After his suicide in April 1945 his corpse was imperfectly cremated due to lack of petrol, and some remains were not burned. Pieces of his skull (including one with a bullet hole) and leg bones were thought to be recovered by the Soviets, however forensic and DNA testing have since proved the remains to not be his. The jaw fragments the Soviets claimed to belong to Hitler were not tested.
Arm was temporarily paralyzed during an assassination attempt by a group of Wehrmacht generals in 1944.
He has been held responsible for the deaths of over 11 million people in concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. Most were Jewish, but others included communists, homosexuals, the intellectually disabled (the experiments conducted upon them convinced Nazi officials that mass extermination of people was feasible), Christians, and Roma and Sinti gypsies. There is no record of Hitler ordering the Holocaust. According to Soviet sources, on 18 December 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was asked by SS leader Heinrich Himmler what should be done about the Jews in the Soviet Union. Hitler replied, “Exterminate them as partisans”. However, Axis forces had already been executing Jews on the Eastern Front since the invasion began in the early summer of 1941.
Leader of Nazi Germany (The Third Reich) from 1933 to 1945.
He was Time Magazine’s 1938 “Man of the Year”. Time’s definition of “Man of the Year”: “The person who most influenced the news” in the indicated year, *no matter whether for good or bad*. The cover picture featured Hitler playing “his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine’s wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on.” This picture was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a German Catholic who had fled Hitler’s Germany.
After his death his corpse was never officially discovered.
There were unconfirmed sightings of him in Denmark and Argentina after his death.
Served as an army messenger in World War I (he was initially deemed “unfit” and “unable to bear arms” after being arrested for attempting to avoid military service), and won two Iron Crosses for bravery.
Was taking 92 different drugs towards the end of his life.
Hitler’s reputation as one of the most evil men in history has inspired several fantasy films. The Boys from Brazil (1978) was based on a theory that Hitler wanted to clone himself, while Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) were based on the premise that he wanted to make his army invincible by acquiring the supernatural powers of the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.
Has been spoofed by Mel Blanc, Mel Brooks, Christopher Carroll, Charles Chaplin, Eric Idle, Adrian Edmondson, Gilbert Gottfried, Benny Hill, Spike Jones, Michael Moriarty, Peter Sellers, and The Three Stooges .
Contracted Parkinson’s Disease in the later years of his life. Recently discovered newsreel footage shows Hitler addressing members of the Hitler Youth (the last footage taken of him alive), with his left hand visibly trembling.
Was involved in a scandal following the death of Geli Raubal, daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Hitler. Originally deemed a suicide by Munich police, present-day theories indicate that Hitler had a love affair with Geli and might have murdered her in a jealous fit. She was living in his apartment and had become a subject of gossip within the ranks of the Nazi Party. She had also had an affair with a Jewish man from Vienna, and was reportedly pregnant with his child when she died. Geli’s brother Leo blamed Hitler for her death.
Hitler’s last command post, the Berlin “Führerbunker,” was also his 13th.
One story regarding Hitler’s death is that when Soviet troops reached Berlin and located the “Führerbunker”, the body of a man was found amid the rubble. He had died from a gunshot to the forehead and resembled Hitler so closely he was mistakenly identified as him. His body was even filmed by newsreel photographers with the Soviet soldiers who found the body. A servant from the Führerbunker identified the man as Gustav Weler, one of Hitler’s personal cooks. Supposedly he had been used as a decoy for “security reasons”. The sensationalist book “The Bush Connection” by Eric Onion claims that SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny shot Weler to distract invading forces. Weler’s body was taken to Moscow for identification and buried at Lefortovo Prison. However, Hugh Thomas reported in 1995 that Weler was found alive after the war and that Allied troops had interviewed him following the fall of Berlin.
While many insist that Hitler was a lifelong vegetarian, medical and historical records prove that he adopted a strictly vegetarian diet in the modern sense only in the last 12 years of his life. He was however a follower and fierce defender of the vegetarian life style, reportedly calling broth “corpse tea” and asking his dining partners how they can “eat dead beings” (around 1930). To maintain a vegetarian diet back then was not as easy as today, and not all vegetarians managed – or wanted – to take it too strictly.
His favorite opera was Richard Wagner’s “Reinzi,” which he claimed to have seen at least 40 times. In his younger years, he befriended the Wagner family and even twice proposed to Wagner’s daughter in-law, Winifred, after her first husband died (she turned him down because he didn’t have “an important position”). He was known to her children as “Uncle Wolf,” and members of the Wagner family affectionately referred to Hitler as “Wolf,” even after he became Germany’s dictator.
He held membership card number 555 of the NSDAP, but the Nazi Party started numbering from 500 to make themselves appear larger
From 1925 to 1945, Hitler held the official title of SS Member #1, a title which he gave to himself upon the group’s creation in 1925.
Did not drink or smoke.
William Patrick Hitler, son of Adolph’s half-brother Alois Hitler, fathered four sons. One son died in an auto accident in 1989. Another son has described his ancestry as “a pain in the ass.” William Patrick’s three surviving sons are the only living descendants of Hitler’s paternal line of the family and are, quite literally, the last of the Hitlers.
While serving in World War I, he found a terrier he named “Little Fox.” He taught the dog many tricks to entertain his fellow soldiers.
Was the first child of his mother’s to survive past infancy.
Was a talented painter, but was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts twice, allegedly because of unfitness for painting and was told that his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture.
After World War II, Soviet forces bulldozed the location of the “Führerbunker” (Hitler’s last command post and site of his suicide), and paved over it, fearing it would become a shrine for Nazi sympathizers.
Recently discovered medical records show that he was receiving doses of methamphetamine as often as six times a day.
According to Leni Riefenstahl , he was anything but happy about hosting the 1936 XI. Olympic Games in Berlin and just agreed because it could have been a great publicity event for his “superior German race”. Even though the German team indeed won most of the medals, probably the biggest disaster for the Nazis was the black so-called “subhuman” Jesse Owens not only winning four gold medals, but becoming the audience’s hero of the games, too.
Forensic pathologists have determined, from both historical records and what little remains of Hitler that still exist, that he probably committed suicide by simultaniously biting into a glass capsule filled with potassium cyanide and shooting himself in the head.
The only American favorably mentioned in his magnum opus “Mein Kampf” was industrialist Henry Ford.
Had a Mercedes touring car with a special seat which could be raised up so that he could be more easily seen when he rode through the streets. This touring car was at the Lars Anderson Auto Museum in Boston until 1994.
He emigrated to Germany to escape service in the Austro-Hungarian army. He was not opposed to military service per se, however, and when war broke out in 1914 he immediately enlisted in a Bavarian regiment. He served as an infantryman, then as a message runner, survived 50 battles, and won the Iron Cross, First Class, rare for a lance corporal.
John Lennon wanted to put Hitler in the crowd on the iconic cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by The Beatles, but the record label refused, fearing it would cause offense.
He suffered from many illnesses and medical conditions, including hypertension, headaches and heart trouble. Being gassed during World War I harmed his vision. After suffering from two episodes of blindness (one of which may have been hysterical), Hitler later suffered from pain in his eyes and blurred vision, as if “viewing objects through a thin veil.” Beginning in the 1930s, he suffered from tinnitus. Towards the end of his life, Hitler was afflicted with Parkinson’s syndrome.
