HITLER, ADOLF. - German politician, b. 20 April 1889 at Braunau, on the border between Austria and Germany, d. 30 April 1945 in Berlin. He went to Vienna to study architecture but, lacking a secondary-school diploma, was forced to earn his living as a draughtsman and house painter. The harsh experiences of life in Vienna left an indelible mark on his mental formation, instilling in him the sentiments that throughout his life would remain fixed points of his political action: pan-German national consciousness, an unrestrained anti-Semitism and a profound aversion to the Catholic religion. In the spring of 1912 H. moved to Munich in Bavaria, and at the outbreak of the war, in 1914, he enlisted in the Bavarian army. Wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, at the time of the armistice he was in the hospital of Pasewalk (Pomerania), admitted for a serious eye injury caused by the gases used by the English in the battle of Ypres. The war lost by Germany was not, for H., as for the majority of Germans, lost by the army, but the consequence of internal betrayal. For this betrayal of a starving people, reduced to extremes, with no further offensive capability after the failure of submarine warfare, H. held Marxism and the Jews responsible.
The legend of the stab in the back found in H. one of its most fanatical and convinced upholders. As he himself wrote in Mein Kampf, at that moment he decided to devote himself to politics in order to rebuild a strong Germany, freed from the chains of the Treaty of Versailles and from the "traitors of Nov. 1918". Having entered in Sept. 1919 the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which the following year changed its name to the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), H. became its leader with full powers in July 1921. The occupation of the Ruhr and inflation gave new fuel to H.'s propaganda against the acquiescent government of Berlin and led him in Munich to conceive the idea of a coup d'état, whose success was to have removed the central government of the Reich and brought him to power. The march on the Feldherrnhalle (9 Nov. 1923), however, failed and H. was tried and sentenced to five years' fortress confinement to be served at Landsberg. He remained there until 20 Dec. 1924, when he was pardoned: during his detention he wrote the first part of Mein Kampf, published on 18 July 1925 (the second part came out in 1927). Having reconstituted the party, H. went from success to success and became Chancellor of the Reich on 30 Jan. 1933. Availing himself of the perplexity of the bourgeois parties, H. managed to obtain full powers with the promise of guaranteeing constitutional liberties; but instead of keeping his given word he began to dissolve all parties and trade-union organizations and centralized all political activity in the single National Socialist party. He further proceeded to rearm the Reichswehr; in 1938 he carried out the annexation of Austria, the following year occupied Czechoslovakia and attacked Poland, unleashing the Second World War, which he had believed he could avoid with the Non-Aggression Treaty concluded with the U.S.S.R. on 23 Aug. 1939. At the same time, domestically, he continued the merciless struggle against any political opposition; he decreed the most ferocious persecutions against the Jews; he spared neither the Catholic Church nor the other confessions, and tried in vain to replace them with a racist neo-paganism, founded on the myth of Aryan blood. The Reich Concordat, which H. had concluded on 20 July 1933 with the Holy See for the sole purpose of acquiring political prestige before the world, remained a dead letter, nor did the Berlin government make any mystery of considering it a chiffon de papier, by multiplying offenses against the Catholic religion and by supporting the neo-pagan current. Pius XI therefore intervened on 14 March 1937 with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, whose reading and publication were forbidden in Germany. The war further worsened the relations of the Holy See with the Third Reich, whose authorities, under the pretext of wartime conditions, confiscated and suppressed ecclesiastical property and hindered in every way the free unfolding of Catholic spiritual life. The campaign of Russia, begun in June 1941, and the defeat of el-Alamein in Libya (Oct. 1942) marked the beginning of the end, and H., when the Russian army was by then in the heart of Berlin, according to the reconstruction of the Führer's last days made by a specially appointed English commission, killed himself so as not to fall alive into the hands of the enemies.
BIBL. On H.'s program and political ideas, with autobiographical indications, see Mein Kampf, I, Munich 1925; II, ibid. 1927. Very useful, with abundant bibl., is a systematic selection of H.'s speeches in English translation, edited by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, The speeches of A. H., Apr. 1922-Aug. 1939, ed. N. H. Baynes, 2 vols., London 1942. Among the biographies of H., rich in generally unknown data, but anti-Hitlerian in tone, is that of K. Heiden, A. H., 2 vols., Zurich 1936-37 (It. trans., Rome 1947). On H.'s foreign policy cf. E. Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, Stuttgart 1948. On the opposition against H.: H. Fraenkel, The german people versus H., London 1940; R. Pechel, Deutscher Widerstand, Erlenbach-Zurich 1947; A. W. Dulles, Germany's underground, New York 1947; M. Mourin, Les complots contre H. (1938-45), Paris 1948; H. Rothfels, The German opposition to H., Hinsdale 1948. On H. and the Catholic Church: N. Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church, London 1939; Mit brennender Sorge. Das päpstliche Rundschreiben gegen den Nationalsozialismus und seine Folgen in Deutschland, ed. S. Hirt, Freiburg im Br. 1946; J. Neuhäusler, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz. Der Kampf des Nationalsozialismus gegen die katholische Kirche und der kirchliche Widerstand, 2nd ed., Munich 1946; M. Maccarone, Il nazionalsocialismo e la S. Sede, Rome 1947. On H.'s last days cf. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The last days of H., London 1947 (It. trans., Milan 1947).