Overview (4)

Mini Bio (1)

Born the fourth of six children to Austrian customs officer Alois Hitler--who had been married twice before--and the former Klara Polzl, Adolf Hitler grew up in a small Austrian town in the late 19th century. He was a slow learner and did poorly in school. He was frequently beaten by his authoritarian father. Things got worse when Adolf's older brother, Alois Jr., ran away from home. His mild-mannered mother occasionally tried to shield him, but was ineffectual. Adolf's attempt to run away at 11 was unsuccessful. At the age of 14 he was freed when his hated father died - an event that he did not mourn.



Hitler dropped out of high school at age 16 and went to Vienna, where he strove to become an artist, but was refused twice by the Vienna Art Academy. By this time Hitler had become an ardent German nationalist--although he was not German but Austrian--and when World War I broke out, he crossed into Germany and joined a Bavarian regiment in the German army. He was assigned as a message runner but also saw combat. Temporarily blinded after a gas attack in Flanders in 1918, he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and was promoted from private to corporal. In 1918, when the war ended, Hitler stayed in the army and was posted to the Intelligence division. He was assigned to spy on several radical political parties that were considered a threat to the German government. One such organization was the German Workers Party. Hitler was drawn by party founder Dietrich Eckart, a morphine addict who propagated doctrines of mysticism and anti-Semitism. Hitler soon joined the party with the help of his military intelligence ties. He became party spokesman in 1919, renamed it the National Socalist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI) and declared himself its Fuhrer (leader) one year later. In 1920 Hitler's intelligence handler, Munich-based colonel named Karl Haushofer, introduced the swastika insignia. In 1921 Haushofer founded the paramilitary Storm Troopers ("Sturmabteiling", or SA), composed of German veterans of WWI and undercover military intelligence officers. They helped Hitler to organize a coup attempt--the infamous "beer hall putsch"--against the Bavarian government in Munich in 1923, but it failed. The "rebels" marched on Munich's city hall, which was cordoned off by police. Hitler's men fired at the police and missed; the police fired back and didn't, resulting in several of Hitler's fellow Nazis being shot dead. Hitler himself was arrested, convicted of treason and sent to prison. During his prison time he was coached by his advisers and dictated his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. He only served several months in prison before being released. By 1925 the Nazi party was in much better straits both organizationally and financially, as it had secured the backing of a large group of wealthy conservative German industrialists, who funneled huge amounts of money into the organization. Hitler was provided with a personal bodyguard unit named the "Schutzstaffel", better known as the SS. The Nazis began to gain considerable support in Germany through their network of army and WWI veterans, and Hitler ran for President in 1931. Defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler next attempted to become Chancellor of Germany. Through under-the-table deals with powerful conservative businessmen and right-wing politicians, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. One month later, a mysterious fire--which the Nazis claimed had been started by "terrorists" but was later discovered to have been set by the Nazis themselves--destroyed the Reichstag (the building housing the German parliament). Then Hitler's machine began to issue a series of emergency decrees that gave the office of Chancellor more and more power.



In March of 1933 Hitler persuaded the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act, which made the Chancellor dictator of Germany and gave him more power than the President. Two months later Hitler began "cleaning house"; he abolished trade unions and ordered mass arrests of members of rival political groups. By the end of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only one allowed in Germany. In June of 1934 Hitler turned on his own and ordered the purge of the now radical SA--that he now saw as a potential threat to his power--which was led by one of his oldest friends, a thug and street brawler named Ernst Röhm. Röhm's ties to Hitler counted for nothing, as Hitler ordered him assassinated. Soon President Hindenburg died, and Hitler merged the office of President with the office of Chancellor. In 1935 the anti-Jewish Nuremburg laws were passed on Hitler's authorization. A year later, with Germany now under his total control, he sent troops into the Rhineland, which was a violation of the World War I Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 he forced the union of Austria with Germany and also took the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia near the German border with a large ethnic German population, on the pretext of "protecting" the German population from the Czechs. In March 1939 Hitler overran the rest of Czechoslovakia. On 23 August 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression treaty. In September of 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. France and the British Commonwealth and Empire declared war on Germany. In 1940 Germany occupied Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, and launched a major offensive against France. Paris fell and France surrendered, after which Hitler considered invading the UK. However, after the German Air Force was defeated in the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled. The British had begun bombing German cities in May 1940, and four months later Hitler retaliated by ordering the Blitz. In 1941 German troops assisted Italy, which under dictator Benito Mussolini was a German ally, in its takeover of Yugoslavia and Greece. Meanwhile, in Germany and the occupied countries, a program of mass extermination of Jews had begun.



On June 22, 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union. In addition to ore than 4,000,000 German troops, there were additional forces from German allies Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Finland, among others. Hitler used multinational forces in order to save Germans for the future colonization of the Russian lands. Following the detailed Nazi plan, code-named "Barbarossa," Hitler was utilizing resources of entire Europe under Nazi control to feed the invasion of Russia. Three groups of Nazi armies invaded Russia: Army Group North besieged Leningrad for 900 days, Army Group Center reached Moscow and Army Group South occupied Ukraine, reached Caucasus and Stalingrad. After a series of initial successes, however, the German Armies were stopped at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for 900 days until the city of 4,000,000 virtually starved itself to death. Only in January of 1944 was Marshal Georgi Zhukov able to finally defeat the German forces and liberate the city, finally lifting the siege after a cost of some 2,000,000 lives. In 1943 several major battles occurred at Kursk (which became the largest tank battle in history), Kharkov and Stalingrad, all of which the Germans lost. The battle for Stalingrad was one of the largest in the history of mankind. At Stalingrad alone the Germans lost 360,000 troops, in addition to the losses suffered by Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian and other forces, but the Russians lost over one million men. By 1944--the same year the Western allies invaded occupied Europe--Germany was retreating on both fronts and its forces in Africa had been completely defeated, resulting in the deaths and/or surrender of several hundred thousand troops. Total human losses during the six years of war were estimated at 60,000,000, of which 27,000,000 were Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other people in Soviet territory. Germany lost over 11,000,000 soldiers and civilians. Poland and Yugoslavia lost over 3,000,000 people each. Italy and France lost over 1,000,000 each. Most nations of Central and Eastern Europe suffered severe--and in some cases total--economic destruction.



Hitler's ability to act as a figurehead of the Nazi machine was long gone by late 1944. Many of his closest advisers and handlers had already fled to other countries, been imprisoned and/or executed by the SS for offenses both real--several assassination attempts on Hitler--and imagined, or had otherwise absented themselves from Hitler's inner circle. For many years Hitler was kept on drugs by his medical personnel. In 1944 a group of German army officers and civilians pulled off an almost successful assassination attempt on Hitler, but he survived. Hitler, by the beginning of 1945, was a frail, shaken man who had almost totally lost touch with reality. The Russians reached Berlin in April of that year and began a punishing assault on the city. As their forces approached the bunker where Hitler and the last vestiges of his government were holed up, Hitler killed himself. Just a day earlier he had married his longtime mistress Eva Braun. Hitler's corpse was taken to Moscow and later shown to Allied Army Commanders and diplomats. Joseph Stalin showed Hitler's personal items to Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam Conference after the victory. Hitler's personal gun was donated to the museum of the West Point Military Academy in New York. Some of his personal items are now part of the permanent collection at the National History Museum in Moscow, Russia.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anthony Hughes husnock31@hotmail.com

Spouse (1)

Trade Mark (5)

His frequently parodied toothbrush mustache



His fierce, loud, energetic speeches



His party salute with extended arm (inspired by Ancient Rome salute)



His dramatic hand gestures while addressing crowds



His diatribes against Jews and Bolshevism



Trivia (236)

After his suicide in April 1945 his corpse was imperfectly cremated due to lack of petrol, and some remains were not burned. Pieces of his skull (including one with a bullet hole) and leg bones were thought to be recovered by the Soviets, however forensic and DNA testing have since proved the remains to not be his. The jaw fragments the Soviets claimed to belong to Hitler were not tested.



Arm was temporarily paralyzed during an assassination attempt by a group of Wehrmacht generals in 1944.





He has been held responsible for the deaths of over 11 million people in concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. Most were Jewish, but others included communists, homosexuals, the intellectually disabled (the experiments conducted upon them convinced Nazi officials that mass extermination of people was feasible), Christians, and Roma and Sinti gypsies. There is no record of Hitler ordering the Holocaust. However on 18 December 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was asked by SS leader Heinrich Himmler what should be done about the Jews in the Soviet Union. Hitler replied, "Exterminate them as partisans". Axis forces had already been executing Jews on the Eastern Front since the summer of 1941.

Leader of Nazi Germany (The Third Reich) from 1933 to 1945.



He was Time Magazine's 1938 "Man of the Year". Time's definition of "Man of the Year": "The person who most influenced the news" in the indicated year, *no matter whether for good or bad*. The cover picture featured Hitler playing "his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on." This picture was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a German Catholic who had fled Hitler's Germany.