According to his valet, Hitler’s vision was so bad, that he read speeches that were printed with inch-high type.
His mother died of breast cancer.
Although Hitler went to great lengths to stress his humble beginnings, it has been suggested that his family was quite well off by the standards of the time and that when his father died, he actually inherited a small fortune, which he spent in less than a year in a frivolous lifestyle. Other reports state that he did not inherit a fortune and gave his share of orphan’s benefits to his sister, Paula Wolf.
Was reportedly a member of the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft), though this is disputed. The Thule Society was a group originally dedicated to articulating and preserving a genuinely German heritage (and was linked to the study of the hermetic arts) that was founded on August 17, 1918, by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who also was a student of Islamic mysticism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and other occult disciplines. The original name of the Thule Society was Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity), and it was closely connected to if not an offshoot of the Germanenorden secret society. Formed by prominent German occultists in 1912, Germanenorden secret society — whose symbol was a swastika — had a hierarchical fraternal structure similar to freemasonry. Its ideology included nationalism and the idea of the superiority of the “Nordic” race, as well as anti-Semitism in addition to its witch’s brew of occult and magical philosophies. The Thule Society soon started to disseminate anti-republican and anti-Semitic propaganda among the urban proletariat to counter the doctrinaire Marxism of the communists and the socialist and republican ideals of the Social Democrats. It gave birth to the Workers’ Political Circle, which was founded contemporaneously in August 1918 with Thulist Karl Harrer as chairman, that in turn became the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party) in 1919. Working as an agent of military intelligence, Cpl. Adolf Hitler was assigned to the task of infiltrating the German Workers Party, but soon became a convert. One year later the German Workers’ Party became the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nazi Party) and was soon under the leadership of Herr Hitler. Other top Nazi leaders, including Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg, were members of the Thule Society, though Hitler likely was not. However, Serbottendorff stated, “Thule members were the people to whom Hitler first turned and who first allied themselves with Hitler.” There has long been speculation that Hitler was involved in the occult and was an initiate into the so-called “Nuremburg Mysteries”, but nothing has ever been proven to any degree of certainty. What is undeniable is that, after the political victory of the Nazi Party in 1933, the occult tradition rooted in the Thule Society and other secret societies was carried over into Hitler’s Third Reich, mainly by the SS, whose Reichsfuhrer, Heinrich Himmler, was an avid student of the occult. An SS occult research department, the Ahnernerbe (Ancestral Heritage), was established in 1935 with SS Col. Wolfram Sievers at its head. Occult research took SS researchers as far afield as Tibet (the department’s activities were reflected in the plot of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)). Sievers had the Tantrik prayer, the Bardo Thodol, read over his body after his execution at Nuremberg. Thus, the Third Reich can be seen as an attempt by occultist “adepts” to establish a brave new world based on their twisted ideas of the “Laws of Nature.” Similarly (in scope if not kind), the American republic was founded by Masonic adepts 150 years before, but as it was rooted in Enlightenment ideals and democracy rather than unsound fables, it managed to flourish for two centuries rather than engender its own destruction in less than a generation.
Learned of the armistice ending World War I while in a hospital from a sobbing pastor.
His original title for Mein Kampf was “My Struggle for Five Years Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”.
Was reputed to have been a big fan of American football.
Almost froze to death while sleeping on the streets in Austria. He was saved, ironically enough, by a Jewish charity group.
Allegedly, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch he retreated to the attic of a building and tried to shoot himself in the head. A policeman wrestled the gun away from him.
In 1943 conspirators placed a bomb on his private plane but the timer was faulty and it failed to detonate.
Allegedly, Rudolf Hess, his private secretary, complained that Hitler’s grammar was terrible, and that much time was spent correcting his papers before they could be published.
Allegedly, at the Munich conference, British Foreign Minister E.F.L. Wood actually mistook Hitler for a servant.
Wrote a sequel to “Mein Kampf”, but then, perversely, refused to allow it to be published. The manuscript was discovered decades after WWII ended; in it, Hitler revealed his plan to attack the United States.
His favorite movies were King Kong (1933) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Born in Austria, he did not become a German citizen until 1932. German citizenship was necessary to run for the parliamentary elections of the same year, which resulted in Hitler being appointed German Chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Was possibly the first media-driven politician in history to understand the power of film. All his public appearances were carefully choreographed.
From the moment of his ascension to power in 1933 to his death in 1945, there were 17 attempts on his life.
Allegedly, his medical records revealed that he was afflicted with monorchism (having only one testicle descended into the scrotum). However this has been debunked.
German industrial titan Fitz Thyssen, an early supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party who turned against them, was instrumental in propagating the myth that Hitler was partly Jewish. In his 1941 book “I Paid Hitler”, he wrote: “According to the published records, Hitler’s grandmother had an illegitimate son, and this son was to become the father of Germany’s present leader. But an inquiry once ordered by the late Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss disclosed that the Fuhrer’s grandmother became pregnant during her employment as a servant in a Viennese family . . . And the family . . . was none other than that of Baron Rothschild.” Thyssen was the scion of the family who owned the Thyssen mining and steel works. After taking over the company upon the death of his father, he formed and headed a conglomerate that dominated the vital steel industry. A conservative stung by Germany’s loss in World War I and the Allies’ brutal policy of reparations, he turned to nationalism and thus was attracted, initially, to Nazism and Hitler. He became a member of the Council of State after the Nazis rose to power, but grew disillusioned with Nazism and Hitler in the antebellum years of the 1930s. Of the man he once supported, Thyssen wrote in the introduction to his 1941 book, “If human civilization is not to perish, everything that is possible must be done to make war impossible in Europe. But the violent solution dreamed of by Hitler, a primitive person obsessed by ill-digested historical memories, is a romantic folly and a barbarous and bloody anachronism”. In November of 1938 Thyssen resigned from the Council of State in protest over the Nazis’ brutal Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. With the outbreak of World War II, he emigrated to Switzerland. After moving to France, Thyssen eventually was apprehended by the Nazis after they took over France and he wound up in the notorious Dachau concentration camp, which he survived. The man who financed Hitler and later broke with him outlived him by nearly six years, dying in February 1951.
In 1983, Stern Magazin bought and published what it purported to be Hitler’s diaries. When it was revealed that the 61 volumes were fakes by forger Konrad Kujau, he and the Stern reporter he sold them to were arrested.
He was born four days after Charles Chaplin. Hitler modeled his mustache after Charlie Chaplin’s mustache.
His favorite film actresses were Pola Negri and Lina Basquette, among others. At his behest, Basquette was offered a film contract in the 1930s. Obviously, she turned down the offer.
Was close friends with German film actress Lil Dagover.
His mother Klara had three children before Adolf, all of whom died in infancy. Klara was always fearful that Adolf would die, too.
The reason that the Vienna art school turned Hitler down was because he could not draw the human form.
Dutch-German actor/singer Johannes Heesters was reportedly Hitler’s favorite actor, especially in his role of Count Danilo Danilovitch from Franz Lehár’s “Die Lustige Witwe” (The Merry Widow).
Forced French officials to sign the treaty of surrender in the same train carriage the Armistice had been signed in.
