Born fourth of six children to Austrian customs officer Alois Hitler, who had been married twice before, and the former Klara Polzl, Adolf Hitler grew up in a small Austrian town in the late 19th century. He was a slow learner and did often poorly in school; partly as a result, his authoritarian father frequently beat him. Things got worse when Adolf's older brother, Alois, Jr., ran away from home. His mild-mannered mother occasionally tried to shield him, but was ineffectual. Adolf attempted unsuccessfully to run away at 11. At the age of 14 he was freed from his hated father when Alois, in his mid-60s died - an event that he did not mourn.

Hitler dropped out of high school at age 16, went to Vienna, where he strove to become an artist, but was refused twice by the Vienna Art Academy. A military career offered itself at the start of World War I, and Hitler crossed into Germany to volunteer in a Bavarian regiment. He was assigned as a message runner but also saw combat. Temporarily blinded after a gas attack in Flanders in 1918, he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and was promoted to corporal. In 1918, when the war ended, Hitler stayed in the army intelligence and was assigned to spy on several radical political parties that were considered a threat to the German government. One such party was the German Workers Party. Hitler was drawn by party's founder Dietrich Eckart, who was a morphine addict, and propagated doctrines of mysticism and anti-Semitism. Hitler soon joined the party with the help of his military intelligence ties; he became party spokesman in 1919, renamed it the National Socalist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI) and declared himself its Fuhrer (leader) one year later. Hitler's intelligence handler, a Munich-based Colonel Karl Haushofer, introduced the swastika insignia in 1920 and, in 1921, founded the paramilitary Storm Troopers (SA) composed of German veterans of WWI and undercover military intelligence officers. They helped Hitler to organize a coup--the infamous "beer hall putsch"--against the Bavarian government in Munich in 1923, but it failed. In a confrontation with police his men fired at the officers who immediately fired back, killing several Nazis. Hitler himself was arrested and jailed for several months during which he was coached by his advisers and dictated his book 'Mein Kamph' to his deputy Rudolf Hess. The Nazis regrouped by 1925 as Hitler's intelligence advisers found business patrons with unlimited means. Hitler was provided with personal bodyguard unit named the SS. The Nazis began to gain considerable support in Germany through their network of army and WWI veterans, and Hitler ran for President in 1931. Defeated by the incumbent 'Paul Von Hindenburg' , Hitler next attempted to become Chancellor of Germany. Through under-the-table deals with powerful conservative businessmen and right-wing politicians, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. One month later, after a mysterious fire--which the Nazis claimed had been started by "terrorists" but was later discovered to have been set by the Nazis themselves--destroyed the Reichstag (the building that housed the German parliament), Hitler's machine began to issue a series of emergency decrees that gave the office of Chancellor more and more power.

In March of 1933 Hitler persuaded the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act, which made the Chancellor dictator of Germany and gave him even more power than the President. Just two months later Hitler began "cleaning house"; he abolished trade unions and ordered mass arrests of rival political groups. By the end of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only one allowed in Germany. In June of 1934 Hitler turned on his own and ordered the purge of the now radical SA, which he saw as a potential threat to his power, and had his oldest friend and SA leader Ernst Röhm assassinated. Two months later, when President Hindenburg died, Hitler merged the office of President with the office of Chancellor. Two years later, with Germany now under his total control, he sent troops into the Rhineland, which was a violation of the World War I Treaty of Versailles. It was also in 1935 that the anti-Jewish Nuremburg laws were passed on Hitler's authorization. In 1938 he forced the union of Austria with Germany and also took the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia near the German border with a large ethnic German population, on the pretext of "protecting" the German population from the Czechs. In the summer of 1939 Hitler sent his military to take over all of Czechoslovakia, and narrowly averted a war with Britain, France and other European powers. At that time Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression treaty which was later unilaterally broken by Hitler. In September of 1939 Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. England and France at once declared war on Germany. In 1940 Germany occupied Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, and launched a major offensive against France. Paris fell and France surrendered, after which Hitler considered invading Great Britain. However, after the German Air Force was defeated in its bombing campaign over England that became known as the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled. In 1941 German troops assisted Italy, which under dictator Benito Mussolini was a German ally, in its takeover of Yugoslavia and Greece. Meanwhile, in Germany and the occupied countries, Hitler had ordered a program of mass extermination of Jews.

In June of 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union with over two million German troops and with additional troops from Romanian, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, Finnish and other Armies fighting on the Nazi side. Hitler used multinational forces in order to save Germans for the future colonization of the Russian lands. Under the Nazi plan code-named "Barbarossa" Hitler was utilizing resources of entire Europe under the Nazi control to feed the invasion of Russia. Three groups of Nazi Armies invaded Russia: Group North besieged Leningrad, Group Center reached Moscow, and Group South occupied Ukraine, reached Caucasus, and Stalingrad. All German Armies were stopped at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for nine hundred days until the four-million city died of hunger. Only in January of 1944 Marshall Georgi Zhukov organized liberation of Leningrad. In 1943 several major battles occurred at Kursk (the largest tank battle in history), Kharkov and Stalingrad, all of which the Germans lost. Stalingrad battle was the largest military battle in the history of mankind. At Stalingrad alone Germans lost 360,000 troops on top of the casualties of Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian and other troops. Russian side lost over one million men at Stalingrad. By 1944, the same year the Western allies invaded occupied Europe, Germany was retreating on both fronts and its forces in Africa had been completely defeated, resulting in the deaths and/or surrender of several hundred thousand troops. Total human losses during the six years of war estimated at sixty million, of which twenty seven million were Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other people on the Soviet territory. Germany lost over eleven million troops and civilians. Poland and Yugoslavia lost over three million people each. Italy and France lost over one million each. Most nations of Central and Eastern Europe suffered severe economic destruction.