After his death his corpse was never officially discovered.



There were unconfirmed sightings of him in Denmark and Argentina after his death.



Served as an army messenger in World War I (he was initially deemed "unfit" and "unable to bear arms" after being arrested for attempting to avoid military service), and won two Iron Crosses for bravery.



Was taking 92 different drugs towards the end of his life.



Contracted Parkinson's Disease in the later years of his life. Recently discovered newsreel footage shows Hitler addressing members of the Hitler Youth (the last footage taken of him alive), with his left hand visibly trembling.





Was involved in a scandal following the death of Geli Raubal , daughter of Hitler's half-sister, Angela Hitler . Originally deemed a suicide by Munich police, present-day theories indicate that Hitler had a love affair with Geli and might have murdered her in a jealous fit. She was living in his apartment and had become a subject of gossip within the ranks of the Nazi Party. She had also had an affair with a Jewish man from Vienna, and was reportedly pregnant with his child when she died. Geli's brother Leo blamed Hitler for her death.

Hitler's last command post, the Berlin "Führerbunker," was also his 13th.





One story regarding Hitler's death is that when Soviet troops reached Berlin and located the "Führerbunker", the body of a man was found amid the rubble. He had died from a gunshot to the forehead and resembled Hitler so closely he was mistakenly identified as him. His body was even filmed by newsreel photographers with the Soviet soldiers who found the body. A servant from the Führerbunker identified the man as Gustav Weler, one of Hitler's personal cooks. Supposedly he had been used as a decoy for "security reasons". The sensationalist book "The Bush Connection" by Eric Onion claims that SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny shot Weler to distract invading forces. Weler's body was taken to Moscow for identification and buried at Lefortovo Prison.

While many insist that Hitler was a lifelong vegetarian, medical and historical records prove that he adopted a strictly vegetarian diet in the modern sense only in the last 12 years of his life. He was however a follower and fierce defender of the vegetarian life style, reportedly calling broth "corpse tea" and asking his dining partners how they can "eat dead beings" (around 1930). To maintain a vegetarian diet back then was not as easy as today, and not all vegetarians managed - or wanted - to take it too strictly.





His favorite opera was Richard Wagner 's "Reinzi," which he claimed to have seen at least 40 times. In his younger years, he befriended the Wagner family and even twice proposed to Wagner's daughter in-law, Winifred, after her first husband died (she turned him down because he didn't have "an important position"). He was known to her children as "Uncle Wolf," and members of the Wagner family affectionately referred to Hitler as "Wolf," even after he became Germany's dictator.

He held membership card number 555 of the NSDAP, but the Nazi Party started numbering from 500 to make themselves appear larger



From 1925 to 1945, Hitler held the official title of SS Member #1, a title which he gave to himself upon the group's creation in 1925.



Did not drink or smoke.





William Patrick Hitler , son of Adolph's half-brother Alois Hitler , fathered four sons. One son died in an auto accident in 1989. Another son has described his ancestry as "a pain in the ass." William Patrick's three surviving sons are the only living descendants of Hitler's paternal line of the family and are, quite literally, the last of the Hitlers.

While serving in World War I, he found a terrier he named "Little Fox." He taught the dog many tricks to entertain his fellow soldiers.



Was the first child of his mother's to survive past infancy.



Was a talented painter, but was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice, allegedly because of unfitness for painting and was told that his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture.



After World War II, Soviet forces bulldozed the location of the "Führerbunker" (Hitler's last command post and site of his suicide), and paved over it, fearing it would become a shrine for Nazi sympathizers.



Recently discovered medical records show that he was receiving doses of methamphetamine as often as six times a day.





According to Leni Riefenstahl , he was anything but happy about hosting the 1936 XI. Olympic Games in Berlin and just agreed because it could have been a great publicity event for his "superior German race". Even though the German team indeed won most of the medals, probably the biggest disaster for the Nazis was the black so-called "subhuman" Jesse Owens not only winning four gold medals, but becoming the audience's hero of the games, too.

Forensic pathologists have determined, from both historical records and what little remains of Hitler that still exist, that he probably committed suicide by simultaniously biting into a glass capsule filled with potassium cyanide and shooting himself in the head.





The only American favorably mentioned in his magnum opus "Mein Kampf" was industrialist Henry Ford

Had a Mercedes touring car with a special seat which could be raised up so that he could be more easily seen when he rode through the streets. This touring car was at the Lars Anderson Auto Museum in Boston until 1994.



He emigrated to Germany to escape service in the Austro-Hungarian army. He was not opposed to military service per se, however, and when war broke out in 1914 he immediately enlisted in a Bavarian regiment. He served as an infantryman, then as a message runner, survived 50 battles, and won the Iron Cross, First Class, rare for a lance corporal.





John Lennon wanted to put Hitler in the crowd on the iconic cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles , but the record label refused, fearing it would cause offense.

He suffered from many illnesses and medical conditions, including hypertension, headaches and heart trouble. Being gassed during World War I harmed his vision. After suffering from two episodes of blindness (one of which may have been hysterical), Hitler later suffered from pain in his eyes and blurred vision, as if "viewing objects through a thin veil.'' Beginning in the 1930s, he suffered from tinnitus. Towards the end of his life, Hitler was afflicted with Parkinson's syndrome.



According to his valet, Hitler's vision was so bad, that he read speeches that were printed with inch-high type.



His mother died of breast cancer.





Although Hitler went to great lengths to stress his humble beginnings, it has been suggested that his family was quite well off by the standards of the time and that when his father died, he actually inherited a small fortune, which he spent in less than a year in a frivolous lifestyle. Other reports state that he did not inherit a fortune and gave his share of orphan's benefits to his sister, Paula Wolf



Was reportedly a member of the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft), though this is disputed. The Thule Society was a group originally dedicated to articulating and preserving a genuinely German heritage (and was linked to the study of the hermetic arts) that was founded on August 17, 1918, by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who also was a student of Islamic mysticism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and other occult disciplines. The original name of the Thule Society was Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity), and it was closely connected to if not an offshoot of the Germanenorden secret society. Formed by prominent German occultists in 1912, Germanenorden secret society -- whose symbol was a swastika -- had a hierarchical fraternal structure similar to freemasonry. Its ideology included nationalism and the idea of the superiority of the "Nordic" race, as well as anti-Semitism in addition to its witch's brew of occult and magical philosophies. The Thule Society soon started to disseminate anti-republican and anti-Semitic propaganda among the urban proletariat to counter the doctrinaire Marxism of the communists and the socialist and republican ideals of the Social Democrats. It gave birth to the Workers' Political Circle, which was founded contemporaneously in August 1918 with Thulist Karl Harrer as chairman, that in turn became the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party) in 1919. Working as an agent of military intelligence, Cpl. Adolf Hitler was assigned to the task of infiltrating the German Workers Party, but soon became a convert. One year later the German Workers' Party became the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party) and was soon under the leadership of Herr Hitler. Other top Nazi leaders, including Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg , were members of the Thule Society, though Hitler likely was not. However, Serbottendorff stated, "Thule members were the people to whom Hitler first turned and who first allied themselves with Hitler." There has long been speculation that Hitler was involved in the occult and was an initiate into the so-called "Nuremburg Mysteries", but nothing has ever been proven to any degree of certainty. What is undeniable is that, after the political victory of the Nazi Party in 1933, the occult tradition rooted in the Thule Society and other secret societies was carried over into Hitler's Third Reich, mainly by the SS, whose Reichsfuhrer, Heinrich Himmler , was an avid student of the occult. An SS occult research department, the Ahnernerbe (Ancestral Heritage), was established in 1935 with SS Col. Wolfram Sievers at its head. Occult research took SS researchers as far afield as Tibet (the department's activities were reflected in the plot of Jäger des verlorenen Schatzes (1981)). Sievers had the Tantrik prayer, the Bardo Thodol, read over his body after his execution at Nuremberg. Thus, the Third Reich can be seen as an attempt by occultist "adepts" to establish a brave new world based on their twisted ideas of the "Laws of Nature." Similarly (in scope if not kind), the American republic was founded by Masonic adepts 150 years before, but as it was rooted in Enlightenment ideals and democracy rather than unsound fables, it managed to flourish for two centuries rather than engender its own destruction in less than a generation.

Learned of the armistice ending World War I while in a hospital from a sobbing pastor.



His original title for Mein Kampf was "My Struggle for Five Years Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice".



Was reputed to have been a big fan of American football.



Almost froze to death while sleeping on the streets in Austria. He was saved, ironically enough, by a Jewish charity group.



Allegedly, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch he retreated to the attic of a building and tried to shoot himself in the head. A policeman wrestled the gun away from him.



In 1943 conspirators placed a bomb on his private plane but the timer was faulty and it failed to detonate.





