Holocaust History

Rise of the Third Reich

Adolf Hitler is presented here at length and in detail — not because his life is interesting in itself, but because the lesson of the twentieth century is that an unremarkable man, in the wrong conditions, with the wrong audience and the wrong enablers, can become the head of a state and the architect of a genocide. Understanding the mechanics of his rise is the work this site exists for. This profile draws from the public scholarship of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and the major academic biographies (Kershaw, Bullock, Friedländer, Evans, Snyder), and is summarized here in the style of the Wikipedia article on Adolf Hitler.

Early life and family (1889–1905)

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a small town on the Austrian side of the Austro-German border. He was the fourth of six children born to Alois Hitler, a customs official, and Klara Pölzl, Alois’s third wife and niece. Three of his siblings died in infancy. His father was authoritarian and frequently violent; his mother, by all accounts including his own, was indulgent. The family moved repeatedly during Hitler’s childhood. He was an indifferent student. After his father’s death in 1903 and his mother’s death from breast cancer in December 1907, Hitler, aged eighteen, was orphaned, alone, and adrift.

Vienna years and radicalization (1905–1913)

Hitler moved to Vienna with the ambition of becoming a painter. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts twice, in 1907 and 1908, and was rejected both times; the second rejection noted he lacked aptitude for painting and might consider architecture, for which he also lacked the prerequisites. He spent roughly five years in Vienna, much of them in poverty, living in a men’s hostel and surviving by selling postcards he hand-painted. Vienna in this period was the political laboratory of Karl Lueger’s antisemitic Christian Social Party and Georg von Schönerer’s pan-German racial nationalism. Hitler absorbed both. By his own later admission in Mein Kampf, the antisemitism that would become the organizing principle of his life was fully formed in Vienna. In 1913, to evade compulsory Austrian military service, he moved to Munich.

World War I (1914–1918)

When war broke out in August 1914, Hitler petitioned the King of Bavaria to be allowed to enlist in the Bavarian army despite his Austrian citizenship; the petition was granted. He served as a regimental dispatch runner on the Western Front with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He was at Ypres, the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele. He was wounded twice, gassed in October 1918, and decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class in 1914 and, unusually for an enlisted man, the Iron Cross First Class in 1918 — the latter on the recommendation of a Jewish adjutant, Hugo Gutmann. He was in a military hospital recovering from the gas attack when Germany surrendered in November 1918. He later wrote that the news of defeat destroyed him, and that he resolved at that moment to enter politics. The defeat was, in his telling, not the consequence of military exhaustion and the entry of the United States, but the result of a betrayal by Jews, Marxists, and democrats on the home front — the Dolchstoßlegende, or stab-in-the-back myth. This conspiracy theory, which he did not invent but which he made central, was the seed of everything that followed.

Entry into politics: the DAP and NSDAP (1919–1921)

After the war Hitler stayed in the army and was assigned by his commanders to surveille a small nationalist group called the German Workers’ Party (DAP). He joined it instead. He discovered, addressing tiny meetings in Munich beer halls, that he could hold a crowd. By 1920 he was the party’s chief propagandist; the party was rebranded the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP or, derogatorily, Nazi). In July 1921 he forced an internal vote that made him sole leader — Führer — of the party, with dictatorial powers over its program and personnel. The Sturmabteilung (SA), a paramilitary street force that beat and murdered political opponents, was formed in 1921 under Ernst Röhm.

Beer Hall Putsch and Mein Kampf (1923–1925)

On 8–9 November 1923, in a moment of hyperinflation and political crisis, Hitler attempted an armed coup. He, the SA, and the war hero Erich Ludendorff marched on Munich expecting the Bavarian government and army to join them. They did not. Police fired on the marchers; sixteen Nazis and four police officers died. Hitler fled, was arrested two days later, and was tried for treason. The trial gave him a national platform he used masterfully; he was sentenced to five years and served nine months in Landsberg Prison. There he dictated Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) to Rudolf Hess. The book is repellent and tedious in roughly equal measure, but it stated plainly what he intended: the destruction of European Jewry, the conquest of Eastern Europe for Lebensraum (“living space”), and the abolition of democracy. He told the world. The world did not listen, or, where it listened, did not believe.

