Adolf Hitler

Braunau am Inn

Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, the son of an Austrian customs official; the family soon moved to Passau and later to the Linz area.

💡 Did you know? Austria expropriated his birth house in Braunau and had it converted into a police station: so that it cannot become a shrine for neo-Nazis.

Adolf Hitler

Official portrait by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer, who controlled the dictator's public image for decades.

💡 Did you know? Hoffmann's assistant Eva Braun met Hitler in his Munich studio in 1929.

painting

After the rejection he lived for a time in a men's hostel in Vienna and sold postcards and watercolours he had painted himself.

💡 Did you know? In his Vienna years Hitler absorbed the antisemitism common there, for example in the politics of mayor Karl Lueger.

the Bavarian Army

In 1913 Hitler had dodged Austrian military service by moving to Munich; in 1914 he volunteered for the Bavarian Army.

💡 Did you know? He remained a lance corporal throughout the war and in 1918 received the Iron Cross First Class: on the recommendation of a Jewish officer.

Mein Kampf

The imprisonment followed his failed putsch in Munich on 9 November 1923. The book combines autobiography, racial ideology and the goal of conquering “living space” in the East.

💡 Did you know? Since 2016 a critical edition by Munich's Institute of Contemporary History has been available in Germany: some 3,500 annotations contradict the text line by line.

Paul von Hindenburg

Hitler did not come to power through an electoral majority: conservatives around Franz von Papen believed they could “box him in” within a cabinet with only three Nazi ministers.

💡 Did you know? After Hindenburg's death in August 1934 Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president and called himself “Führer and Reich Chancellor”.

the Enabling Act

Only the Social Democrats voted against it on 23 March 1933; the Communist deputies had already been arrested or had fled. Otto Wels declared: “You can take our lives and our freedom, but not our honour.”

💡 Did you know? It effectively hollowed out the Weimar constitution; by July 1933 all other parties had been banned or had dissolved themselves.

Poland

A week earlier Hitler had concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Stalin, whose secret protocol divided Poland between the two dictatorships.

💡 Did you know? As a pretext, the SS staged a supposedly Polish attack on the Gleiwitz radio station the evening before.

the Wannsee Conference

Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, 15 representatives of ministries, party and SS coordinated the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in a villa on Berlin's Lake Wannsee on 20 January 1942.

💡 Did you know? Only one copy of the minutes, kept by Adolf Eichmann, survives; it was found in 1947 among the files of the German Foreign Office.

about 6 million

Most died in the extermination camps in occupied Poland (about one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone) and in mass shootings behind the Eastern Front.

💡 Did you know? Besides the Jews, the regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war and political opponents.

Claus von Stauffenberg

The briefcase with the explosives stood behind a heavy table support; Hitler was only lightly injured. Stauffenberg was shot in Berlin that same night.

💡 Did you know? As early as 1939 the carpenter Georg Elser, acting alone, had tried to kill Hitler with a bomb in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller: Hitler left the hall 13 minutes before it went off.

Berlin

Soviet troops were only a few hundred metres away. The day before, Hitler had married Eva Braun, who died with him.

💡 Did you know? A week later, on 8 May 1945, the Wehrmacht surrendered unconditionally; the war in Europe was over.