Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Nazi party and regime 1889–1945 ✕ Suicide

Dictator who built a racist war state

In summer 1942, Hitler split Army Group South into Groups A and B to strike at Caucasus oil and the Volga at the same time, a decision that led to the encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army.

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, and held Austrian citizenship by descent; he moved to Munich in 1913 and falsely registered as stateless. He joined the German Workers' Party in 1919, led it from 1921, and dictated Mein Kampf in prison after the failed 1923 Munich putsch. Released from Austrian citizenship in 1925, he remained stateless until he acquired German citizenship in 1932. Appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933, he used the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 to build a dictatorship and became head of state on 2 August 1934 after Hindenburg's death. His regime was responsible for the genocide of about six million Jews and the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and POWs. He died by suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945.

Political and party leadership Nazi party and regime 1893–1946 ✕ Suicide

A Luftwaffe chief who organized Nazi war and plunder

In August 1940, redirecting the air offensive toward London and civilian cities gave the RAF time to recover.

Hermann Göring rose from a First World War fighter ace to a central power-holder in Nazi Germany and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. He helped build dictatorship and the machinery of aggressive war by directing the Prussian police, the creation of the Gestapo, rearmament, and wartime economic mobilization. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, he overestimated the Luftwaffe and was involved in shifting attacks from the RAF's struggling airfields and fighter defences toward British cities, giving Fighter Command time to recover. After the war, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned him as a major war criminal, and he committed suicide on the eve of his execution.