Adolf Hitler started out as a failed art student in Vienna with no money and no real friends. By 1939, he was running Germany and had started a war that killed tens of millions of people. Understanding how that happened — and how ordinary people let it happen — is one of the most important things history has to teach us.
Most people who end up changing history in terrible ways do not look dangerous at the start. Adolf Hitler was born in a small Austrian village. He failed his art school exams twice. He slept in shelters and sold hand-painted postcards to get by. For years, nobody thought much about him at all. Then Germany fell apart after World War I, people were hungry and angry, and Hitler knew exactly what to say to them. Within about fifteen years, he went from painting park benches on postcards to running one of the most powerful countries in the world. What followed was the deadliest war in human history, and the murder of millions of Jewish people and others in what became known as the Holocaust. This is how it happened.
Adolf Hitler ruled Nazi Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. His decisions started World War II and made the Holocaust possible — two events that together killed tens of millions of people across the world.
Where He Came From
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn — a small town in Austria right on the border with Germany. His father, Alois, had changed the family surname to Hitler from Schicklgruber earlier in his life. Alois worked as a customs inspector and was a strict, hard father. Adolf's mother, Klara, was the opposite — she was warm and protective toward her son. Adolf was not a great student once his father died in 1903. He basically stopped trying at school. He spent his time reading history books, daydreaming about becoming a painter or an architect, and not doing much of anything useful. His family moved to the city of Linz in 1905. At 18, Hitler took a trip to Vienna, the biggest city in Austria, and fell in love with its grand buildings and art scene. He tried to get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907. They turned him down. He tried again in 1908. They turned him down again. He also looked into studying architecture but did not have the right school qualifications to get in. His mother died in December 1907. After that, Hitler was essentially on his own in Vienna with very little money. He scraped together a living painting small pictures of buildings and scenes to sell as postcards and posters. He had a small amount of inheritance money coming in, but not much. He spent five years like this — mostly alone, barely getting by, growing angrier at the world.
Vienna Changed How He Thought
Those years in Vienna were where Hitler's ugly political ideas started taking shape. Vienna in the early 1900s had a very popular mayor named Karl Lueger who was openly anti-Semitic — meaning he publicly blamed Jewish people for the city's problems and used that hatred to win votes. Hitler paid attention. He watched how Lueger whipped up crowds, turned fear and anger into political power, and kept people cheering with someone else to blame. Hitler filed all of that away. In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, Germany. He said it was because he simply preferred Germany — but historians note that he was also trying to dodge the Austrian military draft. Then World War I started in 1914, and Hitler volunteered for the German army. Being in the military was the first time in his adult life that he seemed to have any purpose. He served as a messenger on the Western Front in France, carrying orders between command posts under fire. He was wounded in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, recovered, and came back. He won the Iron Cross Second Class and later the Iron Cross First Class, which was a fairly rare decoration for someone of his low rank. His officers saw him as brave but noted he had no real leadership skills — he was never promoted above lance corporal. In 1918, near the end of the war, Hitler was temporarily blinded by a gas attack and was recovering in a hospital when Germany surrendered. He was devastated. The surrender felt like a betrayal to him — like Germany had been stabbed in the back by enemies from within rather than beaten on the battlefield. That rage never left him.
Hitler served as a messenger on the Western Front during World War I and was wounded twice. The German defeat in 1918 hit him extremely hard — he spent the rest of his life convinced that Germany had been betrayed rather than beaten.
The Nazi Party — How It Started
After the war, Hitler stayed in the army and worked as a political instructor in Munich, warning soldiers about the supposed dangers of communism. It was in this job that he discovered he had a talent for public speaking. He joined a small political group called the German Workers' Party in 1919 and quickly became its most effective speaker. The party rebranded itself as the National Socialist German Workers' Party — the NSDAP, or the Nazi Party for short. Despite the name, it had nothing to do with socialism or helping workers. The name was chosen to sound appealing to as many Germans as possible. Hitler took over as leader of the party in 1921. The Nazi Party was ultra-nationalist, deeply anti-Semitic, and obsessed with returning Germany to greatness after the humiliations of World War I. Hitler became the face of it — a furious, magnetic speaker who could hold a crowd for hours. In November 1923, Hitler decided he was ready to take over Germany by force. He and his supporters stormed a beer hall in Munich where local government officials were holding a meeting, fired a gun into the ceiling, and announced they were seizing control of the government. This became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It failed completely. The police, the army, and other right-wing politicians did not back him. Hitler was arrested and put on trial for treason. The trial turned out to be useful for Hitler even though he lost it. He used his time in court to make long speeches about Germany's problems and his plans for fixing them. The newspapers covered it all. He became nationally known. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served less than a year.
