Hitler and World War 2

Hitler and World War 2

Adolf Hitler was a man who tried to make society perfect. He longed for everybody to have blonde hair and blue eyes. He demolished the humans that he pictured imperfect, and to make up for the losses he created breeding camps for the highest "top quality" people. Yet he himself was not even what he considered perfect, but was quite the opposite.

He was dictator and leader of the German Nazi movement. He was born on April 20, 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunau on the Inn River along the Bavarian-German border. He was son of an Austrian customs official of moderate means.

After a fine performance in elementary school, Adolf soon became rebellious and began failing in college preparatory school. After transferring to another school, he finally left formal education altogether in 1905. Hitler refused to follow the disciplines of a regular job. At this point in time he had aimless existence, and he was left with reading, painting, wandering in the woods, and dreaming of becoming a famous artist.

In 1907, when his mother died, he moved to Vienna in and tried to enroll in the Academy of Fine Arts. He failed to gain admission that year and the next led him into a period of deep depression and seclusion from his friends. During this time he first became fascinated by the great potential that mass political manipulation had. He was impressed by the successes of the anti-Semitic (hating Jews), nationalist Christian-Socialist party, and Mayor Karl Lueger of Vienna and his mass organization.

Under Lueger's influence and that of former Catholic monk Lanz von Liebenfels, Hitler first developed the anti-Semitism and racial mythology that were to remain central to his own "ideology" and that of the Nazi party.

Hitler put Germany's 6 million unemployed to work on a vast rearmament and building program, coupled with a propaganda campaign to prepare the nation for war. Germany's mythical enemy, world Jewry, which was associated with all internal and external obstacles in the way of total power, and was ruthlessly attacked in anti-Semitic mass. With economic sanctions, and the end by the "final solution" of physical destruction of Jewish men, women, and children in his concentration camps.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler began World War II, which he hoped would lead to his control of most of the Europe and Asia. With the quick invasion of Poland, which he immediately followed with the liquidation of Jewish and the Polish society, and the enslavement of the local lower class population, and the beginnings of a German colonization. Following the declaration of war by France and England, he temporarily turned his military to the west.

In April 1940 Denmark surrendered, and Norway was taken by naval and land forces. In May and June the rapidly advancing tank forces defeated France and the Low Countries.

The major goal for Hitler's was in the East. However, in the middle of 1940 German war production was preparing for an eastern campaign. The Air Battle of Britain, which Hitler had hoped would permit either German invasion or (this continued to be his dream) an alliance with "Germanic" England, was broken off, and Germany's naval operations fell from lack of reinforcements.

On June 22, 1941, the German army advanced on Russia in the so-called Operation Barbarossa, which Hitler regarded as Germany's final struggle for existence and "living space", and for the creation of the "new order" of German racial domination. After initial rapid advances, the German troops were stopped by the severe Russian winter, however, and