Hitler’s father was born Alois Schicklgruber. His mother, Maria Schicklgruber, never revealed his paternity. In 1842, she married grain mill operator Johann Georg Hiedler. After their deaths, Alois was raised by his step-father’s brother, an act which has lead some historians to believe that Hiedler was Alois’s biological father. When Alois was legitimated in 1876 via adoption by his step-uncle, the baptismal registry mistakenly changed the family’s surname to “Hitler”, which Alois decided to take. In 1877, he was legally declared to be Hiedler’s son. In 1885, he married his step-uncle’s granddaughter, Klara, Adolf’s mother.
Hitler’s father died when he was aged thirteen.
It has been alleged that Hitler may have had an (unknown) Jewish Grandfather as his father (Alois Hiedler) was the illegitimate son of an Austrian peasant woman from Upper Austria and an unknown father while his (Alois Hiedler) mother was in domestic service in Graz in Styria. However this theory has been debunked several times.
In 1977, German historian Werner Maser wrote in Zeitgeschichte Magazine about Jean-Marie Loret, who claimed to be Hitler’s son. Loret’s aunt confirmed that her nephew was fathered by a German soldier stationed in France during World War I, yet denied that he was Hitler. Balthasar Brandmayer, who served with Hitler, noted in his memoirs that Hitler was a prude who reproached comrades intending on taking up with French girls as having “no German sense of honor”. In 2008, Jean-Paul Mulders obtained DNA samples from Loret’s and Hitler’s living relatives, and concluded Hitler was not Loret’s father. Anton Joachimsthaler, Timothy Ryback, and Ian Kershaw have also stated that, given the inaccuracies in Maser’s account (for example, Maser claimed Loret’s mother was allowed to follow Hitler from town to town, something Hitler’s superiors would never have allowed) Hitler’s paternity of Loret is impossible.
Artist Austin Osman Spare would tell a story that he was asked to paint a portrait of Hitler, but refused, saying “If you are Superman, may I be forever animal.”.
In a documentary entitled “Profiling Hitler”, it is related how the OSS required a Psychiatrist to create a profile of Hitler. The model of the day was Psychoanalysis, and the profile speculated that as the war turned against Hitler he would withdraw from public appearances and probably commit suicide.
Hitler is the subject of the documentary Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story Never Told (2013).
After World War I ended, his former commander, Karl Meyr, recruited Hitler to infiltrate a fringe political group, the German Workers’ Party, formed over founder Anton Drexler’s outrage by the Treaty of Versailles. Impressed with his oratory skills, Drexler invited Hitler to join. Hitler eventually assumed leadership of the group, renaming it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Initially pro-Nazi, Meyer, a Jew, ultimately joined the rival Social Democratic Party. After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, he was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo, sent back to Germany, and died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Although Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States has been described as a mistake, it is likely that it made no difference. After the UK had declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, all US restrictions on aid to Britain had been immediately lifted. It would only have been a short matter of time until German U-Boats began sinking American ships carrying supplies to the UK, giving the US government its casus belli to declare war on Germany. The German and Italian war declarations made the Second Happy Time possible for U-Boats.
Followers of Michel de Nostredame believe he named Hitler as the second of three anti-Christs, Napoléon Bonaparte as the first, and the third not revealed.
Hitler’s impact on History is a tragic study in the effects of charisma. Hitler apologists are frequently people who might not be alive if the Axis Powers had won.
Ordered the London Blitz on 7 September 1940. The British Royal Air Force had bombed German cities from 11 May 1940. On 14 May 1940, three days after the RAF began bombing Germany, the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam. The Rotterdam Blitz was deliberately exaggerated by the British press, with some newspapers increasing the casualties figures tenfold. Under the Treaty of Versailles, from 1920 Germany wasn’t allowed to have an air force.
Ordered Operation Barbarossa as a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, before Stalin had enough time to prepare for war against the European Axis Powers. Stalin had already violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by annexing Bukovina in 1940.
The word “Fuhrer” is German for “leader” or “guide”, but due to the stigma people use the word “Leiter” for “Leader” now.
Publicly offered to end the war in the West in July 1940 after the Fall of France, saying he had no desire to destroy the British Empire. As the British Royal Family is descended from the German noble houses of Hanover, and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hitler considered England more German than British. In May 1941, he again offered to end the war and evacuate northern France if the UK allowed Germany a free hand in the East against the Soviet Union. The UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose to turn down both offers.
Signed the Munich Agreement with the UK, France and Italy in September 1938. Hitler later broke the agreement when he overran the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, probably in response to German economic problems.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials.
Under the Nazi regime, Jews were not permitted to own a pet or a bicycle. Smoking was forbidden. Persons of low IQ were sterilized and the disabled or deformed were put to death.
As a racial supremacist who believed that Northern European people were the “master race”, his close alliance to the Japanese during the Second World War is rather curious. Indeed, in 1942 he forbade celebrations in Germany following the Battle of Singapore (also known as the Fall of Singapore), a defeat of the British by the Japanese, as he felt it was a bad day for the white race. He also refused to allow Ribbentrop to send an official statement congratulating the Japanese on their victory.
As a racial supremacist Hitler told his soldiers they could ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to Slavs, because he considered them “subhuman”. It was also because the Soviet Union had not signed the conventions.
Brother-in-law of Gretl Braun and Ilse Braun during the brief time he was married to Eva. Two hours before the wedding, Hitler had Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein, shot. On May 5, 1945, Gretl gave birth to her and Fegelein’s daughter, whom she named Eva. Eva committed suicide on April 25, 1971 after her boyfriend was killed in an auto accident.
In order to knock France out of the war he was forced to go through Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg so as to avoid a costly frontal assault on the Maginot Line. He also needed to seize control of the Belgian ports to prevent the British Royal Navy from reimposing its blockade of 1914-1919. The blockade was widely regarded as illegal under international law as it contravened the Hague Convention of 1907 which the UK had signed. The tenth treaty of the 1907 Hague Convention concerned Maritime Warfare and the UK did not ratify that one, although its blockades of Germany during both world wars were still widely regarded as being clearly illegal under international law.
Hitler never won an overall parliamentary majority under Germany’s democratic system. In the final free election in November 1932, his party lost considerable support (down from nearly 14 million votes to under 12 million votes) but still remained the largest elected party with 196 seats (293 seats were required for a majority). Hitler was subsequently enabled into power by other right-wing leaders and President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler did not need a majority in the Reichstag in order to govern.
Mountain Dew launched a promotion in 2012 to have its Internet Fans name a new drink. The competition was flooded by inappropriate “funny” suggestions and the project had to be abandoned. The winner up to that point was “Hitler did nothing wrong”.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) was filmed in Germany, but had to import performers from elsewhere to play the Oompa Loompas because after the Nazi atrocities local midget performers could not be found.
Originally Hitler only wanted to expel Jews from Germany. After the Fall of France the Madagascar Plan was drawn up to relocate Europe’s Jews to the French colony. However the British naval blockade meant this was impossible.
Violated the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 by introducing compulsory military conscription in Germany and rebuilding the armed forces.
Unlike his Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, Hitler had no interest in overseas colonies. This was partly because few of Germany’s colonies before World War I were profitable.
He could only invade Poland if Iosif Stalin agreed to invade as well, otherwise Germany risked fighting a two-front war in 1939 before it was ready. Hitler and Stalin agreed their joint invasion of Poland in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939. Stalin deliberately waited until 17 September 1939 before launching his invasion, as he knew France and the British Empire would not be able to declare war on both Germany and the Soviet Union.
