Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. : Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice
Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Justice Elena Kagan. Justice
Clarence Thomas,
Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20
April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was a German politician who was the leader of the
Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), Chancellor
of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer ("leader") of Nazi Germany
from 1934 to 1945.
As dictator of Nazi Germany, he initiated World War II
in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was a central
figure of the Holocaust,
Born into a German-speaking Austrian family and raised
near Linz, Hitler moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service
in the German Army in World War I.
He joined the precursor of the NSDAP, the German Workers' Party, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power.
He joined the precursor of the NSDAP, the German Workers' Party, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power.
The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment,
during which time he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and
political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle").
After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular
support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism,
anti-Semitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda.
Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being
part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Hitler was
discharged from the army on 31 March 1920 and began working full-time for the
NSDAP.
The party
headquarters was in Munich, a hotbed of anti-government German nationalists
determined to crush Marxism and undermine the Weimar Republic.
In February 1921—already highly effective at speaking
to large audiences—he spoke to a crowd of over 6,000.
To publicise the meeting, two truckloads of party
supporters drove around Munich waving swastika flags and distributing leaflets.
Hitler soon gained notoriety for his rowdy polemic speeches against the Treaty
of Versailles, rival politicians, and especially against Marxists and Jews
Hitler's vitriolic beer hall speeches began attracting
regular audiences. He became adept at using populist themes, including the use
of scapegoats, who were blamed for his listeners' economic hardships.
Hitler used personal magnetism and an understanding of
crowd psychology to his advantage while engaged in public speaking.
Historians have noted the hypnotic effect of his
rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups.
Alfons Heck, a former member of the Hitler Youth,
later recalled:
We erupted into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that
bordered on hysteria. For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs,
with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! From that
moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.
Some visitors who met Hitler privately noted that his
appearance and demeanour failed to make a lasting impression.
Early followers included Rudolf Hess, former air force
ace Hermann Göring, and army captain Ernst Röhm.
Röhm became head of the Nazis' paramilitary
organisation, the Sturmabteilung (SA, "Stormtroopers"), which
protected meetings and attacked political opponents.
A critical influence on Hitler's thinking during this
period was the Aufbau Vereinigung,
A conspiratorial group of White Russian exiles and
early National Socialists. The group, financed with funds channelled from
wealthy industrialists, introduced Hitler to the idea of a Jewish conspiracy,
linking international finance with Bolshevism.
In the early 1930s, the mood in Germany was grim. The
worldwide economic depression had hit the country especially hard, and millions
of people were out of work. Still fresh in the minds of many was Germany's
humiliating defeat fifteen years earlier during World War I,
And Germans
lacked confidence in their weak government, known as the Weimar Republic. These
conditions provided the chance for the rise of a new leader, Adolf Hitler, and
his party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi party for
short.
Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding speaker who
attracted a wide following of Germans desperate for change. He promised the
disenchanted a better life and a new and glorious Germany.
The Nazis appealed especially to the unemployed, young
people, and members of the lower middle class (small store owners, office
employees, craftsmen, and farmers).
The party's rise to power was rapid. Before the
economic depression struck, the Nazis were practically unknown, winning only 3
percent of the vote to the Reichstag (German parliament) in elections in 1924.
In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won 33 percent of the
votes, more than any other party. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed
chancellor, the head of the German government, and many Germans believed that
they had found a savior for their nation
The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime
may never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the
death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims.
Recently declassified British and Soviet documents
have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed
. However, the following estimates are considered to
be highly reliable. The estimates:
5.1–6.0 million
Jews, including 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews
1.8 –1.9
million non-Jewish Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that
died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps,
As well as
civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising)
500,000–1.2
million Serbs killed by Croat Nazis
200,000–800,000
Roma & Sinti
200,000–300,000
people with disabilities
80,000–200,000
Freemasons
100,000
communists
10,000–25,000
homosexual men
2,000 Jehovah's
Witnesses
Raul Hilberg,
in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction
of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the
Holocaust.
This figure includes "over 800,000" who died
from "Ghettoization and general privation;" 1,400,000 who were killed
in "Open-air shootings;" and "up to 2,900,000" who perished
in camps.
Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up
to 3,000,000."
Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a
conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which
some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.
British
historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust,
but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated
higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.
Map titled
"Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December
1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad. Marked "Secret
Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region,
and reads at the bottom:
"The estimated number of Jews still on hand is
128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free of Jews").Lucy
Davidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews
died.
Using official census counts may cause an
underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and
villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many
records were destroyed during the war.
Her listing of deaths by country is available in the
article about her book, The War Against the Jews.
One of the most
authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the
Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed
in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett
estimate between
5.59 and 5.86
million Jewish victims in their Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990)
The following
groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little
evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as
was the case for the groups above.
3.5–6 million
other Slavic civilians
2.5–4 million
Soviet POWs
1–1.5 million
political dissidents
Additionally,
the Nazis' allies, the Ustaša regime in Croatia conducted its own campaign of
mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled,
resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs.
resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs.
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