Adolf Hitler

A

The Holocaust

As his armies were rolling through Polish resistance, Hitler stepped up the elimination of peoples he saw as inferior to Germans. Shortly after their 1939 conquest of Poland, the Germans began killing thousands of Poles and driving thousands more out of their homes to make way for German settlers. The Nazis also herded Jewish Poles into city ghettoes, killing thousands of them and condemning the rest to starvation. Within Germany, Hitler ordered a program to systematically kill handicapped Germans, and over 200,000 were eventually murdered.

The German authorities planned to kill all Jews in the portions of the USSR they occupied and began the process in the summer of 1941. In late July 1941, Hitler decided to extend the systematic killing of Jews to all of German-occupied Europe. After the renewed German offensive in the USSR in October 1941 appeared to make great progress, he decided the time had come to go even further: All Jews on earth would be killed. However, the Nazis found that German police and soldiers who did the killing were often traumatized by the experience. To make the slaughter faster and less stressful, the Germans built specially designed death camps, primarily in occupied Poland, to which Jews and other prisoners from all over Europe were transported. These camps contained large gas chambers where hundreds of prisoners at a time could be quickly, easily, and impersonally murdered by poison gas.

In his public speeches, Hitler repeatedly referred to the killing of Europe's Jews but without detailing the process. Because the Allies halted Germany's forces, Hitler's global ambitions were not realized; however, of the approximately 18 million Jews in the world, one-third were killed in what came to be known as the Holocaust. The great majority of European Jews perished, a fact that Hitler boasted of in his last testament.

B

The End of the War

By the time of the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy (Normandie), in northern France, in June 1944, the war was going very badly for Hitler. A series of losses to the Allies and failure to defeat the Soviets had left Hitler’s armies severely weakened. Hitler's Germany had also changed a great deal. British and American bombers were devastating its industries and cities. The Germans who had reservations about Hitler’s regime had begun to find some recruits. However, most of the population still supported the regime and especially Hitler; consequently, those opposed to him saw his assassination followed by a military takeover as the only way to topple the dictatorship. Several assassination attempts, beginning in March 1943, miscarried. A bomb was placed in Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenberg in East Prussia (modern Poland) on July 20, 1944, but did not kill him (see July Plot). The conspirators tried to launch their coup anyway, but with little support the effort failed. Hundreds involved in the coup attempt were executed, and Hitler maintained control of the country.

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Underestimating the Americans, Hitler launched his last reserves west into the Ardennes country of Belgium and Luxembourg in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945). He felt that despite massive Allied gains, a hard blow would cause popular support for the war in America to collapse, and would lead to the disintegration of the coalition arrayed against him. All he accomplished, however, was to draw away troops needed in the east, allowing the Soviet army's winter offensive to roll all the way to the gates of Berlin. Hitler decided to remain in the city, hoping to inspire its defenders and anticipating a breakup of the Allies’ alliance. When neither of these hopes were realized, he appointed Karl Dönitz, the head of the navy and a devoted Nazi, as his successor. He then married his mistress Eva Braun and committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945.

VII

Evaluation

Hitler left Germany and much of Europe in ruins. Over 60 million people died worldwide in the war, and tens of millions more lost their health and homes. Certain that they did not want to fight the Germans a third time, the Allies insisted on an unconditional surrender. They occupied all of Germany and divided it into British, French, American, and Soviet zones. Even after the western zones were joined into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the country remained divided until 1990.

The German people discovered for the first time the extent to which modern warfare could destroy a country. World War I had not been fought to any great extent on German soil. The events of the war also demonstrated to many Germans the problems of dictatorship. Increasing numbers were now prepared to try a different, democratic, path at home, as well as an attempt at reconciliation with their neighbors. Both projects would take time, but they were major departures in the history of Germany and of Europe.

The war also brought the Soviet Army into central Europe and provided the Soviet regime with legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, a new empire in east and southeast Europe, and superpower status in the world. The world role of the United States was also enhanced in spite of the American preference for remaining aloof. Outside of Europe, the war hastened the end of colonial empires and the emergence of the new Jewish state of Israel. It also brought about the creation of new international organizations like the United Nations (UN) that might prevent such wars in the future.

Ironically, these developments were the exact opposite of what Hitler had hoped for. His ambition to make Berlin the capital of the world was not realized, and the enormous buildings he started designing for it in the 1920s were never built. Hitler combined organizational and manipulative talents with great cunning. He was simultaneously obsessed with fantastic visions and blinded to reality by those very visions. However, many Germans shared at least a portion of those visions. This support made it possible for Hitler to utilize the resources of Europe's second largest population and most advanced economy to pursue his ends. The result was an outburst of destruction that consumed the lives of millions and transformed the world.

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