Allegedly, Rudolf Hess , his private secretary, complained that Hitler's grammar was terrible, and that much time was spent correcting his papers before they could be published.



Allegedly, at the Munich conference, British Foreign Minister E.F.L. Wood actually mistook Hitler for a servant.

Wrote a sequel to "Mein Kampf", but then, perversely, refused to allow it to be published. The manuscript was discovered decades after WWII ended; in it, Hitler revealed his plan to attack the United States.



Born in Austria, he did not become a German citizen until 1932. German citizenship was necessary to run for the parliamentary elections of the same year, which resulted in Hitler being appointed German Chancellor on January 30, 1933.



Was possibly the first media-driven politician in history to understand the power of film. All his public appearances were carefully choreographed.



From the moment of his ascension to power in 1933 to his death in 1945, there were 17 attempts on his life.



Allegedly, his medical records revealed that he was afflicted with monorchism (having only one testicle descended into the scrotum). However this has been debunked.





German industrial titan Fitz Thyssen, an early supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party who turned against them, was instrumental in propagating the myth that Hitler was partly Jewish. In his 1941 book "I Paid Hitler", he wrote: "According to the published records, Hitler's grandmother had an illegitimate son, and this son was to become the father of Germany's present leader. But an inquiry once ordered by the late Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss disclosed that the Fuhrer's grandmother became pregnant during her employment as a servant in a Viennese family . . . And the family . . . was none other than that of Baron Rothschild." Thyssen was the scion of the family who owned the Thyssen mining and steel works. After taking over the company upon the death of his father, he formed and headed a conglomerate that dominated the vital steel industry. A conservative stung by Germany's loss in World War I and the Allies' brutal policy of reparations, he turned to nationalism and thus was attracted, initially, to Nazism and Hitler. He became a member of the Council of State after the Nazis rose to power, but grew disillusioned with Nazism and Hitler in the antebellum years of the 1930s. Of the man he once supported, Thyssen wrote in the introduction to his 1941 book, "If human civilization is not to perish, everything that is possible must be done to make war impossible in Europe. But the violent solution dreamed of by Hitler, a primitive person obsessed by ill-digested historical memories, is a romantic folly and a barbarous and bloody anachronism". In November of 1938 Thyssen resigned from the Council of State in protest over the Nazis' brutal Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. With the outbreak of World War II, he emigrated to Switzerland. After moving to France, Thyssen eventually was apprehended by the Nazis after they took over France and he wound up in the notorious Dachau concentration camp, which he survived. The man who financed Hitler and later broke with him outlived him by nearly six years, dying in February 1951.



In 1983, Stern Magazin bought and published what it purported to be Hitler's diaries. When it was revealed that the 61 volumes were fakes by forger Konrad Kujau , he and the Stern reporter he sold them to were arrested.



He was born four days after Charles Chaplin . Hitler modeled his mustache after Charlie Chaplin's mustache.



His favorite film actresses were Pola Negri and Lina Basquette , among others. At his behest, Basquette was offered a film contract in the 1930s. Obviously, she turned down the offer.



Was close friends with German film actress Lil Dagover

His mother Klara had three children before Adolf, all of whom died in infancy. Klara was always fearful that Adolf would die, too.



The reason that the Vienna art school turned Hitler down was because he could not draw the human form.





Dutch-German actor/singer Johannes Heesters was reportedly Hitler's favorite actor, especially in his role of Count Danilo Danilovitch from Franz Lehár 's "Die Lustige Witwe" (The Merry Widow).

Forced French officials to sign the treaty of surrender in the same train carriage the Armistice had been signed in.



Hitler's father was born Alois Schicklgruber. His mother, Maria Schicklgruber, never revealed his paternity. In 1842, she married grain mill operator Johann Georg Hiedler. After their deaths, Alois was raised by his step-father's brother, an act which has lead some historians to believe that Hiedler was Alois's biological father. When Alois was legitimated in 1876 via adoption by his step-uncle, the baptismal registry mistakenly changed the family's surname to "Hitler", which Alois decided to take. In 1877, he was legally declared to be Hiedler's son. In 1885, he married his step-uncle's granddaughter, Klara, Adolf's mother.



Hitler's father died when he was aged thirteen.



It has been alleged that Hitler may have had an (unknown) Jewish Grandfather as his father (Alois Hiedler) was the illegitimate son of an Austrian peasant woman from Upper Austria and an unknown father while his (Alois Hiedler) mother was in domestic service in Graz in Styria. However this theory has been debunked several times.





In 1977, German historian Werner Maser wrote in Zeitgeschichte Magazine about Jean-Marie Loret , who claimed to be Hitler's son. Loret's aunt confirmed that her nephew was fathered by a German soldier stationed in France during World War I, yet denied that he was Hitler. Balthasar Brandmayer, who served with Hitler, noted in his memoirs that Hitler was a prude who reproached comrades intending on taking up with French girls as having "no German sense of honor". In 2008, Jean-Paul Mulders obtained DNA samples from Loret's and Hitler's living relatives, and concluded Hitler was not Loret's father. Anton Joachimsthaler Timothy Ryback , and Ian Kershaw have also stated that, given the inaccuracies in Maser's account (for example, Maser claimed Loret's mother was allowed to follow Hitler from town to town, something Hitler's superiors would never have allowed) Hitler's paternity of Loret is impossible.

Artist Austin Osman Spare would tell a story that he was asked to paint a portrait of Hitler, but refused, saying "If you are Superman, may I be forever animal.".



In a documentary entitled "Profiling Hitler", it is related how the OSS required a Psychiatrist to create a profile of Hitler. The model of the day was Psychoanalysis, and the profile speculated that as the war turned against Hitler he would withdraw from public appearances and probably commit suicide.



After World War I ended, his former commander, Karl Meyr, recruited Hitler to infiltrate a fringe political group, the German Workers' Party, formed over founder Anton Drexler's outrage by the Treaty of Versailles. Impressed with his oratory skills, Drexler invited Hitler to join. Hitler eventually assumed leadership of the group, renaming it the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Initially pro-Nazi, Meyer, a Jew, ultimately joined the rival Social Democratic Party. After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, he was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo, sent back to Germany, and died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.



Although Hitler's declaration of war on the United States has been described as a mistake, it is likely that it made no difference. After the UK had declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, all US restrictions on aid to Britain had been immediately lifted. It would only have been a short matter of time until German U-Boats began sinking American ships carrying supplies to the UK, giving the US government its casus belli to declare war on Germany. The German and Italian war declarations made the Second Happy Time possible for U-Boats.





Followers of Michel de Nostredame believe he named Hitler as the second of three anti-Christs, Napoléon Bonaparte as the first, and the third not revealed.

Hitler's impact on History is a tragic study in the effects of charisma. Hitler apologists are frequently people who might not be alive if the Axis Powers had won.



Ordered the London Blitz on 7 September 1940. The British Royal Air Force had bombed German cities from 11 May 1940. On 14 May 1940, three days after the RAF began bombing Germany, the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam. The Rotterdam Blitz was deliberately exaggerated by the British press, with some newspapers increasing the casualties figures tenfold. Under the Treaty of Versailles, from 1920 Germany wasn't allowed to have an air force.



Ordered Operation Barbarossa as a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, before Stalin had enough time to prepare for war against the European Axis Powers. Stalin had already violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by annexing Bukovina in 1940.



The word "Fuhrer" is German for "leader" or "guide", but due to the stigma people use the word "Leiter" for "Leader" now.





Publicly offered to end the war in the West in July 1940 after the Fall of France, saying he had no desire to destroy the British Empire. As the British Royal Family is descended from the German noble houses of Hanover, and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hitler considered England more German than British. In May 1941, he again offered to end the war and evacuate northern France if the UK allowed Germany a free hand in the East against the Soviet Union. The UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose to turn down both offers.

Signed the Munich Agreement with the UK, France and Italy in September 1938. Hitler later broke the agreement when he overran the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, probably in response to German economic problems.



The UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials.



Under the Nazi regime, Jews were not permitted to own a pet or a bicycle. Smoking was forbidden. Persons of low IQ were sterilized and the disabled or deformed were put to death.



As a racial supremacist who believed that Northern European people were the "master race", his close alliance to the Japanese during the Second World War is rather curious. Indeed, in 1942 he forbade celebrations in Germany following the Battle of Singapore (also known as the Fall of Singapore), a defeat of the British by the Japanese, as he felt it was a bad day for the white race. He also refused to allow Ribbentrop to send an official statement congratulating the Japanese on their victory.



As a racial supremacist Hitler told his soldiers they could ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to Slavs, because he considered them "subhuman".





Brother-in-law of Gretl Braun and Ilse Braun during the brief time he was married to Eva. Two hours before the wedding, Hitler had Gretl's husband, Hermann Fegelein , shot. On May 5, 1945, Gretl gave birth to her and Fegelein's daughter, whom she named Eva. Eva committed suicide on April 25, 1971 after her boyfriend was killed in an auto accident.

