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[[File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-S62600,_Adolf_Hitler.jpg|thumbnail|left|200px|Adolf Hitler]]
In 1934, after the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler became the absolute dictator of Germany under the title Fuhrer or “Leader”. He ruled Germany with an iron fist until he committed suicide in 1945 as the Russian army closed in on Berlin. 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 Fuhrer assured his people that the Third Reich would last for at least a thousand years. However, the National Socialist Party's Germany collapsed just 11 years later.
====Early life: apathy and disappointment with civilian life====
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on 20 April 1889. As a young man, he aspired to become a renowned painter, but he received little public recognition and had to live in poverty in Vienna. He wished to study art but failed to secure entry to the Academy of Fine Arts, since he had not obtained even a secondary school diploma. Unsurprisingly, during the next few years, Hitler lived a lonely, insecure and isolated life in poverty, earning a precarious livelihood by painting postcards and advertisements and often drifting from one municipal hostel to another. By that time, young Adolf had already shown traits that characterized his later life: features as loneliness and secretiveness, hatred of cosmopolitism, and last but not least - intense dislike for the multinational and multicultural character of Vienna.
[[File:565px-Adolf_Hitler_as_a_child.jpg|thumbnail|200px|left|Adolf Hitler as a child]]
Hitler was also drafted for Austrian military service but was not accepted due to a lack of fitness. In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich. At the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered to serve in the Bavarian army. He was accepted in August 1914 and received special permission to enlist as a German soldier and a member of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, though he was still an Austrian citizen. Despite the fact that Hitler spent much of his time away from the front lines, he was still present at a number of significant battles - Hitler managed to take part and was wounded in some of the fiercest struggles of the war.<ref><i>Hitler, Adolf: Rise to power & Early life</i> http://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Hitler</ref> He was decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross First Class and the Black Wound Badge.
Hitler greeted the war with enthusiasm, as a great relief from the frustration and aimlessness of civilian life. He found discipline and comradeship very satisfying and soldiered on his belief in the heroic virtues of the war. However, after the collapse of the war effort, the sad experience reinforced his passionate German patriotism, as he was shocked by Germany’s surrender in 1918. Like other German nationalists, he believed that civilian leaders and Marxists from within (mainly German communists and Jews) had betrayed the German army. Later, in 1941, Hitler already as German Fuhrer would reveal the degree to which his career and its terrible legacy had been shaped by the First World War, writing himself that “I brought back home with me my experiences at the front; out of them I built my National Socialist community.”
====Post WWI resentment and Hitler’s appetite for political and war revival of the nation====
[[File:Parteifoto_Adolf_Hitler_im_Jahre_1923.jpg|thumbnail|200px|left|Adolf Hitler in 1923]]
After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich and continued to work for the military as an intelligence officer. As an army political agent in September 1919, he joined the small German Workers’ Party in Munich. In 1920 Hitler was put in charge of the party’s propaganda and left the army completely devoting himself to improving his position within the party, which in that year was renamed National Socialist German Workers’ party. During the post-war insecure years of poverty, conditions were ripe for further development of such a party. World War I ended in 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which was not only a military defeat, but also a psychological defeat for the German state since the German people were expecting victory. The severe peace terms of the Treaty that caused the most resentment in Germany were the loss of territory, the war guilt placed solely on Germany for starting the war, the deliberate demilitarization and the reparations demands.<ref>Signing of the Versailles Treaty - http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/1920s/VersaillesTreatyCarlos.htm </ref>
The Bavarian region of Germany was famous for its traditional separatism and the region’s popular dislike of the republican government in Berlin. Munich, as the Bavarian centre, was a gathering place for dissatisfied service members and soldiers that were unwilling to return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the “old” republic. Unsurprisingly, many of those groups joined the National Socialist Party, including Ernst Rohm who played a great role in furthering Hitler’s rise within the party. Rohn recruited the “strong arm” squads used by Hitler to protect himself and party meetings, to attack socialists and communists, and to exploit violence for the impression of strength of the “purified Aryan race”. In 1921, these squads were formally organized under Rohm into a private party army, called the SA.
