Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was a monster. The Führer, dictator of the German Reich, killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, one of the greatest genocides of all time, as well as 2.5 million Soviet prisoners, 2 million Poles, 400,000 Serbs, 270,000 disabled people, 100,000 Roma, 10,000 homosexuals, 7,000 Spanish Republicans, 5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, and 3,000 Catholic priests. He was born in Austria in 1889, the son of a 52-year-old customs official and a young peasant woman. Resentful, shy, unstable, and lazy, he loved his mother but was hostile to his authoritarian father. He studied in Linz and decided to go to Vienna in pursuit of his dream: he wanted to be a painter. However, he failed the entrance exam to the School of Fine Arts and ended up living in hostels for the downtrodden, sometimes on the streets. Vienna, for Hitler, was the decadent city of incest and, worse, the city of Jews and communists. Stripped of all compassion, he began to nurture salvific obsessions, electing the Aryan man as the sole founding race of culture and civilization. Hitler disliked working. He escaped beggary by joining the army. He went to Germany in 1913 and volunteered to fight in the First World War. He joined the German Workers' Party, precursor to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, in 1919, and became its leader in 1921. In Munich, he attempted to seize power in a coup d'état. He ended up in prison, where he dictated the Mein Kampf (My Struggle), his autobiography and political manifesto. In 1933, a year after becoming a naturalized German citizen, he became chancellor of the country that adopted him – and which led him into World War II. Faced with imminent defeat, he committed suicide in 1945.