hand trembled; biographer Ian Kershaw and others believe he may have Parkinson's disease. It has also been suspected, due to some of his symptoms, that he may have suffered from syphilis, although the evidence in favor of this is minimal.

Last days

Hitler returned for the last time to Berlin on January 15, 1945, on a special train from Ziegenberg, a town near Bad Nauheim, where from his headquarters known as "Adlerhorst" or "Eagle's Nest" he had directed from on December 11, 1944 the failed Ardennes offensive. His main concern now was the Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front and the immediate reason for his trip was Guderian's radical opposition to his decision to transfer the Grossdeutschland division from East Prussia to the south to reinforce the defense of the Polish front. With his usual distrust of Wehrmacht generals he decided that he should be closer to Zossen's General Staff.

On January 30, on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of his rise to power, he addressed a few words to the German people for the last time in a radio address that, despite Goebbels's optimism, made it possible to verify that his words were no longer able to raise the eyebrows. morale of the population given the evidence of the desperateness of the situation. to which Hitler limited himself to replying that he did not like receiving defeatist reports and to keep it a complete secret. the old Reich Chancellery and severely damaged the new Speer building, forcing Hitler to live almost permanently underground ever since, in an underground bunker. two-story errand located under the garden of the Chancery in which he already slept since his return.

The February 12 communiqué of the Yalta conference, which included the harsh conditions imposed by the Allies on Germany after its defeat, including the division of the country, the banning of the Nazi Party and the prosecution of the criminals of war, did nothing but reaffirm his position that any kind of surrender was out of the question. His hopes were pinned on what he considered inevitable at one point or another: the break of the Western allies, British and American, with the Soviets. The following day Hitler reacted with fury upon learning of the bombing of Dresden and it took the joint insistence of Keitel, Jodl, Dönitz and Ribbentrop to convince him that his initial intention to execute one Allied prisoner for every civilian killed would be counterproductive.

On February 24, he held his last meeting with the Gauleiters on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his speech presenting the party program. He was in very poor physical condition, with difficulties controlling the tremors in his left arm and spoke sitting down for an hour and a half in which he recalled the "heroic" time of the party and, among evocations of his past triumphs, affirmed that he was the only that he could judge the course that the decisive phase of the war would take. He could add little more than allude to the miraculous weapons that were being developed before recalling his theses, in the style of the most implacable social Darwinism, that if the war was lost it would be because, after all, the German people did not have the necessary "inner courage" and he would feel no sympathy for her destruction. The forced absences of Erich Koch (East Prussia) and Karl Hanke (Breslau) were a reflection of the real situation, so his speech could not dispel pessimism even among the stalwarts of the old guard, although there was no shortage of those like Rudolf Jordan, the Gauleiter, from Magdeburg-Anhalt, felt revived, believing they were seeing the "old Hitler". The occasion was limited to a proclamation whose reading was commissioned by Hermann Esser and which became the last one he addressed to the Germans.

Wedding to Eva Braun and will

Adolf Hitler with Eva Braun at the Berghof, the residence of Führer in the Bavarian Alps.

In the early hours of April 29, 1945, shortly after midnight, Hitler married Eva Braun in the map room of the Chancellery bunker. The ceremony was officiated by Walter Wagner, a municipal official, and in addition to the spouses, only Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann were present as witnesses. The ceremony was very brief and at its end the newlyweds retired to their rooms, where a party was organized that lasted several hours, during which their secretary Traudl Junge typed in an adjoining room the private and political testaments that Hitler he had dictated to him around half past eleven. The latest reports confirmed the advance of the Soviet troops to areas just a few hundred meters from the Chancellery, fighting was already taking place at Potsdamer Platz and the last illusory hopes that the Walther Wenck's army could break the encirclement.

In his private will, naming Martin Bormann as executor, Hitler explains his decision to marry Eva Braun, their willingness to die and be cremated to escape the shame of defeat, and bequeaths their possessions to the Party, or to the State if it ceased to exist, with the exception of his collection of paintings, whose destination would be a new museum in Linz, and personal memorabilia or even goods that, in Bormann's opinion, were necessary for the maintenance of the servants or relatives who had served him loyally.

