Date of Issue: May 7, 1945

KEY DATES 1889 Born in Braunau, Austria, on April 20. 1919 Helps form the Nazi Party. 1924 Writes Mein Kampf in prison. 1933 Become dictator of Germany, prepares the nation for a "final Solution" to the "Jewish problem." 1939 Invades Poland and starts World War II 1945 Commits suicide. Historians report that some 11 million people, including six million Jews, were murdered under Hitler's regime.

A dictator who preached hatred.
Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Benito Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head, lay dead in Milan. And Adolf Hitler had been buried in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Hitler's total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to have lasted 1,000 years, sank.

	The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable; it had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy him.

All that was certain to remain after 1,000 years was the all-but-incredible story of the demonic little man who rose from a gutter to make himself absolute master of most of Europe. The suffering that he brought about was beyond human power to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. In his concentration camps, incinerators raged night and day to burn the bodies of those he had condemned to death. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy him.

How had it happened? Who was this monster? Failing even the most elementary studies, Hitler grew up a half-educated man, untrained for any profession. Following the deaths of his parents, Hitler packed his few clothes and set out for Vienna, where he was twice rejected from painting school. Encountering Jews for the first time, he was swayed by the publications of Vienna’s violently anti-Semitic Mayor Doktor Karl Lueger. Soon young Hitler had concluded that the Jew is the enemy of all mankind — and the particular enemy of the Germans.

Hitler’s political career began in 1919 when he became member No. 7 of a tiny political party. He found an economic program in the scrambled theories of another member. And he found something much more important — his voice. One night a visitor said some friendly words about Jews. Without thinking twice, Hitler burst forth in a speech dripping with hatred. He had become an orator. Soon he became the party’s leader, changed its name to the National Socialist German Labor Party — Nazi for short — and wrote its anti-Semitic, antidemocratic program.

Then Hitler made one of the most valuable mistakes of his life: he and his handful of Party comrades decided to seize the Bavarian Government. The plot failed, and Hitler went to jail in the Landsberg prison.

While in prison, with the help of Rudolf Hess, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book included the plans for Hitler’s aggression against Germany and the rest of the world, as well as his intense hatred of Jews. Seldom in the course of human history has a plotter set forth his purposes in plainer language or more explicit detail.