However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler’s political audacity and failed to satisfy his main political rival making him part of the ruling party and cabinet. Instead, one of the new chancellor’s first acts was to start an intensified campaign of violence through the branches of the National Socialist Party and to exploit the burning of the Reichstag (the house of the German parliament) building as a pretext for calling new early general elections. Hitler and his party used the fire as firm “evidence” that communists were plotting against the German government. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains an ongoing topic of debate and research to date.
However, the National Socialist Party effectively accused the Comintern of the act regardless of the official version that the working class started the fire as a protest against intolerable working conditions. Some historians even agree, as proposed by the Communist Party, that the fire was planned and ordered by Hitler as a false flag operation.<ref>The Reichstag Fire of 1933 - http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk</ref> Whatever the truth, Hitler used the fire to solidify their power and eliminate the communists as political rivals. Crucially, the National Socialists won the polling registering 43.9 percent of the votes. On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Bill, giving full powers to Hitler, was passed in the Reichstag by the combined votes of the National Socialists, the Nationalist Nationalists, and the Center party deputies.
====Suppression and Purges of Competitors to Hitler's power====
Hitler decided that he should succeed Hindenburg, however, not as a resident, but instead as a Fuhrer (supreme leader) of the German people. Since Hitler effectively governed the entire Reichstag, within hours after the President’s death, Hitler declared the office of President vacant. The Reichstag immediately introduced a special law to merge and combine the offices of the Reich President and the Reich Chancellor. In effect - all existing authority of the President had to be transferred to the effective Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.<ref>Adolf Hitler: A Study in Tyranny - Revolution and The New Order - http://www.holocaust-trc.org/the-holocaust-education-program-resource-guide/a-study-in-tyranny/</ref> The new law was technically illegal since it violated the German Constitution concerning presidential succession as well as the Enabling Act of 1933, which forbade Hitler from altering the presidency. However, none of that did matter because the National Socialist's already exercised absolute authority. Critics of Hitler’s new regime were eliminated, and Hitler became the ultimate arbiter of the law. Adolf proclaimed and introduced himself as the Reich Chancellor, Fuhrer of all Germans and Head of state.
Furthermore, immediately following the announcement of the new Fuhrer law, the German Officer Corps and every individual soldier in the official German army was forced to swear a brand new oath of allegiance to Hitler personally, not to the German state or Constitution, contrasting the “old regimes”. All men in uniform, in accordance to their military code of honor, would now regard obedience to Hitler as their sacred duty, thus making the entire German army act as the true personal lethal weapon of the Fuhrer. He practically succeeded in merging and uniting SA and official German arm forces under his dictatorship. <ref>The Triumph of Hitler - http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-fuehrer.htm</ref>
After the President’s funeral, the National Socialists even prepared a nationwide vote giving the German people an opportunity to express their “free will” and approval of the Fuhrer’s new powers and thus legitimize Hitler’s position in the eyes of the world. On August 19, 1934, about 95 percent of registered voters in Germany went to the polls and 90 percent of them gave Hitler a positive vote. Therefore, Hitler could now officially claim himself Fuhrer of the German nation with the overwhelming approval of his people. In the end , Hitler had finally triumphed achieving total control and absolute power across Germany.
====Conclusion====
Hitler's rise to power was swift and brutal. He had risen for a corporal in the German army to Fuhrer in just 15 years. Hitler had consolidated power by uniting various nationalist factions and successfully placed himself at the head of the Nationalist Socialist Power. He used violence to fight both the opposition and purge his allies when they became inconvenient. His speeches mesmerized the Germany German citizenry and successfully the public that he was more than just a ruthless thug. The early chaos of German transformed him into a prominent national voice, and the Great Depression gave him the argument that convinced Germany to follow him. Unfortunately, Hitler would lead Germany to a destructive spiral of violence, hatred, and genocide that would destroy the country and millions of lives.
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