His political testament is longer, with a first part in which he reiterates his traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric accusing the Jews of causing the outbreak of war and recalling his prophecy that in that case millions of Aryans would not die but the real culprits, in what seems like a transparent allusion to the final solution. He believes that one day that six-year fight would end up being considered a glorious moment and seems to blame the defeat on his old antagonists, the Army officers (not the Navy officers), for their lack of courage and fidelity. In the second part, he goes on to name a new government and begins by expelling Hermann Göring from the party and removing all his posts, whom he accused of disloyalty for trying to succeed him and take power prematurely, and Heinrich Himmler, for negotiating behind his back with the government. enemy. Instead of Göring he chose to succeed Karl Dönitz, recovering for him the position of Reich President that Hindenburg had held. He rewarded the fidelity of Joseph Goebbels with the appointment of chancellor, replaced Joachim von Ribbentrop as foreign minister with Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Himmler as Reichsführer-SS with Karl Hanke and placed General Ferdinand Schörner at the head of the Army. Both documents were finished around four in the morning, the time at which the signatures of Goebbels, Bormann, Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs are recorded in the political testament, while for the private Nicolaus von Below he added his own to those of Goebbels and Bormann. About noon, emissaries left with copies of the documents to different destinations: a copy of the political testament was entrusted to Hitler's assistant, Willi Johannmeier, to be delivered to General Schörner, and they had to carry copies of both testaments Wilhelm Zander, Bormann's deputy, to Dönitz and Heinz Lorenz, an official of the Ministry of Propaganda, who also carried an "Appendix to the political testament of the Führer" written by Goebbel s that he had to send to the Casa Parda, the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Munich. Due to different circumstances, none of the messengers managed to complete their mission.

Suicide

Main article: Death of Adolf Hitler

Hitler and Karl Dönitz at the Fuehrerbunker. Dönitz would succeed Hitler as President of Germany.

On April 29, Hitler began making final preparations for his suicide. Although he had already learned of the death of Benito Mussolini, hung upside down that same day along with his lover Clara Petacci in a Milan gas station where their corpses suffered all kinds of mistreatment, it is not certain that he knew the details and there is no basis for the claim. thesis that they influenced him beyond reinforcing a decision already made. In the afternoon, before the daily briefing with his generals, he had his dog Blondi killed. Hitler had already provided ampoules of prussic acid, supplied by his doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger, to his secretaries and other members of the bunker staff and decided to try them on Blondi, for which he called in his former surgeon, Professor Werner Haase, who poisoned the animal helped by Fritz Tornow, the sergeant in charge of caring for the Führer's dogs who had already shot dead the other two that belonged to him. Hitler did not witness the poisoning, but went to contemplate for a few moments and in silence the corpse of the animal.

Around noon on April 30, he informed Martin Bormann of his final decision to commit suicide and gave his assistant Otto Günsche strict instructions about the cremation of his body and that of his wife, as he said he did not want them to be exhibited in the « Moscow wax museum. Günsche immediately ordered Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kempka, to get some two hundred liters of gasoline and have it delivered to the Chancellery garden. Afterwards, and as usual around one o'clock, Hitler had lunch with apparent calm in the company of his secretaries, Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, and his cook Constanze Manziarly. After eating, Hitler retired to his rooms and returned shortly after accompanied by Eva Braun for one last farewell ceremony. Present there were Martin Borman, Joseph Goebbels, Wilhelm Burgdorf, Hans Krebs, Otto Günsche, Walther Hewel, Peter Högl, Heinz Linge, Werner Naumann, Johann Rattenhuber and Erich Voss, as well as Magda Goebbels, Else Krüger and the other three women attending the food. Hitler dedicated only a few words to them and, after shaking hands with everyone, returned to his study, from where he only left again to visit Magda Goebbels who, anguished about her future and that of her children, probably asked him to reconsider his decision not to leave Berlin. After the conversation, shortly before 3:30 p.m., he locked himself in his office for the last time, accompanied almost immediately by Eva Braun.

The entire group, joined at the last moment by Artur Axmann, stood by while Günsche stood guard outside the room, and after about ten minutes without a sound, it was Linge who took over. to open the door being accompanied by Bormann. They found Hitler and Eva Braun sitting on the sofa in the office; she was lying to her left, giving off the characteristic bitter almond smell of prussic acid and with a revolver by her side that she never used, while Hitler had at his feet the 7.65 mm Walther PPK pistol with which he had fired a shot in the right temple from which the blood continued to flow.

U.S. military newspaper cover The Stars and Stripes dated 2 May 1945.

Confirmed the deaths of both, their corpses were wrapped in blankets provided by Linge and it was also he himself, with the help of three members of the SS, who took charge of transporting Hitler's body to the Chancellery gardens, for which it was necessary to climb a flight of stairs of about seven and a half meters. For his part, Bormann took out the body of Eva Braun and handed it over to Kempka in the hallway, who in turn handed it over to Günsche to carry up the stairs.