In order to knock France out of the war he was forced to go through Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg so as to avoid a costly frontal assault on the Maginot Line. He also needed to seize control of the Belgian ports to prevent the British Royal Navy from reimposing its blockade of 1914-1919. The blockade was widely regarded as illegal under international law as it contravened the Hague Convention of 1907 which the UK had signed. The tenth treaty of the 1907 Hague Convention concerned Maritime Warfare and the UK did not ratify that one, although its blockades of Germany during both world wars were still widely regarded as being clearly illegal under international law.





Hitler never won an overall parliamentary majority under Germany's democratic system. In the final free election in November 1932, his party lost considerable support (down from nearly 14 million votes to under 12 million votes) but still remained the largest elected party with 196 seats (293 seats were required for a majority). Hitler was subsequently enabled into power by other right-wing leaders and President Paul von Hindenburg , which ultimately had devastating consequences for Germany, Europe and the world.

Mountain Dew launched a promotion in 2012 to have its Internet Fans name a new drink. The competition was flooded by inappropriate "funny" suggestions and the project had to be abandoned. The winner up to that point was "Hitler did nothing wrong".





Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik (1971) was filmed in Germany, but had to import performers from elsewhere to play the Oompa Loompas because after the Nazi atrocities local midget performers could not be found.

Originally Hitler only wanted to expel Jews from Germany. After the Fall of France the Madagascar Plan was drawn up to relocate Europe's Jews to the French colony. However the British naval blockade meant this was impossible.



Violated the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 by introducing compulsory military conscription in Germany and rebuilding the armed forces.





Unlike his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini , Hitler had no interest in overseas colonies. This was partly because few of Germany's colonies before World War I were profitable.



He could only invade Poland if Joseph Stalin agreed to invade as well, otherwise Germany risked fighting a two-front war in 1939 before it was ready. Hitler and Stalin agreed their joint invasion of Poland in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939. Stalin deliberately waited until 17 September 1939 before launching his invasion, as he knew France and the British Empire would not be able to declare war on both Germany and the Soviet Union.

Offered the UK and France a peace proposal on 6 October 1939, following the German-Soviet conquest of Poland.



It is often observed that Hitler would have stood a more realistic chance in World War II if he had focused all resources on the war effort, rather than expending large amounts of money and manpower on building and maintaining concentration camps.



It has often been said that the state of Israel would not have been created in 1948 were it not for Hitler, and that without him the European colonial empires would have lasted for longer.



Maintained the British naval blockade of Germany was illegal under international law, and that the United States was violating its official neutral position by supplying the UK with warships and munitions.



Showed little interest in the independence movements of the colonies of the British Empire, except India. There were plans for the European Axis forces to link up with Japanese forces in the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal in 1942 to bring about the collapse of the British Empire in Asia and the Pacific. This plan was foiled when the Axis lost the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942.





Development of the Nuclear Bomb was hastened out of concern that the Nazis would develop it first. Albert Einstein wrote to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressing this concern in 1939.

The Kriegsmarine (the German Navy) sent out battle instructions in May 1939 which included the ominous phrase "fighting methods will never fail to be employed merely because some international regulations are opposed to them".



Showed little interest in the possibility of Spain formally joining the Axis, partly because the country had been economically destroyed in a brutal civil war, and also because he needed officially neutral harbors to import war materials from Latin America. Hitler felt Spain would be a burden to Germany's war effort, like Italy.



Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union economically by seizing the resources of Ukraine. For this reason he did not consider taking Moscow the priority during Operation Barbarossa.





Authorised Operation Barbarossa on 18 December 1940 after Joseph Stalin 's request on 25 November that Axis forces should withdraw from eastern Europe. This threatened to cut off Germany's main supply of oil from Romania.

He was a militant anti-smoker.



Considered declaring war on the United States in September 1940 after the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, and in March 1941 after the start of Lend Lease.





Along with Italy's Benito Mussolini , Hitler declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese had attacked the US naval bases at Pearl Harbor. The US was keeping the British Empire and the Soviet Union in the war with Lend-Lease. Hitler could no longer ignore the amount of economic and military aid America was giving the UK and the Soviet Union via the Lend-Lease programme. He needed to declare war so his U-Boats would be able to start sinking American ships carrying armaments to the UK and the USSR.



Hitler was not impressed when Italy formally entered the war on 10 June 1940. He felt Benito Mussolini had deliberately remained neutral when the war began, and had opportunistically only entered the war with the Fall of France imminent, having left Germany to do all the heavy lifting. Hitler actually tried to dissuade Mussolini from joining the war in March 1940.

In April 1941 he sent German forces to aid the Italians in the Battle of Greece, mainly so the British Royal Air Force would not be able to bomb the oilfields in Romania. Hitler later blamed the need to help the Italians in Greece for the delay of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, from 15 May 1941 to 22 June 1941. However most historians agree the delay of Barbarossa was due to many other factors, especially the delay in building aircraft bases in eastern Europe.



Hitler had hoped for Japanese support in his war against the Soviet Union, but the Japanese maintained their pact with the Soviets.



A Scottish Psychiatrist, Dr Donald Ewen Cameron, used the example of Nazi Germany to bolster his theories that mental illness had "social contagion" qualities.



Mussolini found Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to be boring and cliché-ridden and George Orwell thought it was clumsily written. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn commented that it lacked original thought and was just a collection of commonplaces.



Philip K Dick wrote an alternative history novel on what the World might be like if Hitler had won: "The Man in the High Castle".



It has been suggested by some historians that Hitler should have focused on North Africa and the Mediterranean after the Fall of France, in order to bring about the collapse of the British Empire and get Greece and Turkey to join the Axis. If Malta had been captured it is likely Spain would have entered the war in order to invade Gibraltar, thus closing the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy.





Hitler offered to treat Soviet prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention if the USSR did the same for German POWs in their captivity, even though the Soviet Union had not signed the document. Joseph Stalin refused as he considered anyone who surrendered to be a traitor to Communism.

The Enigma Machines had a number of Security Features, not including not being retrievable from sunken submarines.



On 25 January 1940 he issued an order which specifically forbade air raids against the UK, including the ports. He also prohibited attacks upon British naval forces unless the RAF bombed Germany first, noting, "the guiding principle must be not to provoke the initiation of aerial warfare on the part of Germany.".



Norway was neutral with regard to World War II and protection from British-French influences was the pretext Germany used to officially justify the occupation, along with securing the ore mines of Sweden and fulfilling propaganda about a larger Germanic Empire. There was a 40,000 strong Norwegian Resistance Movement called the Milorg.



Invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940 as a preventive manoeuvre against a planned, and openly discussed, Franco-British occupation of Norway.



The Blitz ran from 7 September 1940 to 21 May 1941, with 16 UK cities affected. The British began bombing Germany on 10 May 1940 in response to the invasion of France and the Low Countries. The existence of Germany's Air Force broke the Treaty of Versailles.



In March 1940 the Germans intercepted a message that the UK planned to invade Norway as part of a general strategy to slowly encircle Germany and cut it off from its trading partners. However the British postponed the invasion of Norway until April, when they began laying mines in Norway's neutral waters. This time the goal was to draw Germany into a conflict, instigate an engagement at sea and use the situation as a cover to invade Norway in an operation called "Plan R 4". However, just as the first mines were being laid, the Germans found out about the plan, landed in Norway and seized the Norwegian ports.



Outlawed atheist and freethinking organizations in Germany in 1933. The German Freethinkers League had around 500,000 members.





Hitler met with the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco once, on 23 October 1940. Franco asked for French colonial possessions in return for entering World War II, but Hitler refused as he did not want to damage his relations with the new Vichy French government. After the meeting, Hitler reportedly said that he would "rather have three or four teeth pulled out", than barter with Franco again. In May 2013 documents were released showing that the UK's MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200 million bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain from joining World War II after the Fall of France.



He was initially reluctant to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, but was persuaded to offer military assistance by Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Canaris . The Luftwaffe bombed rebel-held areas at the request of the Spanish nationalist government.



He always maintained that the invasion of the Soviet Union was a pre-emptive strike before Joseph Stalin was ready for war with the Axis Powers. It has been suggested that Stalin was preparing to attack Axis forces in eastern Europe in 1941 in the Soviet Offensive Plans Controversy.



Decided war with the United States could no longer be avoided when Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a speech on 11 September 1941 confirming that all American ships had been ordered to fire on any Axis ships.

Quentin Tarantino made a popular movie on a Second World War Theme. The film had alternative history elements, and included a scene in which Hitler's face is obliterated by machine gun fire.



Poland helped Hitler overrun Czechoslovakia by annexing Zaolzie on 1 October 1938, following the Munich Agreement.