Offered the UK and France a peace proposal on 6 October 1939, following the German-Soviet conquest of Poland.
It is often observed that Hitler would have stood a more realistic chance of winning World War II if he had focused all resources on the war effort, rather than expending large amounts of money and manpower on building and maintaining concentration camps.
It has often been said that the state of Israel would not have been created in 1948 were it not for Hitler, and that without him the European colonial empires would have lasted for longer.
Maintained the British naval blockade of Germany was illegal under international law, and that the United States was violating its official neutral position by supplying the UK with warships and munitions.
Showed little interest in the independence movements of the colonies of the British Empire, except India. There were plans for the European Axis forces to link up with Japanese forces in the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal in 1942 to bring about the collapse of the British Empire in Asia and the Pacific. This plan was foiled when the Axis lost the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942.
Development of the Nuclear Bomb was hastened out of concern that the Nazis would develop it first. Albert Einstein wrote to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressing this concern in 1939.
The Kriegsmarine (the German Navy) sent out battle instructions in May 1939 which included the ominous phrase “fighting methods will never fail to be employed merely because some international regulations are opposed to them”.
Showed little interest in the possibility of Spain formally joining the Axis, partly because the country had been economically destroyed in a brutal civil war, and also because he needed officially neutral harbors to import war materials from Latin America. Hitler felt Spain would be a burden to Germany’s war effort, like Italy.
Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union economically by seizing the resources of Ukraine. For this reason he did not consider taking Moscow the priority during Operation Barbarossa.
Authorised Operation Barbarossa on 18 December 1940 after Iosif Stalin’s request on 25 November that Axis forces should withdraw from eastern Europe. This threatened to cut off Germany’s main supply of oil from Romania.
He was a militant anti-smoker.
Considered declaring war on the United States in September 1940 after the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, and in March 1941 after the start of Lend Lease.
Along with Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Hitler declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese had attacked the US naval bases at Pearl Harbor. The US was keeping the British Empire and the Soviet Union in the war with Lend-Lease. Hitler could no longer ignore the amount of economic and military aid America was giving the UK and the Soviet Union via the Lend-Lease programme. He needed to declare war so his U-Boats would be able to start sinking American ships carrying armaments to the UK and the USSR.
Hitler was not impressed when Italy formally entered the war on 10 June 1940. He felt Benito Mussolini had deliberately remained neutral when the war began, and had opportunistically only entered the war with the Fall of France imminent, having left Germany to do all the heavy lifting. Hitler actually tried to dissuade Mussolini from joining the war in March 1940.
In April 1941 he sent German forces to aid the Italians in the Battle of Greece, mainly so the British Royal Air Force would not be able to bomb the oilfields in Romania. Hitler later blamed the need to help the Italians in Greece for the delay of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, from 15 May 1941 to 22 June 1941. However most historians agree the delay of Barbarossa was due to many other factors, especially the delay in building aircraft bases in eastern Europe.
Hitler had hoped for Japanese support in his war against the Soviet Union, but the Japanese maintained their pact with the Soviets.
A Scottish Psychiatrist, Dr Donald Ewen Cameron, used the example of Nazi Germany to bolster his theories that mental illness had “social contagion” qualities.
Mussolini found Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to be boring and cliché-ridden and George Orwell thought it was clumsily written. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn commented that it lacked original thought and was just a collection of commonplaces.
Philip K Dick wrote an alternative history novel on what the World might be like if Hitler had won: “The Man in the High Castle”.
It has been suggested by some historians that Hitler should have focused on North Africa and the Mediterranean after the Fall of France, in order to bring about the collapse of the British Empire and get Greece and Turkey to join the Axis. If Malta had been captured it is likely Spain would have entered the war in order to invade Gibraltar, thus closing the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy.
Hitler offered to treat Soviet prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention if the USSR did the same for German POWs in their captivity, even though the Soviet Union had not signed the document. Iosif Stalin refused as he considered anyone who surrendered to be a traitor to Communism.
The Enigma Machines had a number of Security Features, not including not being retrievable from sunken submarines.
On 25 January 1940 he issued an order which specifically forbade air raids against the UK, including the ports. He also prohibited attacks upon British naval forces unless the RAF bombed Germany first, noting, “the guiding principle must be not to provoke the initiation of aerial warfare on the part of Germany.”.
Norway was neutral with regard to World War II and protection from British-French influences was the pretext Germany used to officially justify the occupation, along with securing the ore mines of Sweden and fulfilling propaganda about a larger Germanic Empire. There was a 40,000 strong Norwegian Resistance Movement called the Milorg.
Invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940 as a preventive manoeuvre against a planned, and openly discussed, Franco-British occupation of Norway.
The Blitz ran from 7 September 1940 to 21 May 1941, with 16 UK cities affected. The British began bombing Germany on 10 May 1940 in response to the invasion of France and the Low Countries. The existence of Germany’s Air Force broke the Treaty of Versailles.
In March 1940 the Germans intercepted a message that the UK planned to invade Norway as part of a general strategy to slowly encircle Germany and cut it off from its trading partners. However the British postponed the invasion of Norway until April, when they began laying mines in Norway’s neutral waters. This time the goal was to draw Germany into a conflict, instigate an engagement at sea and use the situation as a cover to invade Norway in an operation called “Plan R 4”. However, just as the first mines were being laid, the Germans found out about the plan, landed in Norway and seized the Norwegian ports.
Outlawed atheist and freethinking organizations in Germany in 1933. The German Freethinkers League had around 500,000 members.
Hitler met with the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco once, on 23 October 1940. Franco asked for French colonial possessions in return for entering World War II, but Hitler refused as he did not want to damage his relations with the new Vichy French government. After the meeting, Hitler reportedly said that he would “rather have three or four teeth pulled out”, than barter with Franco again. In May 2013 documents were released showing that the UK’s MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200 million bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain from joining World War II after the Fall of France.
He was initially reluctant to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, but was persuaded to offer military assistance by Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Canaris. The Luftwaffe bombed rebel-held areas at the request of the Spanish nationalist government.
He always maintained that the invasion of the Soviet Union was a pre-emptive strike before Iosif Stalin was ready for war with the Axis Powers. It has been suggested that Stalin was preparing to attack Axis forces in eastern Europe in 1941 in the Soviet Offensive Plans Controversy.
Decided war with the United States could no longer be avoided when Roosevelt gave a speech on 11 September 1941 confirming that all American ships had been ordered to fire on any Axis ships.
Quentin Tarantino made a popular movie on a Second World War Theme. The film had alternative history elements, and included a scene in which Hitler’s face is obliterated by machine gun fire.
Poland helped Hitler overrun Czechoslovakia by annexing Zaolzie on 1 October 1938, following the Munich Agreement.
Invaded Poland before Iosif Stalin did in order to demonstrate his commitment to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
On 26 October 1939 Nazi Germany unilaterally annexed Zaolzie. It had been under Polish occupation for just over a year. After World War II it was returned to Czechoslovakia.
The German occupation of Romania in late August 1940 raised tensions with the Soviets, who responded that Germany was supposed to have consulted with the Soviet Union under Article III of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Pact was terminated on 22nd June 1941.