In the midst of the incessant Soviet bombardment, Günsche placed the bodies, Eva Braun to Hitler's right, on the flat ground of the garden about three meters from the exit door of the bunker and, after pouring on them the gasoline provided by Kempka managed to light the pyre with the help of Linge and Bormann. The door was quickly closed and the group, completed by Krebs, Burgdorf and Goebbels, descended to the safety of the bunker after raising their arms in a brief "Heil Hitler" salute.

About half an hour later, Günsche ordered two members of Hitler's personal guard, Ewald Lindloff and Hans Reisser, to take charge of burying the bodies. Lindloff did so in one of the bomb craters that had formed in the garden, where the remains of other victims from the hospital that had been set up in the Chancellery were already being deposited, and declared that the corpses were "completely consumed" and in a "terrible state", most likely also damaged and subsequently dispersed by the effect of the bombardment that would continue for another day. Two other guards outside the compound, Hermann Karnau and Erich Mansfeld, confirmed that the bodies were "charred, shrunken and unrecognizable". At half past six in the evening Günsche confirmed to Reisser that Lindloff had already completed the task and his help was not needed.

A conference attended by Bormann, Goebbels, Krebs, Burgdorf, Axmann and probably also General Wilhelm Mohnke followed, at which it was decided to send Krebs, who spoke Russian as a former military attaché in Moscow, to try to meet with Gueorgui Zhukov and hand him a letter signed by Bormann and Goebbels informing him of Hitler's death and discussing the terms of an armistice or surrender. Krebs left the bunker at 10:00 p.m. and received only one reply. definitive at six in the morning in which Zhukov demanded an unconditional surrender that had to be announced that same day.

It was not until 10:53 in the morning of May 1 that Admiral Karl Dönitz received the first news of this and of Hitler's death in Plön in a misleading telegram written by Bormann: «Testament in force. I will get there as soon as possible. Until then, I think it's better to postpone publication. Bormann». At 3:18 p.m. another more explicit telegram, the last one sent from the bunker and dictated by Goebbels, confirmed Hitler's death without specifying that it had been a suicide, announced his appointment as president and advanced the list of some other ministers., although Dönitz finally ignored it, among other things because he never received the will with the complete list.

The public announcement was delayed a few hours until at 9:30 p.m. Radio Hamburg announced important news and at 10:26 p.m. Dönitz himself announced his appointment and the death of the Führer "this afternoon" fighting "at the head of his troops" against Bolshevism. Dönitz knew that he had died the day before and, although he had assumed that it had been a suicide, he tried to hide it to avoid the possible reaction of some troops who could have felt abandoned by the leader to whom they had sworn allegiance. Helmuth Weidling, at the forefront of the defense of Berlin, did communicate this to his men on May 2, precisely to convince them to stop fighting. In addition, Dönitz wanted to postpone full capitulation to allow the armies desperately trying to escape to continue the fight. of the Red Army and surrender to the Western Allies, but had no objection to accepting further partial capitulations on May 2 in Italy; on May 4 in northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark; on May 5 in the north of the Alps and on the 7th in Austria.

The fate of the corpse and the versions of the Soviets

Hitler's photograph manipulated by the United States Army to facilitate a possible identification of a Hitler with a modified physical appearance.

In large part because of the different versions given by the Soviets, and their refusal to collaborate with the Western Allies' investigations into the end of Hitler and the fate of his corpse, his death was long in doubt., creating all sorts of myths. On May 2, the Soviets seized the Chancellery and immediately began the search for Hitler's body, which had been entrusted to a special NKVD detachment that arrived in Berlin on April 29. As They had already located his remains very late on May 9, since that day they showed a cigar box containing a jawbone and two dental bridges to Fritz Etchmann, a dental mechanic who had worked for Johann Hugo Blaschke, Hitler's dentist since 1938. Etchmann identified the bridges as belonging to Hitler and Eva Braun.

Thus, by early May 1945 the Soviets had already found and identified at least some of the remains of Hitler's corpse. Furthermore, they had not only been informed of Hitler's suicide on the same night of 30 May April by General Hans Krebs, but throughout the following month they also tracked down and questioned many of the other direct witnesses to the events that occurred in the bunker in the last days of April, including Günsche and Linge, who had taken prisoners.

Although the Soviets did not publish any official statement on the matter during that time, on June 5, during a meeting held in Berlin, they assured members of Eisenhower's General Staff that they had identified Hitler's remains with almost absolute certainty. However, on June 9, his attitude had already changed radically and, during a press conference, Zhukov denied that the remains had been identified and speculated that Hitler had escaped from Berlin by plane at the last moment. The Russian commander in Berlin, Nikolai Berzarin, then said that "in his opinion" he had taken refuge somewhere in Europe, probably in Spain with General Franco. From that moment on, obscurantism became a permanent Soviet attitude and they did not provide any type of information about the case again.

