Few names from history inspire such immediate and emphatic revulsion as that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. His hands are stained with the blood of millions killed in the devastation of the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust.
But Hitler was not born a brutal tyrant, he became one. Explore Hitler's life and discover the road that led to destruction.
Apr 1889
Birth and childhood
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, in Upper Austria on the Austrian-German border.
His father, Alois, was a customs official while his mother, Klara, came from a poor peasant family. Life was financially comfortable for the Hitler family but Alois was a domineering character and young Adolf frequently found himself on the wrong side of his father's short temper. At primary school Hitler was a clever, popular child. At secondary school he withdrew psychologically, preferring to re-enact battles from the Boer War than study. He left school with no qualifications at 16.
Feb 1908
Down and out in •
Glade of the Armistice
French WWI national and war memorial
The Glade of the Armistice (French: Clairière de l'Armistice) is a French war memorial in the Forest of Compiègne in Picardy, France, near the city of Compiègne approximately 60 kilometres (37 mi) north of Paris.[1] It was built at the location where the Germans signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended World War I. During World War II, Adolf Hitler chose the same spot for the French and Germans to sign the Armistice of 22 June 1940 after Germany won the Battle of France. The site was destroyed by the Germans but rebuilt after the war.
Today, the Glade of the Armistice contains a statue of World War I French military leader and Allied supreme commander MarshalFerdinand Foch, and the reconstructed Alsace–Lorraine memorial, depicting a German Eagle impaled by a sword.
History
The Armistice of 11 November 1918 was signed in one of the rail carriages ("Le Wagon de l'Armistice") of Foch's private train in Rethondes. The carriage was Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL)
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Introduction
The First World War came to end in a forest in Compiègne, north of Paris. The French and the Germans sat facing each other in a train carriage. Hitler considered this an insult he wanted to eradicate as quickly as possible. When his armies had overrun the French in 1940, he thought he wanted to do the same by having the French sign the armistice at exactly the same location on June 21, 1940. His rants against the subsequent Treaty of Versailles, imposed on Germany, had been a recurring subject in the speeches he had held in the period in which he had evolved from an unknown into an increasingly popular figure in Bavarian and German politics. And now he turned the tables.
Nazi big wigs in front of the railway carriage in Compiègne. F.l.t.r.: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, Erich Raeder, Walther von Brauchitsch, June 21, 1940 Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1112-500 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Definitielijst
First World War
Took place from 1914 till 1918 and is also named The Great War. The conflict started because of i