HITLER, ADOLF. – German politician, b. 20 Apr. 1889 at Braunau, on the borders of Austria and Germany, d. 30 Apr. 1945 in Berlin. He went to
Vienna to study architecture but, lacking a secondary-school certificate, was forced to earn his living as a draftsman and house painter. The harsh experiences of life in Vienna indelibly influenced his mental formation, instilling in him the sentiments that throughout his life would constitute fixed points of his political action: pan-German national consciousness, unrestricted antisemitism, and a profound aversion to the Catholic religion. In the spring of 1912 H. moved to Munich, and at the outbreak of war, in 1914, enlisted in the Bavarian army. Wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, at the time of the armistice he was in the Pasewalk (Pomerania) hospital, where he had been admitted for a serious eye ailment caused by the gas used by the English at the Battle of Ypres. For H., as for the majority of Germans, the war lost by Germany had not been lost by the army, but was the consequence of internal treachery. H. held Marxism and the Jews responsible for this treachery toward the starving people, reduced to the utmost extremity and with no further offensive possibilities after the failure of the submarine war.
The legend of the stab in the back found in H. one of its most fanatical and convinced advocates. 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 joined the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in Sept. 1919, 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 provided fresh fuel for H.’s propaganda against the vacillating government of Berlin, and in Munich led him to conceive the idea of a coup d’état whose success was intended to depose the central government of the Reich and bring him to power. The march on the Feldherrnhalle (9 Nov. 1923), however, failed, and H. was tried and sentenced to five years in a fortress, 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 appeared in 1927). Having reconstituted the party, H. passed from success to success and on 30 Jan. 1933 became Chancellor of the Reich. Taking advantage of the uncertainty of the bourgeois parties, H. succeeded in obtaining full powers with the promise of guaranteeing constitutional liberties; but instead of keeping his word, he began to dissolve all political parties and trade-union organizations and concentrated all political activity in the single National Socialist party. He also proceeded to rearm the Reichswehr; in 1938 he carried out the annexation of Austria, occupied Czechoslovakia the following year, and invaded Poland, unleashing the Second World War, which he had believed he could avoid through the Non-Aggression Treaty concluded with the U.S.S.R. on 23 Aug. 1939. At the same time, internally, he continued the merciless struggle against every political opposition; he decreed the most ferocious persecutions against the Jews; he spared neither the Catholic Church nor the other confessions, and unsuccessfully attempted 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 government of Berlin conceal that it regarded it as a chiffon de papier, while multiplying offenses against the Catholic religion and supporting the neo-pagan movement. Pius XI therefore intervened on 14 March 1937 with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, whose reading and publication were prohibited 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 obstructed in every way the free exercise of Catholic spiritual life. The campaign in
Russia, begun in June 1941, and the defeat at el-Alamein in Libya (Oct. 1942) marked the beginning of the end, and H., when the Russian army was already in the heart of Berlin, killed himself in order not to fall alive into the hands of the enemy, according to the reconstruction of the Führer’s final days made by a special English commission.
BIBL. On H.’s program and political ideas, with autobiographical indications, see Mein Kampf, I, Munich 1925; II, ibid. 1927. An extremely useful systematic selection, with an extensive bibliography, of H.’s speeches in English translation was prepared 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 H.’s biographies, rich in generally unknown data but anti-Hitlerian in tone, is that of K. Heiden, A. H., 2 vols., Zurich 1936–37 (Italian trans., Rome 1947). On H.’s foreign policy cf. E. Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, Stuttgart 1948. On the opposition to 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 final days cf. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The last days of H., London 1947 (Italian trans., Milan 1947).