The Russians finally confirmed Hitler's death in 1955, but no very substantial evidence was shown, except for some dental details, which confirmed despite everything that the Russians had the bodies.

Recent versions that emerged in the 1990s from the Russian side confirm that the Soviets (NKVD), after an unsuccessful search in which they even came to speculate on the possibility that a double of Hitler had remained in the Chancellery while he was escaped from Berlin, they finally found the unrecognizable remains of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family and that these, still secretly from General Zhúkov himself, were transported in special boxes to the border, to a military barracks that would later go to be territory of the German Democratic Republic.^{[citation needed]}

These remains remained secretly buried under a garden of said barracks in the city of Magdeburg and only some NKVD authorities knew where they were, until in 1970 they were exhumed, Hitler's skull was extracted and the rest of the corpses were cremated to prevent his grave from being venerated, and the ashes were thrown into the river.

Hitler's skull has not been found, but a part marked Hitler's, the parietal bone of his braincase, is in a Soviet museum. However, in September 2009, archaeologist Nick Bellantoni announced that, after DNA analysis of the remains, the skull fragment was determined to be that of a woman between the ages of 20 and 40.

In May 2018, a group of French scientists verified that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in 1945 in his Berlin bunker with his partner Eva Braun.

"He didn't flee to Argentina on a submarine, he's not on a hidden base in the Antarctic or on the dark side of the moon"
Philippe Charlier

Personality Traits

Main articles: Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler, Religious opinions of Adolf Hitler, Vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler and Sexuality of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler in one of his oratory features.

The great interest aroused by the figure of Hitler is due precisely to the edges of his extraordinary type of personality and his aura of impenetrability. Hitler possessed an extraordinary charisma capable of enveloping not only people, but also the masses, in addition to possessing a highly studied gestural oratory and a remarkable leadership capacity; but whoever has stayed with him would say the same as his minister and architect Albert Speer: "I never got to know him."

Certain psychoanalysts, such as Arno Gruen, start from the premise that Hitler's relationship with his father was dominated by violence. His mother, on the other hand, would have "godified" him. Since his three older brothers had died shortly before Adolf's birth, his mother would always have feared losing her fourth child as well. This strained relationship would have had a determining influence on the development of Hitler's personality: the mother would not have been able to protect the son from punishment by the father, but nevertheless he would have deified him, in a compensatory way, thus using him in a power game against his father. The child would have experienced his mother as weak and despised, just as his father would have perceived her. At the same time, the son would have wanted to protect the mother against the father. This situation would have precipitated the child into certain internal conflicts, which he could only have avoided by alienating himself and his needs. Because of this alienation a very weak identity would have developed. The inner void would have been filled by violent fantasies and superimposed poses. Apart from this interpretation, numerous psychological works deal with Hitler's various psychic illnesses.

Hitler was himself a very self-sufficient and lonely individual. Very few people were part of his personal entourage, including Albert Speer, the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Martin Bormann, Wilhelm Bruckner, Joseph Dietrich, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Schaub, Julius Schreck and the architect Geisler and his personal secretaries. From them he demanded loyalty to all tests and discretion.

Eger, 3 October 1938

According to some historians, Hitler was a vegetarian, although others rule it out, a non-smoker, a teetotaler (a fact also questioned by some historians), an environmentalist, it is said that he promulgated the first laws in history that punished animal abuse, although the truth is that the first laws against animal abuse already come from the Roman Empire. It is said that he did not allow his collaborators to smoke or drink in front of him.

Hitler never visited a bombed-out city, a concentration camp or a hospital^{[citation needed]} (the only exception was to visit the victims of the attack on 20 September July). A faithful example of this aspect is that Hitler refused to see the photos and filming of the executions of those involved in the attack carried out by Claus von Stauffenberg towards his person in 1944.

One of the most relevant characteristics of Hitler's personality was the ability to impress (fascinate), charm, manipulate and subjugate those around him; there were people who could be very strong and confident in their fields of action, but in the presence of Hitler these personalities were diminished and manipulated to the point of servility; for example, Hermann Göring told Finance Minister Schacht that:

Every time I stand in front of the Fuehrer I feel the heart in a fist.

Hitler, was very little inclined to show any emotional trait or show affinity towards someone when taking pictures in the presence of people he trusted and accepted; instead if he showed a very human side in the presence of children, especially when he was visited at the Berghof.

Hitler also showed insensitivity and lack of scruples when it came to getting rid of enemies and/or sacrificing soldiers; the destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad can be cited as an example.

