Surely you, in your history (or geography) classes, have heard the name of adolf hitlea. Hitler was one of the most complex and terrifying characters in contemporary history, alongside others like BenitoMussolini, Stalin, HandTse-Tung and inPot. Like the latter, Hitler built a murderous, centralized and totalitarian government regime, that is, all power converged on his figure. He was considered by his followers as the furher, which in German means “the leader”, the chief who leads the people. The political ideology he developed, the Nazism, led the German population into one of the darkest periods in its history and the world, the Second World War.
Read too:Causes of World War II
First years
Hitler was of Austrian origin. He was born near the city of Liz, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, on April 20, 1889. he was the son of alois hitler, a civil servant, with Klara, second cousin of Alois. His parents died when he was still very young: his father in 1903 and his mother in 1907. From Liz, Hitler left for the capital of the empire, Vienna, in an attempt to join the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was refused.
After surviving a few years making postcards in Vienna, Hitler went to Munich, Germany, where, in 1914, he enlisted as a combatant to fight in the First World War. We know that at that time one of the engines of the war was the competition between the various nationalisms that ruled inside and outside the European continent. Hitler became imbued with German nationalism, which became the basis for his ideas, which began to be articulated in the 1920s in post-World War I Germany.
rise to power
Germany and its allies (including the Austro-Hungarian Empire) lost the war and were forced to comply with severe sanctions imposed by the victorious countries. This created a climate of resentment on the part of the German population, especially among ex-war fighters and workers. Part of these social groups organized themselves around the National Socialist Party of German Workers (whose abbreviation is NAZI, hence also called Nazis). It was in this party that Hitler joined in the early 1920s, transforming it into an expressive vehicle of racist, anti-Semitic, nationalist and revanchist ideas.
One of the transformations that Hitler operated within the Nazi movement was symbolic in character. The introduction of the Indian symbol of the swastika in the center of a red flag was his work, as there was something "magnetic" in that symbol, which psychologically impressed the masses – unlike the symbols of imperial coats of arms, whose meanings were not easily assimilated by the bulk of the population. The rituals of greetings, such as the arm raised diagonally, imitating the greeting of the military of the Roman Empire, was also introduced by Hitler among the Nazis.
Gradually, between the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazis gained more and more seats in the German Parliament, as Hitler put pressure on the then President of Germany, Hindenburg, to make him chancellor (top position in the country's public administration), which occurred in 1933. From then on, Hitler began to concentrate all his powers on himself, especially after Hindenburg's subsequent death. One of his government's immediate actions was to isolate the Jews who inhabited Germany in ghettos and concentration camps. This policy, over time, became one of the greatest genocides in human history, the Holocaust.
Germany, under the command of Hitler, militarized itself, thus breaking the determinations of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, after World War I. This treaty established, among other things, heavy restrictions on the reorganization of the German armed forces. The Nazi government ignored them. In 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, provoking the reaction of France and Great Britain, starting the Second World War.
Read too: Holocaust - one of the greatest genocides in human history
last days and death
Until 1943, Hitler managed, with the help of Italy to Mussolini, control a vast region of the European continent, using the power of his army. However, in that same year, the first coalitions between the Western Front (commanded by the United States and England) and the Front Eastern (commanded by the Soviet Union) began to promote a siege against the Nazis that would have their greatest success in operations of D-Day (June 6, 1944). Thereafter the war on the European continent came to an end, which occurred in 1945. That year, Hitler committed suicide with his wife. Both bodies are believed to have been cremated by German army officers.
*Image credits:Everett Historical and Shutterstock
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
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