About 345,000 World War II casualties were from Czechoslovakia, 277,000 of them Jews. As many as 144,000 Soviet troops died during the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army.
Not taking Moscow in September 1941 was often cited as a mistake on Hitler’s part. However the move allowed the Wehrmacht to destroy a main Soviet army, netting more than 600,000 prisoners. Hitler knew the Soviets would not surrender if the capital city fell, and in any case the Axis would have to defend a destroyed city against repeated Soviet counterattacks in the winter.
The Nazi regime is often used as an example of “Why Evolution is Evil”, even though, ultimately, it failed.
Attributed his survival of the July 20th plot to “Divine Intervention”.
Napoleon captured Moscow in 1812, but failed to defeat the Russians. Germany defeated Russia in World War I and imposed the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Hitler believed defeating the Red Army was more important than capturing individual cities.
There was a serious attempt to establish a Nationalist interpretation of Science: Deutsche Physik or Aryan Physics, which was absorbed into the Nazi Party when Philipp Lenard joined.
Hitler’s Army High Command had several objectives – Army Group North, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by the Baltic Sea; Army Group Center, Russia’s capital, Moscow; Army Group South, Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. They severely underestimated the total fighting strength of the Red Army. Instead of 200 divisions, the Soviets could field 400 divisions when fully mobilized. This meant there were three million additional Soviets available to fight.
Maria Mauth, a 17-year-old German schoolgirl at the time, recalled her father’s reaction to Hitler invading the Soviet Union: “I will never forget my father saying: ‘Right, now we have lost the war!’.”.
Hitler allegedly only had one testicle due to an infected injury amputation during World War I, although this may be another urban myth. Such a rumour might have started if he were a sufferer of Monorchism or cryptorchidism.
The German High Command began planning the invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, after the Soviets violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by annexing Bukovina on 28 June 1940. The planned invasion was initially code named Operation Otto, and later Operation Barbarossa.
The Soviet Union had planned to accomplish the annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina with a full-scale invasion, but the Romanian government, responding to a Soviet ultimatum delivered on June 26, agreed to withdraw from the territories in order to avoid a military conflict. Germany, which had acknowledged the Soviet interest in Bessarabia in a secret protocol to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had been made aware prior to the planned ultimatum on June 24, but had not informed the Romanian authorities, nor were they willing to provide support.
More and more modern historians and scholars have cast doubt on the soundness and feasibility of an Axis attack on Moscow in September 1941. Steven D. Mercatante argued that the correct course of action would have been to focus on Leningrad, Ukraine and the Caucasus, just as Hitler had wanted from the beginning. Robert Citino wrote that the efforts around Kiev were remarkable and a stunning success, which in his opinion validated the approach Hitler took.
In addition to claiming there was an intended Soviet attack in the summer of 1941, Hitler also invaded the Soviet Union because he wanted to destroy Communism and to destroy the USSR as a world power and potential threat to the Axis Powers. He may also have wanted the natural resources of the Soviet Union to continue the war with the British Empire, as the UK had refused to accept his peace proposals in July 1940 and May 1941.
The target of assassination attempts from within his own organization.
In telling his father’s Auschwitz Survivor’s Story in the Pulitzer Prize winning “Maus”, Art Spiegelman relates his father’s experience of another Camp Inmate who claimed to be a German put there by mistake and was ignored.
Had a “Museum to a Dead Race” planned.
Hilter made peace proposals after breaking the Munich Agreement.
He is widely believed to have changed the world more than any other person since Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC).
He appears in a Visualisation of Hell in the Film “Little Nicky”, where he must wear a Frilly French Maid’s Dress and receive a pineapple from behind on a regular basis for the rest of Eternity.
Rearmament actually began on a more limited scale in the 1920s during the Weimer Republic.
Considered pursuing a Mediterranean strategy in 1941-42, but believed war with the Soviet Union had become unavoidable and delaying the invasion would allow Iosif Stalin too much time to rearm and build up his forces. Stalin was set to begin the full modernization of the Red Army in 1942, which would have made the USSR a formidable threat to the Axis Powers.
Hitler refused to give Czechoslovakia to Poland in 1939, which caused the Polish government to seek an alliance with the UK and France.
Allowed France’s vast colonial empire to remain intact in 1940, and agreed to respect French property rights for the duration of the occupation.
When Paris fell to German occupation on June 14, 1940, French resistance fighters allegedly cut the elevator cables to the Eiffel Tower. This meant that if Hitler wanted to hoist a swastika flag, a soldier would have to climb the roughly 1710 stairs to the summit platform. As Allies neared Paris in August 1944, a Frenchman scaled the tower and hung the French flag. When it became obvious that the Germans would lose Paris, Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to turn the city into rubble – including the Eiffel Tower. General von Choltitz did not carry out the command. Reportedly, within hours of the Liberation of Paris, the Tower’s lifts worked again.
His Speech Delivery Technique has been compared to the Induction Techniques of Stage Hypnotists.
He is mentioned in the lyrics of the theme song to the popular BBC comedy series Dad’s Army (1968). It was sung by music hall performer Bud Flanagan especially for the series.
Hitler had no interest in North Africa or the Mediterranean Sea. However after Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 the Battle of the Mediterranean began, and British forces in Egypt attacked Italian forces in Libya. In February 1941 Hitler was forced to send the Afrika Korps to prevent the Italians from suffering total defeat. The Allied victory in the North African Campaign in May 1943 led to the Italian Campaign and the end of the Italian Fascist regime.
Early in 1941 Hitler was faced with the choice between obtaining more oil from the Soviet Union or surrendering. Undoubtedly Iosif Stalin would have resisted any German demands for increased oil deliveries, or at least made an increase dependent on greatly increased German deliveries of manufactured products that Germany would have been incapable of meeting. Viewed in that light, the invasion of the Soviet Union appears inevitable, even without the ideological aspect.
At D-Day, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s reasoning was sound, his action decisive, his orders clear. But the panzer divisions were not under his command. They were in OKW reserve. To save precious time, Rundstedt had first ordered them to move out, then requested OKW approval. OKW did not approve. At 0730 Jodi informed Rundstedt that the two divisions could not be committed until Hitler gave the order, and Hitler was still sleeping. Rundstedt had to countermand the move-out order. Hitler slept until noon.
Contrary to popular belief, Hitler never issued a halt order immediately prior to the evacuation from Dunkirk. The order was actually issued by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, at the request of his tank unit commander, who had lost 50% of his armored forces and needed time to regroup.
DNA tests on Hitler’s relatives ironically show Jewish and African heritage.
Signed the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement on 11 February 1940.
Like SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Hitler was in favor of using Muslims against the British Empire during World War II. He met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini in Berlin on 28 November 1941. The Mufti advised him not to exile Jews to the Middle East.
Some historians believe the Final Solution was decided because Germany had clearly lost the war by the beginning of 1942 and was facing complete destruction by the United States, China, the British Empire and the Soviet Union.
Plans were drawn up to deport people from Europe to Madagascar, Palestine and Siberia. The British naval blockade meant the Madagascar Plan was not viable, and Arab leaders objected to the idea of Jews being moved into the Middle East. Finally the failure of the European Axis Powers to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941 ended the Siberian plan. The Axis had captured a third of the Soviet Union by the end of 1941, containing more than four million Jews. The internment camps were overflowing and the logistics of moving so many people during wartime were impossible. Therefore instead of deporting people the Nazis decided to exterminate them instead.