In his very discreet sentimental life, the names of Geli Raubal, María Reiter, Eva Braun, who was his lover, Unity Mitford and Inga Ley are associated. Leni Riefenstahl, one of the most accused at the time, denied having Been Hitler's lover. Hitler was very zealous and did not allow almost anyone to meddle in these issues. Albert Speer in his memoirs pointed out that Hitler showed inconsiderate, oppressive and vexatious treatment to Eva Braun.

Regarding Hitler's sexual orientation, much has been written^{[citation needed]} due to his initial link with Ernst Röhm, but the evidence indicates that Hitler was, without no doubt, heterosexual.

One of Hitler's personal secretaries, Traudl Junge, described the energy emanating from the person of Hitler thus:

When he was present (Hitler), the entire building was buzzing with activity, all ran, the phones sounded, the radiospectators did not cease to send and receive notes of communiqués (...) When he was absent, everything went back to a monotonous normality, Hitler was like a kind of dynam.

Junge described Hitler as having two personalities: one very considerate and affable, and the other very cold, angry and overbearing in the extreme, passionate and calculating.

Junge quotes in his reminiscences:

Hitler was vegetarian, he liked tea and he also did not support heat; he could not smoke in his presence and made his atmospheres cool to no more than 11 °C of temperature. Another aspect is that Hitler liked to hear gossip, as they distracted him from his reality. In addition, Hitler slept very late, at three or four in the morning, and rose too late, between 10:00 and 11:00 hours; the military personnel on the first floor lay at midnight, the last war meeting of each day and rose at seven o'clock.^{[chuckles]required]}

For members close to Hitler, Keitel, Lammers and Bormann, Hitler led by example by paying his own personal costs without devoting any state funds. Hitler's income, ably managed by his personal secretary Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess's successor, came from his royalties for his postage image and for his book Mein Kampf. ^{[citation required]}

Another of Hitler's characteristic traits was his contempt for weakness before and for the enemy, especially Judaism and communism to a second degree, his impulsiveness and obsession with goals no matter what the cost. For example: when Brauchistch asked him for a strategic withdrawal from Moscow, Hitler became angry saying:

You can't take away Moscow, I want Moscow!

An example of his apparent flexibility is when he conceded to Himmler over the deportation of the Dutch to Poland, in favor of increasing the SS contingent first.

Albert Speer came to issue the following comment on the matter:

At the place where there was to be a heart in Hitler's chest, there was a great gap.

When he had to deal with various topics on technical or military aspects, he showed a thorough knowledge of these, surprising his interlocutors.

Hitler was very condescending to those who showed courage and courage in combat; He even designed the Diamond Cross, Swords and Oaks himself for Hans Ulrich Rudel, the famous Stukas pilot.

Self-taught and avid reader

Hitler, profile.

Hitler was self-taught. His detailed knowledge of various subjects had not been acquired systematically or under scientific direction, since he also always had an aversion against universities and university professors, whom he contemptuously called "Profaxe";. He repeatedly expressed his aversion to established science. Following his mentor Dietrich Eckart, Hitler praised the esoteric and occult teachings of authors such as Guido von List or Hanns Hörbiger, who linked certain scientific theses with mythical and mystical elements and who frequently they also integrated nationalist or racist ideas into their works.

Hitler owned more than 16,000 books distributed in three private libraries located in Munich, Berlin and Berchtesgaden, of which some 12,000 have been preserved. Along with practical military literature, such as Heigls Taschenbuch der Tanks (Heigl's Tank Compendium), which accounted for about half of the inventory, Hitler read numerous national-German and anti-Semitic writers such as Paul de Lagarde, Hans F. K. Günther or Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and documented their behavior as a reader with underlining and marginal notes. More than ten percent of the surviving books were represented by right-wing esoterics and the occult, for example works by Carl Ludwig Schleich, Maximilian Riedel or Ernst Schertel.

There is little fiction or belles lettres among the surviving works. Hitler's claim that in prison he would have carried out philosophical studies with Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche deserves to be questioned due to the lack of these philosophers among what is preserved from the library. Only one volume with writings by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, gifted by and dedicated by Leni Riefenstahl, is found together with dramas by Shakespeare, preferred by Hitler before Goethe and Schiller. He liked to impress his listeners with quotes from Julius Caesar and Hamlet. will in their speeches, conversations or monologues. In doing so, he generally avoided stating the source, so listeners often got the impression that these were Hitler's own original ideas.

