A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the precursor of the Nazi Party (DAP) in 1919, and became leader of NSDAP in 1921. He attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich in 1923. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (in English "My Struggle"). After his release in 1924, he gained support by promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda. He was appointed chancellor in 1933, and transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism.
Hitler's avowed aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe. His foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Aryan people. This included the rearmament of Germany, resulting in the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
Under Hitler's leadership, German forces and their European allies at one point occupied most of Europe and North Africa, reversed in 1944 when the Allied armies freed German-occupied Europe. Hitler's reign resulted in the systematic murder of as many as 17 million civilians, including an estimated six million Jews targeted in the Holocaust and between 500,000 and 1,500,000 Roma.
In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. To avoid capture by Soviet forces, the two committed suicide less than two days later on 30 April 1945 and their corpses were burned Keep Reading +
