10 facts about hitler's rise to power

Age of extremes

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

Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is unquestionably the central figure in the story of the Holocaust.  It was the combination of his virulent hatred of Jews and his success in creating a political movement that was able to seize control of Germany that made the campaign to exterminate the Jews possible. 

Hitler’s origins:  Hitler was born in a small town in Austria in 1889.  He was the son of a local customs official and his much younger third wife.  Hitler’s father was an illegitimate child and it is uncertain who his father was, but there is no evidence for the legend that this unidentified grandfather was Jewish.  Hitler’s father was harsh and distant. He had a closer relationship with his mother, and her death from cancer when he was 17 was traumatic for him.

Hitler had a normal education.  As a young man, he showed no special talents.  He wanted to study art, and moved to Vienna after his mother’s death in hope of being accepted to art school, but was turned down for l

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