HITLER BECOMES FÜHRER:

HITLER BECOMES FÜHRER:
August 2, 1934

With the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler
becomes absolute dictator of Germany under the title of Führer, or "Leader." The
German army took an oath of allegiance to its new commander-in-chief, and the
last remnants of Germany's democratic government were dismantled to make way for
Hitler's Third Reich. The Führer assured his people that the Third Reich would
last for a thousand years, but Nazi Germany collapsed just 11 years later.Adolf
Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889. As a young man he aspired
to be a painter, but he received little public recognition and lived in poverty
in Vienna. Of German descent, he came to detest Austria as a "patchwork nation"
of various ethnic groups, and in 1913 he moved to the German city of Munich in
the state of Bavaria. After a year of drifting, he found direction as a German
soldier in World War I, and was decorated for his bravery on the battlefield. He
was in a military hospital in 1918, recovering from a mustard gas attack that
left him temporarily blind, when Germany surrendered.He was appalled by
Germany's defeat, which he blamed on "enemies within"--chiefly German communists
and Jews--and was enraged by the punitive peace settlement forced on Germany by
the victorious Allies. He remained in the German army after the war, and as an
intelligence agent was ordered to report on subversive activities in Munich's
political parties. It was in this capacity that he joined the tiny German
Workers' Party, made up of embittered army veterans, as the group's seventh
member. Hitler was put in charge of the party's propaganda, and in 1920 he
assumed leadership of the organization, changing its name to
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German
Workers' party), which was abbreviated to Nazi.The party's socialist orientation
was little more a ploy to attract working-class support; in fact, Hitler was
fiercely right-wing. But the economic views of the party were overshadowed by
the Nazis' fervent nationalism, which blamed Jews, communists, the Treaty of
Versailles, and Germany's ineffectual democratic government for the country's
devastated economy. In the early 1920s, the ranks of Hitler's Bavarian-based
Nazi party swelled with resentful Germans. A paramilitary organization, the
Sturmabteilung (SA), was formed to protect the Nazis and intimidate their
political opponents, and the party adopted the ancient symbol of the swastika as
its emblem.In November 1923, after the German government resumed the payment of
war reparations to Britain and France, the Nazis launched the "Beer Hall
Putsch"--an attempt at seizing the German government by force. Hitler hoped that
his nationalist revolution in Bavaria would spread to the dissatisfied German
army, which in turn would bring down the government in Berlin. However, the
uprising was immediately suppressed, and Hitler was arrested and sentenced to
five years in prison for treason.Imprisoned in Landsberg fortress, he spent his
time there dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a bitter and
rambling narrative in which he sharpened his anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist
beliefs and laid out his plans for Nazi conquest. In the work, published in a
series of volumes, he developed his concept of the Fýhrer as an absolute
dictator who would bring unity to German people and lead the "Aryan race" to
world supremacy.Political pressure from the Nazis forced the Bavarian government
to commute Hitler's sentence, and he was released after nine months. However,
Hitler emerged to find his party disintegrated. An upturn in the economy further
reduced popular support of the party, and for several years Hitler was forbidden
to make speeches in Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany.The onset of the Great
Depression in 1929 brought a new opportunity for the Nazis to solidify their
power. Hitler and his followers set about reorganizing the party as a fanatical
mass movement, and won financial backing from business leaders, for whom the
Nazis promised an end to labor agitation. In the 1930 election, the Nazis won
six million votes, making the party the second largest in Germany. Two years
later, Hitler challenged Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency, but the
84-year-old president defeated Hitler with the support of an anti-Nazi
coalition.Although the Nazis suffered a decline in votes during the November
1932 election, Hindenburg agreed to make Hitler chancellor in January 1933,
hoping that Hitler could be brought to heel as a member of his cabinet. However,
Hindenburg underestimated Hitler's political audacity, and one of the new
chancellor's first acts was to exploit the burning of the Reichstag (parliament)
building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police under Nazi
Hermann Goering suppressed much of the party's opposition before the election,
and the Nazis won a bare majority. Shortly after, Hitler took on dictatorial
power through the Enabling Acts.Chancellor Hitler immediately set about
arresting and executing political opponents, and even purged the Nazis' own SA
paramilitary organization in a successful effort to win support from the German
army. With the death of President Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler united
the chancellorship and presidency under the new title of Führer. As the economy
improved, popular support for Hitler's regime became strong, and a cult of
Führer worship was propagated by Hitler's capable propagandists.German
remilitarization and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism drew criticism from abroad,
but the foreign powers failed to stem the rise of Nazi Germany. In 1938, Hitler
implemented his plans for world domination with the annexation of Austria, and
in 1939 Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia. Hitler's invasion of Poland on
September 1, 1939, finally led to war with Germany and France. In the opening
years of World War II, Hitler's war machine won a series of stunning victories,
conquering the great part of continental Europe. However, the tide turned in
1942 during Germany's disastrous invasion of the USSR.By early 1945, the British
and Americans were closing in on Germany from the west, the Soviets from the
east, and Hitler was holed up in a bunker under the chancellery in Berlin
awaiting defeat. On April 30, with the Soviets less than a mile from his
headquarters, Hitler committed suicide with Eva Braun, his mistress whom he
married the night before.Hitler left Germany devastated and at the mercy of the
Allies, who divided the country and made it a major battlefield of Cold War
conflict. His regime exterminated nearly six millions Jews and an estimated
250,000 Gypsies in the Holocaust, and an indeterminable number of Slavs,
political dissidents, disabled persons, homosexuals, and others deemed
unacceptable by the Nazi regime were systematically eliminated. The war Hitler
unleashed upon Europe took even more lives--close to 20 million people killed in
the USSR alone. Adolf Hitler is reviled as one of history's greatest villains.