He did not master any foreign language apart from a rudimentary French that he had learned in high school in Linz, finishing his studies in the field in the third year with the grade of "insufficient". Presumably in the years 1914– 1918 has had the opportunity to somewhat refresh his knowledge of French on the Western Front. As chancellor, Hitler informed himself of the foreign press only via his chief translator Paul-Otto Schmidt. Apart from Prague (1939), Warsaw (1939), Paris (1940) and Rome, as well as Vienna and Berlin, Hitler personally did not know other European capitals.

Since he had poor eyesight, but refused to wear glasses out of vanity, the servants were to distribute reading glasses in all the rooms of the Chancellery, so that Hitler would have one quickly at hand.

Anti-Semitism

Hitler's first testimony on the Jewish question is found in a letter written in September 1919:

Using the biological terminology he would frequently deploy, he stated that the activities of the Jews produced "racial tuberculosis in the nations." He categorically affirmed that the Jews were a race, not a religion. Anti-Semitism as a political movement, he said, should be based on “reason”, not on emotion, and should lead to the systematic elimination of the rights of Jews. However, he concluded:
The “final objective”, which could only be achieved with a government of “national luck”, had to be the “full elimination of the Jews”.

Twenty-five years later, on the eve of his suicide, he left written in his Political Testament his assessment of the "Jewish race" as the true culprit of the ongoing war.

In a passage from Mein Kampf, he wrote that the sacrifice of German soldiers on the front lines of the Great War would not have been necessary if "twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jewish corrupters of the people had been subjected to toxic gases".

Hitler's anti-Semitism was a deeply rooted and essential component of his ideology, beyond the propaganda uses he could have given it throughout his political career. Along with the desire to ensure Germany's hegemony in Europe and the achievement of a living space for his country, the elimination of the Jews was the third element that made up his ideology.

The desire for revenge that Hitler developed after the German capitulation in November 1918 focused on a series of enemies that he had already identified years before, who could only be fought through war;

Since under his view the Jews were responsible for the most terrible crimes of all time - for the "puñalada en la espalda" of 1918, capitulation, revolution, the misfortune of Germany - because under his perverted perception they were the main protagonists of Wall Stret capitalism and the City of London, as well as the Bolshevism of Moscow; and since, according to his belief in the legend of the "Jewish"

In this sense, Hitler saw himself as the necessary agent for the salvation of Germany and saw the destruction of the power of the Jews as the indispensable means to achieve it.

With his rise to power on January 30, 1933, his Weltanschauung, above all a set of visionary objectives, served to integrate the centrifugal forces of Nazism, to mobilize its activists and to legitimize certain political initiatives carried out following, in one way or another, their will. Among such objectives was the elimination of the Jews, an idea that he knew how to handle tactically throughout his career. A) Yes,

Hitler intervened to channel the attacks in the form of tremendously discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation, deploring radicals at each stage and progressing in radicalizing the measures taken. There was, therefore, a "dialectic" between "save" actions from below and discrimination orchestrated from above. Each phase of radicalization was more intense than that preceded it. In this way, inertia never faded.

Hitler's obsession with Jews led him to despise, in his later years, Christianity because of its Jewish origin. In his closest circle, Hitler used to deliver long monologues, by way of table proposals, which his personal secretary, Martin Bormann, wrote meticulously. Thus, in 1943 and in the middle of the war, Hitler said:

The hardest blow to humanity is Christianity—communism is the son of Christianity—it is all the inventions of the Jews.
Adolf Hitler, 1943.

Theories about the origin of his antisemitism

Since his appearance in the political world, all sorts of theories and rumors have sprung up that have attempted to explain the origins of Hitler's anti-Semitism.

Rumors are said to have been circulating since at least the 1920s that Hitler had some Jewish blood ancestry. The most serious of these theories is the one expounded by Hans Frank in his memoirs, written after the war. Frank claimed to have investigated his family history on Hitler's own orders and concluded that his grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had given birth to Alois Hitler, Hitler's father, while working as a maid in a Jewish family in Graz named Frankenberger., of which her son, Leopold Frankenberger, would be the father of Alois. None of these stories, including Frank's, have been shown to have any factual basis. Understandably the implications of these rumors were politically explosive for a proponent of a particularly racist anti-Jewish ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler had Jewish or Czech ancestors, and although these rumors were never proven, it is thought that for Hitler they were a sufficient reason to hide his origins.^{[citation needed]} According to Robert G. L. Waite in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, the Hitler regime made it illegal for German women to work in Jewish families, and after the Anschluss (annexation) from Austria, turned his father's hometown into a gunnery practice area. Waite says that Hitler's insecurities in this regard may have been more important than whether Jewish ancestry could be proven by his companions.