Invaded Poland before Joseph Stalin did in order to demonstrate his commitment to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

On 26 October 1939 Nazi Germany unilaterally annexed Zaolzie. It had been under Polish occupation for just over a year. After World War II it was returned to Czechoslovakia.



The German occupation of Romania in late August 1940 raised tensions with the Soviets, who responded that Germany was supposed to have consulted with the Soviet Union under Article III of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Pact was terminated on 22nd June 1941.



About 345,000 World War II casualties were from Czechoslovakia, 277,000 of them Jews. As many as 144,000 Soviet troops died during the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army.



Not taking Moscow in September 1941 was often cited as a mistake on Hitler's part. However the move allowed the Wehrmacht to destroy a main Soviet army, netting more than 600,000 prisoners. Hitler knew the Soviets would not surrender if the capital city fell, and in any case the Axis would have to defend a destroyed city against repeated Soviet counterattacks in the winter.



The Nazi regime is often used as an example of "Why Evolution is Evil", even though, ultimately, it failed.



Attributed his survival of the July 20th plot to "Divine Intervention".



Napoleon captured Moscow in 1812, but failed to defeat the Russians. Germany defeated Russia in World War I and imposed the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Hitler believed defeating the Red Army was more important than capturing individual cities.



There was a serious attempt to establish a Nationalist interpretation of Science: Deutsche Physik or Aryan Physics, which was absorbed into the Nazi Party when Philipp Lenard joined.



Hitler's Army High Command had several objectives - Army Group North, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by the Baltic Sea; Army Group Center, Russia's capital, Moscow; Army Group South, Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. They severely underestimated the total fighting strength of the Red Army. Instead of 200 divisions, the Soviets could field 400 divisions when fully mobilized. This meant there were three million additional Soviets available to fight.



Maria Mauth, a 17-year-old German schoolgirl at the time, recalled her father's reaction to Hitler invading the Soviet Union: "I will never forget my father saying: 'Right, now we have lost the war!'.".



Hitler allegedly only had one testicle due to an infected injury amputation during World War I, although this may be another urban myth. Such a rumour might have started if he were a sufferer of Monorchism or cryptorchidism.



The German High Command began planning the invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, after the Soviets violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by annexing Bukovina on 28 June 1940. The planned invasion was initially code named Operation Otto, and later Operation Barbarossa.



The Soviet Union had planned to accomplish the annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina with a full-scale invasion, but the Romanian government, responding to a Soviet ultimatum delivered on June 26, agreed to withdraw from the territories in order to avoid a military conflict. Germany, which had acknowledged the Soviet interest in Bessarabia in a secret protocol to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had been made aware prior to the planned ultimatum on June 24, but had not informed the Romanian authorities, nor were they willing to provide support.



More and more modern historians and scholars have cast doubt on the soundness and feasibility of an Axis attack on Moscow in September 1941. Steven D. Mercatante argued that the correct course of action would have been to focus on Leningrad, Ukraine and the Caucasus, just as Hitler had wanted from the beginning. Robert Citino wrote that the efforts around Kiev were remarkable and a stunning success, which in his opinion validated the approach Hitler took.



In addition to claiming there was an intended Soviet attack in the summer of 1941, Hitler also invaded the Soviet Union because he wanted to destroy Communism and to destroy the USSR as a world power and potential threat to the Axis Powers. He may also have wanted the natural resources of the Soviet Union to continue the war with the British Empire, as the UK had refused to accept his peace proposals in July 1940 and May 1941.



The target of assassination attempts from within his own organization.



In telling his father's Auschwitz Survivor's Story in the Pulitzer Prize winning "Maus", Art Spiegelman relates his father's experience of another Camp Inmate who claimed to be a German put there by mistake and was ignored.



Had a "Museum to a Dead Race" planned.



Hilter made peace proposals after breaking the Munich Agreement.



He is widely believed to have changed the world more than any other person since Alexander the Great (356 BC - 323 BC).



He appears in a Visualisation of Hell in the Film "Little Nicky", where he must wear a Frilly French Maid's Dress and receive a pineapple from behind on a regular basis for the rest of Eternity.



Rearmament actually began on a more limited scale in the 1920s during the Weimer Republic.





Considered pursuing a Mediterranean strategy in 1941-42, but believed war with the Soviet Union had become unavoidable and delaying the invasion would allow Joseph Stalin too much time to rearm and build up his forces. Stalin was set to begin the full modernization of the Red Army in 1942, which would have made the USSR a formidable threat to the Axis Powers.

Hitler refused to give Czechoslovakia to Poland in 1939, which caused the Polish government to seek an alliance with the UK and France.



Allowed France's vast colonial empire to remain intact in 1940, and agreed to respect French property rights for the duration of the occupation.



When Paris fell to German occupation on June 14, 1940, French resistance fighters allegedly cut the elevator cables to the Eiffel Tower. This meant that if Hitler wanted to hoist a swastika flag, a soldier would have to climb the roughly 1710 stairs to the summit platform. As Allies neared Paris in August 1944, a Frenchman scaled the tower and hung the French flag. When it became obvious that the Germans would lose Paris, Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to turn the city into rubble - including the Eiffel Tower. General von Choltitz did not carry out the command. Reportedly, within hours of the Liberation of Paris, the Tower's lifts worked again.



His Speech Delivery Technique has been compared to the Induction Techniques of Stage Hypnotists.





He is mentioned in the lyrics of the theme song to the popular BBC comedy series Dad's Army (1968). It was sung by music hall performer Bud Flanagan especially for the series.

Hitler had no interest in North Africa or the Mediterranean Sea. However after Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 the Battle of the Mediterranean began, and British forces in Egypt attacked Italian forces in Libya. In February 1941 Hitler was forced to send the Afrika Korps to prevent the Italians from suffering total defeat. The Allied victory in the North African Campaign in May 1943 led to the Italian Campaign and the end of Italian Fascism.





Early in 1941 Hitler was faced with the choice between obtaining more oil from the Soviet Union or surrendering. Undoubtedly Joseph Stalin would have resisted any German demands for increased oil deliveries, or at least made an increase dependent on greatly increased German deliveries of manufactured products that Germany would have been incapable of meeting. Viewed in that light, the invasion of the Soviet Union appears inevitable, even without the ideological aspect.



At D-Day, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt 's reasoning was sound, his action decisive, his orders clear. But the panzer divisions were not under his command. They were in OKW reserve. To save precious time, Rundstedt had first ordered them to move out, then requested OKW approval. OKW did not approve. At 0730 Jodi informed Rundstedt that the two divisions could not be committed until Hitler gave the order, and Hitler was still sleeping. Rundstedt had to countermand the move-out order. Hitler slept until noon.



Contrary to popular belief, Hitler never issued a halt order immediately prior to the evacuation from Dunkirk. The order was actually issued by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt , commander of Army Group A, at the request of his tank unit commander, who had lost 50% of his armored forces and needed time to regroup.

DNA tests on Hitler's relatives ironically show Jewish and African heritage.



Signed the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement on 11 February 1940.





Like SS leader Heinrich Himmler , Hitler was very pro-Muslim. He met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini in Berlin on 28 November 1941. The Mufti advised him not to exile Jews to the Middle East.

Some historians believe the Final Solution was decided because Germany had clearly lost the war by the beginning of 1942 and was facing complete destruction by the United States, China, the British Empire and the Soviet Union.



Plans were drawn up to deport people from Europe to Madagascar, Palestine and Siberia. The British naval blockade meant the Madagascar Plan was not viable, and Arab leaders objected to the idea of Jews being moved into the Middle East. Finally the failure of the European Axis Powers to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941 ended the Siberian plan. The Axis had captured a third of the Soviet Union by the end of 1941, containing more than four million Jews. The internment camps were overflowing and the logistics of moving so many people during wartime were impossible. Therefore instead of deporting people the Nazis decided to exterminate them instead.



Psychologists believe Hitler's world view was shaped by his experiences as a soldier on the Western Front during World War I.



Intervened in Norway in April 1940 in response to Plan R 4.



Had to divert his forces to help the Italians in France in June 1940, in North Africa in February 1941, and in the Balkans in April 1941. He was also forced to deploy troops training in France to meet the Allied invasion of Sicily rather than use them for the Battle of Kursk, and to withdraw forces from the Soviet Union when the invasion of Italy began in September 1943.





Gave Italy a million tons of coal each month from the start of World War II, even though the country had remained neutral. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had only demanded six million tons of coal from Germany for the first year of the war.

After France and the British Commonwealth declared war on Germany, Hitler originally intended to invade France in the autumn of 1939 to force an end to the war and the economic blockade. However the Polish campaign did not end until October, which meant the invasion of France had to be delayed until 1940 due to the onset of winter.



The vast majority of German officers supported the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and believed it could succeed, even those who disliked Hitler or those who had favored retaining good relations with the Soviets.





Decided to reject Joseph Stalin 's offer of an alliance in December 1940 because he was convinced the Soviet leader was playing a double game, and because Stalin kept changing his demands.

