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Adolf Hitler bears direct responsibility for the deaths of more than thirty million people, most of them killed between 1939 and 1945. Born in Braunau, on the border between the multi-ethnic empire of Austria-Hungary and the German Reich, his political ideas originated in the racist radicalism of his homeland, a racism he digested whilst he was a young layabout in Vienna, trying unsuccessfully to enter art school.
He moved Munich in 1913, where he enlisted in the German army. He was twice wounded, and decorated, during World War One. His political career began in 1918, fired by loathing for the German revolution of 1918/19 and the Weimar Republic, which he (and countless others) regarded as symbolic of Germany's defeat in the war and of the illegitimate 'power of Jews and Bolsheviks'.
In 1919 he joined the fascist German Workers' Party (DAP), whilst still employed by the German army as a propagandist. Demonstrating rare talent as a rabble-rouser, he played to the resentments of right-wingers, promising extremist 'remedies' to Germany's problems, including the killing of Jews, which few believed would ever be enacted. By July 1921 he was the unquestioned leader of what had become the NSDAP, the Nazi Party.
In 1923 Hitler attempted an armed uprising in Munich (along the lines of Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome), but this collapsed, and he was put behind bars for nine months. In 1925 he re-founded the party as a vote-winning machine, its core ideas intact, in an attempt to use democracy as the means of its own destruction. Using new techniques of mass communication to project his own quirky charisma, and backed by the brutality of his storm troopers, he pounded with his rhetoric the west, the Soviets, democrats, communists, capitalists and Jews. At this time of rural economic depression, the 1929 crash, and mass unemployment, voters were in the right frame of mind to move his way, and by 1932 the Nazis could no longer be ignored by Germany's political élites.
Although his party never won an overall majority in Germany, on 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of a coalition government. Many believed power would 'tame' him, but the descent into the hell of the Third Reich was rapid. By 1938 radicalism, terror, expansionism had become the norm, and far too many Germans tolerated the situation and supported Hitler - fear and propaganda are only partial explanations for this acceptance.
Hitler sought world domination (he always took war to his enemies, not they to him), and his policies led inexorably to World War Two. His murderous racial and political intentions were also always clear, however, even if secrecy at times shrouded the precise means of their execution. He killed himself in Berlin in 1945.
Mis à jour le 16/05/2010 par Pierre Ratcliffe. 