Rebuilding the party (1925–1930)

Released from prison at the end of 1924, Hitler rebuilt the NSDAP as a national electoral force rather than a putschist street gang. In the relatively stable years of the late Weimar Republic the party stagnated; in May 1928 it received 2.6% of the national vote. Then in October 1929 the New York stock market collapsed. Within eighteen months German unemployment passed three million. Industrial production halved. The Weimar coalition governments fell apart. In the September 1930 elections, with the NSDAP campaigning on a combination of nationalist resentment, economic rescue, and unmistakable antisemitism, its share of the vote leapt from 2.6% to 18.3%. It was now the second-largest party in Germany.

Rise to Chancellor (1930–1933)

Between 1930 and 1933, Germany was governed by a succession of caretaker chancellors ruling by emergency decree under President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler ran for the presidency against Hindenburg in March–April 1932 and lost — but received 36.8% of the runoff vote, an extraordinary showing for the leader of a movement that had been a fringe sect five years earlier. In July 1932 the NSDAP became the largest party in the Reichstag with 37.3%. Hindenburg refused to appoint Hitler chancellor, calling him “the Bohemian corporal.” A second 1932 election that November saw Nazi support actually drop, and the party was in financial trouble. It was at this moment, when the Nazi threat was beginning to recede on its own, that a clique of conservatives around Franz von Papen convinced the elderly Hindenburg that Hitler could be safely appointed Chancellor and “hemmed in” by a cabinet of traditional right-wingers. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was sworn in. Within seventy-two hours, the destruction of German democracy was underway.

Consolidation as Führer (1933–1934)

On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building burned down. A young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was caught at the scene; whether the Nazis themselves had a hand in the fire remains a historical question. What is not in question is the use Hitler made of it. The next day he persuaded Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties — freedom of the press, assembly, association, the privacy of correspondence — indefinitely. Communist deputies were arrested. On 23 March 1933, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which transferred legislative power to the cabinet for four years. The cabinet was now Hitler. He did not have to overthrow the constitution; he had it vote itself out of existence. Within months all rival parties were dissolved or banned; trade unions were absorbed into the Nazi Labor Front; independent newspapers were shuttered or co-opted (Gleichschaltung, “coordination”). On 30 June 1934, in the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler used the SS to murder the leadership of his own SA — including Röhm — along with assorted conservative critics. On 2 August 1934, Hindenburg died. Hitler merged the offices of Chancellor and President into a single position: Führer und Reichskanzler. The army swore a personal oath to him. He was now, in legal fact, the sole sovereign of Germany.

The pre-war regime (1934–1939)

The five and a half years between consolidation and the invasion of Poland are the years in which the world failed to act. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jewish Germans of citizenship and criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. In March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; the French and British did nothing. In March 1938 he annexed Austria (the Anschluss); the response was again nothing. In September 1938 at Munich, Britain and France handed him the Sudetenland in exchange for “peace in our time.” In March 1939 he took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Inside Germany, the persecution of Jews accelerated: forced emigration, expropriation, and, on 9–10 November 1938, the coordinated pogrom of Kristallnacht, which destroyed roughly 7,500 Jewish businesses and 267 synagogues, murdered at least 91 people, and sent approximately 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. The Evian Conference of July 1938, called to address Jewish refugees, ended with almost no country raising its immigration quota. The MS St. Louis sailed in 1939 with 937 Jewish refugees aboard and was turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada; she returned to Europe and 254 of her passengers were later murdered in the camps.

World War II and the Holocaust (1939–1945)

On 23 August 1939 Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin that secretly divided Eastern Europe between them. On 1 September 1939 he invaded Poland. Within weeks, the SS Einsatzgruppen were murdering Jewish and Polish civilians behind the front. Ghettos were established. The killing of disabled Germans under Aktion T4 was already underway. On 22 June 1941, in the largest invasion in military history, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and behind that front the Einsatzgruppen carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” — the mass shooting of approximately 1.5 million Jews, including the massacre at Babi Yar near Kyiv in September 1941, where 33,771 people were murdered in two days. In December 1941 Hitler declared war on the United States. In January 1942 senior Nazi officials met at Wannsee to coordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — the systematic industrial murder of the remaining European Jewry in killing centers at Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chełmno, Majdanek, and above all Auschwitz-Birkenau. The order to murder Europe’s Jews originated with Hitler. The chain of command ran through Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and tens of thousands of perpetrators down to the last camp guard and police battalion. By the time Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, roughly six million Jewish men, women, and children had been murdered, together with millions of Roma, Soviet POWs, Polish civilians, disabled people, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents.