Mein Kampf and What Was in It
While he was in prison, Hitler wrote a book. He called it Mein Kampf, which means 'My Struggle' in German. The book laid out everything Hitler believed and everything he planned to do if he ever got real power. He wrote about building Germany back up into a great nation. He wrote about the need for Lebensraum — 'living space' — claiming Germany needed to conquer territory to the east so German people could expand and prosper. He wrote at length about his hatred of Jewish people, blaming them for almost every problem Germany had ever faced. He wrote about creating a 'pure' German race. None of it was hidden. It was all written down in a book you could buy in a bookstore. Many people who would later claim they did not know what Hitler planned had, in fact, had every opportunity to read his intentions years before he acted on them. After getting out of prison in 1924, Hitler decided the fast route to power — armed coup — had not worked. He would try the slow route instead: elections.
The Slow Climb to Power
For most of the 1920s, the Nazi Party did not do very well in elections. In 1928, they won only 12 seats in the German parliament out of 491 total. That is a small, fringe party. Then everything changed in 1929 when the US stock market crashed and triggered the Great Depression. Germany was hit especially hard. Unemployment shot up into the millions. Families went hungry. Banks closed. People who had been doing fine suddenly had nothing. Hitler had exactly the right message for that moment. He promised to fix unemployment by rearming Germany and launching big building projects. He promised to tear up the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement after WWI that had humiliated Germany, stripped away its territory, and loaded it with massive war debts. He promised to make Germany powerful again. He pointed at Jewish people and communists and said they were the ones responsible for Germany's misery. People who were desperate and angry and scared listened. The Nazi Party went from 12 seats in 1928 to 107 seats in 1930 to 230 seats in July 1932. That is not a slow build — that is a collapse of faith in everyone else. Hitler also played rough. The Nazi Party had two paramilitary groups — the SA (the 'brownshirts') and the SS — that broke up political meetings, beat up opponents, and intimidated voters at polling stations. Fear was part of the strategy from the very beginning. In January 1933, Germany's elderly president Paul von Hindenburg made a decision he would not live long enough to regret properly. Thinking he could keep Hitler under control inside the government, he appointed Hitler as chancellor — the head of the government. It was the last real choice that Germany's democratic system got to make.
President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor in January 1933, believing he could control him. Within eighteen months, Hitler had dismantled German democracy entirely and declared himself Führer.
From Chancellor to Dictator — Faster Than Anyone Expected
Hitler moved fast once he was chancellor. In February 1933, the Reichstag — Germany's parliament building — caught fire. A young Dutch communist was arrested for starting it. Hitler used the fire as an excuse to claim that communists were plotting to overthrow the government, and he pushed through emergency laws that took away people's basic rights like free speech and the right to a fair trial. In the March 1933 elections, the Nazis won 288 seats. Still not a majority on their own, but combined with their allies they had enough. Hitler then pushed through the Enabling Act, a law that let him bypass parliament entirely and rule by decree. Intimidation kept enough votes in line to pass it. From there it accelerated. All other political parties were banned. The press was put under Nazi control. The police were reorganized under Nazi leadership. Trade unions were dissolved. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor into one position and gave it a new name: Führer, meaning 'leader.' Every soldier in the German military now had to swear a personal oath of loyalty not to Germany, but to Hitler himself. In June 1934, Hitler also cleaned house within the Nazi Party itself. He ordered the murder of the SA's leadership, including his old ally Ernst Röhm, in a purge that became known as the Night of the Long Knives. The SA had gotten too powerful and too unpredictable. Hitler had them killed and used the SS instead. The message was clear: there was no law above Hitler anymore, not even inside his own party.