Facts about Adolf Hitler

1. Born on the 20th of April, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria. 2. Adolf Hitler was the 4th child of Klara Plzl (ne Hitler) and Alois Hitler. 3. Adolf Hitler's early life was spent in Austria. As a child, he was an excellent in academics. After he lost his younger brother, Edmund, he became depressed and detached and would fight with people around him, especially his father and his teachers. 4. His father died suddenly in1903. His behaviour at school went from bad to worse, due to which he was asked to leave the technical school he was studying in. 5. He did not have enough money. Although he liked drawing, he was unsuccessful in passing the examination at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, twice. He was instead asked to go in for architecture. 6. He lost his mother to cancer, 4 years after he lost his father. When he was unsuccessful in his exam at the Academy twice, he had to resort to being a casual laborer, a painter or doing some odd jobs before he joined the infantry. 7. At the start of the First World War, he went to Munich and joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment of World War I and served as a runner. During the war, he was gassed and wounded. After the war he was given an award for bravery in action during the war. 8. It was in 1919, that Hitler joined what was known as the German Workers Party, which was abbreviated to the Nazi Party. Soon, he took charge of the propaganda of the party and by the year 1921 he was

made the leader. 9. After that, in 1932, Hitler tried to become the chancellor by challenging Paul von Hindenburg in the election that was held, but could not succeed. Later, after the death of Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler became the Fhrer and Chancellor in 1934. 10. He established absolute dictatorship, enforcing his newly formed rules with the help of the Gestapo, the brutal secret police. Concentration camps were set up for the organized killing of Jews, political opponents and Gypsies. 11. He then went about invading and annexing as much territory as he could in Europe, such as the Sudetenland and Austria, in 1938, and then invading Poland on the 1st of September, 1939, whereupon France and Britain declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September, thus beginning World War II. 12. In the initial years of the war, Adolf Hitler, using the might of the German infantry and tanks to unleash a Blitzkrieg, had remarkable success, sweeping through large parts of Western Europe, with nations falling one by one to the great German war machine. 13. Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R. in 1941, ignoring a non-aggression pact he had earlier signed with them in 1939. After initial victories, Hitler's forces suffered crushing defeats, first at Moscow in December 1941, and then later in Stalingrad, in the winter of 1942 to 1943. 14. It was in the month of December in 1941 that the United States of America entered the war. The Allies began their invasion of occupied Europe by landing on the French coast at Normandy Beach, in 1944. Then German cities began being bombed and destroyed and the allied

troops entered Germany and made their way to Berlin by 1945. In the meantime, Italy, under the rule of the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who was an ally of Germany, also fell. 15. During the war, many high-ranking Nazis became desperate, and several attempts were made to assassinate Hitler, all of which were unsuccessful. In the meantime, the forces of the Soviet Union were also closing in on Berlin, which was the place Hitler had his headquarters. 16. As it became apparent that the war was lost, and his hand-picked lieutenants went against his orders, on realizing the futility of continuing, Adolf Hitler committed suicide on the 30th of April, 1945. However, on the night before, he married Eva Braun, his long-term mistress, who also committed suicide with him. Thus came to an end both the war as well as Nazi rule.