Psychologists believe Hitler’s world view was shaped by his experiences as a soldier on the Western Front during World War I.
Intervened in Norway in April 1940 in response to Plan R 4.
Had to divert his forces to help the Italians in France in June 1940, in North Africa in February 1941, and in the Balkans in April 1941. He was also forced to deploy troops training in France to meet the Allied invasion of Sicily rather than use them for the Battle of Kursk, and to withdraw forces from the Soviet Union when the invasion of Italy began in September 1943.
Gave Italy a million tons of coal each month from the start of World War II, even though the country had remained neutral. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had only demanded six million tons of coal from Germany for the first year of the war.
After France and the British Commonwealth declared war on Germany, Hitler originally intended to invade France in the autumn of 1939 to force an end to the war and the economic blockade. However the Polish campaign did not end until October, which meant the invasion of France had to be delayed until 1940 due to the onset of winter.
The vast majority of German officers supported the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and believed it could succeed, even those who disliked Hitler or those who had favored retaining good relations with the Soviets.
Decided to reject Iosif Stalin’s offer of an alliance in December 1940 because he was convinced the Soviet leader was playing a double game, and because Stalin kept changing his demands.
War declarations were already becoming obsolete by the start of World War II. Hitler only declared war once, against the United States on 11 December 1941.
Some German generals felt the armed forces were not ready for a major war in 1939. However delaying the war would have allowed the Soviet Union, the British Empire, France and the United States more time to rearm.
In a private conversation with his ally Gustaf Mannerheim on 4 June 1942 Hitler maintained he would still have invaded the Soviet Union, even if he had known the Soviet forces were stronger than he had believed.
In early June 1940, when Benito Mussolini informed Hitler that he at long last would enter the war, Hitler was most dismissive, in private calling Mussolini a cowardly opportunist who had broken the terms of the Pact of Steel in September 1939, and was only entering the war nine months later after it was clear that France was beaten and it appeared that Britain would soon make peace.
Hitler refused to restore the monarchy as he blamed Kaiser Wilhelm II for Germany’s defeat in World War I.
In 2016, the British left-wing politician Ken Livingstone, a former Mayor of the City of London, caused an outrage in the UK when he stated as a fact that Hitler supported Zionism. He was publicly confronted by fellow Labour Party politician John Mann, who called him a racist and a Nazi apologist in front of television cameras, and Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party. Livingstone has refused to apologize for his comments despite widespread criticism from members of his own party and beyond. He maintained his remarks were factually correct in view of the Haavara agreement.
The Nazi government signed the Haavara agreement, which facilitated the relocation of Jews to Palestine in 1933.
On December 10, 1941, when Hitler resumed his conference with Erich Raeder, Wilhelm Keitel and Hermann Göring, Hitler said that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech on the previous day confirmed everything in the Tribune story. Hitler considered Roosevelt’s speech to be a de facto declaration of war. Since war with the United States was inevitable, Hitler felt he had no choice but to declare war on the United States.
Without the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Germany would have run out of oil in August 1941.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor surprised Hitler. Hitler had never wanted Japan to attack the United States. Germany had repeatedly urged Japan to attack Singapore and the rest of Britain’s Far Eastern Empire, but Japan had refused to do so. After the war General Alfred Jodl said that Hitler had wanted Japan to attack the British Empire and the Soviet Union in the Far East, which would have set up a two-front war. Hitler thought Franklin D. Roosevelt would probably not be able to persuade the American public to go to war to defend Britain’s Asian colonies. Jodl said that Hitler had wanted in Japan “a strong new ally without a strong new enemy.”.
The Armenian Genocide was a Plot Point in the book “We need to talk about Kevin”, despite Hitler’s assertion about it being forgettable.
On December 9, 1941, Hitler returned to Berlin from the Eastern front and plunged into two days of conferences with Admiral Erich Raeder, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The three advisers stressed that the Rainbow Five plan showed that the United States was determined to defeat Germany. They pointed out that Rainbow Five stated that the US would undertake to carry on the war against Germany alone even if the Soviet Union collapsed and Britain surrendered. The three advisers leaned toward Raeder’s view that an air and U-boat offensive against both British and American ships might be risky, but that the United States was already unquestionably an enemy. On December 9, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt made a radio address to the nation. In addition to numerous uncomplimentary remarks about Hitler and Nazism, Roosevelt accused Hitler of urging Japan to attack the United States. In reality Hitler had told the Japanese not to attack the US, instead urging them to attack the Soviet Union or British colonies like Singapore.
Originally Hitler wanted to invade the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1940, but his generals all said the armed forces were not ready.
The Nazi Regime inspired Stanley Milgram’s “The Banality of Evil” Conformity Experiment, which proved that people have a very low threshold for giving in to the demands of authority figures.
Had a “Hunger Plan” to starve the “inferior” Slavs after the Soviet 1941 invasion, by diverting their food supplies to the German Army.
It is disputed whether Hitler was aware of the Plan Dog memorandum, which determined in 1940 that the United States would focus on defeating Germany and Italy while fighting a defensive war in the Pacific against Japan.
Shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor Hitler informed the Japanese he would declare war on the United States, even if they made the first move.
Hitler was in his bunker after dinner when Otto Dietrich, his press secretary, brought him a news flash about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like Churchill, the Führer was delighted to hear it: “Hitler snatched the sheet of paper from my hand, strode out of the room and walked unaccompanied, without cap or coat, the hundred yards to the bunker of the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces. He was the first to bring the news there.” Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel never forgot the moment: “Jodl and I were both present that night as – the only time during the war – he came bursting in to us with the telegram in his hand. I gained the impression that the Führer felt that the war between Japan and America had suddenly relieved him of a nightmare burden; it certainly brought us some relief from the consequences of America’s undeclared state of war with us.”.
On 9 December 1941 he allowed Axis U-Boats to begin operating in American waters, in view of Rainbow Five and the Plan Dog memorandum.
Due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact he was forced to pressure Italy into ending its support for Finland during the Winter War. Hitler was delighted by the outcome of the conflict, as both the Soviet Union and the League of Nations were humiliated.
Lampooned by The Kids in the Hall (“What is that bad man doing to my Horse?” Sketch).
A few photos of Hitler striking dramatic poses have been edited together over the song “Pumped Up Kicks” in order to create a Meme of Hitler Raving with Glowsticks.
The Holocaust was heavily inspired by the Great Purge of 1936-38, and the Hunger Plan was inspired by the Holodomor.
In 1945 Adolf Hitler Street in Berlin was renamed Roosevelt Drive.
The Nazi State was called “The Thousand-year Empire”.
Hitler was furious at the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940. He admonished the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano for opening an opportunity for the British to enter Greece and establish an airbase in Athens, putting the British within striking distance of valuable oil reserves in Romania, which Hitler relied upon for his war machine. It also meant that Hitler would have to divert forces from North Africa, a high strategic priority, to Greece in order to bail Mussolini out. Hitler considered leaving the Italians to fight their own way out of this debacle – possibly even making peace with the Greeks as a way of forestalling an Allied intervention. But Germany eventually invaded Greece in April 1941, mainly so the British Royal Air Force would be unable to bomb the oil refineries in Romania during the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Lampooned by Dr Seuss in “Yertle the Turtle”.