War declarations were already becoming obsolete by the start of World War II. Hitler only declared war once, against the United States on 11 December 1941.



Some German generals felt the armed forces were not ready for a major war in 1939. However delaying the war would have allowed the Soviet Union, the British Empire, France and the United States more time to rearm.





In a private conversation with his ally Gustaf Mannerheim on 4 June 1942 Hitler maintained he would still have invaded the Soviet Union, even if he had known the Soviet forces were stronger than he had believed.



In early June 1940, when Benito Mussolini informed Hitler that he at long last would enter the war, Hitler was most dismissive, in private calling Mussolini a cowardly opportunist who had broken the terms of the Pact of Steel in September 1939, and was only entering the war nine months later after it was clear that France was beaten and it appeared that Britain would soon make peace.



Hitler refused to restore the monarchy as he blamed Kaiser Wilhelm II for Germany's defeat in World War I.



In 2016, the British left-wing politician Ken Livingstone , a former Mayor of the City of London, caused an outrage in the UK when he stated as a fact that Hitler supported Zionism. He was publicly confronted by fellow Labour Party politician John Mann , who called him a racist and a Nazi apologist in front of television cameras, and Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party. Livingstone has refused to apologize for his comments despite widespread criticism from members of his own party and beyond. He maintained his remarks were factually correct in view of the Haavara agreement.

The Nazi government signed the Haavara agreement, which facilitated the relocation of Jews to Palestine in 1933.





On December 10, 1941, when Hitler resumed his conference with Erich Raeder Wilhelm Keitel and Hermann Göring , Hitler said that Franklin D. Roosevelt 's speech on the previous day confirmed everything in the Tribune story. Hitler considered Roosevelt's speech to be a de facto declaration of war. Since war with the United States was inevitable, Hitler felt he had no choice but to declare war on the United States.

Without the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Germany would have run out of oil in August 1941.





The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor surprised Hitler. Hitler had never wanted Japan to attack the United States. Germany had repeatedly urged Japan to attack Singapore and the rest of Britain's Far Eastern Empire, but Japan had refused to do so. After the war General Alfred Jodl said that Hitler had wanted Japan to attack the British Empire and the Soviet Union in the Far East, which would have set up a two-front war. Hitler thought Franklin D. Roosevelt would probably not be able to persuade the American public to go to war to defend Britain's Asian colonies. Jodl said that Hitler had wanted in Japan "a strong new ally without a strong new enemy.".

The Armenian Genocide was a Plot Point in the book "We need to talk about Kevin", despite Hitler's assertion about it being forgettable.





On December 9, 1941, Hitler returned to Berlin from the Eastern front and plunged into two days of conferences with Admiral Erich Raeder , Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel , and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring . The three advisers stressed that the Rainbow Five plan showed that the United States was determined to defeat Germany. They pointed out that Rainbow Five stated that the US would undertake to carry on the war against Germany alone even if the Soviet Union collapsed and Britain surrendered. The three advisers leaned toward Raeder's view that an air and U-boat offensive against both British and American ships might be risky, but that the United States was already unquestionably an enemy. On December 9, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt made a radio address to the nation. In addition to numerous uncomplimentary remarks about Hitler and Nazism, Roosevelt accused Hitler of urging Japan to attack the United States. In reality Hitler had told the Japanese not to attack the US, instead urging them to attack the Soviet Union or British colonies like Singapore.

Originally Hitler wanted to invade the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1940, but his generals all said the armed forces were not ready.



The Nazi Regime inspired Stanley Milgram's "The Banality of Evil" Conformity Experiment, which proved that people have a very low threshold for giving in to the demands of authority figures.



Had a "Hunger Plan" to starve the "inferior" Slavs after the Soviet 1941 invasion, by diverting their food supplies to the German Army.



It is disputed whether Hitler was aware of the Plan Dog memorandum, which determined in 1940 that the United States would focus on defeating Germany and Italy while fighting a defensive war in the Pacific against Japan.



Shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor Hitler informed the Japanese he would declare war on the United States, even if they made the first move.



Hitler was in his bunker after dinner when Otto Dietrich, his press secretary, brought him a news flash about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like Churchill, the Führer was delighted to hear it: "Hitler snatched the sheet of paper from my hand, strode out of the room and walked unaccompanied, without cap or coat, the hundred yards to the bunker of the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces. He was the first to bring the news there." Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel never forgot the moment: "Jodl and I were both present that night as - the only time during the war - he came bursting in to us with the telegram in his hand. I gained the impression that the Führer felt that the war between Japan and America had suddenly relieved him of a nightmare burden; it certainly brought us some relief from the consequences of America's undeclared state of war with us.".



On 9 December 1941 he allowed Axis U-Boats to begin operating in American waters, in view of Rainbow Five and the Plan Dog memorandum.



Due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact he was forced to pressure Italy into ending its support for Finland during the Winter War. Hitler was delighted by the outcome of the conflict, as both the Soviet Union and the League of Nations were humiliated.



Lampooned by The Kids in the Hall ("What is that bad man doing to my Horse?" Sketch).



A few photos of Hitler striking dramatic poses have been edited together over the song "Pumped Up Kicks" in order to create a Meme of Hitler Raving with Glowsticks.



The Holocaust was heavily inspired by the Great Purge of 1936-38, and the Hunger Plan was inspired by the Holodomor.



In 1945 Adolf Hitler Street in Berlin was renamed Roosevelt Drive.



The Nazi State was called "The Thousand-year Empire".



Hitler was furious at the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940. He admonished the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano for opening an opportunity for the British to enter Greece and establish an airbase in Athens, putting the British within striking distance of valuable oil reserves in Romania, which Hitler relied upon for his war machine. It also meant that Hitler would have to divert forces from North Africa, a high strategic priority, to Greece in order to bail Mussolini out. Hitler considered leaving the Italians to fight their own way out of this debacle - possibly even making peace with the Greeks as a way of forestalling an Allied intervention. But Germany eventually invaded Greece in April 1941, mainly so the British Royal Air Force would be unable to bomb the oil refineries in Romania during the invasion of the Soviet Union.



Lampooned by Dr Seuss in "Yertle the Turtle".



While much is said of Stalingrad being of symbolic value for Hitler, it was a transit hub for oil deliveries for the Soviets, who got their oil from Chechnya and Azerbaijan at the time. The whole southern focus of the Axis campaign on the Eastern Front was to capture the Caucasus oilfields.



Historians are divided on whether Hitler ever seriously considered the "Mediterranean Plan" proposed by Admiral Erich Raeder in the summer of 1940, before he finally committed to the invasion of the Soviet Union on 18 December 1940 after it became certain that Spain was not going to join the war. Any Mediterranean strategy was flawed because Hitler was not prepared to treat Vichy France as an ally, and Spain and Italy both wanted French colonies in Africa and the Mediterranean. In addition the Germans did not have the experience or the logistics to wage war in the Middle East. Some historians have asserted that Hitler intended to focus on the Mediterranean in 1942 after the conquest of the Soviet Union, which many in the German High Command expected to take only a few months.



At the time, very few people took Mein Kampf seriously.



US presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy all doubted whether Hitler had really died in 1945.



It is likely that European settlers in North America killed far more people in their genocidal campaign of conquest against the natives than the Nazis did. That period of History is variously called "The Native American Holocaust", "The American Indian Holocaust", "The North American Holocaust" or "The 500 Years' War".



In 2014, the FBI released 742 pages of documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking to find out what the US government knew about Hitler's presumed escape to South America.



A large dental bridge was fitted to Hitler's upper jaw in 1933. On 10 November 1944 he had surgery to cut off part of the bridge due to a gum infection that was causing him severe toothache.





German historian Sebastian Haffner argued that without Hitler's unprecedented genocide of the Jews, the modern nation state of Israel would not exist. He contended that without Hitler, the decolonization of former European spheres of influence would have been postponed. Further, Haffner claimed that, other than Alexander the Great, Hitler had a more significant impact than any other comparable historical figure in that he caused a wide range of worldwide changes in a relatively short time span. Haffner's opinion of Hitler: "If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness.".

Assumed command of the German army on 19 December 1941, following the failure to capture Moscow.



Sonke Neitzel, Professor of history at the London School of Economics, said witness accounts used to compile the British report into Hitler's death are unreliable. He said, "We know that prisoners who had been in the bunker most likely lied to the Soviets when they were interrogated.".



Magda Goebbels reminisces in her memoir about Hitler once saying in the Café Anast that he would like to squash a little Jewish boy "flat like a bug against the wall". She thought it was just talk, and goes on to say that he actually did it.





In the Nazi propaganda film Triumph des Willens (1935), crowd members can be seen copying Hitler's mustache.



On February 20, 1920, the German Workers' Party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler did not like the addition of the word "socialist" because he loathed socialism and communism, but acquiesced because the executive committee thought it might be helpful in attracting workers from the left. Some of the first people to be arrested and sent to concentration camps upon Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 were prominent German socialists and communists, which is mentioned in the documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997).

