by Prof. George Monaco

Created on: June 01, 2008

Adolf Hitler was the absolute ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945.He was directly responsible for the start of World War II and the mass murder of 11 million innocent people in the Holocaust.

Hitler was born in 1889 in Austria, right on the border of Germany. As a young man, Hitler wanted to be a painter or an architect, but he was rejected from art school. For awhile, Hitler was a struggling artist, selling original paintings and postcards. He really wasn't such a bad artist, and maybe if he had gotten into art school history would have turned out differently.

While in his twenties, Hitler fought for Germany as a soldier in World War I. He won some medals and was even temporarily blinded in a poison gas attack. World War I ended in 1918, with the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty said that Germany alone was responsible for the war. The country was forced to give up a lot of territory, most of its military, and make millions of dollars in payments called reparations to some of the victorious countries.

Needless to say, most Germans weren't thrilled about this. Hitler soon joined a political party called the German Workers Party. By 1921, Hitler had become the party's Fuhrer, or leader. He changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party, or the Nazi Party for short. Hitler began to attract followers with his fiery speeches. He would rail against the enemies of Germany and the Versailles Treaty.
In 1923, Hitler led an armed uprising against the German government. It failed, and he was thrown in jail for one year. While in jail, he wrote a book called Mien Kampf, or My Struggle, which outlined his political philosophy. It was pretty simple: Hitler had a racist world view in which people with Northern European roots were naturally superior to all other people on Earth. He believed that they were a "master race," and that it was their destiny to conquer all of Europe.

Their main enemy was the Jewish people. Hitler believed that Jews were responsible for everything he didn't like, from the Versailles Treaty, to Communism, and even modern art. He also believed that democracy was an inefficient form of government, and that dictatorships were much better (I think that it's easy to see why).

After he got out of jail, he initially vowed to take over Germany by democratic means- by having the Nazi Party win elections. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression swept over Germany. High unemployment made the government unpopular, and the Nazi Party seemed like a fresh

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