Death and aftermath (1945)

By April 1945 Soviet armies were inside Berlin. Hitler, in the Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery, married his companion Eva Braun on 29 April 1945 and dictated a final political testament that blamed the Jews, one last time, for the war he had started. On 30 April 1945, with Soviet troops approximately five hundred meters away, Hitler and Braun took their own lives. Their bodies were burned in the Chancellery garden. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945 (V-E Day). At Nuremberg in 1945–1946 the surviving Nazi leadership was tried for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; the principle that “just following orders” is not a defense was established in international law.

Ideology

Hitler’s worldview was not original; it was a synthesis of ideas already in circulation, organized with unusual intensity and applied with state power. The three pillars were eliminationist antisemitism (Jews defined as a biological enemy of the German Volk whose presence in Europe had to be ended); the doctrine of Lebensraum, which held that the German nation required the conquest and depopulation of the agricultural lands of Eastern Europe for its survival; and a racial hierarchy that placed Germans at the top, defined Slavs, Roma, and others as subhuman, and Jews not as inferior but as actively diabolical. None of this is mysterious in his own writing. He stated all of it openly. The question the twentieth century leaves us is not what he believed; it is why so many cooperated, why so many were silent, and what we will do when the warning signs come around again.

Why we study him

This site does not romanticize Hitler and rejects all attempts to do so. We study him for the same reason the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem study him: because the lesson of his life is a civic lesson, not a biographical curiosity. Democracies can be voted out of existence. Conservatives who believe they can “contain” an extremist movement are usually wrong. Institutions that survive on prestige alone do not survive long. Neighbors who say nothing become accomplices. And a stated genocidal intent, when ignored or rationalized, is always carried out.

Personal life and health

Hitler’s private life was deliberately mythologized in his own time and is a subject of continuing historical study. He never married Eva Braun until the final hours of his life. He had no children. He was a strict vegetarian by the late 1930s, abstained from alcohol and tobacco in his public persona, and used these abstinences as propaganda. His personal physician, Theodor Morell, treated him with a regimen of injections — vitamins, hormones, amphetamines, and, by the war’s end, opiates — documented in Morell’s surviving notebooks; historians debate the degree to which Hitler’s late-war decision making was clouded by this pharmacology. He suffered tremors in his left hand and arm in the final years, almost certainly Parkinson’s disease. None of this excuses or explains the crimes, and presenting it as if it might is itself a category of error against which scholars like Ian Kershaw have warned: the search for a medical or psychological key that would make the genocide a private pathology rather than a political and civic catastrophe.

The Hitler myth and the propaganda apparatus

The Hitler the German public knew in the 1930s was a manufactured figure — what Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography, calls “the Hitler myth.” The architect was Joseph Goebbels as Minister of Propaganda, supported by Heinrich Hoffmann as the regime’s official photographer and Leni Riefenstahl as the regime’s most prominent filmmaker. The myth held that Hitler was austere, celibate, devoted to Germany above himself, and granted by Providence a unique insight into the German nation’s destiny. The Nuremberg Party Rallies of 1933–1938 were the myth’s great staged liturgies, designed for the camera as much as for the participants. Radio, which the regime made cheap and ubiquitous (the Volksempfänger “people’s receiver”), carried his voice into every home. Newspapers were coordinated under the Reich Press Chamber. Schools rewrote their curricula. The myth survived even military disaster: well into 1944 a majority of Germans polled by the SD security service still distinguished between “Hitler the Führer” and the regime’s failures, blaming subordinates rather than him. The lesson of the myth is its mechanism: complete control of communication, ritualized public spectacle, a leader figure presented as personally pure and supernaturally insightful, and a perpetual external enemy. The mechanism has been reproduced often since 1945. It works the same way every time.

Annotated reading list specific to Hitler

If you want to go further — and this is the kind of subject where reading further is the responsible thing to do — these are the works that the major Holocaust scholars themselves cite. They are not equivalent in quality. The list is annotated so you can choose.

• Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (1998) and Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000). The standard scholarly biography in English. Two volumes, exhaustively sourced. Kershaw’s core insight — “working towards the Führer” — explains how a regime in which Hitler issued few written orders nonetheless executed his stated intentions with terrifying efficiency: subordinates anticipated and competed.
• Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952, revised 1962). The first major postwar biography. Now superseded in places by later research, but its psychological portrait remains valuable as a starting point.
• Joachim Fest, Hitler (1973). A German perspective from a journalist who lived through the regime as a child. Strong on the cultural and aesthetic dimension of Nazism.
• Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939 (2013) and Hitler: Downfall 1939–1945 (2018). The most recent major scholarly biography, drawing on archival sources unavailable to Kershaw. Particularly strong on the early Munich years.
• Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna (1996). A close study of the Vienna years, which Hitler himself credited as the source of his worldview.
• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (1997) and Volume II: The Years of Extermination 1939–1945 (2007). Not a biography of Hitler but the definitive integrated history of the Holocaust. Friedländer is a Holocaust survivor and historian; the books carry that weight.
• Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005), The Third Reich at War (2008). A three-volume institutional history of Nazi Germany. The trilogy is the place to understand the regime around Hitler.
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). Not about Hitler. About the people who did the shooting. Indispensable.
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A philosophical analysis of how movements like Nazism and Stalinism became possible. The chapters on antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism repay slow reading.
• Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015). Argues that the Holocaust was made possible by the destruction of states, not by their strength. Reorients much of the conventional reading.
• Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (1993). A direct response to Holocaust denial as a phenomenon. Read this before you encounter denial online — because you will.

The Camps and the Victims

Approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered. Millions of others were murdered alongside them. The numbers should not anesthetize us: every figure here is a person with a name, a family, and a life that was taken.

The killing centers

Six camps in occupied Poland were built or repurposed for industrial murder: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Chełmno, and Majdanek. Auschwitz alone took at least 1.1 million lives, the overwhelming majority Jewish. These sites operated alongside a much larger network of concentration camps, labor camps, and ghettos across Nazi-occupied Europe.

Who was murdered

• Six million Jews — the principal target of the Final Solution. Two-thirds of European Jewry.
• Roma and Sinti — the Porajmos. Estimates range from 250,000 to 500,000 murdered.
• Disabled people — murdered under Aktion T4, the regime’s “euthanasia” program; roughly 250,000 victims.
• Soviet prisoners of war — an estimated 3.3 million murdered through starvation, exposure, and execution.
• Polish civilians — roughly 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish citizens killed.
• Gay men — imprisoned under Paragraph 175; thousands died in the camps.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, political prisoners, clergy, trade unionists — persecuted, imprisoned, and killed.

The names of the victims are preserved in the databases maintained by Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We link to them in the Sources section, and we encourage every reader to search a name there.

How It Could Have Been Prevented

This is the central question of the site. If the Holocaust was the endpoint of decades of choices, then those choices were also off-ramps that were missed. Recognizing the off-ramps is how we recognize them when they come around again.

1. A Weimar Republic with stronger institutions

   An independent judiciary that refused to legitimize Nazi street violence. A constitutional court that struck down the Enabling Act. Police that protected Jewish citizens instead of standing aside during Kristallnacht.

2. Conservatives who refused the deal

   The 1933 cabinet that included Hitler existed because traditional conservatives believed he was a useful tool. They were wrong. The lesson: never normalize a movement that has openly stated genocidal goals, regardless of short-term political advantage.

3. An immigration response that matched the crisis

   At the 1938 Evian Conference, 32 nations met to discuss Jewish refugees. Almost every one declined to raise its quota. If even a handful had opened their doors in 1938–1939, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia all bear responsibility here. The MS St. Louis sailed back to Europe; 254 of its passengers died in the camps.

4. No appeasement

   The Munich Agreement of 1938 taught Hitler that the democracies would not fight. Without that lesson he would have moved more slowly, and slower may have meant survivable.

5. Churches that spoke

   When Dutch Catholic bishops publicly condemned the deportations in 1942, the Nazis retaliated — but the protest also delayed and disrupted operations. Imagine if the protest had been continental.

6. Neighbors who refused

   Where ordinary citizens refused to cooperate — in Denmark, in parts of Bulgaria, in Le Chambon — rescue was possible. The bystander’s decision is, in the end, the decisive one.

Sources and Further Reading

Everything on this site is drawn from authoritative public scholarship. The institutions and books below are where to go next.

Institutions

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — archives, survivor testimony, victim database, teacher resources.
• Yad Vashem — the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem. Names database and Righteous Among the Nations.
• USC Shoah Foundation — the Visual History Archive of survivor testimony.
• The Wiener Holocaust Library — London.
• Anne Frank House — Amsterdam.
• Wikipedia: The Holocaust — a good first overview with extensive citations.
• Wikipedia: Adolf Hitler — biographical reference.

Books

• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
• Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947).
• Elie Wiesel, Night (1956).
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (2007).
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1992).
• Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017) and Bloodlands (2010).
• Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (1993).