Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the political and military leader of Germany from 1933 to his death at the end of the Second World War. He had been a junior corporal in the First World War, a failed artist, and was a rootless but emotionally and intellectually powerful man who took control of a set of movements of the German right in the early and middle 1920s. In the chaotic conditions of the Weimar Republic his party, offering a violent and aggressive assertion of nationalism, populism and racism (see fascism), and bearing the nowadays self-contradictory title of ‘National-Socialist German Working Man’s Party’, was one apparent answer. Hitler ruthlessly used any phobia he could find in the German population, especially anti-Semitism, to build up an emotional support for his party against the apparent threat of the communists, with whom his paramilitary party fought in street demonstrations in German cities. Ultimately he came to power as a result of ordinary electoral politics, helped tacitly by the right-wing president, Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), and managed to get himself appointed leader, ‘Führer’, of Germany for life. Once in legal power he and his party took over all aspects of German life, controlling totally the military and police powers, and much of industry, as well as the whole of civil government. There were no elections allowed in Germany during his rule.
His aim was the creation of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, a new German state that he hoped would cover most of Europe, and which did, during much of the Second World War, very nearly achieve this.
Hitler was responsible for initiating a movement of fanatical and violent aggression through Europe which took the combined force of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the USA to overcome. As far as political science is concerned, Hitler poses two enormous questions. Firstly, how does a movement like his take over a major civilized nation, and secondly, how can one describe the totalitarianism he represented, or even begin to make such a political system comprehensible, inside the usual terms of the social sciences? There are no totally satisfactory accounts of Hitler or his impact, but inevitably parallels are drawn between him and Stalin and with later dictators such as Idi Amin of Uganda, Saddam Hussein of Iraq or Pol Pot of Cambodia as examples of huge and evilly-used political power. There seems to be an inexplicable tendency for single individuals to wield enormous and catastrophic power at odd times in history, and this (witness, for example, the Roman Emperor Caligula) is not a recent phenomenon. The nearest to an explanation to be offered involves the idea of charisma, but much more mundane considerations, such as control over well disciplined and ruthless security forces and the cunning exploitation of tribal or ethnic hatreds, are equally important. At the beginning of the 21st century there appears to be no diminution in public fascination with Hitler and his regime, with new studies often winning large sales, appearing almost monthly.
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