Hitler's ability to act as a figurehead of the Nazi machine was long gone by 1944. His less visible advisers and handlers were already in other lands, or some killed each other. For many years Hitler was kept on drugs by his medical personnel. Some German Generals tried to kill Hitler several times to stop the war. Hitler, by the beginning of 1945, was a frail, shaken man who had almost totally lost touch with reality. The Russians reached Berlin in April of 1945 and began a punishing assault on the city, and as their forces approached the bunker where Hitler and the last vestiges of his government were holed up, Hitler put a gun in his mouth and killed himself. Just a day earlier he had married his longtime mistress Eva Braun. Hitler's corpse was taken to Moscow and later shown to the Allied Army Commanders and diplomats. Joseph Stalin demonstrated Hitler's personal items to Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam Conference after the Victory. Hitler's personal gun was donated to the museum of the West Point Military Academy in New York, USA. Twenty seven million people died in WWII.
After his suicide in April, 1945, the corpse was imperfectly cremated, and some remains were not burned away. Pieces of the skull (including one with a bullet hole) and leg bones were recovered by the Russians, and now reside in the Russian National Archives. Arm was paralyzed during an assassination attempt by a group of Wehrmacht generals in 1944. Responsible for the deaths of over 11 million people during the second world war. Most were Jewish, but others included communists, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (gypsies) as well as anyone he saw as a threat or inferior. Ruler of Nazi Germany (The Third Reich) 1933-1945. 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*. After his death his corpse was never officially discovered. There were unconfirmed sightings of him in Denmark and Argentina after his death. Served as a messenger boy in World War 1. Was taking 92 different drugs towards the end of his life. The Boys from Brazil was based on a theory that Hitler wanted to clone himself. 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 . Has been portrayed by Richard Basehart, Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Derek Jacobi, Udo Kier, Martin Landau, Ian McKellen, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Robert Vaughn, Bobby Watson and Robert Carlyle. 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. In 1931, Adolf Hitler was involved in a scandal following the apparent suicide of his half niece, Angela Geli Rabaul. Originally deemed a suicide by Munich police, present-day theories indicate that Hitler had a love affair with and might have murdered his niece. She was living in his apartment and had become a subject of gossip within the ranks of the Nazi Party, giving Hitler a very bad image. Hitler's last command post, the Berlin "Führerbunker", was also his 13th. When the 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. While a coroner's examination verified that the man was NOT Hitler, his resemblance to him was eerily uncanny. His true identity, however, remains a mystery. While many insist that Hitler was a lifelong vegetarian, medical and historical records prove that he adopted a vegetarian diet only in the last 12 years of his life, due to medical complications. 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. Heinrich Himmler, who became the overall commander of the SS, held membership #168. The man who is actually credited with founding the SS, however, was not Hitler or Himmler. He was SS Member #2, a half Jewish associate of Hitler's named Emil Maurice . Tests he took showed that he had a genius IQ of 141 Did not drink or smoke. In his book "50 Things You're Not Suppposed To Know", Russ Kick reports that four paternal descendants (all male) of Adolf Hitler were born between 1949 and 1965 in New York State in the USA. The children, Adolf's great-nephews, are the sons of Irish-born William Patrick Hitler (who later changed his last name), himself the son of Alois Hitler, Jr., Adolph's older half-brother. One of the four died in an auto accident in 1989. Two of them have vowed never to have children. Another is presently childless and describes his ancestry as "a pain in the ass". They are the only living descendants of Adolf Hitler's paternal line of the family and are, quite literally, the last of the Hitlers. While serving in WW1, he found a terrier he named "Little Fox." He taught the dog many tricks to entertain his fellow comrades. Was the first child of his mothers to survive past infancy. As a child, was once beaten into a 2-day coma by his father, Alois. Was a talented painter, but was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts because he was unable to paint the human form. As a child, his dream was to become a priest. After WW2, the 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 special 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 is at the Lars Anderson Auto Museum in Boston. He emigrated to Germany to escape service in the Austrian army. He was not opposed to military service per se, however, and when the war broke out in 1914, he immediately volunteered for service in the German army. Beatle John Lennon wanted to put Hitler in the crowd on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", but The Beatles' record label refused, for obvious reasons. 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. The young Hitler reportedly had fits and attacks of rage from his early childhood and throughout puberty. Some observers said that his father Alois was a peculiarly cruel man, and there is no doubt that he beat his young son, which likely had a deleterious effect on the psyche of the highly intelligent child. The only confirmed antisocial behavior on the part of the young Hitler that points to a disturbed adulthood is the pleasure he took in shooting rats. 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, his family was quite well off by the standards of the time. When his father died, he actually inherited a small fortune, which he spent in less than a year in a frivolous lifestyle. 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 Raiders of the Lost Ark). 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 German surrender (1918) 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 interviewed by a psychiatrist in 1925 following the Beer Hall Putsch. The psychiatrist's final determination was "this man is crazy", but his notes were mislaid and forgotten. Was 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. 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 place a bomb on his private plane but the timer was faulty and it failed to detonate. 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. At the Munich conference, English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain actually mistook Hitler for a servant. Actually wrote a sequel to "Mein Kampf", but then, perversely, refused to allow it to be published. His favorite movies were King Kong and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.