While much is said of Stalingrad being of symbolic value for Hitler, it was a transit hub for oil deliveries for the Soviets, who got their oil from Chechnya and Azerbaijan at the time. The whole southern focus of the Axis campaign on the Eastern Front was to capture the Caucasus oilfields.
Historians are divided on whether Hitler ever seriously considered the “Mediterranean Plan” proposed by Admiral Erich Raeder in the summer of 1940, before he finally committed to the invasion of the Soviet Union on 18 December 1940 after it became certain that Spain was not going to join the war. Any Mediterranean strategy was flawed because Hitler was not prepared to treat Vichy France as an ally, and Spain and Italy both wanted French colonies in Africa and the Mediterranean. In addition the Germans did not have the experience or the logistics to wage war in the Middle East. Some historians have asserted that Hitler intended to focus on the Mediterranean in 1942 after the conquest of the Soviet Union, which many in the German High Command expected to take only a few months.
At the time of its initial publication, very few people took his first book “Mein Kampf” seriously.
US presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy all doubted whether Hitler had really died in 1945.
It is likely that European settlers in North America killed far more people in their genocidal campaign of conquest against the natives than the Nazis did. That period of History is variously called “The Native American Holocaust”, “The American Indian Holocaust”, “The North American Holocaust” or “The 500 Years’ War”.
In 2014, the FBI released 742 pages of documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking to find out what the US government knew about Hitler’s presumed escape to South America.
A large dental bridge was fitted to Hitler’s upper jaw in 1933. On 10 November 1944 he had surgery to cut off part of the bridge due to a gum infection that was causing him severe toothache.
German historian Sebastian Haffner argued that without Hitler’s unprecedented genocide of the Jews, the modern nation state of Israel would not exist. He contended that without Hitler, the decolonization of former European spheres of influence would have been postponed. Further, Haffner claimed that, other than Alexander the Great, Hitler had a more significant impact than any other comparable historical figure in that he caused a wide range of worldwide changes in a relatively short time span. Haffner’s opinion of Hitler: “If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness.”.
Assumed command of the German army on 19 December 1941, following the failure to capture Moscow.
The character of Davros, the creator of the Daleks, in Doctor Who (1963) was mainly based on Hitler. Like Hitler, Davros is introduced in the serial Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks: Part One (1975) as a genocidal, racist psychopath. The Daleks, pitiless killers whose catchphrase is “exterminate!”, were based on the SS as far back as their first appearance in Doctor Who: The Dead Planet (1963). The allusions to the Nazis in “Genesis of the Daleks” became so strong that morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse complained to the BBC that it was unsuitable for children (being broadcast at 5:30 pm on Saturdays) and was “teatime brutality for tots”.
Sonke Neitzel, Professor of history at the London School of Economics, said witness accounts used to compile the British report into Hitler’s death are unreliable. He said, “We know that prisoners who had been in the bunker most likely lied to the Soviets when they were interrogated.”.
Magda Goebbels reminisces in her memoir about Hitler once saying in the Café Anast that he would like to squash a little Jewish boy “flat like a bug against the wall”. She thought it was just talk, and goes on to say that he actually did it.
In the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will (1935), crowd members can be seen copying Hitler’s mustache.
On February 20, 1920, the German Workers’ Party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler did not like the addition of the word “socialist” because he loathed socialism and communism, but acquiesced because the executive committee thought it might be helpful in attracting workers from the left. Some of the first people to be arrested and sent to concentration camps upon Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 were prominent German socialists and communists, which is mentioned in the documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997).
In 1932, before becoming German chancellor, Hitler had already earned a profile in the British reference book “The New Standard Encyclopaedia and World Atlas”. The book’s biography of him provides a fascinating insight into how underestimated the threat from Hitler and the Nazis was at the time in Britain, merely concluding: “Hitler has written a book, Mein Kampf (My Battle), and has put forward various schemes for reform, some of a very drastic kind.” It doesn’t mention Hitler and his party’s aggressive antisemitism, racial ideology or plans for German territorial expansion, all of which had been set out in Mein Kampf several years earlier. Interestingly, the book’s entry on antisemitism describes it as an “opposition to the Jewish race” and a “movement” which “appears to be based on economic rather than religious or political causes”. The book does not describe antisemitism as a form of bigotry or prejudice, despite mentioning that it was responsible for “many brutal outrages” in Russia and Hungary in the 19th century, as well as The Anti-Semitic League in Germany and the Dreyfus Case in France, which suggests that antisemitism was seen at the time as having a certain degree of legitimacy, even from a British reference book’s perspective.
For all the braggadocio, he did give up on his painting.
Elevated to Chancellor by an Aristocracy who thought, wrongly, that they could keep him in check.
Was almost killed in a car accident on March 13, 1930.
His niece committed suicide. Hitler had recently had a letter he’d sent to her covertly retrieved.
He was lampooned in They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968).
Eisenhower ordered filming of the liberation of Concentration Camps specifically to make future successful “Holocaust Denial” impossible.
Annexed the Free City of Danzig on 2 September 1939. Hitler advised the United Kingdom and France that he would withdraw from Poland if allowed to keep Danzig and part of the Polish corridor.
Many historians agree that 1941 was the turning point of World War II and there is no way that the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan could have won once they were in combat with both the USSR and the USA. Narrator Laurence Olivier even mentioned on The World at War (1973) that the outcome of the war was certain with the United States’ entry in December 1941, as no country in the world could compete against the industrial might of the United States.
The Channel Islands, just off the coast of northern France, were the only part of Britain to come under German occupation during the Second World War. In occupied Jersey, a British printer was compelled to start printing stamps for the island. When accused of complicity, he protested that he had put four letter ‘A’s in the corners of each stamp, which he said stood for a Latin Motto which translated to “Go to Hell, Atrocious Adolf!”.
Hitler’s first major military defeat in World War II is generally accepted to have been the “Battle of Britain” between July and October 1940, during which the German air force, the Luftwaffe (literally “Air Weapon”), failed to defeat the Royal Air Force in the skies over England (known in German as “Luftschlacht um England”, literally “The Air Battle for England”). While this is often remembered now in the British popular imagination as the precursor to an imminent invasion of Britain, in reality the primary objective was to compel Britain to agree to a negotiated peace settlement. An invasion plan, provisionally called “Operation Sea Lion”, had not been developed in great detail by the Germans and there are doubts over whether it would have been feasible anyway, as an invasion would have been seaborne and Britain still had a superior navy to the Germans in 1940. The Royal Navy would have continued the war from Canada in any event.
While Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister 1937-40) is usually landed with the historical blame for his policy of appeasement and for signing the Munich Agreement in 1938 which gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, which encouraged Hitler to attack Poland the following year, it was actually Chamberlain’s predecessor, Stanley Baldwin (British Prime Minister 1935-37), who had failed to act when Hitler was flagrantly transgressing the Treaty of Versailles with large-scale rearmament, conscription and illegally launching the Luftwaffe, as well as the Remilitarization of the Rhineland. Poland also invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 and annexed Zaolzie.
One of the many infamous personalities mentioned in the song “Nome aos Bois” by Brazilian rock group Titãs.
The age gap between Hitler and Eva was 23 years.
