Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (IPA: ['aːdɔlf 'hɪtlɐ] (help·info)) (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and Führer from 1934 to 1945. He led the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party).

He gained power during Germany's period of crisis after World War I. Substantially supported by corporations, he used propaganda and charismatic oratory, emphasizing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism. After restructuring the economy and rearming the military, he established a totalitarian dictatorship. He pursued an aggressive foreign policy to expand German Lebensraum (living space), and triggered World War II by invading Poland, much of which was also annexed to form the Großdeutsches Reich ("Greater German Reich").

Though Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers occupied most of Europe and parts of Asia at their zenith, they were eventually defeated by the Allies. By the end of the war, Hitler's policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust.

In the final days of the war, Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin, as the city was overrun by the Red Army of the Soviet Union.