In 1932, before becoming German chancellor, Hitler had already earned a profile in the British reference book "The New Standard Encyclopaedia and World Atlas". The book's biography of him provides a fascinating insight into how underestimated the threat from Hitler and the Nazis was at the time in Britain, merely concluding: "Hitler has written a book, Mein Kampf (My Battle), and has put forward various schemes for reform, some of a very drastic kind." It doesn't mention Hitler and his party's aggressive antisemitism, racial ideology or plans for German territorial expansion, all of which had been set out in Mein Kampf several years earlier. Interestingly, the book's entry on antisemitism describes it as an "opposition to the Jewish race" and a "movement" which "appears to be based on economic rather than religious or political causes". The book does not describe antisemitism as a form of bigotry or prejudice, despite mentioning that it was responsible for "many brutal outrages" in Russia and Hungary in the 19th century, as well as The Anti-Semitic League in Germany and the Dreyfus Case in France, which suggests that antisemitism was seen at the time as having a certain degree of legitimacy, even from a British reference book's perspective.



For all the braggadocio, he did give up on his painting.



Elevated to Chancellor by an Aristocracy who thought, wrongly, that they could keep him in check.



Was almost killed in a car accident on March 13, 1930.



His niece committed suicide. Hitler had recently had a letter he'd sent to her covertly retrieved.



The President ordered filming of the liberation of Concentration Camps specifically to make future successful "Holocaust Denial" impossible.



Annexed the Free City of Danzig on 2 September 1939. Hitler advised the United Kingdom and France that he would withdraw from Poland if allowed to keep Danzig and part of the Polish corridor.





Many historians agree that 1941 was the turning point of World War II and there is no way that the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan could have won once they were in combat with both the USSR and the USA. Narrator Laurence Olivier even mentioned on Die Welt im Krieg (1973) that the outcome of the war was certain with the United States' entry in December 1941, as no country in the world could compete against the industrial might of the United States.

The Channel Islands, just off the coast of northern France, were the only part of Britain to come under German occupation during the Second World War. In occupied Jersey, a British printer was compelled to start printing stamps for the island. When accused of complicity, he protested that he had put four letter 'A's in the corners of each stamp, which he said stood for a Latin Motto which translated to "Go to Hell, Atrocious Adolf!".



Hitler's first major military defeat in World War II is generally accepted to have been the "Battle of Britain" between July and October 1940, during which the German air force, the Luftwaffe (literally "Air Weapon"), failed to defeat the Royal Air Force in the skies over England (known in German as "Luftschlacht um England", literally "The Air Battle for England"). While this is often remembered now in the British popular imagination as the precursor to an imminent invasion of Britain, in reality the primary objective was to compel Britain to agree to a negotiated peace settlement. An invasion plan, provisionally called "Operation Sea Lion", had not been developed in great detail by the Germans and there are doubts over whether it would have been feasible anyway, as an invasion would have been seaborne and Britain still had a superior navy to the Germans in 1940. The Royal Navy would have continued the war from Canada in any event.





While Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister 1937-40) is usually landed with the historical blame for his policy of appeasement and for signing the Munich Agreement in 1938 which gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, which encouraged Hitler to attack Poland the following year, it was actually Chamberlain's predecessor, Stanley Baldwin (British Prime Minister 1935-37), who had failed to act when Hitler was flagrantly transgressing the Treaty of Versailles with large-scale rearmament, conscription and illegally launching the Luftwaffe, as well as the Remilitarization of the Rhineland. Poland also invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 and annexed Zaolzie.

One of the many infamous personalities mentioned in the song "Nome aos Bois" by Brazilian rock group Titãs.



The age gap between Hitler and Eva was 23 years.



As a result of World War II the Treaty of Versailles, seen by many as a direct cause of the conflict, ceased to exist.



Supported the Iraqi uprising against the British in May 1941.





According to the television series Nazi Victory: The Post War Plan (2018), Hitler had plans to invade America using long-range bombers.

Like Napoleon - who also invaded Russia, but in 1812 - Hitler was nicknamed as the petty corporal, because it was his rank in the army during WW1.



Hitler's OKW Direktive Nr 2 and Luftwaffe Direktive Nr 2 prohibited attacks upon enemy naval forces unless the enemy bombed Germany first, noting, "the guiding principle must be not to provoke the initiation of aerial warfare on the part of Germany.".



When the Japanese informed Berlin on 17 November 1941 that they were likely to go to war with the United States, Hitler immediately replied that Germany would declare war on the US in the event of a Japanese attack. He could no longer ignore American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, as well as the increasingly frequent incidents between US warships and Axis U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. After President Roosevelt publicly confirmed "shoot on sight" in his Fireside Chat on 11 September 1941 the United States was in an undeclared state of war with Germany and Italy.



On 15 December 1940 he ordered the remains of Emperor Napoleon II of the French to be transferred from Vienna to Paris.



In February 1945 Hitler claimed he had deliberately allowed the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to evacuate Dunkirk in May-June 1940, and that Winston Churchill had not appreciated this. Modern historians however do not give credence to this claim, as Hitler's orders at the time were to destroy the BEF.



An Anglophile, he wrote admiringly of "Anglo-Saxon determination" to hold India.



As a child he supported the Boers during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The German-speaking public and press at the time were overwhelmingly opposed to what the British were doing in South Africa.





Shares a birthday with George Takei who, ironically, as a boy spent time in a Japanese internment camp in the United States Of America during World War 2.

On September 11, 1940, Hitler sent German army and air force reinforcements to Romania to protect precious oil reserves and to prepare an Eastern European base of operations for a future assault against the Soviet Union.



In June 1940 when the Germans defeated France, which Stalin had hoped would turn into a stalemated conflict lasting for several years, the Soviets overran the Baltic States and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Since this put Ploesti a two-day journey by tanks from the new border, and given nearly two-thirds of German oil came from there, Hitler started planning Barbarossa.



Personal Quotes (155)

What luck for the rulers that men don't think.



Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.



Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. [One people, one empire, one leader]



When we have won the war, who will question our methods?



[Regarding the invasion of the USSR] We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after this battle. This is a war of annihilation.





[Comparing himself with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain ] Mr. Chamberlain likes to take weekends in the country; I shall take countries in the weekend!

Art is the most endearing investment.



The family is the smallest but most precious unit in the building of a State.



The Jews are definitely a race, but they are not human.



Strength lies not in defense but in attack.



I cannot be mistaken - what I say and do is historical.



I follow my life with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.



My father I respected, my mother I loved.



We don't say to the rich 'Give to the poor', we say 'German people, help each other'. Rich or poor, each one must help thinking, there's someone even poorer than I am, and I want to help them as a fellow countryman.



When a man is starving in the streets he is not thinking of bread and water, but of caviar and champagne!



Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.



Society's needs come before the individual's needs.



The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.



The great time has just begun. Germany has awoken. We have won power in Germany, now we have to win over the German people. I know, my comrades, that it must have been difficult at times when you desired change that never came, so again and again the appeal had to be made to continue the struggle. You mustn't act yourself, you must obey, you must give in, you must submit to the overwhelming need to obey.



A new community is being built in Germany and it is our most beautiful goal and aim. Those who can not see past their own nose deserve our pity more than anything else. It is the luck to help which rewards those who commit themselves to this socialist state, and this commitment must happen every new winter. Our social welfare system is so much more than just charity because we do not say to the rich people "Please, give something to the poor." Instead we say "German people, help yourself!" Everyone must help, whether you are rich or poor. Everyone must have the belief that there's always someone in a much worse situation than I am, and this person I want to help as a comrade. If one should say, "Yes, but do I have to sacrifice a lot?" That is the glory of giving! When you sacrifice for your community, then you can walk with your head held up high.



What we dreamed for years has become a reality. The symbol of the unification of all classes of German people has become the symbol of the new Reich, and thus it has become the standard of the German people. The most precious possession you have in the world is your own people. And for this people, and for the sake of this people, we will struggle and fight, and never slacken, never tire, never lose courage, and never lose faith.



The struggle against Marxism has for the first time evolved into a united struggle. For the first time, I allow myself as an unknown man to start a war, and not rest until this plague has been removed from the German way of life.



We don't have their colonies. We don't have the opportunities of international world connections which these states and peoples possess. Our Reich, which is so crammed and which has so few of the necessities for life needs to be carefully and thoughtfully cultivated and managed. We cannot succeed without planning.