By 1903, Hitler was attending the Realschule at the same time as Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. A book by Kimberley Cornish suggests that the conflicts between Hitler and some Jewish students, including Wittgenstein, were a critical moment in Hitler's formation as an anti-Semite. However, Cornish's work has been accused of being speculative in nature.

Many other historians try to speculate the origin of his extreme hatred of Jews by pointing to the possibility that Alois's biological father (and therefore his grandfather) was of Jewish origin,^{[citation required]} which was later denied. Others attribute this to the fact that his mother, Klara Hitler, died in the care of a Jewish doctor, but Hitler himself seemed grateful for her attentions (he gave her a painting and later as chancellor allowed her to leave Austria). According to some, it would be the idea of the alleged Zionist influence for the United States to enter the war.^{[citation needed]} To date, none of these assertions have been convincingly confirmed.

On the other hand, various authors also claim that Hitler was seriously influenced by the theory of social Darwinism based on Darwin's idea of "the supremacy of the strongest" and extended as a social practice due to the belief in the supposed physical and intellectual superiority and inferiority of some humans as a result of evolution. In this line of thought, some authors consider that Hitler believed that the Jews and others ethnic groups such as African-Americans and Gypsies, were "corrupting" the supposed "purity" of the German nation, and endangering its physical health, and its chance of competition with other nations of the world. The theory is even covered in the book Why the holocaust: Hitler's Darwinistic Messianic Genocide by Jan Horník, where the author points to a quote from Darwin in which he wrote that in "the not too distant future" an extermination and replacement would take place of human "wild races" that would undoubtedly generate a "more civilized state" in humanity.

Another hypothesis states that it was simply a political strategy.^{[citation needed]} Hitler found a symbolic culprit that allowed him to easily justify nationalism German and overcome the class struggle (what in basic psychology is called scapegoating).^{[citation needed]} The banker was not bad by to be a banker, but for being a Jew. If the banker was a German, a German nationalist, he could only pawn the surplus value he obtained at the expense of the workers to make Germany great. He was an adaptation of the fascist idea of nationalism to overcome the class struggle, but he was much more powerful when he identified a mythical enemy against whom there was already mythical and ancient suspicion and aversion. A brilliant idea with which to promote a unitary movement with a large dose of criticism and constructive action (the great Germany) and a no lesser dose of destruction and mythical violence. The perfect political action: build and destroy as a political proposal.

Al-Husseini, the Great Mufti of Jerusalem and President of the Supreme Islamic Council together with Adolf Hitler, 1941

According to his writings, he considered the Jews as a foreign race on German territory and shared many of the anti-Semitic ideas common at the time, which were of very ancient origin (an example of this is the influence of the apocryphal pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). This is how he spoke of a "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy" (in which he included all left movements equally), at the same time that he blamed Jewish businessmen and financiers for the economic problems Germany was going through at the time. (Some of his early speeches were about what he called "the slavery of interest"). As will be seen, this also led to accusations of leading Germany to defeat in 1918.

As for his personal influences that are often mentioned as fueling his racism against Jews, we find Henry Ford (whose anti-Semitism is known), who also published a series of pamphlets known as The International Jew: The World's Foremost Famous Problem and appealed to an alleged "Zionist conspiracy", pointing to the Jews as the culprits. It is believed that all this also influenced Hitler, since the relationship was evident, in fact, when in 1923, Ford was accused of providing financial aid to Hitler, and later (two years before he became chancellor of Germany) Hitler declared to a journalist from The Detroit News: "I consider Henry Ford my inspiration" (1931)

Other figures with whose ideology his anti-Semitism has been linked include both Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works he read in Landsberg prison where he wrote Mein Kampf; and the German reformer Martin Luther, who he considered, along with Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great, as one of the truly "great" Germans in history, and responsible for a large number of anti-Jewish writings.

Hitler's Legacy

During the Nuremberg Trials, 611 people, members of the various institutions of the Third Reich, were accused of five crimes: conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity (extermination), crimes against peace and genocide. The main captured Nazi hierarchs were sentenced to be hanged or to long prison terms; others died in the months that followed the fall of Berlin.

Nazism and any related ideological reminiscence were banned in almost all of Europe; in fact, Nazi-oriented texts cannot be published or swastikas and other Hitler symbols can be publicly used without the risk of committing a misdemeanor or punishable offence. However, anti-Semitic discrimination remained until well into the 1960s, especially in American countries.

First edition Mein KampfJuly 1925.

From a military point of view, the most important legacy of Nazi Germany is the complete adoption of the concept of the Blitzkrieg, literally lightning warfare, in all the war academies of the world. The strategies, battles and techniques of the Wehrmacht used in World War II are the subject of study in all military institutes. Hitler was nominated for the 1939 Nobel Peace Prize, but this was not a serious nomination and was more of a satirical criticism of a member of the Swedish parliament.

