How a rejected art student took power through Germany's own institutions
Twice turned away by Vienna's art academy, Adolf Hitler drifted through homeless shelters selling watercolours. Two decades later, conservative politicians persuaded President Hindenburg to appoint him chancellor, believing they could control him. Within eighteen months the Weimar Republic was a dictatorship, and his wars and racial policies would kill tens of millions.
Braunau am Inn, an Austrian town on the German border, was Hitler's birthplace on 20 April 1889. He was the son of a customs official, Alois, whose own father is unrecorded. Historians reject a Nazi official's later claim that this grandfather was Jewish. Adolf clashed with his strict father, absorbed German nationalism as a teenager and despised the multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy. In 1907 he moved to Vienna to study art but was rejected twice, and he lacked the schooling to try architecture. His mother died that December. Broke by 1909, he lived in shelters, sold paintings of city sights, and soaked up the antisemitic populism of mayor Karl Lueger and the pan-German agitator Georg von Schönerer, though when his antisemitism hardened is still debated.
He moved to Germany in 1913 and won the Iron Cross in the First World War. In 1919 he joined the small German Workers' Party, leading its Nazi successor by 1921. A failed coup in Munich in 1923 earned a five-year sentence, of which he served little more than a year, dictating Mein Kampf in prison. Afterwards he built support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and preaching pan-Germanism, anti-communism and hatred of Jews.
After the November 1932 elections the Nazis were the largest party without a majority. Franz von Papen and other conservatives talked Hindenburg into appointing Hitler on 30 January 1933. The Enabling Act followed in March, and on Hindenburg's death on 2 August 1934 Hitler made himself head of state. Economic recovery, defiance of postwar restrictions and annexations of German-speaking lands made him popular while Jews were stripped of rights.
His demand for living space in Eastern Europe drove the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and the war that followed. The regime murdered an estimated six million Jews and millions of others it deemed undesirable, in the deadliest conflict in history. With Soviet forces closing in, he died by suicide in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945. The biographer Ian Kershaw called him the embodiment of modern political evil.
Source: Adolf Hitler