As a result of World War II the Treaty of Versailles, seen by many as a direct cause of the conflict, ceased to exist.
Supported the Iraqi uprising against the British in May 1941.
According to the television series Nazi Victory: The Post War Plan (2018), Hitler had plans to invade America using long-range bombers.
Like Napoleon – who also invaded Russia, but in 1812 – Hitler was nicknamed as the petty corporal, because it was his rank in the army during WW1.
Hitler’s OKW Direktive Nr 2 and Luftwaffe Direktive Nr 2 prohibited attacks upon enemy naval forces unless the enemy bombed Germany first, noting, “the guiding principle must be not to provoke the initiation of aerial warfare on the part of Germany.”.
When the Japanese informed Berlin on 17 November 1941 that they were likely to go to war with the United States, Hitler immediately replied that Germany would declare war on the US in the event of a Japanese attack. He could no longer ignore American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, as well as the increasingly frequent incidents between US warships and Axis U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. After President Roosevelt publicly confirmed “shoot on sight” in his Fireside Chat on 11 September 1941 the United States was in an undeclared state of war with Germany and Italy.
On 15 December 1940 he ordered the remains of Emperor Napoleon II of the French to be transferred from Vienna to Paris.
In February 1945 Hitler claimed he had deliberately allowed the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to evacuate Dunkirk in May-June 1940, and that Winston Churchill had not appreciated this. Modern historians however do not give credence to this claim, as Hitler’s orders at the time were to destroy the BEF.
An Anglophile, he wrote admiringly of “Anglo-Saxon determination” to hold India.
As a child he supported the Boers during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The German-speaking public and press at the time were overwhelmingly opposed to what the British were doing in South Africa.
Shares a birthday with George Takei who, ironically, as a boy spent time in a Japanese internment camp in the United States Of America during World War 2.
On September 11, 1940, Hitler sent German army and air force reinforcements to Romania to protect precious oil reserves and to prepare an Eastern European base of operations for a future assault against the Soviet Union.
In June 1940 when the Germans defeated France, which Stalin had hoped would turn into a stalemated conflict lasting for several years, the Soviets overran the Baltic States and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Since this put Ploesti a two-day journey by tanks from the new border, and given nearly two-thirds of German oil came from there, Hitler started planning Barbarossa.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor Hitler accused President Roosevelt of waging a campaign against Germany since 1937, blamed him for the outbreak of war in 1939, and said he was planning to invade Germany in 1943 under Rainbow Five.
The terms of his July 1940 peace offer reportedly closely mirrored his proposed May 1941 peace offer, including granting nominal independence to Poland as a German protectorate along with a full German military withdrawal from France (except for Alsace-Lorraine), Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway.
On his final public appearance on 20 March 1945 Hitler, his mustache gray and his left arm uncontrollably twitching, met with members of the Hitlerjugend who had distinguished themselves in combat. He was too infirm to pin the Iron Crosses on the boys’ tunics himself. The job had to be done by Artur Axmann.
In the final multi-party election in March 1933 the Nazis registered a large increase in votes. However, despite waging a campaign of terror against their opponents, they only tallied 43.9 percent of the vote, well short of a majority. They needed the votes of their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a bare working majority in the Reichstag.
During the “Phoney War” there was a reluctance to move to all out war. Hitler entertained the notion that it might be possible to come to terms with Britain until quite late in 1940, so an avoidance of civilian casualties was a factor that could help a possible accommodation.
In March 1935 Hitler told Sir John Simon, on the visit of the Foreign Secretary to Berlin, that the Luftwaffe had attained parity with the British Royal Air Force. The claim was untrue, but nevertheless caused widespread shock in the UK.
Joseph Stalin refused to believe that Hitler was really dead after World War II, and eventually clamped a secrecy order on all matters related to Hitler’s death.
A definitive stamp series (1941-1945) of ‘Deutsche Reichspost’ (Nazi German mail) showed his portrait.
He met former US president Herbert Hoover in Berlin on 8 March 1938. In their conversation, Hitler said he had been democratically elected. Hoover spoke up for personal liberty, but Hitler replied that Germany, unlike the resource-rich United States, could not afford such liberties. Hoover returned to the US confident that Germany was only a threat to the Soviet Union.
Zsa Zsa Gabor made headlines in June 1941 after telling the Associated Press that she had danced with him twice.
It was the British RAF, under the direct orders of Winston Churchill, which started the saturation bombing of civilians in World War II on May 10, 1940, the day the new Prime Minister took office. From that day onward, British bombers bombed German civilian targets almost every night. Even then, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe not to respond in kind, and only to bomb military targets in Britain, such as airfields and ports, in preparation for a planned invasion of the United Kingdom. On August 25, 1940, a German raid on an oil refinery on the banks of Thames River in east London took place as part of this tactical assault. Some of the bombs landed next to the refinery, in London’s East End, causing no causalities – but in response to this bombing, described by the post-war Official History of the Defence of the United Kingdom as “unintentional” – the first mass raid on Berlin by British bombers took place six days later. After that, regular British raids on Berlin’s non-military targets took place, and escalated throughout the war. Despite these attacks on Berlin, Hitler still refused to retaliate. But this situation could not last, and after nearly four months of the RAF bombing German cities and towns, the Luftwaffe was finally ordered to strike back.
As part of a general post-World War II propaganda campaign to paint the Germans in as bad a light as possible, the mainstream media has always claimed that the Germans started the bombing of civilians, using the two examples of the Luftwaffe attack on Warsaw in September 1939 and the 14 May 1940 bombing of Rotterdam. In 1944, public discontent in Britain over the RAF’s civilian bombing policy had reached record heights, and to counteract this dissent, the former British Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, J.M. Spaight, published a book titled “Bombing Vindicated”, which set out to justify the saturation bombing of German civilians. Spaight was honest in his book about the origins of the civilian bombing, and openly admitted that the Warsaw and Rotterdam bombings could not be compared to the RAF’s tactics, saying, “When Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed, German armies were at their gates. The air bombardment was an operation of the tactical offensive.” In other words, the bombing of Warsaw took place as part of a set tactical battle. The German army had laid siege to the city on 16 September 1939, and the Polish resisted until 27 September, turning the city into an effective fortress which the Germans battled to subdue. The Luftwaffe attack was therefore, part of the established rules of conflict and not a saturation bombing of civilians. The Rotterdam bombing was an identical scenario. The bombing raids on Warsaw and Rotterdam were in direct support of attacking ground troops, and were not strikes against civilians for the purpose of spreading terror without any military objective.
As J.M. Spaight detailed in his book “Bombing Vindicated”, it was the British who were to “realise the full potential” of saturation civilian bombing, and that the British bombers were designed to bomb cities, he said, while the “Teutonic mind” never even considered such a policy, and instead viewed an air force merely as a tool to “blast open” a path for attacking armies. Spaight also wrote that Hitler’s hope that “Churchill would stop this nonsense” was “stupid” and furthermore the “blitz” on London which followed was actually minor by comparison to what had already been thrown at German cities by the RAF, and to what occurred in 1943 and 1944 (the bombing of Hamburg, Cologne, and Munich-where, Spaight boasted, the fires could be seen 150 miles away).
Widely hailed as one of the top few evil men (not just leaders) –of all recorded history. A ‘Hitler’ is a term meaning a country’s extremely evil or treacherous leader.