My German youth... just as we're gathered here, my young comrades, as part of the life of the people, so must the rest of the people. It was not always so. In the past, people did not want to understand each other. Each thought only of themselves. At best, their class alone. We have been witnesses to the consequences of this aberration of the spirit. In your youth you must safeguard that which you possess -- the great feeling of comradeship of being part of the group. If you hold on to this, then there is no force in the world who can take it from you. You will be one people bound together as tightly as you are now. As German youth, our only hope, the courage and faith of our people. You, my youth, are indeed the living guarantee of the living future of Germany, not an empty idea, not an empty formalism, or an insipid plan. No! You are the blood of our blood, the flesh of our flesh, and the spirit of our spirit. You are the continuation of our people. May Germany live and may her future which lives in you be praised.



[on hearing Richard Wagner's music for the first time, at age 12] In one instant I was addicted.



Weakness must be hammered away. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes. That is how I will create the New Order.



Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.



Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.



[to the German people after the start of World War II] We will not give up. We will not rest. We will be victorious. Our time has come.



Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely, it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defense makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support, the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.



He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.



Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith... we need believing people.



[about the Munich Agreement] Chamberlain was such a charming old man, I felt I had to give him my autograph!



[General Halder's diary summation of a Hitler speech] Britain's hope lies in Russia and the United States. If Russia drops out of the picture America, too, is lost for Britain, because elimination of Russia would tremendously increase Japan's power in the Far East. Russia is the Far Eastern sword of Britain and the United States pointed at Japan. Russia is the factor upon which Britain is relying most. Something must have happened in London! With Russia smashed, Britain's last hope would be shattered. Germany will then be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia's destruction must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941. The sooner Russia is crushed, the better. Attack achieves its purpose only if Russian state can be shattered to its roots with one blow. Holding part of the country will not do. Standing still for the following winter would be perilous. Resolute determination to eliminate Russia



Moscow must disappear from the earth's surface as soon as its riches have been brought to shelter.



The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it



The British Isles looks like a great chicken waiting for its neck to be broken. [Churchill's response: Some chicken, some neck.]



I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work



This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief



The anti-Semitism of the new movement (Christian Social movement) was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge



What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator



My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed



A truly impressive amount of authentic material is now available which confirms that a Soviet Russian attack was intended. We are also sure about when this attack was to take place. In view of this danger, the extent of which we are perhaps only now truly aware, I can only thank the Lord God that He enlightened me in time and has given me the strength to do what must be done. Millions of German soldiers may thank Him for their lives, and all of Europe for its existence. I may say this today: If this wave of more than 20,000 tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of artillery pieces, along with more than 10,000 airplanes, had not been kept from being set into motion against the Reich, Europe would have been lost.



The masses are more likely to believe a big lie than a little one.



So far as Germany's attitude towards America is concerned, I have to state: (i) Germany is perhaps the only great power which has never had a colony either in North or South America, or otherwise displayed there any political activity, unless mention be made of the emigration of many millions of Germans and of their work, which, however, has only been to the benefit of the American Continent and of the U.S.A. (ii) In the whole history of the coming into being and of the existence of the U.S.A. the German Reich has never adopted a politically unfriendly, let alone hostile attitude, but, on the contrary with the blood of many of its sons, it helped to defend the U.S.A. The German Reich never took part in any war against the U.S.A. It itself had war imposed upon it by the U.S.A. in 1917, and then for reasons which have been thoroughly revealed by an investigation committee set up by President Roosevelt himself. There are no other differences between the German and the American people, either territorial or political, which could possibly touch the interests let alone the existence of the U.S.A. There was always a difference of constitution, but that cannot be a reason for hostilities so long as the one state does not try to interfere with the other. America is a Republic, a Democracy, and today is a Republic under strong authoritative leadership. The ocean lies between the two States. The divergences between Capitalist America and Bolshevik Russia, if such conceptions had any truth in them, would be much greater than between America led by a President and Germany led by a Führer.



I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?



["Second Book"] The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.



You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?



[on the invasion of the Soviet Union] Had I known they had as many tanks as that, I'd have thought twice before invading.



It is a wonderful thing to see our nation at war, in its fully disciplined state. This is exactly what we are experiencing at this time, as Mr Churchill is demonstrating to us the aerial night attacks he has concocted. He is not doing this because these air raids might be particularly effective, but because his Air Force cannot fly over German territory in daylight. Whereas German aviators and German planes fly over English soil daily, there is hardly a single Englishman who comes across the North Sea in daytime. They therefore come during the night - and as you know, release their bombs indiscriminately and without any plan on to residential areas, farmhouses and villages. Wherever they see a sign of light, a bomb is dropped on it. For three months past, I have not ordered any answer to be given; thinking that they would stop this nonsensical behavior. Mr Churchill has taken this to be a sign of our weakness. You will understand that we shall now give a reply, night for night, and with increasing force. And if the British Air Force drops two, three or four thousand kilos of bombs, then we will drop 150,000, 180,000, 230,000, 300,000 or 400,000 kilos, or more, in one night. If they declare that they will attack our cities on a large scale, we will erase theirs! We will put a stop to the game of these night-pirates, as God is our witness. The hour will come when one or the other will crumble, and that one will not be National Socialist Germany. I have already carried through such a struggle once in my life, up to the final consequences, and this then led to the collapse of the enemy who is now sitting these in England on Europe's last island. (4 September 1940)



When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."



If the War is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it. I still would not shed a single tear for them, because they did not deserve any better.



By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.



Deputies, in the midst of a great battle for the freedom and greatness of the German nation, I called you. The necessity for this is an historic hour. We appeal to general reason Germany wanted to revise the Versailles Treaty peacefully, if possible. Even our enemies knew it was impossible to hold his situation forever. Germany's peaceful attempts at revision did not succeed. Germany did not recognize the legality of this treaty because the victor was not a real victor. Our downfall was due to poor leadership. National Socialism wanted to free Germany from Versailles as well as from the chains of the Demo-Plutocratic system. In actual fact, this revision had to be forced through against the wills of the French and British rulers.



We didn't know ourselves just how monstrous this powerful beast was. Had I known, I would have been more reluctant, but I had already made the decision then, and there would be no other possibility.



What is coming will visit the people, not Churchill, who will probably be in Canada. He may think the outcome will be the annihilation of Germany, but it will the destruction of a great world empire - the destruction of which was never my wish or aim ... I regret the victims the war will exact among civilians in Britain as well as among Germans, even though I know millions of young Germans are straining to fight England. Churchill may parry my words with the claim that I feel doubt or fear, but in any case I will have the knowledge that I acted rightly according to my conscience.



In this hour and before this body, I feel myself obliged to make one more appeal to reason to England. I do this not as a victor, but for the triumph of common sense ... Churchill may parry my words with the claim that I feel doubt or fear, but in any case I will have my knowledge that I acted rightly, according to my conscience. Despite my sincere efforts it has not been possible to achieve the friendship with England which I believed would have been blessed by both.



I appealed to the insight of the statesmen, predicting devastating consequences. I appealed to the rest of the world, although I feared that my word would not be heard and would more than ever arouse the fury of the warmongers. I predicted correctly that my appeal would not be heard.



Had I finished off France in '39, then world history would have taken another course. But then I had to wait until 1940. Then a two-front war, that was bad luck. After that, even we were broken.



I asked from Poland something no other German statesman could have dared. I asked for the return of the old German provinces, then only with a plebiscite. If Churchill and the warmongers felt half the responsibility toward Europe that I did they never would have started the war. On September 2, 1939, war still could have been avoided. The British and the French wanted war, however they wanted a three-year war in order reap profits from their war investments ... After 18 days the Polish campaign ended. Then I issued an appeal to responsible men. I warned all against war, particularly the French against the pursuance of a war which would be horrible. This only served to incite the Franco-British warmongers, who saw their war profits most endangered. They began, however, to call it danger to civilization and culture.



[2nd speech to the Wehrmacht commanders a week before they invaded Poland in 1939] ...kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race of language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?



[Mein Kampf] While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.



Since the beginning of the war, the American President Roosevelt has steadily committed ever more serious crimes against international law. Along with illegal attacks against ships and other property of German and Italian citizens, there have been threats and even arbitrary deprivations of personal freedom by internment and such. The increasingly hostile attacks by the American President Roosevelt have reached the point that he has ordered the American navy to immediately attack, fire upon and sink all German and Italian ships, in complete violation of international law. American officials have even boasted about destroying German submarines in this criminal manner. American cruisers have attacked and captured German and Italian merchant ships, and their peaceful crews were taken away to imprisonment. In addition, President Roosevelt's plan to attack Germany and Italy with military forces in Europe by 1943 at the latest was made public in the United States, and the American government made no effort to deny it. Despite the years of intolerable provocations by President Roosevelt, Germany and Italy sincerely and very patiently tried to prevent the expansion of this war and to maintain relations with the United States. But as a result of his campaign, these efforts have failed.



The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.



Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over.



[Pearl Harbour reaction] We can't lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years! [Japan]



The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.



Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice



It goes without saying that we have no affinities with the Japanese. They're too foreign to us, by their way of living, by their culture.



Like a woman, . . . who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realize the impudence with which they are spiritually te