The publication of Hitler's book Mein Kampf is prohibited in many European countries, mainly in Germany since 1945; however, it continues to be published in other countries, such as Spain and Mexico, it circulates freely in many languages by bookstores in many countries and is the subject of studies of all kinds.

Different groups around the world consider themselves heirs of Nazism. Violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, etc., claim heirs to this doctrine.

Another of Hitler's legacies is the name and concept of the Volkswagen automobile (people's car), originally called the Kdf-Wagen (Kraft durch Freude, force through of joy). The original design of the car was carried out by the engineer Ferdinand Porsche, but Hitler himself took care of the final details of the body finish and provided the name. During the Nazi government only prototypes were built, but after the war the Volkswagen (as the car was eventually known) became very popular, developing various beetle models.

"Racial Hygiene" and the Holocaust

Main article: Holocaust

Generalplan Ost: the deportation or extermination of the population of Slavic origin.

One of the foundations of the social policies of Hitler and the NSDAP is the concept of "racial hygiene." It was based on the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau, the eugenics movement, and social Darwinism. Applied to humans, "survival of the fittest" was interpreted as a demand for racial purity and killing outside of "life not worth living." The first victims were mutilated and retarded children in a program called Action T4. After a public outcry, Hitler made a move to end this program, but in fact the killings continued.

Between 1939 and 1945, the SS, with the help of collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries, systematically murdered between 11 and 14 million people, including about six million Jews, in concentration camps, ghettos and mass executions and through other methods, such as medical experiments. In addition to those being gassed to death, many of the victims died as a result of starvation and disease while working as slaves (sometimes for the benefit of private German companies in the process, due to the low cost of such labor).). Along with Jews, non-Jewish Poles (more than three million victims), political opponents (such as some communists), members of resistance groups, Soviet prisoners of war (an estimated three million of them), trade unionists, religious Catholics and opposition Protestant Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the anti-Nazi clergy, the handicapped, the physically disabled, the mentally retarded, psychiatric patients, homosexuals and Gypsies. One of the largest centers of mass murder was the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex. Hitler never visited the concentration camps and did not speak publicly about the deaths in precise terms.

Ships stacked on a trailer outside the Buchenwald concentration camp crematorium (April 1945).

The massacres that led to the Holocaust (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" or Endlösung der Judenfrage) were planned and ordered by Nazi leaders, with Himmler playing a key role. Although Hitler's specific order authorizing the mass murder of Jews has not been found, documentation exists showing that he endorsed the Einsatzgruppen, the death squads that followed the German army through Poland and Russia, and that he was kept well informed about his activities. Evidence also suggests that in the fall of 1941, Hitler and Himmler decided on mass extermination by gassing. During interrogations by Soviet intelligence officers, declassified more than fifty years later, valet Heinz Linge and military adjutant Otto Gunsche overheard Hitler say that there were "extra pores in the close-ups of the gas chambers." i>”.^{[citation required]} Hitler was also concerned that the so-called Final Solution was applied to each invaded country, proof of this was the personal order to Theodor Dannecker to supervise the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria. When the deportations of the Dutch Jews began, Baldur von Schirach's wife, Henriette Hoffmann, disgraced Hitler in the same face because of what was happening to the Jewish population in that country. After that unfortunate comment, Hitler expelled the von Schirach couple from his social circle.

To advance in the application of this «Final Solution», the Wannsee Conference was held near Berlin, on January 20, 1942, with fifteen senior officials participating, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. The minutes of this meeting would provide the clearest evidence of Holocaust planning. On February 22, Hitler was recorded telling his associates, "We will regain our health only by eliminating the Jews."^{[citation needed ]}

Predecessor: Paul von Hindenburg (Chairman)	Fuehrer of Germany 1934-1945	Successor: Karl Dönitz (Chairman)
Predecessor: Kurt von Schleicher	Imperial Chancellor of Germany 1933-1945	Successor: Joseph Goebbels
Predecessor: Anton Drexler	Leader of the Nazi Party 1921-1945	Successor: Martin Bormann
Predecessor: Franz Pfeffer von Salomon	Commander of the Sturmabteilung 1930-1931	Successor: Ernst Röhm
Predecessor: Walther von Brauchitsch	Oberkommando des Heeres High Command 1941-1945	Successor: Ferdinand Schörner
Predecessor: Chiang Kai-shek Soong May-ling	Person of the Year for Time 1938	Successor: Joseph Stalin
Predecessor: -	Reichsstatthalter of Prussia 1933-1935	Successor: Hermann Göring

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