Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Austria-Hungary. He was a dec­o­rated vet­eran of World War I, and joined the Nazi Party in 1919. After arrested for a failed coup, Hitler gained power by pro­mot­ing Ger­man nation­al­ism, anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-communism with zeal. In 1933, he became chan­cel­lor of the NSDAP.

Hitler’s desire to re-arm Ger­many led to the inva­sion of Poland, to which Great Britain and France responded, ini­ti­at­ing the sec­ond World War.

Within three years, Ger­many and the Axis pow­ers had occu­pied most of Europe, and most of North­ern Africa, East and South­east Asia, and the Pacific Ocean. How­ever, with the rever­sal of the Nazi inva­sion of the Soviet Union, the Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onwards. By 1945, Allied armies had invaded German-held Europe from all sides. Nazi forces engaged in numer­ous vio­lent acts dur­ing the war, includ­ing the sys­tem­atic mur­der of as many as 17 mil­lion civil­ians, an esti­mated six mil­lion of whom were Jews that were tar­geted in a geno­cide we know as the Holocaust.

In the final days of the war, at the fall of Berlin in 1945, Hitler mar­ried his long-time mis­tress Eva Braun and, to avoid cap­ture, both he and his wife com­mit­ted sui­cide on April 30, 1945.