⚠️

Adolf Hitler

Führer of Nazi Germany; Instigator of WWII in Europe, Chief Party Responsible for Genocide

Those Who Turned a Ruler’s Decision Into Reality · Generals & Statesmen

Nazi GermanyWorld War IIGenocide

Who they are

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was leader of the German Nazi party who in 1933 became chancellor and swiftly built a dictatorship, abolishing the democracy of the Weimar Republic and imposing an extreme nationalist and antisemitic racist ideology. In 1939 he ordered the invasion of Poland, directly setting off World War II in Europe, and his forces then occupied most of the continent. Under his direct orders and the Nazi party’s systematic organization, Nazi Germany carried out the organized, industrialized murder of the Jews (the Holocaust), causing the deaths of about six million Jews and vast numbers of Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others — one of the gravest genocides in human history. On the eve of the Soviet army entering Berlin in 1945 he killed himself in his bunker, and Nazi Germany surrendered in defeat. European nations continue to warn later generations of this history through legislation, education, and memorials; this site’s stance is to state facts fully established by historians and international tribunals, with no glorification or revisionism of any kind.

Primary sourcesRecords of the Nuremberg International Military TribunalNazi Germany official archivesHolocaust survivor testimony and original camp documents

Key stories

The Reichstag Fire and the Building of Dictatorship

In 1933, soon after Hitler became chancellor, a fire broke out at the German Reichstag; the Nazi party used it to claim a communist plot, pushing through emergency presidential decrees that broadly suppressed political opposition, and then through the Enabling Act gave the cabinet power to legislate around the parliament, gutting the democratic constitutional order of the Weimar Republic within months and establishing one-party Nazi dictatorship.

The Wannsee Conference and the "Final Solution"

In 1942, Nazi leaders held a conference at Wannsee in Berlin to systematically coordinate the administrative and logistical arrangements for the "Final Solution" to Europe’s Jews, after which the scale of industrialized murder at camps such as Auschwitz expanded sharply. This history is documented in exhaustive detail through the Nuremberg trials and a vast body of original documents and survivor testimony — one of the most firmly proven crimes against humanity in 20th-century history.

Relationships

Nemesis

⚒️Stalin　His opponent in the Soviet–German war 🚬Churchill　The leader of Britain’s resistance to the Nazi German invasion in WWII

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

Postwar Germany’s historical education and remembrancePostwar Germany built a systematic apparatus of historical education and remembrance (such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin), continuing to face this history at the national level — a representative case of Europe’s "never forget" practice of historical education.

Appears in

World Wars, Revolution, and Twentieth-Century EuropeHitler Launches World War II and the Nazi Genocide

← Back to Figures